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)
The Guardsman made a small sound, a considered little grunt. “The fisse is responsive. Tight.” A pause. “She wept throughout, but she obeyed. She asked for permission before she climaxed.” He seemed to weigh something, as if running figures. “She is progressing. Bellatrix, how did you find the mouth?”
My eyes went to Giovanna, my tummy lurching at the arch, satisfied look on her face.
“Certainly more pleasurable than it was yesterday. Henrik has gentled her nicely.”
I couldn’t keep a little sob of humiliation from emerging. They took no notice.
All their eyes turned to the screen, where Sven remained quiet for a moment. His pale eyes had not moved from me, and I had the uncanny sensation—one I was becoming more familiar with than I found comfortable—that he could read in my face things I hadn’t finished writing yet.
“From the perspective of the North, she is more than progressing,” he said at last, in a formal register that seemed to mark pronouncements rather than observations. “She saw Yggdrasil from the longship in her dream. That is not the dream of an ordinary vǫlva-in-training.” His gaze shifted to Henrik, and then to the others. “If a girl sees the Worldtree at all, in her first night’s dreams, she sees it on land, outside a village… or more frequently atop a mountain.”
“What does that mean?” asked Leo Aetnaeus, frowning. “We know enough now to trust your vǫlur’s visions, but your paradoxical belief in certain… symbols… such as where a girl sees the tree… that continues to confuse us—to put it mildly.”
I thought I could perceive in the Guardsman’s words an iron fist clad in a velvet glove. To put it mildly… in this Bruno’s amiable voice, couched in amiable words, I thought I sensed something that didn’t seem mild at all. I shivered as something that extended from below the level of my conscious mind seemed to make its way into my rational brain. I could almost feel the fault lines between two clandestine organizations who possessed real geopolitical power—the more impressive because of how deeply hidden their operation upon the world had obviously been, apparently over the course of centuries.
“May I?” my Herra asked his chieftain.
“Of course, brother,” Sven replied from the monitor.
Herra Henrik turned to the leo. I felt another shiver go through me at the mere sight of his face, wearing an expression of such gravity that I felt a perverse, distressing surge of pride that I belonged to him.
CHAPTER 25
Ilsa
“There was a time, many hundreds of years ago, when we believed what the skalds sang, about the women we claimed as bed thralls and mothers of our children. That for those to whom the gift came, their visions and dreams held literal truth, sent from Asgard, and any contradictions among them, or differences from what actually occurred, sprang from the vǫlva’s own failure to report exactly what she had seen.”
I felt my brow crease as I tried to follow my master’s logic. Sven nodded from the screen in agreement, but Henrik seemed to be telling Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea something different from what he had told me. A moment later, though, his reasoning fell into place for me as he continued, and I gained a new piece of this extraordinary puzzle. As shameful as it all was, my intellect couldn’t keep from finding the cryptic history utterly fascinating.
“Over the last century, though, we have studied our annals and our vǫlur’s visions in a scientific way, and we have understood that what they see—both in their waking visions upon the bride saddle and in their dreams after we claim them—comes from the extraordinary acuity of their unconscious minds. A bed thrall like Ilsa can interpret the world in ways of which no other human we know is capable.”
A bed thrall like me. A rare kind of bed thrall, apparently. A vǫlva in the making, according to the men who kept those records in the archive beneath Rouen.
As my Herra went on, speaking in his measured, exact way, I took my hands from my stomach and let them rest at my sides, the wrist cuffs clicking softly as my arms descended. The skin of my belly felt warm and slightly tacky where I had rubbed. I stared at the curved stone ceiling and felt the confusion of what was happening inside me arrange itself into something I couldn’t ignore.
First… that crazy pride. Sven Hallstrom had called me rare. The leo, who had watched my binding with amber eyes that seemed to find most things beneath full attention, had granted my progression, too. And my Herra had said nothing really specific, but as he spoke I could feel his gaze on the side of my face: steady, present, and containing more information than its surface suggested.
Underneath the pride, though, utter degradation. The two things were not opposites in this room and had apparently never been, and I had begun to understand that this world had somehow been built precisely on that fact.