Chapter 19
Ilsa
I breathed. The pain pulsed with my heartbeat, deep and present and—I found, to my considerable surprise—not entirely unwelcome.
It felt like something being resolved. Like a question that had been building since the café, since the mosaic border, since the moment I had run my hand along the worn surface of the rowing bench and understood with my body before my mind caught up that I had been meant to find this place. The pain felt like an answer.
I welcomed it. I pressed back against the lap of my deflowerer, very slightly, and Henrik made a low sound above me. His hands tightened on my shoulder and on my hip.
The tree remained. Yggdrasil’s roots came down through the volcanic stone, solid and vast and indifferent to the pain or the heat or the tears falling from my face onto the floor.
I was near those roots, very near; I could feel the enormous, cold presence of the trunk above me, the roots spreading out beneath me like the fingers of a hand that had been reaching for me for a very long time.
But I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t find the lower branches. I lay amid the roots and I felt the pain and the building, impossible warmth that was beginning to replace it. The branches, though, lay somewhere above me, stirring in their cold upper wind, and I couldn’t reach them.
“Herra,” I sobbed. “I can’t… I can see the roots. I’m at the roots. But I can’t rise. The branches… I can’t get to them.”
He moved, a slow and careful withdrawal and then a deeper, steadier press forward, and I cried out again at the sharp residue of pain that met the new motion. But underneath it, building with each pass, something else had begun to assemble itself.
“No,” he said, his voice rough but certain. “You won’t rise. Not now.”
“But why…”
“When a v?lva is being bred,” he said, “she is not free to rise. The tree holds her at its roots. She is planted there.” Another slow thrust, and I sobbed and gripped the iron posts.
“The rootedness is the point, lille en. The seed goes down. A v?lva who is being given her master’s seed in her fisse is of the earth.
She will rise through the branches when she is taken in her r?vhul—when her body is claimed in the way that is wildest and most animal and most hers.
That is the path upward.” A pause, then his hand on my back pressed more firmly, and I felt him deepen his claim on me.
“This is the path down. Into the earth. Into what is generational, as we call it.”
The bride saddle. I remembered it with a vividness so complete it seemed to exist in the cell alongside the present moment: the way I had imagined, on the saddle, what it would feel like to be taken in my forbidden place…
in the place Giovanna had prepared and Henrik had touched and promised to use.
I saw in my mind’s eye the way the tree had opened its branches to me at that precise imagining, the way I had gone upward into the cold light with a totality that had frightened me and drawn me in equal measure.
The path upward. When he took me there… by taking me there. When I was ready.
The thought made me clench around my master’s rigid length. That brought the confusing realization that the warmth between my thighs had overtaken the pain entirely, somewhere in the last several breaths. I hadn’t noticed the transition until it was already complete.
Herra Henrik moved with greater sureness now, his breathing changed, and every slow thrust built upon the last in a way that seemed to have very little to do with decision and everything to do with gravity, with the rootedness he had described, with the oldest and most fundamental logic of what was happening.
“Please,” I begged, with the inside-out meaning, the only meaning the word had left. “Please, Herra. Please… may I…”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice had gone entirely to timber, nothing else. “Come as much as you want, lille en. Come for your Herra. Come while my reer uses you.”
The first climax arrived at his degrading words, with a totality that made every previous approximation of the thing seem like a sketch for the real work.
It moved through me, as if from the Worldtree’s roots upward, and it broke against the base of the tree and spread outward.
I cried out to the stone floor and felt my body close around my master’s cock with a helpless, rhythmic insistence that I had no more control over than I had over the tides.
He grunted above me, perhaps the first purely unguarded sound I had heard from him, stripped of all construction, patience, and careful deliberateness. It seemed to come from the same place my cry had come from. It seemed to belong to the same very old, very simple logic.
The second climax followed before the first had finished, and the third followed the second, and I lost count after that.
I had no ability to count, to number things…
as if what he did to me, in me, existed in a time before men had discovered numbers at all.
I lost everything except the roots of the tree beneath me, Henrik’s hands on my hips, and the gathering urgency in his rhythm that told me, even through the haze of sensation, that he was close…
that he found my newly opened pussy pleasurable—perhaps even more pleasurable than he had anticipated.
When he came, I felt it. The warmth of him, the intimate heat of his seed, shooting into the deepest part of me with a force that matched the growl he gave. His hands tightened on my hip and my shoulder with a grip that left no ambiguity about who owned me from henceforth.
I cried out again, a broken, wordless sound, and the orgasm that answered his climax was different from the others—rooted in another place still, deeper, less frantic, as if the body understood that something had changed and wanted to mark the change with a different kind of response.
I pressed my cheek against the stone and wept, quietly, in the particular silence that followed.
Henrik’s hands moved to my back, and then to my sides, and he gathered himself slowly, as if he had arrived somewhere he hadn’t entirely expected to go.
I felt him withdraw, and the absence felt strange.
It seemed to bring a new kind of awareness of myself, of the body that a strong man had claimed and now held the evidence of his enjoyment.
For a long moment my master didn’t speak. The torch through the barred window sent its orange light across the mosaic floor, and somewhere in the corridor beyond the door I thought I heard, or imagined I heard, the quiet sound of measured footsteps moving away.
Giovanna? Going back to wherever she had been, having heard what she had needed to hear?
I breathed against the cool stone, and thought about roots, about what Henrik had said about the path upward, and about the girl in the branches of a distant or maybe an identical tree who had looked down at me with recognition in her eyes.
She was still up there somewhere. Waiting, perhaps, like the tree itself, with the patience of something that had been growing since before any of us were born and would continue growing long after.
I would find her again. I understood that now with the same quality of certainty my mind brought to a finished report—not decided upon but simply known.
When Herra Henrik took me in the place he had promised. When he met the wildness in me there, as he had said, and claimed it.
Then I would rise.
I heard my master moving, and then a sound came from the corner of the cell I hadn’t properly examined, behind me and to my left, beyond my field of vision from the floor.
A soft sound of stone moving against stone, one unyielding surface moving over another, scraping, but only slightly.
As if the things my Herra manipulated had been made to move that way… as if he had just opened something.
Then water, running water, and I understood: a basin.
Something built into the cell for exactly this purpose, as everything in this place had been built for exactly its purpose, with the patient foresight of people who had been doing this for a very long time.
A sink where a guardsman could cleanse himself after deflowering a columba…
or, I realized with a helpless thrill of dark arousal…
after having her in another way, along another path…
one that required washing his cock afterward.
I lay where he had left me, my cheek against the stone floor, my wrists still bound to the iron posts, my knees on the cushioned leather mat.
I listened to the water run and to the small sounds of my master washing himself, and my face burned so fiercely that the ancient coolness beneath my face felt like a mercy.
He was washing me off of him. Off of his manhood. He was washing away the evidence of what I had been, five minutes ago, and was not any longer. My maiden blood.
I bit my lower lip, stared at the dimly lit floor, and thought about what blood meant, as an artifact, on a man’s penis. As evidence of a moment that could not be undated or reattributed or filed under uncertain provenance.
And then I thought about the other thing. The thing he had said, in the rough, stripped voice, before he had used me. Whatever the Norns have already spun out. If they spin it so, I will breed you.
The water ran on in the corner, and I lay with my master’s seed inside me. The heat in my face went far beyond my intellect’s ability to measure and assess.
I had no way of knowing. Of course I had no way of knowing.
The timing, the probability, the sheer biological contingency of the thing—my rational mind assembled these considerations with the speed of long habit and found them genuinely inconclusive.
The rational mind had gotten, I noticed, somewhat quieter than it had been this morning.
Less confident of its authority. As if something had rearranged the hierarchy of what mattered while I had found myself occupied with other things.
A strong warrior in your belly, he had said. Or a fair maiden.
So… I heard my adviser’s voice in my head. So sexist. So misogynistic.
And yet the need blazed between my thighs helplessly in response to the submissive—no, the thoroughly subjugated idea.
The splashing stopped.
I thought I could hear him drying his hands, so acute had my senses apparently become, or perhaps so delusional.
He rubbed them with a cloth, then folded it and set it aside.
Somehow my mind gathered that, and I remembered what my Herra had said about my senses and my mind and what it meant to become a v?lva, according to these ‘Sons of Odin.’
His footsteps crossed back toward me. I kept my eyes on the floor, much too aware of the warmth that lingered at the center of me.
I realized also that I was still crying quietly, without much investment in stopping.
A little pool of my tears… my mourning for my lost virginity, I couldn’t help thinking… had gathered on the stone.
My new master’s hands found the clip at my left wrist first. The small sound of its release seemed almost gentle.
Then my right. I felt the blood move back through my fingers as I released the iron posts, which I only then understood I’d continued to grip so hard that I could feel my fingers creak as I uncurled them.
I gripped and released my hands twice, feeling the ache of the metal in my palms.
Herra Henrik crouched. His hands were under me, one arm behind my knees and one behind my back, and before I had fully understood his intention, he had lifted me from the mat entirely. I made a startled sound and gripped his shoulder with both hands, my fingers finding the warm, solid fact of him.
He carried me across the cell at a slow, certain pace. I kept my face turned toward his chest, because looking up at his expression from this position felt like more than I could manage.
A thrill of fear went through me as in my head I reconstructed the layout of the little cell as I had absorbed it when my mistress had led me to the iron posts.
“Oh… Herra… please… not the bench?” I begged, sure that my master meant to position me as Giovanna had, with my face in the alcove, so as to take my final virginity immediately.
“The sleeping alcove,” he corrected quietly. “It looks a little like the bench where Bellatrix Hestiaea prepared you, but its purpose is quite different.”
I felt the texture of the air change as we reached the enclosed space: a warmer, enclosed space, perhaps heated by the same fires that warmed the pool in the chamber of preparation.
My Herra set me down with care, lowering me onto a surface that received me with a softness I hadn’t expected after the volcanic stone and the thinly padded leather mat.
Furs? Deep and warm and carrying the faint, complex scent of something animal and old and preserved.
I sank into them slightly and my body, which had been held at a pitch of tension for so many hours that I had forgotten what ordinary felt like, simply released.
All at once, as if it had been waiting for permission.
Henrik settled behind me. He was warm—warmer than the furs, warmer than the stone.
His big body seemed to generate its own climate.
He drew me against his side with a naturalness…
a matter-of-factness, even… that somehow made it easier to accept than a more tentative gesture would have been, as naughty as it felt to feel the length of his still semi-hard penis against my bottom.
His left hand found the curve of my throat, holding me gently there and making it very difficult to think.
“The Pretorian Guard and the Sons of Odin,” he murmured softly into my ear, as his voice in his chest vibrating soothingly against my back, “share a few values. One of them is a preference for sleeping in fur.”