Chapter 36
Ilsa
Our masters carried us to a room they called a chamber of brotherhood.
There, firelight moved over stone and oak.
An enormous bed stood on a raised platform, piled with dark furs and thick woolen blankets, broad enough for a small household.
Around it I saw other things my eyes now recognized too quickly: a bride saddle, hooks, folded straps, a low chest with its lid open to show neat coils of leather and polished metal.
Henrik laid me down on the bed with a care that made the soreness in my body feel even more intimate.
Across from us Sven did the same with Mary.
For a moment the two of us only looked at each other over the expanse of the furs, flushed and exhausted and still somehow newly alive from what we had seen together.
My ivory pendant felt cooler now, as if it had spent some mystic force, though I knew even as I thought it that my own mind’s power of imagination had created both the heat and the coolness.
Then our masters, the Sons of Odin, returned to business without any warning. It seemed they found no contradiction between strategic planning and sexual use.
Sven sat on the edge of the bed, one big hand on Mary’s ankle. “The Fellowship cannot be left to build quietly,” he said. “If they have a working oracle helping them make plays on energy infrastructure, then we are already late.”
Henrik unbuttoned his cuffs, then his collar. He looked to Sven with grave directness.
“We need the Guard,” Henrik said. “And they need us. Bellatrix Hestiaea understands that much already, even if she dislikes the flavor of the lesson.”
Sven’s mouth shifted. “A formal meeting, then. Neutral enough to satisfy all parties and operational enough to matter.”
“At Project Athena,” Henrik said.
The name struck me at once with the little thrill of hearing one secret system touch another.
I didn’t think I had heard anyone say the name Project Athena before, but I could see in Mary’s face that she knew it well.
Somehow it felt to me, in a way that struck my logical mind as bizarre while my imagination accepted it instantly, that I knew it too.
In Mary’s green eyes I saw that Project Athena was a place where women of unusual capacities and men who meant to use them came into alignment with the strategic intent of saving civilization.
I turned my head on the furs and found Henrik looking down at me, as if to confirm that I understood the significance.
“Athena headquarters,” he said, and though the words were directed to Sven, they seemed also meant for me.
“The Sons of Odin and the Guard. Leo Marmareus, Erik and Camille. Aksel and Lorna. We compare intelligence. We plan a joint response before the Fellowship decides to come looking for the girls who looked back.”
“Good,” Sven said. His hand moved once over Mary’s calf, possessive and absentmindedly soothing at the same time. “Aksel can prepare a technical brief. I’ll contact Erik. You’ll speak to Giovanna and she can bring in her leones.”
Henrik nodded. “And meanwhile—”
He let the sentence hang. Both men looked at us.
I knew with a soft, dreadful clench what meanwhile meant.
Sven finished it. “Meanwhile our little seer-girl fuck toys must be tamed properly, together, and fully introduced to one another’s bodies.”
Mary lowered her eyes at once. I felt the heat rise in my face, though some deeper part of me responded not with embarrassment but with a strange, trembling gratitude. To be named so plainly by men like these ought to have reduced me. Instead it seemed to make my place more solid.
Henrik put his hand under my chin. “Do you understand, lille en?”
“I think I do,” I whispered.
And I did, because I could feel the truth of it: Mary and I had met in the branches of Yggdrasil, in a disembodied state. We must learn to partner in the flesh, under the eyes of our warriors, used together to teach us how to serve more fully as v?lur.
His eyes stayed on mine another moment, gray and intent. “Good. You may find yourself at the roots of the Worldtree, but you will not rise; this is not a time to seek a true vision. This fuck is for our refreshment, and yours. You may climax as much as you like.”
“You as well, Mary,” Sven said. “Enjoy one another fully.”
They moved us. Sven drew Mary across the bed; Henrik turned me by the hips, onto my back.
The furs shifted and whispered beneath my knees and shoulders.
Then Mary was above me, lowered carefully until our bodies lined up in the most ancient and blushingly obvious posture of mutual service.
My face came against the softness of her inner thighs.
I felt her gasp against my own sex a breath later, as if her Herra held her face there, close to my newly bare, endlessly needy pussy.
I made a helpless sound.
“Pleasure one another,” Henrik said.
“Properly,” Sven added. “Not as schoolgirls experimenting. As women of power, given each other to taste.”
Mary’s hands found the fur on either side of my waist and gripped it.
I felt the first shy stroke of her tongue, and my whole body jolted.
At once I answered, parting her wet pussy lips with my mouth the way I had already learned to do, under my mistress’s command, finding the warm, delicate folds of her with an eagerness that made the heat rush to my face as I understood how thoroughly I yielded to my naughtiest impulses, thanks to my shameful training.
She tasted sweet and intimate and alive.
The fact that it was Mary—that this was the girl I had found in the branches, the girl whose exhausted body had trembled like mine in the consultation chamber—made the act feel both tender and degrading in equal measure.
I licked her carefully, then more firmly when I heard Henrik make a low, approving growl.
She cried out softly into me, and that cry against my own sex sent a flood of wetness through me so sudden it felt humiliatingly virginal.
“Better,” Henrik said from somewhere near my shoulder. “Use your mouth properly, Ilsa.”
I obeyed. Mary did too. The sixty-nine position had always seemed terribly naughty to me, when I had caught glimpses of it in films or even read about it in books.
From inside it, it seemed like a dizzying circularity of giving and receiving, tongue on cunt and cunt on tongue, my own need mounting in direct proportion to the little sounds Mary made into me.
Her tongue flickered over the place that made my hips strain upward; I answered by circling the swollen nub hidden in her folds until she shuddered.
“Good girls,” Sven said. The phrase made my whole body tighten.
The men undressed around us. I heard buckles, zippers, fabric sliding over skin. Then the mattress dipped under their much heavier weight.
“Stay,” Henrik said to me, one palm on my knee.
Mary was eased a little higher over me, enough that I had to stretch my tongue to lick her while the men positioned themselves. Then everything changed at once as Sven’s huge, hard penis, in a tangle of reddish hair under washboard abs, filled my view.
Henrik’s broad hands spread my thighs farther, pressing them toward my chest to open me fully. The blunt head of his manhood found the swollen entrance to my slick sheath. My mouth opened automatically for Sven.
Henrik thrust into my vagina in one heavy stroke that made me moan up into Mary’s pussy.
Sven gave me no time to recover before he put his cock into my mouth.
The fullness of both at once—one filling my lips and throat, the other my cunt—obliterated any possibility of coherent thought.
Mary cried out above me, because Sven had taken her literally in hand as well, and I watched his fingers enter her.
The bed itself seemed built to withstand exactly this kind of use. It gave under the rhythm but held us in place. Furs brushed my shoulders and my bottom cheeks. Firelight flickered red around the bodies that blocked my view of anything but my shameful, thrilling sexual service.
Sven fed his cock to me with steady, dominating thrusts, then pulled his hardness from between my lips and thrust it into Mary’s soaking pussy while I, shuddering with shame and need, tasted the salty skin of his tight scrotum.
Henrik fucked my pussy from behind in deep strokes that made my whole lower body rock, then made Mary taste my cunt on my Herra’s demanding length.
I tried to serve them all, through the avalanche of sensation.
I licked and sucked at Mary’s clit while the huge penis moved inside her vagina.
I took Sven’s cock as deeply as I was able, when he elected to use my mouth.
I remembered that he was not my master and yet I knew he was entirely entitled to my mouth in this place, under this law.
That thought made everything more embarrassing, and hotter.
Henrik’s hands came to the backs of my knees and held me still for the particular angle he wanted, and then his thrusts found something inside me that made my eyes flood at once.
“That’s it,” he said roughly. “Take him in your mouth. Take me in your cunt. Be what you are.”
Mary was coming apart above me, I thought.
It had become difficult to tell where one girl’s trembling ended and the other’s began.
I sucked Sven with all the obedience I had in me, swallowing around him when he pressed deeper, breathing through my nose, trying desperately to please him while Henrik drove me on.
The bed, the chamber, the men’s voices, the taste of Mary and Sven, the hard insistence of Henrik inside me—somewhere under the unbearable totality of it, a familiar opening began.