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)
He moved, a slow and careful withdrawal and then a deeper, steadier press forward, and I cried out again at the sharp residue of pain that met the new motion. But underneath it, building with each pass, something else had begun to assemble itself.
“No,” he said, his voice rough but certain. “You won’t rise. Not now.”
“But why…”
“When a vǫlva is being bred,” he said, “she is not free to rise. The tree holds her at its roots. She is planted there.” Another slow thrust, and I sobbed and gripped the iron posts. “The rootedness is the point, lille en. The seed goes down. A vǫlva who is being given her master’s seed in her fisse is of the earth. She will rise through the branches when she is taken in her røvhul—when her body is claimed in the way that is wildest and most animal and most hers. That is the path upward.” A pause, then his hand on my back pressed more firmly, and I felt him deepen his claim on me. “This is the path down. Into the earth. Into what is generational, as we call it.”
The bride saddle. I remembered it with a vividness so complete it seemed to exist in the cell alongside the present moment: the way I had imagined, on the saddle, what it would feel like to be taken in my forbidden place… in the place Giovanna had prepared and Henrik had touched and promised to use. I saw in my mind’s eye the way the tree had opened its branches to me at that precise imagining, the way I had gone upward into the cold light with a totality that had frightened me and drawn me in equal measure.
The path upward. When he took me there… by taking me there. When I was ready.
The thought made me clench around my master’s rigid length. That brought the confusing realization that the warmth between my thighs had overtaken the pain entirely, somewhere in the last several breaths. I hadn’t noticed the transition until it was already complete.
Herra Henrik moved with greater sureness now, his breathing changed, and every slow thrust built upon the last in a way that seemed to have very little to do with decision and everything to do with gravity, with the rootedness he had described, with the oldest and most fundamental logic of what was happening.
“Please,” I begged, with the inside-out meaning, the only meaning the word had left. “Please, Herra. Please… may I…”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice had gone entirely to timber, nothing else. “Come as much as you want, lille en. Come for your Herra. Come while my reðr uses you.”
The first climax arrived at his degrading words, with a totality that made every previous approximation of the thing seem like a sketch for the real work. It moved through me, as if from the Worldtree’s roots upward, and it broke against the base of the tree and spread outward. I cried out to the stone floor and felt my body close around my master’s cock with a helpless, rhythmic insistence that I had no more control over than I had over the tides.
He grunted above me, perhaps the first purely unguarded sound I had heard from him, stripped of all construction, patience, and careful deliberateness. It seemed to come from the same place my cry had come from. It seemed to belong to the same very old, very simple logic.
The second climax followed before the first had finished, and the third followed the second, and I lost count after that. I had no ability to count, to number things… as if what he did to me, in me, existed in a time before men had discovered numbers at all. I lost everything except the roots of the tree beneath me, Henrik’s hands on my hips, and the gathering urgency in his rhythm that told me, even through the haze of sensation, that he was close… that he found my newly opened pussy pleasurable—perhaps even more pleasurable than he had anticipated.
When he came, I felt it. The warmth of him, the intimate heat of his seed, shooting into the deepest part of me with a force that matched the growl he gave. His hands tightened on my hip and my shoulder with a grip that left no ambiguity about who owned me from henceforth.
I cried out again, a broken, wordless sound, and the orgasm that answered his climax was different from the others—rooted in another place still, deeper, less frantic, as if the body understood that something had changed and wanted to mark the change with a different kind of response.
I pressed my cheek against the stone and wept, quietly, in the particular silence that followed.
Henrik’s hands moved to my back, and then to my sides, and he gathered himself slowly, as if he had arrived somewhere he hadn’t entirely expected to go. I felt him withdraw, and the absence felt strange. It seemed to bring a new kind of awareness of myself, of the body that a strong man had claimed and now held the evidence of his enjoyment.