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)
I swallowed again. “A longship,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “The rowing bench. Men talking about the East. Something stirring there, concerning Ymir’s body. And the tree at the horizon, over the sea.” A pause. “I could see Yggdrasil from the longship.”
Something moved in Sven Hallstrom’s pale eyes. He looked at Henrik.
“From the rowing bench,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, not sure why that question seemed to have such weight.
Leo Aetnaeus had settled himself at the head of the table. He watched this exchange with the expression of a man attending a presentation in a field adjacent to his own: interested despite himself, reserving judgment, unwilling to show either. Giovanna had uncrossed and recrossed her legs, and her dark eyes moved between the screen and my face with a focus that unsettled me. Her attention to detail apparently included the question of whether my dream constituted something worth taking seriously.
“Before we proceed further,” Henrik said, his voice shifting into the register I had learned meant something formal was about to happen, “I want Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea to satisfy themselves about her training thus far, while you witness, chief, that I am sharing my bed thrall’s mouth and fisse as befits her submissive obedience and my warrior duty.”
CHAPTER 23
Henrik
The sharing of a bed thrall always provoked conflict in me. From Sven I had learned the wisdom of our elders: that such conflict, in the end, tempered both a warrior’s natural dominance and a girl’s natural submission.
On the screen, Sven’s pale eyes had moved from me to Ilsa and back again.
“You are right to do this,” he said. His voice carried the solemn quality it always had in making pronouncements for the men who followed him. “To share her certifies the claim. Every warrior who has seen his bed thrall serve another man of the brotherhood has done what the longship demanded of him. He has demonstrated that his claim is not a weakness but a strength. That he has trained her well enough to give her away and take her back.” He paused. “Leo Aetnaeus is a leo of the Guard. Bellatrix Hestiaea serves the Guard’s purposes. They are not of our brotherhood, but the principle holds across traditions.” His eyes found me again. “You know this.”
“I know it,” I said.
“I did it myself,” Sven said, “with my Mary. In the Central Mithraeum in New York. I shared her with Leo Marmareus himself, before the pit and the eternal fire, with the full rite observed.” A pause. “She came back to me afterwards more fully mine than she had been before. That is always the way of it, when the girl is truly a bed thrall… a vǫlva even… and not merely a possession.”
Bruno, at the head of the table, made a small, growling sound deep in his chest that might have been agreement or merely acknowledgment. Giovanna said nothing, but her dark eyes seemed to focus more intently, as if she had moved from anticipation to preparation.
I looked at Ilsa. She had her gaze fixed on some point on the stone floor between her bare feet, and her hands were clasped before her. Her fetching braid had loosened somewhat in sleep, and strands of platinum hair fell across her cheek. The collar sat at her throat. The belt girded her at her waist. She was breathing with a careful shallowness that told me she had heard and understood every word, and that her scholarly mind was at this moment engaged in a ferocious and entirely futile attempt to reason its way out of the helpless mix of pleasure and discomfort that her body already knew would soon befall her.
I looked at Giovanna. “Bind her for the sharing, Bellatrix, if you would.”
Giovanna rose from her chair in a single fluid movement, smoothing her jacket. She crossed to the far wall of the control room, where I had noted on my initial inspection that a bench had been positioned flush against the stone—not the kind of bench from the chambers above, carved into the stone, but something purpose-built for this room’s more specific requirements. Movable, narrower, lower. With fittings at each corner and along its length that required no explanation.
She took hold of it and drew it away from the wall, positioning it at a deliberate angle to the center of the room—to the table, to the monitors, to Sven’s watchful face on the large screen. A practical angle. An angle that served multiple audiences simultaneously.
I held the leash out toward her, watching Ilsa’s face as I did it. My fuck toy’s brow furrowed, and I saw a wave of pink come and go in her face. Giovanna took the leash from my hand without ceremony, and the transfer felt, as it always did, like a special kind of statement… indeed, a demonstration.