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)
“Of course,” I heard my Herra say, as if the scene among the three of them, all clothed, were taking place in some parallel galaxy, a universe away from the version of the subterranean control room where I, Ilsa Matthews, somehow stood naked but for leather cuffs, belt, and collar. “The Sons of Odin’s rites involve sharing our bed thralls from their first use—as the girls were shared on the longships that brought them to their new lives in the North.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, but I didn’t even feel sure that I’d made a sound, because none of the other people in the room seemed to pay me the slightest attention, except of course as a possession from which pleasure could be derived.
My master hadn’t told me that my dream had apparently evoked an essential, if lewd and utterly degrading, experience of the Vikings’ bed thralls. Part of me had wanted to believe the coincidence merely that, my mind working along logical paths to find a plausible scene of degradation for my dreaming self. It had felt too correct, though… too exact; a shiver traveled down my back as I wondered if the answer lay in my developing abilities as a vǫlva.
“But,” Herra Henrik continued, “I’m hoping you’ll permit my chief—the leader of the Sons of Odin, Sven Hallstrom—to bear witness and give counsel. I have a request to make that may prove problematic, and I want us to have the benefit of Sven’s thoughts. That’s why I’ve asked for a secure link to Huginn’s Eye. Sven is known to the Guard, I believe?”
I managed to lift my eyes, my curiosity to see the leo’s reaction overcoming my abject embarrassment. He nodded, though his brow had developed a furrow of concern.
“Well known,” he confirmed. “Very well… and trusted by the Central Mithraeum in New York.”
Then Leo Aetnaeus moved to the monitors and touched a sequence of controls. One of the screens—the largest, mounted at the center of the bank—shifted from a camera feed to a different image. A loading indicator, brief and professional. And then a face.
I had not been expecting the face to do what it did to me.
The man I saw was perhaps thirty-five, broad-shouldered, with blond hair and a neatly trimmed beard and eyes that were a shade of steel blue so pale they seemed almost colorless in the monitor’s light. He sat in what appeared to be a stone chamber, maybe even older even than this one. I could see rough-cut walls behind him. He wore dark clothing that sat on his powerful frame with the ease of something chosen carefully, and for some reason I knew in an instant that he could only be a professor.
He looked, in other words, like an academic version of the carved warriors in the limestone cavern, as my Herra looked like—I supposed—a commercial version of them.
He also looked like what the men in my dream would have looked like, if they had put on contemporary clothing and sat before a camera. Perhaps my reaction came from knowing that my master did indeed have fellow Vikings who brought to life what I’d seen and imagined in the cavern. Perhaps it arose as well from the way Herra Henrik had referred to him with such respect… as his chief.
Of course a warrior would share his bed thrall with his chief, wouldn’t he? If he shared her with anyone, surely it would be his chief, who had the privilege to enjoy her alongside her owner…
Oh, God.
“Henrik,” he said. His accent was more pronounced than my Herra’s, the same Nordic cadence but less smoothed by years of international travel. “And this—” his pale eyes found me on whatever corresponding feed he was watching, “—this is the girl from Capo Zafferano.”
“Ilsa Matthews,” Henrik said. “Archaeologist. Doctoral candidate. Now a columba of the Pretorian Guard as well as my bed thrall. She found the cavern.”
“I know what she found.” Sven Hallstrom’s gaze remained on me, and I felt it the way I had felt the cold wind in the upper branches of the tree: present, indifferent, and somehow… beckoning, all at the same time. “She had a vision on the bride saddle, you told me. Without a warrior’s tól in her bottom.”
I closed my eyes very tightly and swallowed down the little sob that threatened to break free of my chest.
“Without anyone present,” Henrik said. “Last night, after I took her fisse’s flower, she dreamed a vǫlva’s dream. I have no remaining doubt.”
The reference to my defloration in the phrase somehow both graphic and figurative… my fisse’s flower… in my master’s mouth, spoken to these people, in this room, produced a heat in my face so acute that I felt glad the monitor’s blue light was probably washing out my complexion entirely.
“Tell me about the dream,” Sven said, and he said it to me. Not to my Herra.