Chapter 24
Ilsa
I tried to find something to look at that was not Leo Aetnaeus’s cock moving in and out of my body, and discovered that the restraints and the cushion under my head had conspired to make that essentially impossible.
I was required to watch. I understood, with a clarity that arrived alongside a fresh wave of tears whose cause I still couldn’t identify, that making me watch my pussy being shared represented part of the point.
I had not noticed Giovanna in several minutes. She came back into view then, as Leo Aetnaeus began to fuck me in earnest.
My mistress, the bellatrix, had stripped down to black lingerie—a lacy bra and thong that somehow managed to look both professional and much too sexual, the lingerie of a liberated woman who had chosen it knowing exactly what the day would require.
She moved with her usual practiced grace, coming to the bench and then without warning swinging her leg over it and over me.
Before I had fully understood her intention, she had settled herself above my face, her thighs on either side of my head, the cushion under my head keeping my face precisely where she so clearly wanted it.
“I will evaluate your mouth, now that your master has tamed it with his phallus. You must ask to climax,” she said to me in the professional voice, as if she were reminding me of an administrative procedure. “You will not come without permission.”
Then Bellatrix Hestiaea lowered herself, and I had no more opportunity for scholarly observation. I whimpered as I scented her, her pussy wet through the lacy fabric that rubbed against my lips and my nose.
“Bruno.” Henrik’s voice, from somewhere to my left, carried a collegial quality as if he meant to raise a point at a meeting among equals. “I’d ask you not to come inside her. If you would.”
A pause, in which the only sounds were the leo’s rhythm and Giovanna’s breathing, which had changed its normal rhythm to something less controlled.
“Of course,” the Guardsman said. His voice had become rougher, and I felt the change in his rhythm—a slight deepening and quickening, as if the request had paradoxically increased his urgency.
“Thank you for the reminder that the Sons of Odin’s bed thralls serve for more than pleasure.
For breeding as well.” A thrust that made me sob against Giovanna.
“Our tradition is to put initiates on contraception.”
Giovanna moved her hips. I whimpered, looking upward at her flat belly, her lacy bra and doing my best to breathe. The air that came through my nostrils was heady with the musk of my mistress’s need, and I couldn’t help licking and licking, suddenly desperate to please.
I felt myself detach from my body again and rise above the scene somehow, almost as if I could lift myself into the invisible lower branches of a tree…
the tree, even. I saw myself, still weeping as my mistress pleasured herself against my face…
as her master the leo fucked my sore pussy…
as my Viking Herra and his faraway chieftain stood by, observing…
all of it to assess my progress into the dark world of their ritual dominance and my submission.
The tears… I understood them, for an unmeasurable moment at least. I didn’t weep from fear, pain, or any sadness…
I wept from sheer excess of emotion and sensation.
Part of me even wanted to say, insanely, that I had started to cry out of happiness…
joy, even… to have a master who had given me, and kept giving me, what some essential element of me, body and soul, had always needed.
I watched Giovanna’s hand move between her thighs.
She posted up an inch or two, then pulled the gusset of the lacy black thong aside.
I sobbed at the sight of her bare pussy, the wrinkled hood of her clit, as Leo Aetnaeus’s grip on my thighs tightened and the thrusting of his rigid shaft grew harder and faster.
My mistress’s sex descended again. She presented her clit to my tongue, and I did my best to serve her well.
It was very different from serving Henrik with my mouth, but at the same time there was something parallel in this shameful duty: the simple, degrading fact of submission, of being made to give pleasure with my face to the dark, forbidden part of the body of another person—a person who held authority over me, and would punish me savagely if I failed to serve well.
The leo thrust hard. I cried out into the bellatrix’s sopping pussy.
Her hips jerked, driving herself against my face, and then she came with a sharp, controlled sound from high above me.
Her thighs tightened for a moment, and then she lifted herself away and I could breathe again in the way that breathing is only truly appreciated after its temporary absence.
Giovanna kept her hand on the bench beside my head, steadying herself, and I felt her composure reassemble in the quality of her weight and her breath, professional again almost immediately.
The orgasm that had been building in me since the leo’s first thrust was no longer a distant thing.
It had become immediate and it felt seismic, a pressure that seemed to occupy the same space as the soreness and the shame and the particular, impossible warmth that my body had seemed to manufacture in response to all of this since the morning.
I felt the straps at my thighs and wrists and the cushion behind my head as a single fact about my position in the world.
To acknowledge that fact seemed to compound the pressure rather than relieve it.
“Please,” I said, in that new, reversed sense, the only meaning it had left… please do with me as you will. “Please… please, I need to… I need…”
The Guardsman’s rhythm deepened, and the sound he made was not the controlled sound of a professional.
“Magnusson,” he said. “Your permission?”
Henrik was quiet for a moment that lasted approximately a thousand years.
“Come on the leo’s cock, Ilsa,” he said. “Come for us.”
The orgasm broke over me with a completeness that made the ceiling of the control room seem to tilt.
I cried out to the stone in a voice that sounded more ancient than the mithraeum or the cavern…
older than books, older than ships, and older than anything except the Worldtree itself, growing from the severed parts of Ymir’s slain body.
I felt my own body close around the cock inside me with long, rhythmic pulses, I felt him withdraw with a sharp, decisive movement, and then the warmth of him landed on my stomach in several quick, spreading pulses. I lay in my straps and breathed and let the tears run down into my hair.
I felt my Herra’s hands releasing my wrists. I thought for a moment that it represented an act of kindness, a reward even. Then he spoke.
“Rub the leo’s seed into your skin,” Herra Henrik said in a quiet voice. “It is a gesture of respect and gratitude, lille en. For the pleasure the leo has given you and for the privilege of serving his reer with your fisse.”
My hands shook as I brought them to my stomach.
The warmth of him… of Leo Aetnaeus… Bruno, apparently…
the man who had just used my body with such complete authority…
his scalding seed had already begun to cool against my skin.
The act of spreading it, though, seemed to renew the heat—in my face, above all—with each slow, circular pass of my palms. I watched myself do it, because the cushion behind my head still held me in place, still aimed my gaze forward and slightly down the length of my own body, and what I saw seemed worse than anything I had seen yet.
Henrik stood to my left, observing closely. His expression held the familiar quality of note-taking, assessing, cataloguing. Bruno had stepped back from the bench. He had already begun to adjust his trousers with the brisk efficiency of a man returning to his day, but his amber eyes hadn’t left me.
Giovanna stood a little further back, perfectly composed again, her dark gaze moving over my face and hands, narrowing slightly as she measured my obedience.
And on the monitor—the large central screen that Giovanna’s repositioning of the bench had put in full view—Sven Hallstrom’s pale eyes regarded me from the stone chamber in Rouen with an expression that I couldn’t read, though I knew it must conceal deep consideration of my performance as a fuck toy.
Four of them. All clothed. All watching me rub a man’s seed into my belly with my own obedient hands.
I took my upper lip between my teeth and kept moving my palms. The tears had stopped, or nearly.
Something drier and warmer replaced them—a heat that began at my sternum and radiated outward, taking in my throat, my cheeks, the backs of my hands.
I understood that I should feel degraded, and I did feel degraded.
But I also thought of my grandmother’s pendant, with its wunjo rune, and of the heritage it implied, realized here in the strangest, most thrilling, most shameful way.
The point, as my Herra had made clear, lay in the submission itself… a specific, mortifying act of obedience witnessed by people who would enter it in their own mental records, their own long institutional memory of girls bound to benches and made to demonstrate what they had become.
I smoothed my palms over the skin of my lower belly, and then further up toward my ribs where a few drops had reached, and I looked at the ceiling and breathed.
“Are you satisfied, Leo Aetnaeus,” Henrik said, “with what you’ve seen of her progress?”
He spoke with the collegial quality that brought the blood to my cheeks. I saw his gaze move to the monitor, too, where Sven’s expression hadn’t changed at all.
The Guardsman made a small sound, a considered little grunt.
“The fisse is responsive. Tight.” A pause.
“She wept throughout, but she obeyed. She asked for permission before she climaxed.” He seemed to weigh something, as if running figures.
“She is progressing. Bellatrix, how did you find the mouth?”
My eyes went to Giovanna, my tummy lurching at the arch, satisfied look on her face.
“Certainly more pleasurable than it was yesterday. Henrik has gentled her nicely.”
I couldn’t keep a little sob of humiliation from emerging. They took no notice.
All their eyes turned to the screen, where Sven remained quiet for a moment. His pale eyes had not moved from me, and I had the uncanny sensation—one I was becoming more familiar with than I found comfortable—that he could read in my face things I hadn’t finished writing yet.
“From the perspective of the North, she is more than progressing,” he said at last, in a formal register that seemed to mark pronouncements rather than observations.
“She saw Yggdrasil from the longship in her dream. That is not the dream of an ordinary v?lva-in-training.” His gaze shifted to Henrik, and then to the others.
“If a girl sees the Worldtree at all, in her first night’s dreams, she sees it on land, outside a village… or more frequently atop a mountain.”
“What does that mean?” asked Leo Aetnaeus, frowning. “We know enough now to trust your v?lur’s visions, but your paradoxical belief in certain… symbols… such as where a girl sees the tree… that continues to confuse us—to put it mildly.”
I thought I could perceive in the Guardsman’s words an iron fist clad in a velvet glove.
To put it mildly… in this Bruno’s amiable voice, couched in amiable words, I thought I sensed something that didn’t seem mild at all.
I shivered as something that extended from below the level of my conscious mind seemed to make its way into my rational brain.
I could almost feel the fault lines between two clandestine organizations who possessed real geopolitical power—the more impressive because of how deeply hidden their operation upon the world had obviously been, apparently over the course of centuries.
“May I?” my Herra asked his chieftain.
“Of course, brother,” Sven replied from the monitor.
Herra Henrik turned to the leo. I felt another shiver go through me at the mere sight of his face, wearing an expression of such gravity that I felt a perverse, distressing surge of pride that I belonged to him.