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)
For a long moment my master didn’t speak. The torch through the barred window sent its orange light across the mosaic floor, and somewhere in the corridor beyond the door I thought I heard, or imagined I heard, the quiet sound of measured footsteps moving away.
Giovanna? Going back to wherever she had been, having heard what she had needed to hear?
I breathed against the cool stone, and thought about roots, about what Henrik had said about the path upward, and about the girl in the branches of a distant or maybe an identical tree who had looked down at me with recognition in her eyes.
She was still up there somewhere. Waiting, perhaps, like the tree itself, with the patience of something that had been growing since before any of us were born and would continue growing long after.
I would find her again. I understood that now with the same quality of certainty my mind brought to a finished report—not decided upon but simply known.
When Herra Henrik took me in the place he had promised. When he met the wildness in me there, as he had said, and claimed it.
Then I would rise.
I heard my master moving, and then a sound came from the corner of the cell I hadn’t properly examined, behind me and to my left, beyond my field of vision from the floor. A soft sound of stone moving against stone, one unyielding surface moving over another, scraping, but only slightly. As if the things my Herra manipulated had been made to move that way… as if he had just opened something.
Then water, running water, and I understood: a basin. Something built into the cell for exactly this purpose, as everything in this place had been built for exactly its purpose, with the patient foresight of people who had been doing this for a very long time. A sink where a guardsman could cleanse himself after deflowering a columba… or, I realized with a helpless thrill of dark arousal… after having her in another way, along another path… one that required washing his cock afterward.
I lay where he had left me, my cheek against the stone floor, my wrists still bound to the iron posts, my knees on the cushioned leather mat. I listened to the water run and to the small sounds of my master washing himself, and my face burned so fiercely that the ancient coolness beneath my face felt like a mercy.
He was washing me off of him. Off of his manhood. He was washing away the evidence of what I had been, five minutes ago, and was not any longer. My maiden blood.
I bit my lower lip, stared at the dimly lit floor, and thought about what blood meant, as an artifact, on a man’s penis. As evidence of a moment that could not be undated or reattributed or filed under uncertain provenance.
And then I thought about the other thing. The thing he had said, in the rough, stripped voice, before he had used me. Whatever the Norns have already spun out. If they spin it so, I will breed you.
The water ran on in the corner, and I lay with my master’s seed inside me. The heat in my face went far beyond my intellect’s ability to measure and assess.
I had no way of knowing. Of course I had no way of knowing. The timing, the probability, the sheer biological contingency of the thing—my rational mind assembled these considerations with the speed of long habit and found them genuinely inconclusive. The rational mind had gotten, I noticed, somewhat quieter than it had been this morning. Less confident of its authority. As if something had rearranged the hierarchy of what mattered while I had found myself occupied with other things.
A strong warrior in your belly, he had said. Or a fair maiden.
So… I heard my adviser’s voice in my head. So sexist. So misogynistic.
And yet the need blazed between my thighs helplessly in response to the submissive—no, the thoroughly subjugated idea.
The splashing stopped.
I thought I could hear him drying his hands, so acute had my senses apparently become, or perhaps so delusional. He rubbed them with a cloth, then folded it and set it aside. Somehow my mind gathered that, and I remembered what my Herra had said about my senses and my mind and what it meant to become a vǫlva, according to these ‘Sons of Odin.’
His footsteps crossed back toward me. I kept my eyes on the floor, much too aware of the warmth that lingered at the center of me. I realized also that I was still crying quietly, without much investment in stopping. A little pool of my tears… my mourning for my lost virginity, I couldn’t help thinking… had gathered on the stone.
My new master’s hands found the clip at my left wrist first. The small sound of its release seemed almost gentle. Then my right. I felt the blood move back through my fingers as I released the iron posts, which I only then understood I’d continued to grip so hard that I could feel my fingers creak as I uncurled them. I gripped and released my hands twice, feeling the ache of the metal in my palms.