Chapter 34
Ilsa
As Sven led the way through the passages of the sanctuary, the sheer extent of the facility quickly impressed itself on me. I had foolishly thought the Pretorian Guard’s Palermo mithraeum, and even the Viking cavern with the longship, strikingly extensive. This place, though, seemed to have no end.
Amber light from torches that I noticed, like those in the mithraeum, gave off no smoke caught on carved stone and old timber.
We passed openings that seemed to promise entire worlds beyond them: one vast chamber where I glimpsed the high curved ribs of what could only be a longship like the one in Sicily…
another where trestle tables gleamed under suspended lamps…
another from which came the faint rhythmic sounds of exertion, leather, command.
The place felt like a buried kingdom that had accepted electricity and plumbing without conceding any metaphysical ground to the modern world.
Sven glanced back at me once, perhaps seeing the way I kept turning my head despite the care with which I still had to walk.
“I know how curious you are, Ilsa,” he said, and there was a hint of apology in his deep, measured voice.
“I should show you the sanctuary properly. The longship cavern here, the carvings, the Mead Hall, the training rooms. And Bellatrix Hestiaea should see them as well.” His pale eyes flicked briefly to Giovanna.
“But the debriefing cannot wait. The girls must speak while the branches still cling to them.”
Giovanna gave a small nod. “Of course.”
Beside me Mary leaned close enough that her red hair brushed my cheek.
“I’m so glad,” she whispered, with the intimate urgency of a schoolgirl sharing a secret in chapel, except that we were two exhausted sexual servants in an underground Viking citadel. “I’m so glad you’re my new v?lva partner.”
I turned my head a fraction toward her. “New?”
“My old partner was Camille,” she murmured. “She’s in North America on assignment with Erik. Sven’s second.” Mary’s lips curved. “She and I are also Pretorian Guard columbae, like you.”
I nodded, remembering the discussion in Palermo. I turned further to her with a questioning look, in hope of more information. Mary smiled.
“I’ll tell you the story later, but we didn’t find a secret sanctuary or anything. And more important… Camille and I never found each other on the tree, the way you and I did.”
The idea touched something raw and tender in me. Found each other. On Yggdrasil, yes… and here in the world below, too.
Sven guided us through a set of double doors made of dark wood clad in iron.
The chamber beyond had none of the theatrical barbarity of the longship cavern and yet it seemed, if anything, more authoritative.
It felt designed for thought, but thought disciplined by ritual and tradition.
I saw shelves of books, maps, a long central rug.
Lamps burned low behind horn-like shades.
The air held beeswax and old leather. I saw a chess set laid out on a little table.
“This is the Hall of Refreshment, lille en,” Henrik told me. “I think you’ll spend many pleasant hours here, as bed thralls have done for many decades.”
But Sven led us to the side of the room, and opened another, smaller door. Inside lay a room furnished in a similar style but dominated by six large, heavy chairs carved of dark wood. In front of each of these quasi-thrones stood a footstool.
A man stood up from one of the chairs when we entered.
I instantly knew him as Aksel, from the strange communication I had experienced with Mary during our joint vision.
Then I had a moment of cognitive vertigo as my logical brain realized that I could well simply be imagining that I had somehow read Mary’s mind; that it seemed just as likely, if not more, that my subconscious mind had simply put together all the details I had noticed without noticing myself noticing.
Clairvoyance or meta-cognition… telepathy or quantum entanglement… the supernatural or the scientific…
Too much for an archaeologist to contemplate, perhaps, but I found myself fascinated beyond my capacity to express it—and I could see that this man, Aksel, was too.
He looked severe, but utterly brilliant: lean, pale, scarred hands, eyes so controlled they made me think absurdly of measuring instruments.
Henrik put a hand lightly at my back and brought me nearer.
“Ilsa,” he said, “this is Aksel Bergstrom. Among other things, he serves as consort to the prime minister of Jagland.”
Aksel inclined his head. “A pleasure.”
I blinked. “Consort?”
Henrik’s mouth shifted, not quite into a smile. “Functionally the first gentleman of the country, yes. The prime minister is under discipline. A bed thrall like you and Mary, submissive to Aksel.”
The statement landed in me with a peculiar doubleness.
First came intellectual astonishment of a political nature: a head of government?
Then came the bodily response, immediate and humiliating, a pulse deep between my thighs at the idea of a powerful woman subjected in private to exactly the dominion that had overcome me and made me my Herra’s fuck toy.
I felt heat climb into my face and disliked, instantly and fruitlessly, the fact that Henrik would certainly understand the reason for it if he cared to look.
Aksel, perhaps mercifully, showed no sign of noticing.
Sven moved to another of the large chairs and rested a hand on its carved arm.
“We have no precedent for this,” he said. “Two v?lur, one vision, mutual corroboration. So I have had to improvise.”
“Dangerous,” Giovanna said mildly.
“Potentially,” Sven replied. “But then, Bellatrix, that applies to nearly everything worth learning. Please, have a seat.”
He indicated another of the throne-like chairs. Giovanna settled into it.
“Henrik,” Sven continued, “here, please.”
I saw that the chair Sven pointed to faced Sven’s own, the two of them a little apart from the remainder of the chairs.
Henrik sat where his chief bade him. Aksel sat back down beside Giovanna with the posture of a man preparing to monitor the data that would emerge from a highly unusual experiment.
For one irrational second I thought Mary and I might be allowed to remain standing outside the scene like witnesses of some obscure tribunal.
I should have known better.
“Mary,” Sven said, settling back and patting his knee. “Fetch a cunt cloth for you and one for Ilsa, then come here.”
I blinked, unsure what was happening, as I watched my fellow naked bed thrall go to a basket on a side table and take two squares of thick felt from it. She brought one of them to me, and I noticed a crimson blush as she delivered it into my hands.
“They’re to keep you from staining your Herra’s clothes,” she murmured. “Watch me and do the same when Henrik calls you.”
Then Mary went to Sven, with the ease of apparent long practice.
He took the cloth from her and placed it on his lap, and then he drew her down across him sideways so that her knees rested over one carved arm and her shoulders against his chest. She made a small sound as he arranged her atop the cloth, not of protest but of intimate recognition.
Henrik looked at me, holding out his hand.
“Come, lille en.”
My body obeyed before any part of me could entertain alternatives.
With a flare of heat in my cheeks, I handed him my own cunt cloth.
He spread it over his thighs, then guided me down onto his lap facing slightly inward, mirroring Mary’s position opposite me.
The movement made my battered bottom and the tender place between my legs complain at once; I couldn’t keep back a tiny wince despite the slight comfort the mortifying cloth gave.
Henrik’s broad hand settled first on my hip, then traveled with grave deliberation between my thighs.
I sucked in a breath, becoming acutely aware of the pendant that represented my only covering. It had grown warm again, as if sensing my mortification.
Sven did the same to Mary at almost the same instant, his right hand cupping her bare pussy.
“No speaking yet,” Sven said. “Not until your bodies are ready.”
I almost laughed from nerves. Ready? My whole lower half felt used nearly beyond endurance.
My anus still remembered my master’s thrusting penis with a vividness that made the notion of any fresh stimulation seem impossible.
But his fingers, calm and experienced, found the soft, swollen folds of me with humiliating ease.
He did not thrust. He merely parted, stroked, weighed.
He reached a little further, under me, to move his fingertips over the tender flesh of my backside with a gentleness made more dominating by its confidence.
Across from me, Mary’s lips parted as Sven’s hand worked in the same slow, claiming way.
I knew I ought to focus on holding still, on conserving strength, on the intellectual urgency of remembering the vision intact.
Instead I watched Mary.
I watched the color rise in her cheeks. I watched her eyelids lower and then flutter.
I watched her try not to squirm under her master’s fingers.
The sight was so intimate, so indecently sisterly, that my own body responded in direct betrayal of every soreness it contained.
Wetness gathered almost at once under Henrik’s hand, as if my pussy had far less pride than the rest of me.
His beard brushed my temple when he leaned in.
“Responsive little thing,” he murmured, for me alone.
I shut my eyes, then opened them because keeping them closed made me imagine too much. Across from me Mary had begun to breathe through her mouth. Sven’s fingers, buried more decisively now between her legs, made faint movements I could read from the changes in her face.
Henrik tested me once with two fingers spread just enough to feel what his handling had produced. I felt the slickness with shameful clarity. So, obviously, did he.
“She’s wet,” he said.
Sven’s answering tone carried satisfaction. “Mary too.”
Neither man sounded as though he had discovered anything other than that a mechanism was functioning correctly. That, perversely, made the heat in my body worse. I had become knowable to them in this way, measurable through lubrication and tremor and the involuntary lift of my hips.
We were both moving now, Mary and I, despite ourselves.
Little shifts. Tiny arches. The kind of motions one might once have believed private and spontaneous, but which under male hands revealed themselves as reactions, as service.
I saw Sven slide two fingers lower over Mary’s soft, helpless sex and then back again, lingering where she must be most swollen.
She bit her lip. Henrik’s thumb found the same place on me, and my whole body gave a traitorous jerk.
“Good,” he said quietly.
I had an absurd fear that I would lose the vision entirely this way, that there could be no scholarship, no coherent recollection, with a man’s hand slowly making my body into an instrument of dominant pleasure.
But the room had already begun to change around the edges.
The pressure between my thighs, the sight of Mary similarly handled, the facing masters, the silent observers at the side…
it all formed a pattern my nervous system recognized instantly.
Sven looked at me across Mary’s red hair.
“Now, Ilsa.”
My mouth felt dry. “I—”
“Begin.”
I thought, helplessly, that I could not possibly do it like this. Then Henrik’s fingers stroked once through the slick folds of my pussy, deep enough to make my breath catch, and the first words came out of me in a low, unsteady rush.
“At first there was only the branch,” I said. “No… the feeling of arriving on it. The sense of height before sight properly formed…”
As soon as I started, Mary made a soft sound and picked up where I faltered, not interrupting but joining, as if we had both stepped back into the same current.
“And the bough was enormous,” she whispered. “Larger than any branch I’d ever traveled on the tree.”
“Yes,” I said at once, though I had never seen Yggdrasil properly, as a v?lva, before Henrik had broken me on the bride saddle. “And we were together there… immediately.”