Chapter 20
Henrik
I felt Ilsa’s body tense a bit under my left arm as I caressed the soft skin of her neck.
A shudder in her hips told me that her submissive nature had truly awoken as I had fucked her into full womanhood.
It sent a jolt of arousal to my cock, and I felt her sweet little bottom push back, helplessly, against me, as if to beg for more of my hardness.
The shudder moved through her like a wave settling after a storm, and I gathered her more firmly against me, my palm moving from her throat to her hair, finding the practical braid Giovanna had left intact and smoothing it softly.
“You will dream tonight,” I said. I kept my voice low, in the register that seemed to reach her most directly, bypassing whatever remained of her academic resistance. “I want you to know that before you sleep. What you dream may be different from anything you have dreamt before.”
She stirred against me. I felt her trying to form a question and I pressed my lips to her temple, which quieted it.
“The v?lur dream,” I said. “All of them do, it seems, after their first breeding. The records are consistent on that point across four centuries of documentation.” I paused, letting my thumb move in the slow arc across her hair.
“But I don’t want you to misunderstand what the dreaming is.
The Sons of Odin have debated this for a very long time. ”
“Debated what?” Her voice came out small and rough with tears and exhaustion, and something about the smallness of it did something to my chest that I did not entirely welcome.
“Whether the v?lva can truly go to Yggdrasil in her sleep.” I felt her go still against me, with the particular quality of stillness she produced, I gathered, when her scholar’s mind engaged with something.
“We don’t believe she does. The tree is not a place you travel to, as I told you.
It is the shape your mind makes when it works at its deepest level.
” I let the silence settle for a moment, the way I had learned to let silences settle with bed thralls whose intelligence was their primary gift.
“In sleep, that working continues without the body’s interruption.
You may glimpse the tree. Its roots, perhaps.
A branch or two. But you won’t be in it the way you were today, let alone rise the way you will when I break you. ”
She let out a little whimper, her hips jerking as if in answer to my frank words.
“Then what will I see?” she whispered.
I considered how much to tell her. The annals held accounts of v?lur who had dreamed of specific places, people, and events that had later proved significant.
A research team in Rouen, two decades ago, had spent three years cross-referencing those accounts against historical records, trying to establish a pattern.
They had found one, though it remained imperfect and contested.
I had read every document in the digitized archive, and I had my own view.
“Your unconscious will take you where it needs to go,” I said.
“To important places. Real places, perhaps, or the memory of places. People you haven’t understood yet.
Connections that haven’t assembled themselves into pattern while you were awake.
” I pressed my lips again to her temple, feeling her breath slow against my arm. “The Chinese girl, perhaps.”
Ilsa made a small sound that might have been assent or might have been the beginning of sleep.
Her body had been releasing its held tension in increments since I had laid her down in the furs, each breath giving up a little more of the day’s accumulated strain.
The welts on her thighs and bottom must still have ached.
I had seen girls sleep on those welts before, and knew the ache became, in some paradoxical way, a comfort in the dark—a reminder, felt from the inside, of the dominion their masters had established over their sweet bodies.
“Sleep, lille en,” I murmured. “Let your mind go where it will.”
Her breathing changed. It took perhaps another ten minutes, during which I lay still and felt the warmth of her against me and thought about what I would write to Sven.
The defloration of Ilsa Matthews was accomplished this evening in the Pretorian Guard’s Palermo mithraeum, with Bellatrix Hestiaea (Giovanna Perella) in attendance and Leo Aetnaeus (Bruno Falcone) observing by arrangement.
The welcome extended by the Guard has been, on the whole, as generous as we might have hoped.
I must tell you, first, at the outset, that the girl is exceptional.
Exceptional. Indeed. With that word in my mind and Ilsa’s leather-bound body in my arms, I fell asleep myself.
* * *
Ilsa
I dreamt, just as my master had told me I would.
The dream began with salt.
It came into my nostrils before anything else resolved itself—the ancient brine of open water, and underneath it the smell of pine resin and masculine sweat, the earthy scent of men who had been at sea for many days. I found myself lying down, when I began to understand where I was, in the dream.
I felt, beneath my belly and my breasts, the worn smoothness of the bench’s surface, and I knew it for a rowing bench like the one I had willfully, insanely laid myself down upon in the cavern that I knew now belonged to the Sons of Odin.
And I understood also, somehow from before the dream had begun, that they—the men—had bound me there: leather bindings at my wrists and ankles, attached to iron rings, held me on the bench, face down, though my face itself extended over the edge of the bench’s wooden surface.
The rocking of the hull moved through the wood and into my body with a slow, indifferent rhythm.
I knew this bench too well. Somehow I knew it not only from what I had done in the cavern, but also from a part of me that existed below waking knowledge.
Ancestral memory, thought some part of my mind, observing what I realized was a dream scene without being able to control it in the slightest. To my mild, detached surprise, another voice in my head offered the possible correction: You think it’s ancestral memory, but it’s just noticing things.
Wherever that deep sense originated, through it I recognized the particular quality of the bench’s smoothness, the way the grain of the wood had been polished by years of exactly this use, as well as its more ordinary, more menial one. Viking raiders had bound many girls here, as they had bound me.
My chin pressed against the bench. The leather straps at my wrists, tied to iron rings, held my arms beneath me, fixed to the base of the bench.
The ones at my ankles kept my legs in place, straddling the bench, spread wide enough that the sea air moved freely over the backs of my thighs and my bare, exposed, offered pussy.
My bottom was raised slightly, in the way that the bench’s construction seemed designed to achieve, a low ridge of wood beneath my hips that tilted me into an unmistakable posture, furnishing my private places for my captors’ use.
I heard their voices. Several of them, nearby, conversational. For a moment, some rational part of my brain thought I wouldn’t be able to follow the Old Norse they must be speaking, but of course I understood them, because it was a dream.
“—have to go East before the summer ends,” one of them was saying. “The reports from the traders are too consistent to ignore.”
“What traders?” Another voice, skeptical, closer.
“The ones who came through Hedeby in the spring. Three of them, separately, all saying the same thing. Something stirs in the East. Ymir’s body fights against itself.
” The first voice again, and I felt the bench shift slightly as weight settled onto it near my head.
“Not a natural stirring. Something deliberate. Something organized.”
It didn’t make logical, realistic sense: three traders, from the East, talking about Ymir’s body. A metaphor, or an unknown kenning, that my dreaming mind had used to tell me something. The detached but apparently still functional part of my intellect registered the idea without real interest.
I lifted my eyes. The dream sky above the longship was the gray-blue of early morning, high and cold, the kind of sky I associated with Scandinavian paintings.
The sail, dark red, bellied with a wind I could feel against my bare skin.
The oars were shipped. We were running before the wind, and the warriors had the leisure to enjoy their plunder.
Their new bed thrall. Me.
A hand came to the back of my head. Not cruel, nor especially gentle, simply present and certain of itself, and I understood what was about to happen with the same below-threshold knowledge that had let me read the bench before I opened my eyes.
The owner of the hand came around to tower over me, blocking my view of the sky. He had hiked his robe to his waist and tucked it into his belt to reveal the obscene sight of his long, hard manhood, its head purple with blood.
“Open,” said the voice that had spoken of the East. He said it the way one might say it to a well-trained animal, not unkindly, simply with the expectation of compliance. “Show what you have learned so far.”
I opened my mouth. In the dream, I wanted to.
The man whose cock used me first was broad and fair-haired, somewhere in his middle thirties.
He had a weathered quality, as if he had spent most of his life outdoors in cold wind.
He held my head in both hands and moved with the ease of someone accustomed to this kind of masculine pleasure.
In the dream, somehow I remembered what Nymphobus Oceanus had taught me, and I received the thrusting of the thick, hot shaft with a slow pull of air through my nose that allowed me to accommodate his steady rhythm.
“She takes it well,” he said, to whoever stood behind him, his voice a little rough. “She pleases the reer like a more experienced slut.”