Page 37 of Her Viking Guardian

“The Sons of Odin don’t speak of the act the way the Pretorian Guard speaks of it. Giovanna told you about it, and called it the act of civilization. For her and her masters, it’s about imposing order on wilderness.” A pause in which he pressed inward a little further and I cried out and gripped the iron posts with everything I had. “For us it is different—as perhaps it is for this Chinese fellowship you may have caught a glimpse of. Among us, the bed thrall fights her nature. She is wild. She resists. And the act of taming her, here…” Another press, deliberate and slow. “Here especially, embodies that wildness as much as it subdues it. The warrior who takes his thrall’s røvhul takes her in the place where she is most herself, most animal, most untamed.” His thumb and forefinger found my nipple again. “He doesn’t impose civilization. He meets the wilderness in her and claims it.”

I was crying. I hadn’t noticed when it had started. The tears fell onto the stone beneath my face and joined whatever older tears had fallen there before them.

“I can’t find her in the tree,” I said again. The admission this time carried a different quality—not failure but recognition. I understood, with the part of me that assembled patterns below the threshold of awareness, why she wasn’t there. The tree was present and vast and beckoning, and I was on its lower branches, barely above its roots, held there by whatever I hadn’t yet given up.

“More,” I whispered. “I need… if I could go further… I think she might be…”

The words fell apart.

His finger withdrew, and his hand moved down and forward. The orgasm rose so suddenly and so completely that I heard myself make a sound that belonged in the carvings, if the artist could have incorporated audio. It echoed off the stone of the cell as I felt certain the same kind of sound must have come from kneeling columbae more than a thousand years.

“Please,” I said, and it was the new meaning of the word, the inside-out meaning, the meaning that had no relationship to any decision I had made but was simply true. “Please, Herra. Please… I need you to… please, I need it…”

“I know what you need,” he said, and his voice had roughened entirely, the careful construction gone, nothing left but the stripped timber of it. “I’m going to take your sweet fisse now, lille en. I’m going to put my seed inside you.” He moved, repositioning himself behind me, and I felt the heat of his lap against the back of my thighs. “Your røvhul I will take when you’re truly ready. When I’ve made your sweet cunt my prized possession. When your body knows me well enough to welcome me there the way a thrall should welcome her Herra, and we can begin your true training as a vǫlva.”

“Yes,” I said, or tried to say.

The blunt heat of him pressed against me, and I shuddered so violently that I felt the iron posts shake in their stone sockets.

He didn’t rush. It undid me: his absolute lack of urgency even as I could feel the hard, insistent pressure of his cock against the virgin entrance to my body and the warmth of his thighs’ fronts against the punished backs of mine. He held himself there with his left hand flat on my hip, steadying me, letting me feel the full implication of what was about to happen. I pressed my forehead into the stone and tried to remember how to breathe.

“You’re going to have my seed inside you,” he said. His voice had gone very quiet, with a roughness in it that layered something else atop his authority… the sheer animal masculinity of his will… his power to possess me as men possess women, and had possessed them from the dawning of the world.

“Whatever else happens. Whatever the Norns have already spun out for you and for me.” His hand moved on my hip, and I felt the pressure increase, just slightly, against the maiden barrier of my needy pussy… the place where I had never been entered by a man, and thus had never become a woman in that ancient way. “If they spin it so, lille en, I will breed you. I will put a strong warrior in your belly, or a fair maiden.”

I had never thought about having children. Not seriously, not in the way one considers actual futures rather than abstract theoretical possibilities. My dissertation, my career, the next conference, the next excavation season… those had represented my futures. The idea of a child had lived in some vague, deferred elsewhere that I had never examined closely.

Now, kneeling on a leather mat in a volcanic stone cell with a Viking’s hands on my hips, I felt the idea arrive with a force so immediate and so physically located that I couldn’t pretend it was abstract at all.

His child. A son with those broad shoulders and those pale gray eyes and the patient, absolute certainty of him. Or a daughter who would grow up knowing more than I, her curiosity gratified earlier, her learning deeper.

I thought of the bed thralls in the carvings. I had studied those images so intently, cataloguing the details of the limestone’s preservation, noting the stylistic conventions of the anonymous artist. I had looked at the women on their knees and told myself I was documenting an artifact.

But they had been real women. Real women who had knelt as I was kneeling, or who had ridden the rowing benches of the longships. They had felt what I was feeling… had been claimed by strong men in bride chambers… and had carried those men’s children afterward. And perhaps that had been—I couldn’t stop the thought—perhaps it had been a consolation. The strong child of a powerful man, in a world where strength was the only reliable currency. Perhaps it had been more than consolation. Perhaps it had been, for some of them, the thing they had wanted most.

I clenched my teeth shut very hard and failed to keep the small, desperate sound from escaping anyway.

Both of Henrik’s hands took hold of my hips, and he thrust forward, very hard.

The pain arrived before I had finished bracing for it, and it was nothing like what I had anticipated, in my cautious academic imagination. It felt total. It was a tearing brightness that began at the center of me and radiated outward to the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. I screamed.

I could hear how the sound left the cell immediately, bouncing off the curved stone walls and then escaping through the barred window into the mosaic corridor beyond, and I knew—I knew with a certainty as complete as any scholarly conviction I had ever held—that it could be heard out there. That Giovanna was somewhere in that corridor, or in one of the other stone rooms, and that she had heard it. That my mistress Bellatrix Hestiaea had heard the exact moment of my defloration, the specific pitch and timbre of the cry that announced what I was now and had never been before: a man’s possession… a Viking’s bed thrall… my Herra’s naughty fuck toy…

The thought sent a wave of heat through me so acute and so mortifying that it seemed to compound the pain rather than displace it, and then compound the heat again in return, until I couldn’t separate the two, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Breathe,” Henrik said, above me. He held himself at full length as I squirmed beneath him, my spanked bottom burning against his firm lap. His right hand moved from my hip to my shoulder, the same steadying pressure that restrained me too, keeping me where he wanted me, impaled on his manhood. “Breathe, lille en. The pain is true. Let it be true, as a sign that you belong to a warrior who knows how to use his new bed thrall.”

CHAPTER 19

Ilsa

I breathed. The pain pulsed with my heartbeat, deep and present and—I found, to my considerable surprise—not entirely unwelcome. It felt like something being resolved. Like a question that had been building since the café, since the mosaic border, since the moment I had run my hand along the worn surface of the rowing bench and understood with my body before my mind caught up that I had been meant to find this place. The pain felt like an answer.

I welcomed it. I pressed back against the lap of my deflowerer, very slightly, and Henrik made a low sound above me. His hands tightened on my shoulder and on my hip.

The tree remained. Yggdrasil’s roots came down through the volcanic stone, solid and vast and indifferent to the pain or the heat or the tears falling from my face onto the floor. I was near those roots, very near; I could feel the enormous, cold presence of the trunk above me, the roots spreading out beneath me like the fingers of a hand that had been reaching for me for a very long time.

But I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t find the lower branches. I lay amid the roots and I felt the pain and the building, impossible warmth that was beginning to replace it. The branches, though, lay somewhere above me, stirring in their cold upper wind, and I couldn’t reach them.