Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
I waited until she let out a small, desperate sound, pressing back helplessly against my hand, trying to draw my fingers deeper into the sweet, hot sheath of her vagina.
“Tell me about the vision,” I said. I kept my voice level, though my cock ached with urgency. “What did you see on the bride saddle?”
“But… I… I told… I told Giovanna…” She gasped as my thumb moved. “I told her… the… the… bellatrix. I told her… please, Herra…”
“I know you did,” I replied, making my voice a growl and feeling her body arch at the sound of my authority. “Now you will tell your Herra, if you want his tól inside this pretty little cunt of yours.”
“Oh… oh, God… I… please, Herra…”
I stilled my hand. Ilsa gave a sob of frustration.
“The tree…” she gasped. “Roots and branches. Coolness… soothing… almost cold.”
“Yes.” I eased the pressure of my touch just enough to give her mind room to work alongside her body. The elders had always said that a vǫlva’s gift lived in that tension—the space between thought and sensation where a submissive bed thrall’s creative imagination can take hold. “And something else. You told her there was another girl.”
Her breathing caught. On her face, in profile to me as she gazed down at the smooth stone between her hands, I saw an adorable frown of deep concentration come over her face.
“She was on the tree too… or… I don’t know, Herra. It was confusing… maybe she was on a different tree that was also the same tree? But… she was… she was like me, I thought. A girl, paddled so… so hard by the man, and… he… he used her… her poor bottom… and she went to her tree the way I went to mine and they were the same, and I saw her in the branches below, and she looked up at me. I thought… she looked Chinese to me?”
I considered that, feeling a frown of my own emerge onto my forehead. Having a vǫlva vision without a Son of Odin present was remarkable enough. But the other girl, on the other tree… a Chinese tree…
I had messaged Sven to ask if any of the records held an account of a vǫlva seeing another vǫlva on the tree. He had replied that none of the materials we’d digitized over the past decade seemed to contain anything of the sort. Those records, though, only included a little more than half the annals stored in the archive beneath Rouen.
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.