Page 35 of Her Viking Guardian

A shared vision—two women on the tree simultaneously, aware of one another, and one of them perhaps not a vǫlva, but something else: something from the East. I kept my fingers moving, steady and purposeful.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I want you to understand something about what you are, Ilsa. About what a vǫlva actually is.”

* * *

Ilsa

“Please,” I whispered. The word had taken on its new meaning entirely now. “Please, Herra… please don’t stop.”

“I won’t stop, lille en,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle.

His fingers found a new angle. I sobbed and arched my back on the mat, the cuffs at my wrists pulling taut against the iron posts.

His voice returned to the growling rumble that seemed to work its way into my flesh. “But you will listen.”

I heard myself make a broken sound of acquiescence.

“The Sons of Odin have studied the vǫlur for centuries,” he said. “We have records going back to the first settlements of the Vikings in Denmark. And in all that time, in all of those records, there is not one instance of a vǫlva whose gift was truly supernatural, in the way the old skalds describe it.”

He paused, letting his thumb rest very lightly on the small, swollen nub at the crest of my desperate pussy while his fingers continued their work below it. I let out a helpless moan.

“What the vǫlur have, every one of them, is something more interesting than prophecy. More useful. More real.”

“What?” I could barely form the word.

“Intelligence,” he said. “Observation so fine it operates below the threshold of awareness. You notice everything, lille en. I’m sure if you think of it, you will realize that you always have. You read the mosaic that no one else had read in perhaps nine hundred years. You found the directions and you followed them. Your mind had begun to assemble the picture long before you understood what kind of picture it was assembling.”

To my mingled distress and delight, he moved his fingers with greater deliberateness for a moment. I cried out, my hips rocking back against his knowing hand.

“The tree is not a hallucination. It is what your mind looks like from the inside when it does what it does best. When the observations become pattern. When pattern becomes understanding.”

Silence, except for my breathing and the small, wet sounds of his hand working between my thighs.

My Herra’s explanation settled into me. My academic brain judged the basic argument a good one. It seemed to click into place, like a key in a lock.

Pattern becoming understanding. I had always noticed too much, remembered too much, assembled connections that other people seemed not to see. My dissertation adviser had called it intuition, and told me that I needed to learn to produce evidence for every assertion.

But it wasn’t intuition… or it was a very different kind of intuition from what she had meant. It was work. Relentless, unconscious, accumulating work.

The tree had already arrived in my mind, at the edges of the cell, when I understood that. It hadn’t waited to arrive—it had been there all along, the way the inscription had been there in the mosaic border, visible to anyone with the patience to read it. The roots came down through the volcanic stone beneath my hands and knees as if the stone were only a suggestion of solidity, a temporary agreement between matter and time. The trunk and the branches soared somewhere above the low dome, beyond it, into a cold upper air, a height beyond ordinary reckoning.

I pressed my lips together hard and heard a tiny whine emerge from my nose.

I would not tell him. The recognition of what his explanation meant had reached me alongside the recognition of what it cost. If this Henrik person—I absolutely refused in that moment to call him Herra… if he had it right, if the tree represented the shape of my own mind doing what it did best, then the only way I had ever reached it, the only way I had reached it on the bride saddle and in the intake room and in the jade-colored bath, was through this. Through submission. Through sexual submission. Through the humiliating need he was fostering in me with his distressingly skillful hand.

I could only become what he was calling me… what he was making me… here with my knees spread on a mat in a stone cell… letting a gorgeous, muscular man work my body toward a crisis I couldn’t control. The vǫlva’s gift, if it was a gift at all, lived inside the bed thrall.

The kneppetøj… the fuck toy.

They were the same thing. I couldn’t have one without being the other.

My jaw tightened. The tree waited, patient as stone.

His left hand moved from my back. I felt it travel around my ribcage, then it cupped my breast from below with a warm, deliberate lifting, and his thumb found my nipple.

The sound that came out of me then had nothing to do with rational cogitation.

He rolled the nipple between his thumb and forefinger with a slow, considered pressure, and his right hand kept moving between my thighs. The two sensations found each other somewhere in the center of me and became a single, compounding thing that overwhelmed my nervous system. My back arched. My hips rocked. The cuffs at my wrists pulled taut against the posts and I gripped the iron and tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone.