Chapter 33
Ilsa
A creeping dread began to work its way into my mind, as I tried to understand what I could see in the Chinese tree.
The feeling arrived with such clarity that it seemed less like an inference than a warning.
The linked lights below the Chinese tree had begun to seem aware in a way I didn’t understand at first. Not sentient exactly, not in any simple anthropomorphic sense, but…
responsive. If Mary and I pressed further downward into that gleaming network of towers and kneeling women and transmitted force, then something in it might feel the pressure of our looking.
I turned to Mary on the branch. Her pale face, framed in loose red hair, had taken on the same tautness I felt in my own. Her eyes widened. She gave the smallest shake of her head.
Yes, I thought at her without words. You feel it too, don’t you?
Below us, or through us, or in whatever impossible relation the vision bore to our bodies, I felt again the soreness between my legs, the burning in my bottom cheeks, the profound, used heaviness of a girl who had been ridden to the edge of her mind.
The sense of danger should have sharpened my awareness, maybe. Instead it reminded me how tired I was.
The branches under us seemed suddenly less solid than they had before.
The air around the Chinese structure hummed with a kind of electric appetite.
I had the awful intuition that if we lingered, some woman there—or some man behind those women, some master of that other order—might look up and find us.
Mary’s face changed again, softening into an exhausted resignation that I felt certain matched my own.
We had gone as far as we safely could. Whatever link had let us look into that other tree, whatever leak between systems or symbols or networks I had only begun to understand, didn’t feel like a passage we should force.
I let go.
I had the impression of falling back into my own body.
The duality that I had found as I had climbed into the canopy of the tree vanished immediately under a wave of pain…
and then aftershock… and at last relief so complete it seemed to erase thought.
The branch, the lights, the industrial trunk of power and finally our own tree, Yggdrasil itself, all seemed to fold inward like a map being closed.
The bridal chamber rushed up around me.
I was still draped over the saddle, every muscle trembling.
My anus still held the memory—no, more than the memory, the throbbing fact—of what my master had done to me there.
My clit felt used almost raw by the bride’s consolation.
My bottom cheeks burned where the mastix and the strap had marked them.
I tried to lift my head and could not. I had the impression that I had made a small sound, but even that seemed to cost too much.
Henrik’s hands came to the old restraints.
I heard leather move and metal creak. The sudden release of pressure at my wrists and thighs seemed almost as shocking as the bondage had been.
He caught me before I could slide gracelessly from the saddle, one arm under my breasts and one under my hips, and gathered me up against him.
I felt the pendant against my breastbone again, where it belonged, and I fancied for a moment that it was burning, painlessly, a wunjo onto my skin, to designate me fully as a v?lva.
The heat of my Herra’s body impressed itself on my senses first. Then the smell of sweat and leather and sea-washed stone came to my nostrils. Then, in my whole body, the extraordinary, almost childish relief of not having to hold myself up anymore.
Giovanna said something that I probably could have understood if my mind had been functional.
Mateo, too, I thought. Their voices had become distant and unimportant.
I let my face rest against Henrik’s shoulder.
The cavern moved around us as he carried me.
I knew, dimly, when we left the bridal chamber and entered the larger space near the ship.
The air felt different there, broader, touched by the scent of old wood.
Then even that perception began to grow thin.
The longship, the carvings, the hidden approach through the rock—everything receded into a dreamlike sequence of impressions seen through half-closed eyes.
Henrik kept me in his arms as if I weighed nothing.
I experienced an absurd fragment of consciousness in which I felt certain that this, too, had probably happened a thousand years ago: a warrior carrying away the girl he had just used in a rite too old to be explained to the modern world.
Then blackness took me.
* * *
When I came back to myself, I thought for a few moments that I must be in the middle of a dream.
The seat beneath me was broad and butter-soft, pale leather contoured to hold the body in luxury.
A folded blanket lay over my lap. The air had that faintly sterile, exquisitely conditioned quality that I immediately associated with the aroma of the first-class cabin of a transoceanic flight: wealth in transit.
There was a low, steady engine hum under everything.
Then I gathered that if I thought I was dreaming, I probably wasn’t dreaming. Immediately, my body objected; it definitely didn’t want to return to consciousness just yet.
The soreness between my legs and in my bottom asserted itself so decisively that I inhaled sharply and then regretted even that, because my abdominal muscles were somehow tired too.
I shifted a fraction and discovered fresh complaints from my thighs, my lower back, my mouth.
My lips felt swollen. My neck, where Henrik had apparently bitten me, gave a small throb.
Every part of me seemed to have become a record of my Herra’s dark pleasure and my submission to it.
“Easy, lille en,” came Henrik’s voice beside me.
I turned my head. He sat in the facing seat, immaculate again somehow, though not in the exact clothes he’d worn to the cavern.
I had the disorienting impression that he could move from ancient barbarism to executive composure without ever truly changing his attitude.
Giovanna sat a little further away, dark and elegant and perfectly put together, as if private jets after ritualized sexual breaking were part of an ordinary itinerary.
Which, for her, I supposed they probably were.
I swallowed. My throat felt dry. “Where…”
“We’re about to land,” Henrik said. “Rouen.”
The word took a moment to settle. Rouen. Sven. Mary.
Mary.
I tried to sit more upright, wincing at the protest from my battered body. “I saw…” I began at once. “In the tree, there was…”
My master lifted one hand, not harshly but with complete authority.
“Not yet, lille en.”
I blinked at him.
The urge to explain, to report, to turn the whole impossible experience into language before it dissolved, felt almost academic in its intensity.
My mind wanted field notes. It wanted immediate transcription.
It wanted to say Chinese network… women as conduits…
energy extraction… tower-tree… detection risk.
It wanted, perhaps most of all, to say Mary and I saw each other, Mary and I knew.
“I need to tell you,” I said. “Before I forget, or before it changes in my head.”
“That,” Henrik replied, “is exactly why you must wait.”
His gray eyes held mine with that grave steadiness I had come to associate with pronouncements from the annals rather than ordinary opinions.
“We’ve learned,” he said, “that after the breaking is finished, speaking a v?lva’s vision too soon can alter it. The act of narration begins interpretation at once. Interpretation has consequences.”
Giovanna crossed one long leg over the other. “How scientific of you.”
Henrik didn’t look at her. “Sven and I want the two of you together when you tell us what you saw. Your accounts may hold one another in place.”
I stared at him, breath shallow with discomfort and frustration and the lingering weakness of exhaustion.
The idea made enough sense to infuriate me further.
Of course one account might stabilize the other.
Of course language itself might shift the shape of memory.
Any anthropologist, cognitive scientist, or historian of ritual would have found the proposition fascinating.
Part of me hated that I was beginning to think of their practices as methodologically interesting.
“Mary’s all right?” I asked.
Something softer came into Henrik’s expression: an acknowledgment of my concern for my fellow bed thrall and v?lva.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s waiting for you.”
I let my head rest back against the seat for a moment.
Relief moved through me so powerfully I nearly cried again.
Not because I knew Mary in any ordinary sense.
I didn’t. But I had met her where it mattered now, in some upper branch of consciousness and degradation and impossible communion that left ordinary acquaintances seeming almost secondary.
A flight attendant—perhaps attendant was too weak a word for a woman with such polished discretion—appeared as if from nowhere, with a cup of water.
I drank greedily and then more carefully.
Even swallowing seemed to remind me of things I had done with my mouth…
of what dominant men had done there, for their enjoyment and my education in service as their fuck toy.
My face warmed. Giovanna noticed, of course. Her dark mouth curved very slightly.
“You continue to be very responsive to training,” she said, evidently meaning it as a compliment.
I might have answered if I had felt sure either that I did like hearing myself praised that way, or that I didn’t. Instead I simply held the glass and watched cloud light shift across the cabin wall as the jet descended.