Chapter 22
Ilsa
The word whip arrived in my stomach, alongside break, as a cold drop of fear, mixed with something warmer. The bride saddle seemed to find a place directly below it, in the specific region that was not my stomach at all, as a heat that contradicted the cold completely.
I stared up at him and tried to find something to say that would not constitute either a question or a plea, both of which seemed equally dangerous and equally inevitable. He gazed down at me, his brow slightly furrowed as if he had equations to think through. At last he spoke, slowly.
“Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea will certify that you have received your first initiation at my hands and upon my phallus.”
The way he said it—certify—made the academic part of my brain flinch even as the rest of me registered the lewd implications. He meant to present me. To show me to Giovanna and her master, and thus to provide the evidence of what he had accomplished here in this initiation cell.
I understood, with a clarity that came with a fresh wave of heat to my face, that my body represented the evidence.
“Yes, Herra,” I whispered.
He donned his red robe. I watched him from the furs and tried not to make it obvious that I was watching him, though I felt certain I failed completely. He didn’t appear to notice, though, or perhaps he noticed and found it appropriate, as a simple confirmation of his ownership of me.
Then he turned to me with a leash in his hand, undoubtedly left by Giovanna for the convenience of my new master. My master… my leash. I shuddered as he reached the end down toward me. He clipped it to the ring at my collar’s front with a small, definitive sound.
“On your feet, lille en.”
I got up. The ache between my thighs announced itself with every movement, a deep interior soreness.
I chewed the inside of my cheek to quell the whimper that threatened to emerge, and I stood as straight as I could manage.
The cuffs at my wrists and ankles caught the torchlight.
The collar seemed to press against my throat.
My Herra looked at me for a moment with that assessing quality, the ledger expression. Then a different kind of light came into his eyes, something I couldn’t name and wasn’t sure I was meant to see—something that made my chest warm though I couldn’t have said why.
“Come,” he said. He turned and the leash drew taut.
The corridor outside the cell received us into its old, torch-lit silence.
My bare feet padded over the worn mosaic floor and I followed my master’s broad back across the geometric patterns, past the other doors with their barred windows, back toward the chamber of preparation and whatever lay beyond it.
Giovanna waited at the end of the corridor.
She stood with her hands clasped before her, dressed again in the tailored jacket and dark trousers of her public self, as if the robe and the oil and the mastix had been a costume she had simply set aside.
With a lurch of my tummy, though, I suddenly wondered if I had it the wrong way around: if this fashionable woman represented the costume, and her persona as my exacting mistress, preparing me for my master’s pleasure, was who Giovanna really was.
She examined me as I emerged from the cell, her dark eyes moving over my face and body with the professional thoroughness I had come to understand as simply how she looked at everything.
“Well,” she said, to Henrik rather than to me. “The night has agreed with her. She served you well?”
“She did. Very well indeed,” my master said. “I need to meet with Leo Aetnaeus in the control room, if that can be arranged.”
Giovanna’s brow arched, a fraction. “Now?”
“Now.”
She turned without further comment and walked ahead of us, her heels sounding on the mosaic.
I followed, drawn by the leash, and tried to think about something other than the fact of my nudity and the contrast it made with Herra Henrik’s robe and Giovanna’s business attire…
of what was written on my backside in pink and red…
of the bareness of my pussy… of the illogical idea that anyone looking at me could tell I had lost my virginity with my face against the floor and my master astride me.
I failed at that too.
The control room took me by surprise, though I instantly chastised my mind for having any expectations at all of this insane situation.
It occupied a chamber even deeper in the mithraeum than the cells and the preparation chamber, carved from the same volcanic stone, but furnished in a way that belonged entirely to the present century.
Banks of monitors lined one curved wall, their screens showing camera feeds I recognized with a lurch of my stomach: the preparation chamber, the corridor, the cells themselves.
A long table of dark wood occupied the center of the space, surrounded by chairs that managed to look both expensive and ancient, as if they had been selected to bridge whatever gap existed between a Roman mystery cult and a modern intelligence operation.
A man in a charcoal business suit was already there.
Somehow I could tell from the moment I laid eyes on him that he must be Leo Aetnaeus.
He stood before the monitors with his hands clasped behind his back, the subtle red of his pocket square catching the blue light of the screens as he turned at our entry, and his sharp, hawkish face moved over me with an expression I couldn’t read, but that made me blush anyway.
I saw appreciation in his eyes, but of a purely masculine, frankly dominant kind.
“Good morning, Magnusson,” he said. Something in his tone made it perfectly clear that he had become accustomed to being addressed first in any room he entered, and found it mildly irritating if that didn’t happen.
“Leo Aetnaeus.” Henrik’s voice carried its own authority, and I thought I could feel a tension between the two men. “I need to request access to a secure link to Huginn’s Eye… our control room in Rouen.”
The leo’s eyes moved to me again, briefly. “I gather you’ve initiated her?”
“I have. She performed exceptionally.” Henrik said it the way he said so much—as a simple notation of fact. “Which is why I need to talk to Rouen.”
Giovanna had moved to one of the chairs and seated herself. She crossed her legs and watched the two men with an expression of polite attention that I understood, by now, concealed considerably more than it revealed.
Leo Aetnaeus considered Henrik for a long moment, with a kind of calculating stillness.
“Are you willing to let us inspect this columba and assess the degree of her initiation according to our standards?” he finally asked. “Are you willing to share her mouth and cunt with us, as specified by our laws for that certification?”
My heart raced and my breathing came in little puffs that flared my nostrils. I couldn’t look anywhere but the stone floor.
“Of course,” I heard my Herra say, as if the scene among the three of them, all clothed, were taking place in some parallel galaxy, a universe away from the version of the subterranean control room where I, Ilsa Matthews, somehow stood naked but for leather cuffs, belt, and collar.
“The Sons of Odin’s rites involve sharing our bed thralls from their first use—as the girls were shared on the longships that brought them to their new lives in the North. ”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, but I didn’t even feel sure that I’d made a sound, because none of the other people in the room seemed to pay me the slightest attention, except of course as a possession from which pleasure could be derived.
My master hadn’t told me that my dream had apparently evoked an essential, if lewd and utterly degrading, experience of the Vikings’ bed thralls.
Part of me had wanted to believe the coincidence merely that, my mind working along logical paths to find a plausible scene of degradation for my dreaming self.
It had felt too correct, though… too exact; a shiver traveled down my back as I wondered if the answer lay in my developing abilities as a v?lva.
“But,” Herra Henrik continued, “I’m hoping you’ll permit my chief—the leader of the Sons of Odin, Sven Hallstrom—to bear witness and give counsel.
I have a request to make that may prove problematic, and I want us to have the benefit of Sven’s thoughts.
That’s why I’ve asked for a secure link to Huginn’s Eye. Sven is known to the Guard, I believe?”
I managed to lift my eyes, my curiosity to see the leo’s reaction overcoming my abject embarrassment. He nodded, though his brow had developed a furrow of concern.
“Well known,” he confirmed. “Very well… and trusted by the Central Mithraeum in New York.”
Then Leo Aetnaeus moved to the monitors and touched a sequence of controls. One of the screens—the largest, mounted at the center of the bank—shifted from a camera feed to a different image. A loading indicator, brief and professional. And then a face.
I had not been expecting the face to do what it did to me.
The man I saw was perhaps thirty-five, broad-shouldered, with blond hair and a neatly trimmed beard and eyes that were a shade of steel blue so pale they seemed almost colorless in the monitor’s light.
He sat in what appeared to be a stone chamber, maybe even older even than this one.
I could see rough-cut walls behind him. He wore dark clothing that sat on his powerful frame with the ease of something chosen carefully, and for some reason I knew in an instant that he could only be a professor.
He looked, in other words, like an academic version of the carved warriors in the limestone cavern, as my Herra looked like—I supposed—a commercial version of them.
He also looked like what the men in my dream would have looked like, if they had put on contemporary clothing and sat before a camera.
Perhaps my reaction came from knowing that my master did indeed have fellow Vikings who brought to life what I’d seen and imagined in the cavern.
Perhaps it arose as well from the way Herra Henrik had referred to him with such respect… as his chief.
Of course a warrior would share his bed thrall with his chief, wouldn’t he? If he shared her with anyone, surely it would be his chief, who had the privilege to enjoy her alongside her owner…
Oh, God.
“Henrik,” he said. His accent was more pronounced than my Herra’s, the same Nordic cadence but less smoothed by years of international travel. “And this—” his pale eyes found me on whatever corresponding feed he was watching, “—this is the girl from Capo Zafferano.”
“Ilsa Matthews,” Henrik said. “Archaeologist. Doctoral candidate. Now a columba of the Pretorian Guard as well as my bed thrall. She found the cavern.”
“I know what she found.” Sven Hallstrom’s gaze remained on me, and I felt it the way I had felt the cold wind in the upper branches of the tree: present, indifferent, and somehow…
beckoning, all at the same time. “She had a vision on the bride saddle, you told me. Without a warrior’s tól in her bottom. ”
I closed my eyes very tightly and swallowed down the little sob that threatened to break free of my chest.
“Without anyone present,” Henrik said. “Last night, after I took her fisse’s flower, she dreamed a v?lva’s dream. I have no remaining doubt.”
The reference to my defloration in the phrase somehow both graphic and figurative… my fisse’s flower… in my master’s mouth, spoken to these people, in this room, produced a heat in my face so acute that I felt glad the monitor’s blue light was probably washing out my complexion entirely.
“Tell me about the dream,” Sven said, and he said it to me. Not to my Herra.
I swallowed again. “A longship,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “The rowing bench. Men talking about the East. Something stirring there, concerning Ymir’s body. And the tree at the horizon, over the sea.” A pause. “I could see Yggdrasil from the longship.”
Something moved in Sven Hallstrom’s pale eyes. He looked at Henrik.
“From the rowing bench,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, not sure why that question seemed to have such weight.
Leo Aetnaeus had settled himself at the head of the table.
He watched this exchange with the expression of a man attending a presentation in a field adjacent to his own: interested despite himself, reserving judgment, unwilling to show either.
Giovanna had uncrossed and recrossed her legs, and her dark eyes moved between the screen and my face with a focus that unsettled me.
Her attention to detail apparently included the question of whether my dream constituted something worth taking seriously.
“Before we proceed further,” Henrik said, his voice shifting into the register I had learned meant something formal was about to happen, “I want Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea to satisfy themselves about her training thus far, while you witness, chief, that I am sharing my bed thrall’s mouth and fisse as befits her submissive obedience and my warrior duty. ”