Epilogue
Ilsa
Six months later Henrik surprised me with a trip back to Sicily.
I had really begun to show by then. My center of gravity had shifted.
My dresses fell differently. Men’s eyes, when they rested on me in public, slid not only to my face and my breasts now but to the swell of my belly, and every such glance reminded me that I carried my master’s child beneath my heart.
I felt slower, yes, and heavier, and easier to tire.
But I also felt strangely more integrated.
Less divided against myself. The frantic, dissociative quality my desire had once possessed had softened into something denser and more rooted.
Submission no longer felt like a dramatic departure from my identity.
It felt like one of the forms my identity had always wanted to take.
The surprise of Sicily therefore affected me in two opposite ways at once.
On the one hand, I felt instantly girlish with delight.
On the other, I felt a solemn little thrill, because I understood at once what it meant to come back here in this condition: rounder, fuller, carrying the proof of what the tree and the bed and Henrik’s body had made of me.
I felt him watching me when we first approached the hidden way through the rock.
His hand stayed at my elbow over the trickier footing, protective without fussing.
I wore a loose pale dress and flat sandals, my braid over one shoulder, my pendant cool against the top of my chest. The Mediterranean air smelled of salt and sun-struck stone. The sea looked almost indecently blue.
“You planned this,” I said, because the bag full of sleeping furs in the car on the drive had not escaped my notice.
Henrik’s mouth moved faintly. “I did.”
“For leisure?”
“For your leisure,” he said. “You’ve worked enough, little v?lva.”
The familiar phrase warmed me embarrassingly. A vacation. From strategic debriefings, from Sisters of Freya business, from the unnerving seriousness with which powerful men now treated my body and mind when the two worked together. I ought to have relished the rest on its own terms.
I did relish it. I also felt, with mounting heat between my thighs, that the cavern could never belong wholly to the category of rest.
Before we even entered the chamber proper, my pulse had changed.
The air itself seemed to thicken with memory.
Then the cavern opened around us, and there lay the ship again in its impossible half-light, dark wood and carving and all the condensed symbolic weight of what had happened to me here before. I stopped where I was.
I had wondered if my pregnancy might make the place feel foreign, or render my former self slightly ridiculous to me.
Instead I experienced an overwhelming continuity.
The girl who had stood here uncertain and inexplicably (she had thought) aroused, and pretending to be a detached observer…
she hadn’t vanished. She had simply become a part of what she had once only studied.
Henrik went aboard the longship first and turned to offer me his hand.
I took it and stepped into the ship with absurd care, as if boarding not a relic in a cave but a vessel afloat on dark water.
He led me to the bench… the same bench. My whole body recognized it before my mind had finished the thought.
I sat beside him. The wood under me was cool—I knew that factually and rationally—but it still felt warm, just as it had when I had first touched it, six months before.
For a little while he only kissed me. Slowly at first. Then with a pressure that reminded me at once of exactly what sort of man my elegant, disciplined, terrifyingly competent partner remained beneath his modern clothes.
His palm moved over my side and came to rest on the curve of my belly. He kissed me more softly then.
I laid my hand over his. The gesture should just have made everything tender, and it did that.
It also made everything hotter, though. I was his bed thrall, his v?lva, his kneppet?j, his fuck toy…
and I carried his child while I sat on the bench where I had once played with my naughty fisse in secret…
and where he had later claimed me with the Pretorian Guard looking on.
I broke the kiss and looked down, breathing harder.
“The roots,” I said quietly, half to myself.
Henrik brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “What, little one?”
“I can feel them.” I glanced around the ship and the carved chamber and then back to him. “The roots, under everything.”
His expression changed a little, growing graver. “You don’t have to work today.”
I smiled despite myself. “I know.”
He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Do you? You’ve been very obedient about pretending to rest. Not always successfully.”
That made me laugh softly. It also made me want to kneel before him and serve as I should, my mouth full of my Herra’s hardness.
“I’m serious,” he said, not harshly. “You’re not on v?lva duty.”
The word duty, applied to something so intimately perverse, sent a pulse through me.
I lowered my eyes. In six months the title Sister of Freya had become attached in me to meeting schedules, intelligence summaries, pregnancy monitoring, nursing consultations with the matres and the m?er, and also, inseparably, to the humiliating bodily means by which the men expected their intelligence and visions improved: my anus stretched around my master’s cock atop his bride saddle, rising into the upper boughs of the Worldtree as he enjoyed my bottom’s tightness.
The practical and the obscene had long ago fused.
“I know, Herra,” I said.
He stroked my braid once, then my neck. “Good.”
I should have left it there. Instead I heard myself say, “Will you use my bottom anyway, Herra?”
His hand went still against me.
The words had come out with less hesitation than they once would have done.
That, by itself, fascinated me. There had been a time when merely imagining myself asking for so shameful a thing would have made me want to disappear into the floor.
Now the shame remained fully alive, but it no longer blocked speech.
It had become a roadway through which desire and need traveled.
Henrik searched my face. “For pleasure?”
“For a vision,” I whispered, then corrected myself because the distinction no longer held cleanly. “For both.”
His eyes darkened.
I wet my lips. “Put me on the saddle.”
“No.”
His refusal came instantly.
I think some old reflex in me still expected to test boundaries, because disappointment flashed up at once, irrational and hot. “Henrik… please?”
“No.” He cupped my jaw, not roughly but with complete finality. “You are not going on the bride saddle like that.” His hand slid from my face to my belly. “Not now.”
I let out a breath through my nose. There was no arguing with the calm certainty in his voice, and in truth some part of me had known he would refuse. Pregnancy had not made him less dominant. It had made his protectiveness another instrument of command.
Still, I looked at him with what must have been a plainly pleading expression, because his thumb passed once over my lower lip and his tone softened.
“I’ll give you what you need,” he said. “In the bridal chamber. On the furs I brought for you.”
My whole body answered that. It was so immediate and so complete that I felt heat rise into my face.
“Yes, Herra.”
He rose and helped me to my feet. The ship creaked slightly under our movement, though it did not move at all.
The old irrationality of the place pleased me.
He kept his hand in mine as we went into the narrower chamber, carrying the bag in his other hand.
The bridal room felt smaller than I remembered, and more intimate.
Perhaps that was because I knew more now.
Perhaps it was because my body had already begun to anticipate the exact route by which shame would become sight.
He spread the furs with care, making a layered softness over the old stone. Then he turned to me and undressed me almost ceremonially. My dress went over my head. My bra unclasped. My panties slid down my thighs. He helped me step free of them one foot at a time because of my altered balance.
The difference from the way he had ripped my clothes off the last time we had been in this sanctuary could not have been starker, but my Herra’s ownership of me felt no less complete for the care he took.
I stood before him with my belly rounded, my breasts heavier than they had once been, my sex already slick and my bottom destined for him if he chose.
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Beautiful,” he said.
No elaborate praise could have moved me more. Beautiful in this state. Beautiful because of it, perhaps. I touched my pendant and then let my hand fall.
“How do you want me?” I asked, feeling my brow furrow in the familiar way it always did when the time to receive my master’s huge, hard reer had arrived again.
“On your side.”
He eased me down to the furs himself, arranging me with pillows from the bag I hadn’t even noticed he’d packed.
One supported my head. Another tucked partly under my belly, another between my knees until the whole posture felt surprisingly stable and safe.
The care of it made my throat tighten. Then he bent my upper leg a little and settled it where he wanted it.
The position opened me enough that I felt exposure immediately.
“You’re comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll tell me if that changes.”
“Yes, Herra.”
He kissed my shoulder. Then I heard the small practical sounds of his preparation: a zipper, fabric moving, a cap unscrewed. The scent of the lubricant was faint and clean. My body recognized it with absurd submissive gratitude.