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 bridal chamber rushed up around me.
I was still draped over the saddle, every muscle trembling. My anus still held the memory—no, more than the memory, the throbbing fact—of what my master had done to me there. My clit felt used almost raw by the bride’s consolation. My bottom cheeks burned where the mastix and the strap had marked them. I tried to lift my head and could not. I had the impression that I had made a small sound, but even that seemed to cost too much.
Henrik’s hands came to the old restraints. I heard leather move and metal creak. The sudden release of pressure at my wrists and thighs seemed almost as shocking as the bondage had been. He caught me before I could slide gracelessly from the saddle, one arm under my breasts and one under my hips, and gathered me up against him. I felt the pendant against my breastbone again, where it belonged, and I fancied for a moment that it was burning, painlessly, a wunjo onto my skin, to designate me fully as a vǫlva.
The heat of my Herra’s body impressed itself on my senses first. Then the smell of sweat and leather and sea-washed stone came to my nostrils. Then, in my whole body, the extraordinary, almost childish relief of not having to hold myself up anymore.
Giovanna said something that I probably could have understood if my mind had been functional. Mateo, too, I thought. Their voices had become distant and unimportant. I let my face rest against Henrik’s shoulder. The cavern moved around us as he carried me. I knew, dimly, when we left the bridal chamber and entered the larger space near the ship. The air felt different there, broader, touched by the scent of old wood. Then even that perception began to grow thin.
The longship, the carvings, the hidden approach through the rock—everything receded into a dreamlike sequence of impressions seen through half-closed eyes. Henrik kept me in his arms as if I weighed nothing. I experienced an absurd fragment of consciousness in which I felt certain that this, too, had probably happened a thousand years ago: a warrior carrying away the girl he had just used in a rite too old to be explained to the modern world.
Then blackness took me.
* * *
When I came back to myself, I thought for a few moments that I must be in the middle of a dream. The seat beneath me was broad and butter-soft, pale leather contoured to hold the body in luxury. A folded blanket lay over my lap. The air had that faintly sterile, exquisitely conditioned quality that I immediately associated with the aroma of the first-class cabin of a transoceanic flight: wealth in transit. There was a low, steady engine hum under everything.
Then I gathered that if I thought I was dreaming, I probably wasn’t dreaming. Immediately, my body objected; it definitely didn’t want to return to consciousness just yet.
The soreness between my legs and in my bottom asserted itself so decisively that I inhaled sharply and then regretted even that, because my abdominal muscles were somehow tired too. I shifted a fraction and discovered fresh complaints from my thighs, my lower back, my mouth. My lips felt swollen. My neck, where Henrik had apparently bitten me, gave a small throb. Every part of me seemed to have become a record of my Herra’s dark pleasure and my submission to it.
“Easy, lille en,” came Henrik’s voice beside me.
I turned my head. He sat in the facing seat, immaculate again somehow, though not in the exact clothes he’d worn to the cavern. I had the disorienting impression that he could move from ancient barbarism to executive composure without ever truly changing his attitude. Giovanna sat a little further away, dark and elegant and perfectly put together, as if private jets after ritualized sexual breaking were part of an ordinary itinerary. Which, for her, I supposed they probably were.
I swallowed. My throat felt dry. “Where…”
“We’re about to land,” Henrik said. “Rouen.”
The word took a moment to settle. Rouen. Sven. Mary.
Mary.
I tried to sit more upright, wincing at the protest from my battered body. “I saw…” I began at once. “In the tree, there was…”
My master lifted one hand, not harshly but with complete authority.
“Not yet, lille en.”
I blinked at him.
The urge to explain, to report, to turn the whole impossible experience into language before it dissolved, felt almost academic in its intensity. My mind wanted field notes. It wanted immediate transcription. It wanted to say Chinese network… women as conduits… energy extraction… tower-tree… detection risk. It wanted, perhaps most of all, to say Mary and I saw each other, Mary and I knew.
“I need to tell you,” I said. “Before I forget, or before it changes in my head.”
“That,” Henrik replied, “is exactly why you must wait.”