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 pressed forward very slowly. The ring gave way. I gasped into the furs.
“That’s it,” he said. “Easy.”
The stretch resolved into fullness by degrees. The old pain had softened over the months from a crisis into an ache, but that ache still carried enough edge to light up the same pathways. Shame flashed through me with almost chemical swiftness. My mind caught fire in the familiar pattern.
I was a pregnant woman lying on her side in a hidden Viking chamber while her master gently pushed his cock into her anus because she had asked him to.
The thought itself sent me upward.
It happened so fast that I scarcely distinguished bodily sensation from ascent. Henrik still moved with exquisite care inside me, and at the same time I felt my consciousness gather and rise through the trunk I no longer needed to seek laboriously. I had traveled the route too often now. The metaphor came when called. The canopy opened almost reflexively.
The leaves above me were green and silver with northern light.
For a moment I only hovered there, suspended in the strange doubleness I had come to know: my body in the furs, the weight of Henrik’s manhood lodged in my bottom, his hand on my hip; and also my self among boughs immense enough to hold weather and time. I expected at first some mission, some branch leading toward intelligence, some pressure of other systems touching ours.
Instead I found stillness.
No, not stillness. Summer.
The transition came with such gentleness that tears pricked my eyes before I understood why. The air changed from mythic abstraction to something I could almost smell: warm grass, salt, a sweetness like clover and sun on dry earth. The branch gave way to a slope. I stood, or seemed to stand on a meadow that tipped softly toward a blue-gray sea.
The light had the long, slanting richness of a northern evening in high summer, when everything seemed both mild and impossibly vivid. Grass brushed my bare ankles. Wind moved through it in little silver runs. Beyond the slope the North Sea shone under a pale sky, not violent now but deep and breathing and familiar in some place below thought.
Children’s voices rang out behind me.
I turned at once, and the sight of them struck me so hard with joy that for a moment I simply put my hand to my mouth.
Three.
The oldest boy ran first, fair-haired and long-legged already, his face open with the serious, intent happiness children bring to play as if it were a form of labor. A smaller boy followed him, broader somehow in the shoulders even in childhood, his laugh less contained, his whole body more heedless. After them came a girl with pale hair blown loose around her face, quick and watchful and full of some concentrated feminine certainty that hit me like recognition.
My sons. My daughter.
I knew them before I knew anything else.
They moved around me without fear, without strangeness, with the complete trust of children to whom I belonged and who belonged to me. The younger boy grabbed at my hand and then let go again because he had already seen something in the grass he needed to show me. The girl leaned briefly against my hip, warm and solid, before darting away. The eldest turned back from the crest of the slope to make sure I followed, responsible already in the way first children often are.
I laughed.