Page 81 of Her Viking Guardian

That could have meant visions. It could have meant fieldwork. It could also have meant exactly what it sounded like, in a world where men arranged women’s bodies for use first and asked theory to catch up later.

Mary went still beside me. Camille gave a tiny exhalation through her nose. I felt my face warm again.

Sven said, “You have all borne children or are bearing them, including Ilsa, who has only just begun her pregnancy. You have all shown capacities the rest of our women do not possess in the same configuration. You are bed thralls, yes. But you are not merely bed thralls. Together, you form something new.”

Henrik’s mouth moved faintly, into a small smile that brought warmth to my chest.

“So we’ve chosen a new name for you.”

There was a pause in which I became acutely conscious of my own skin, my bare feet on the heated floor, the nearness of the other women’s bodies, the men’s composure, the absurdity and inevitability of naming as an act of power.

Then Sven gave us our new designation, one that sent a thrill up my spine as I wondered what it would mean, to us and to the world.

“You will be the Sisters of Freya.”

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 vǫlva.”

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 vǫlva, his kneppetøj, 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.”