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)
She let out a little whimper, her hips jerking as if in answer to my frank words.
“Then what will I see?” she whispered.
I considered how much to tell her. The annals held accounts of vǫlur who had dreamed of specific places, people, and events that had later proved significant. A research team in Rouen, two decades ago, had spent three years cross-referencing those accounts against historical records, trying to establish a pattern. They had found one, though it remained imperfect and contested. I had read every document in the digitized archive, and I had my own view.
“Your unconscious will take you where it needs to go,” I said. “To important places. Real places, perhaps, or the memory of places. People you haven’t understood yet. Connections that haven’t assembled themselves into pattern while you were awake.” I pressed my lips again to her temple, feeling her breath slow against my arm. “The Chinese girl, perhaps.”
Ilsa made a small sound that might have been assent or might have been the beginning of sleep. Her body had been releasing its held tension in increments since I had laid her down in the furs, each breath giving up a little more of the day’s accumulated strain. The welts on her thighs and bottom must still have ached. I had seen girls sleep on those welts before, and knew the ache became, in some paradoxical way, a comfort in the dark—a reminder, felt from the inside, of the dominion their masters had established over their sweet bodies.
“Sleep, lille en,” I murmured. “Let your mind go where it will.”
Her breathing changed. It took perhaps another ten minutes, during which I lay still and felt the warmth of her against me and thought about what I would write to Sven.
The defloration of Ilsa Matthews was accomplished this evening in the Pretorian Guard’s Palermo mithraeum, with Bellatrix Hestiaea (Giovanna Perella) in attendance and Leo Aetnaeus (Bruno Falcone) observing by arrangement. The welcome extended by the Guard has been, on the whole, as generous as we might have hoped.
I must tell you, first, at the outset, that the girl is exceptional.
Exceptional. Indeed. With that word in my mind and Ilsa’s leather-bound body in my arms, I fell asleep myself.
* * *
Ilsa
I dreamt, just as my master had told me I would.
The dream began with salt.
It came into my nostrils before anything else resolved itself—the ancient brine of open water, and underneath it the smell of pine resin and masculine sweat, the earthy scent of men who had been at sea for many days. I found myself lying down, when I began to understand where I was, in the dream.
I felt, beneath my belly and my breasts, the worn smoothness of the bench’s surface, and I knew it for a rowing bench like the one I had willfully, insanely laid myself down upon in the cavern that I knew now belonged to the Sons of Odin. And I understood also, somehow from before the dream had begun, that they—the men—had bound me there: leather bindings at my wrists and ankles, attached to iron rings, held me on the bench, face down, though my face itself extended over the edge of the bench’s wooden surface. The rocking of the hull moved through the wood and into my body with a slow, indifferent rhythm.
I knew this bench too well. Somehow I knew it not only from what I had done in the cavern, but also from a part of me that existed below waking knowledge. Ancestral memory, thought some part of my mind, observing what I realized was a dream scene without being able to control it in the slightest. To my mild, detached surprise, another voice in my head offered the possible correction: You think it’s ancestral memory, but it’s just noticing things.
Wherever that deep sense originated, through it I recognized the particular quality of the bench’s smoothness, the way the grain of the wood had been polished by years of exactly this use, as well as its more ordinary, more menial one. Viking raiders had bound many girls here, as they had bound me.
My chin pressed against the bench. The leather straps at my wrists, tied to iron rings, held my arms beneath me, fixed to the base of the bench. The ones at my ankles kept my legs in place, straddling the bench, spread wide enough that the sea air moved freely over the backs of my thighs and my bare, exposed, offered pussy. My bottom was raised slightly, in the way that the bench’s construction seemed designed to achieve, a low ridge of wood beneath my hips that tilted me into an unmistakable posture, furnishing my private places for my captors’ use.
I heard their voices. Several of them, nearby, conversational. For a moment, some rational part of my brain thought I wouldn’t be able to follow the Old Norse they must be speaking, but of course I understood them, because it was a dream.