Chapter 31
Ilsa
The chamber filled with the sounds of my breaking: leather striking skin, the wet pull of his cock at my lips, my little broken cries, the hard creak of the saddle as my body rode the little knob some kind warrior had built into it for a spear-bride’s torment and relief.
I could no longer separate the stimuli into categories.
Pain felt right. Pleasure became punitive.
Humiliation transformed into a medium through which both traveled.
I sucked his cock and tasted myself and rubbed my clit raw on the bride’s consolation while he striped my skin and looked at me as if every flinch and moan belonged to him by right.
I could perceive, dimly, Giovanna and Mateo at the edge of my vision, watchful and silent.
Their observation of my breaking on the saddle only deepened the chamber’s logic.
They saw my open mouth. They saw the strap’s marks rise.
They saw me begin to ride the leather like an animal desperate for its obscene friction, restrained by more leather so that she couldn’t escape her own display.
The orgasm that threatened would not crest. It only built and built, blocked somehow by the very intensity of the scene, by the fact that he would not let me disappear into it. He kept me there. On the brink. On his cock. On the little wooden knob.
I started to beg without planning to, issuing muffled words around his thrusting shaft.
At first it was only sounds: please… oh, God… Master… Herra… please.
Then language returned in the most shameful form available to it.
“Please,” I gasped when he let me draw enough breath. “Please, I need—”
The strap cracked across my thigh and I screamed.
“What do you need?” he asked, and drove his cock against my tongue until I almost gagged.
I writhed on the saddle. The restraints held my wildness for his enjoyment exactly as he had promised.
I understood now that he had meant not only my resistance but my appetite.
I could not hide any of it. The leather displayed need as effectively as it displayed flesh.
My upper body bucked and arched, so violently that I felt my pendant bounce against my chest.
He pulled me off the slick shaft of his penis.
“My bottom,” I cried. “Please… my… my bottom—”
He struck me again and the pain opened the words fully.
“Fuck my r?vhul,” I begged him. “Please, Herra, please fuck my bottom, please…”
The chamber went still around the sentence. I heard myself panting. I heard, beneath it, the distant sea in the stone or perhaps only the rush of blood in my own ears.
Henrik thrust himself into my mouth one final time, then withdrew his manhood with deliberate slowness. My lips felt swollen and empty at once. He stood. The stool scraped softly as he moved it aside with one foot.
I looked up at him through tears and heat and could barely endure the expression on his face.
It held satisfaction, yes, and triumph, but also something darker and more solemn: the gravity of a man in the midst of an ancient ritual, at a point where the victim had just declared herself a willing sacrifice.
He moved around behind me.
I could not see him. That made everything worse.
I heard him spit into his palm. The intimate ugliness of the sound sent a shock through my whole body.
Then a different sound: his hand moving on himself, wet and practical, preparing his cock.
My breath came faster and faster. I felt the bride’s consolation still present where my body had frantically used it; felt the leather at my thighs, my wrists, my waist; felt the fresh, burning marks all over my skin.
I felt Giovanna and Mateo still there, still silent.
I felt the cavern, the longship, and all the carved women who had gone before me in this posture.
Then his hand came between my whipped cheeks.
His fingers spread me. One callused thumb pressed briefly at the small ring I had offered him in my frantic words. My whole body clenched. He made a low sound behind me, almost approving.
“Hold still, lille en,” he said.
As if I could have done anything else.
Then I felt the broad, slick head of his cock settle against the tiny bud of my anus.
The contact alone seemed almost unbearable. He waited. Only the weight and heat of my master’s cock placed there, as if claiming the place in advance, teaching it to expect his possession. My mouth fell open on a whimper that had no words in it.
Then a whisper emerged.
“Please.” Language had reduced itself to this one shape. “Please.”
He pushed just enough to make the ring of my anus first resist and then begin to yield.
I thought for one suspended instant that the chamber had begun to change around me, and then I understood: my own mind was opening, under pressure, the way my body did.
That realization didn’t change how it felt at all, though, and I welcomed the fictive supernatural quality of my vision with no less wonder than if it had come from some real magic in the earth.
The stone around me seemed to deepen, somehow. The imaginary darkness into which the carved chamber roof mutated did not feel like a ceiling at all but a canopy. Branches, I thought wildly. Or the possibility of branches.
Herra Henrik did not thrust. He held the head of his cock against the unopened flower.
He worked its lewd pressure with terrifying patience, making my body learn the dimensions of the masculine authority it was about to receive.
I rocked helplessly against the bride’s consolation, and that tiny movement changed the angle enough that he gave a short, rough laugh behind me.
“Yes,” he said softly. “That’s right. Ride the saddle while I open your sweet little r?vhul.”
The obscenity of the phrase, and the feeling of deep inevitability I could hear in his voice, broke through another layer inside me.
I moaned and obeyed, not because I chose to pleasure myself but because my body had accepted my master’s power over me much, much faster than my mind could object.
Each helpless movement rubbed my clit and pressed my anus more insistently onto the broad crown of his rigid cock.
With each movement, I felt the pendant with its rune swing as if in emphasis.
Pain bloomed through me in a white, unbearable ring that seemed to be made equally of violation and invitation.
At the edge of my hearing, Giovanna’s voice filled the chamber with its usual cool exactness.
“Sven confirms from Rouen,” she said. “He is mounting Mary now.”
For one dizzy instant I could see nothing but my imagination of it: the other girl, somewhere far to the North, bent and bound on another saddle, another man behind her, the same shameful, ancient rite taking hold of her body at the very moment mine opened beneath my master’s hand and cock.
I had never seen Mary. I knew almost nothing about her except the name, the implication of youth and submission like mine.
Yet the idea that she and I were being used this way together—two women hundreds of miles apart, both with our masters thrusting into our smallest, most embarrassing place—made humiliation flood so hotly through me that I nearly fainted with it.
Then Henrik stopped being patient, and drove his rigid shaft deep into my whipped, broken bottom.
The entry tore a cry from me so raw it scarcely sounded human.
The broad head of him breached me and kept going, splitting me open by degrees too large to comprehend, each fraction of an inch bringing a fresh sob.
I felt my whole body seize against the straps.
I ground my clit mercilessly against the bride’s consolation as my back arched and my mouth fell open in a sob.
“Oh, God… oh, God…”
My Herra didn’t stop. With one relentless thrust he buried himself to the root.
I felt the hard, final weight of his lap push into my battered cheeks, skin to skin over the fresh welts, and the shock of that contact seemed to complete the outrage.
He was all the way inside my anus. All of him.
My master had filled the place he had promised to make his own.
I thought the world inside me would shatter from the stretch alone. Instead it opened, the way my anus had on his manhood.
“Come,” Henrik said behind me, his voice thick and commanding and somehow far away already. “Climax on my cock, little v?lva. Go up into the boughs.”
The order reached me through roaring blood and burning nerves. My body obeyed before my mind could understand. The pressure of him inside my bottom, the tortured friction under me, the exquisite wrongness made right by the terrible ritual and my degraded need—it all surged together at once.
The orgasm swept through me so violently that I forgot the reality of the chamber.
Or perhaps I forgot that it was only a chamber.
I still rode my master’s bride saddle. I still felt the straps.
I still felt him lodged impossibly deep in my anus, holding me open around him.
At the same time, though, I was no longer merely there.
I felt myself lifted, my consciousness rushing upward through the metaphor my unconscious had chosen and made real enough for me to inhabit: trunk, bark, vastness, the cold and living immensity of Yggdrasil.
Branches spread in all directions, larger than roads, larger than cathedrals. Light moved through leaves that seemed made of memory and instinct and hidden knowledge. I clung to nothing and yet I stood, hovered, or existed there in a way the rational mind could not diagram.
And then, almost at once, I saw her.
She was not far from me at all.
It shocked me so deeply that the remains of the bridal chamber seemed to give a little lurch around the edges of my awareness.
I had expected distance, difficulty, symbolic obscurity.
Instead it was as if she and I had climbed up the trunk by neighboring paths and emerged onto boughs so close that only a narrow gulf of shimmering air separated us.
Red hair. Red hair loose around a pale face turned toward me with the same stunned recognition I felt in myself.
Mary.
I knew it with the instant certainty of dream logic mixed with the feeling of a breakthrough in scholarship; the same certainty with which one recognizes a script one has spent years studying the first moment it appears out of the dust, under the brush.
She was my counterpart, my fellow v?lva, her presence at once strange and intimate.
She didn’t speak, and I sensed that if I tried to form words, only silence would emerge.
But recognition passed between us anyway, immediate and undeniable.
At the same time Henrik’s cock remained in my body, buried in my bottom, somewhere else… somewhere below. A duality opened, between two parts of my consciousness.
I was in two places. No, not two places: in one experience with two forms. In the bridal chamber my body writhed atop the saddle, impaled and climaxing around my master’s manhood.
In the branches I faced a woman I had never met and yet knew with impossible certainty.
The two realities did not cancel each other.
They ran in parallel, each illuminating the other.
Herra Henrik’s hand came to my hip below, grounding me and possessing me. I heard him say something—perhaps my name, perhaps another command—and found that the part of me still wholly inside the chamber could answer.
“I’m with her,” I whispered, and then louder, because I needed him to understand. “I’m with Mary.”
Silence followed for half a beat, thick with attention.
Then Henrik made a low sound I felt as much through his chest against my back as heard with my ears. His grip on my hip tightened.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
I tried. On the branch, Mary’s face swam with the same effort.
She seemed to be trying too, trying to bridge the gap, trying to speak across whatever medium this was.
Nothing verbal came. But impressions gathered around her: fear, astonishment, submission so acute it had turned incandescent.
And behind her, or below her, or threaded through the same impossible architecture, I sensed another presence with the cold steadiness of male authority.
Sven, I thought. Or the idea of Sven as refracted through her.
And then, with concentration, I could see it—the scene in Rouen, a chamber, bigger than mine, but furnished the same way.
Mary atop the saddle, an expression of passionate discomfort on her face as her master’s huge cock stretched her tiny bottom hole just as my master’s stretched mine.
I could see it… the way I had seen the ordeal of the Chinese girl when last I had traveled the branches of Yggdrasil.
“She found me,” I said, gasping as Henrik shifted inside my bottom just enough to make my whole body convulse again. “She’s there… she’s just there… her master is fucking her bottom, too… oh… Herra… it hurts… oh, no…”