Page 68 of Her Viking Guardian

I tried. The effort itself seemed to pull me and Mary farther along the branch, as if articulation could function as a kind of steering. We moved toward the industrial tree, as if direction meant nothing in this utterly non-Euclidean space. That tree was and wasn’t the same one where we were.

The imagery thickened. Young women knelt beneath it, naked. Men crouched behind them… over them. The girls knelt as conduits, faces down and bottoms up. Their heads were bowed to the ground as their masters fucked their bottoms, their hair spreading over the soil around them.

From their thoroughly used bodies rose filaments of light that fed the larger structure. Behind them the men, in dark modern clothes, their rigid manhoods jutting from their flies, drove them onward. Their faces would not hold still. Executive. Priest. Engineer. Party official. The vision slid among categories, refusing to settle.

A sisterhood, I thought suddenly. A sisterhood to serve the fellowship. The way the Order of Ostia served the Pretorian Guard… the way bed thralls, vǫlur, like Mary and me served the Sons of Odin.

CHAPTER 33

Ilsa

A creeping dread began to work its way into my mind, as I tried to understand what I could see in the Chinese tree. The feeling arrived with such clarity that it seemed less like an inference than a warning. The linked lights below the Chinese tree had begun to seem aware in a way I didn’t understand at first. Not sentient exactly, not in any simple anthropomorphic sense, but… responsive. If Mary and I pressed further downward into that gleaming network of towers and kneeling women and transmitted force, then something in it might feel the pressure of our looking.

I turned to Mary on the branch. Her pale face, framed in loose red hair, had taken on the same tautness I felt in my own. Her eyes widened. She gave the smallest shake of her head.

Yes, I thought at her without words. You feel it too, don’t you?

Below us, or through us, or in whatever impossible relation the vision bore to our bodies, I felt again the soreness between my legs, the burning in my bottom cheeks, the profound, used heaviness of a girl who had been ridden to the edge of her mind.

The sense of danger should have sharpened my awareness, maybe. Instead it reminded me how tired I was.

The branches under us seemed suddenly less solid than they had before. The air around the Chinese structure hummed with a kind of electric appetite. I had the awful intuition that if we lingered, some woman there—or some man behind those women, some master of that other order—might look up and find us.

Mary’s face changed again, softening into an exhausted resignation that I felt certain matched my own. We had gone as far as we safely could. Whatever link had let us look into that other tree, whatever leak between systems or symbols or networks I had only begun to understand, didn’t feel like a passage we should force.

I let go.

I had the impression of falling back into my own body. The duality that I had found as I had climbed into the canopy of the tree vanished immediately under a wave of pain… and then aftershock… and at last relief so complete it seemed to erase thought. The branch, the lights, the industrial trunk of power and finally our own tree, Yggdrasil itself, all seemed to fold inward like a map being closed.

The bridal chamber rushed up around me.

I was still draped over the saddle, every muscle trembling. My anus still held the memory—no, more than the memory, the throbbing fact—of what my master had done to me there. My clit felt used almost raw by the bride’s consolation. My bottom cheeks burned where the mastix and the strap had marked them. I tried to lift my head and could not. I had the impression that I had made a small sound, but even that seemed to cost too much.

Henrik’s hands came to the old restraints. I heard leather move and metal creak. The sudden release of pressure at my wrists and thighs seemed almost as shocking as the bondage had been. He caught me before I could slide gracelessly from the saddle, one arm under my breasts and one under my hips, and gathered me up against him. I felt the pendant against my breastbone again, where it belonged, and I fancied for a moment that it was burning, painlessly, a wunjo onto my skin, to designate me fully as a vǫlva.

The heat of my Herra’s body impressed itself on my senses first. Then the smell of sweat and leather and sea-washed stone came to my nostrils. Then, in my whole body, the extraordinary, almost childish relief of not having to hold myself up anymore.

Giovanna said something that I probably could have understood if my mind had been functional. Mateo, too, I thought. Their voices had become distant and unimportant. I let my face rest against Henrik’s shoulder. The cavern moved around us as he carried me. I knew, dimly, when we left the bridal chamber and entered the larger space near the ship. The air felt different there, broader, touched by the scent of old wood. Then even that perception began to grow thin.

The longship, the carvings, the hidden approach through the rock—everything receded into a dreamlike sequence of impressions seen through half-closed eyes. Henrik kept me in his arms as if I weighed nothing. I experienced an absurd fragment of consciousness in which I felt certain that this, too, had probably happened a thousand years ago: a warrior carrying away the girl he had just used in a rite too old to be explained to the modern world.

Then blackness took me.

* * *

When I came back to myself, I thought for a few moments that I must be in the middle of a dream. The seat beneath me was broad and butter-soft, pale leather contoured to hold the body in luxury. A folded blanket lay over my lap. The air had that faintly sterile, exquisitely conditioned quality that I immediately associated with the aroma of the first-class cabin of a transoceanic flight: wealth in transit. There was a low, steady engine hum under everything.

Then I gathered that if I thought I was dreaming, I probably wasn’t dreaming. Immediately, my body objected; it definitely didn’t want to return to consciousness just yet.

The soreness between my legs and in my bottom asserted itself so decisively that I inhaled sharply and then regretted even that, because my abdominal muscles were somehow tired too. I shifted a fraction and discovered fresh complaints from my thighs, my lower back, my mouth. My lips felt swollen. My neck, where Henrik had apparently bitten me, gave a small throb. Every part of me seemed to have become a record of my Herra’s dark pleasure and my submission to it.

“Easy, lille en,” came Henrik’s voice beside me.

I turned my head. He sat in the facing seat, immaculate again somehow, though not in the exact clothes he’d worn to the cavern. I had the disorienting impression that he could move from ancient barbarism to executive composure without ever truly changing his attitude. Giovanna sat a little further away, dark and elegant and perfectly put together, as if private jets after ritualized sexual breaking were part of an ordinary itinerary. Which, for her, I supposed they probably were.

I swallowed. My throat felt dry. “Where…”

“We’re about to land,” Henrik said. “Rouen.”