Chapter 18
Ilsa
“Tell me about the tree,” he said. His finger moved in a slow circle, not pressing inward, simply mapping the exterior of my untried anus with a deliberateness that seemed designed to make the distinction between inside and outside feel very significant.
“Tell me what you see. The branches. The roots. What does it feel like to be there?”
“I—” I swallowed. His finger continued its slow, maddening circuit.
“The roots go very deep. Past the stone. Past everything. I can feel them… the… the way you can… you know… feel something… something… um… vibrating… oh, God… through a… a… a floor.” I gasped as his thumb and forefinger pressed my nipple with greater firmness.
“The branches are… they’re… it’s… it’s cold, there.
Not… you know… painful? Like on a mountain, maybe…
when you’re wearing warm clothes… high… um…
high altitude. Like standing on a mountain before the sun has reached the upper slopes. ” I sobbed. “Herra Henrik, please…”
“Keep going,” he said. The finger at my anus pressed inward, very slightly, with a steadiness that communicated both absolute intention and absolute patience. He didn’t breach me, but he made it very clear that he would, when he chose. “What else do you see?”
“I don’t…” I couldn’t think. I tried to form ideas, find concepts.
The Worldtree was there, his finger was there, his other fingers were on my nipple, and the orgasm that had never fully receded was building again from its endless suspension.
“Branches… so many branches. I can’t see where they end.
They go beyond… I… I can’t see the top.”
“Can you see the other girl?” His voice carried a quality of focused attention that cut through the haze of sensation. “The Chinese girl. Can you find her?”
I looked. I genuinely looked, trying to do it the way I had learned to look at an archaeological site when something felt present but hadn’t revealed itself yet, not staring directly but letting the peripheral vision do its work, letting the pattern assemble, trying to allow my ‘intuition’ to take over.
The branches moved. The cold light between them shifted. I traveled along a bough with whatever part of me traveled on the tree, going lower and then higher, following the logic of the growth.
She wasn’t there.
I looked harder, my forehead creasing against the stone.
I thought of her eyes looking up at me from her version of the bride chamber…
the special place with the dais on which her master had paddled and taken her.
I thought of the specific quality of her gaze—recognition, surprise, and something that had looked like understanding.
I thought of the Chinese man, her master, and of the way his rigid penis had looked as it had thrust in and out of her little bottom.
“I can’t find her,” I gasped, feeling like I’d failed.
“She was there before. He had paddled her… the man, I mean. He paddled her bottom. Very hard, with a long wooden paddle… and then he…” Heat surged into my face even with my cheek resting against the cold stone.
“He… he took her… there. In her bottom hole. I watched it, and then she looked up at me and I thought she could see me, and then the vision ended.”
Henrik’s finger pressed inward, just a tiny bit further, and my whole body contracted around the intrusion with a shudder that was equal parts reflex and helpless arousal.
I told myself that Giovanna’s careful preparation had planted that response, with the knowledge of what this meant, what it would mean, and what it was building toward.
I knew with a hot surge to my cheeks, though, that she had only made visible what nature itself had planted somewhere deep down in me.
“She was on her tree as you were on yours, perhaps,” Henrik said, his voice very low, “with her master’s tól in her tight little r?vhul. And I think the trees were the same tree.”
His finger moved again in a slow, shallow rhythm that made coherent thought nearly impossible.
“The Sons of Odin don’t speak of the act the way the Pretorian Guard speaks of it.
Giovanna told you about it, and called it the act of civilization.
For her and her masters, it’s about imposing order on wilderness.
” A pause in which he pressed inward a little further and I cried out and gripped the iron posts with everything I had.
“For us it is different—as perhaps it is for this Chinese fellowship you may have caught a glimpse of. Among us, the bed thrall fights her nature. She is wild. She resists. And the act of taming her, here…” Another press, deliberate and slow.
“Here especially, embodies that wildness as much as it subdues it. The warrior who takes his thrall’s r?vhul takes her in the place where she is most herself, most animal, most untamed.
” His thumb and forefinger found my nipple again.
“He doesn’t impose civilization. He meets the wilderness in her and claims it. ”
I was crying. I hadn’t noticed when it had started. The tears fell onto the stone beneath my face and joined whatever older tears had fallen there before them.
“I can’t find her in the tree,” I said again.
The admission this time carried a different quality—not failure but recognition.
I understood, with the part of me that assembled patterns below the threshold of awareness, why she wasn’t there.
The tree was present and vast and beckoning, and I was on its lower branches, barely above its roots, held there by whatever I hadn’t yet given up.
“More,” I whispered. “I need… if I could go further… I think she might be…”
The words fell apart.
His finger withdrew, and his hand moved down and forward.
The orgasm rose so suddenly and so completely that I heard myself make a sound that belonged in the carvings, if the artist could have incorporated audio.
It echoed off the stone of the cell as I felt certain the same kind of sound must have come from kneeling columbae more than a thousand years.
“Please,” I said, and it was the new meaning of the word, the inside-out meaning, the meaning that had no relationship to any decision I had made but was simply true. “Please, Herra. Please… I need you to… please, I need it…”
“I know what you need,” he said, and his voice had roughened entirely, the careful construction gone, nothing left but the stripped timber of it.
“I’m going to take your sweet fisse now, lille en.
I’m going to put my seed inside you.” He moved, repositioning himself behind me, and I felt the heat of his lap against the back of my thighs.
“Your r?vhul I will take when you’re truly ready.
When I’ve made your sweet cunt my prized possession.
When your body knows me well enough to welcome me there the way a thrall should welcome her Herra, and we can begin your true training as a v?lva. ”
“Yes,” I said, or tried to say.
The blunt heat of him pressed against me, and I shuddered so violently that I felt the iron posts shake in their stone sockets.
He didn’t rush. It undid me: his absolute lack of urgency even as I could feel the hard, insistent pressure of his cock against the virgin entrance to my body and the warmth of his thighs’ fronts against the punished backs of mine.
He held himself there with his left hand flat on my hip, steadying me, letting me feel the full implication of what was about to happen.
I pressed my forehead into the stone and tried to remember how to breathe.
“You’re going to have my seed inside you,” he said. His voice had gone very quiet, with a roughness in it that layered something else atop his authority… the sheer animal masculinity of his will… his power to possess me as men possess women, and had possessed them from the dawning of the world.
“Whatever else happens. Whatever the Norns have already spun out for you and for me.” His hand moved on my hip, and I felt the pressure increase, just slightly, against the maiden barrier of my needy pussy…
the place where I had never been entered by a man, and thus had never become a woman in that ancient way.
“If they spin it so, lille en, I will breed you. I will put a strong warrior in your belly, or a fair maiden.”
I had never thought about having children.
Not seriously, not in the way one considers actual futures rather than abstract theoretical possibilities.
My dissertation, my career, the next conference, the next excavation season…
those had represented my futures. The idea of a child had lived in some vague, deferred elsewhere that I had never examined closely.
Now, kneeling on a leather mat in a volcanic stone cell with a Viking’s hands on my hips, I felt the idea arrive with a force so immediate and so physically located that I couldn’t pretend it was abstract at all.
His child. A son with those broad shoulders and those pale gray eyes and the patient, absolute certainty of him. Or a daughter who would grow up knowing more than I, her curiosity gratified earlier, her learning deeper.
I thought of the bed thralls in the carvings. I had studied those images so intently, cataloguing the details of the limestone’s preservation, noting the stylistic conventions of the anonymous artist. I had looked at the women on their knees and told myself I was documenting an artifact.
But they had been real women. Real women who had knelt as I was kneeling, or who had ridden the rowing benches of the longships.
They had felt what I was feeling… had been claimed by strong men in bride chambers…
and had carried those men’s children afterward.
And perhaps that had been—I couldn’t stop the thought—perhaps it had been a consolation.
The strong child of a powerful man, in a world where strength was the only reliable currency.
Perhaps it had been more than consolation.
Perhaps it had been, for some of them, the thing they had wanted most.
I clenched my teeth shut very hard and failed to keep the small, desperate sound from escaping anyway.
Both of Henrik’s hands took hold of my hips, and he thrust forward, very hard.
The pain arrived before I had finished bracing for it, and it was nothing like what I had anticipated, in my cautious academic imagination. It felt total. It was a tearing brightness that began at the center of me and radiated outward to the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. I screamed.
I could hear how the sound left the cell immediately, bouncing off the curved stone walls and then escaping through the barred window into the mosaic corridor beyond, and I knew—I knew with a certainty as complete as any scholarly conviction I had ever held—that it could be heard out there.
That Giovanna was somewhere in that corridor, or in one of the other stone rooms, and that she had heard it.
That my mistress Bellatrix Hestiaea had heard the exact moment of my defloration, the specific pitch and timbre of the cry that announced what I was now and had never been before: a man’s possession…
a Viking’s bed thrall… my Herra’s naughty fuck toy…
The thought sent a wave of heat through me so acute and so mortifying that it seemed to compound the pain rather than displace it, and then compound the heat again in return, until I couldn’t separate the two, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Breathe,” Henrik said, above me. He held himself at full length as I squirmed beneath him, my spanked bottom burning against his firm lap.
His right hand moved from my hip to my shoulder, the same steadying pressure that restrained me too, keeping me where he wanted me, impaled on his manhood.
“Breathe, lille en. The pain is true. Let it be true, as a sign that you belong to a warrior who knows how to use his new bed thrall.”