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)
And underneath both of them… an emotion I had identified in the cell with the same awful clarity I had brought to the inscription in the mosaic border… affection. It had no business existing. It was objectively insane, a textbook case of so many things my rational mind could name and diagnose and explain, and it existed anyway with the same impervious, illogical-but-spiritually-true rootedness as the Worldtree in the volcanic stone beneath my hands and knees. I felt it most acutely when I looked at Henrik’s face, which I kept trying and failing not to do. It produced in him no visible response except that small, almost involuntary crinkle at the corners of his gray eyes that I had begged myself to stop noticing.
He looked at me, then. I looked away first. He continued, and more of the puzzle took shape in my mind even as I tried to push away the idea that I had fallen in love with the modern Viking who had brought so many fascinating, shameful, needed things into focus for me.
“Each vǫlva’s mind and imagination therefore construct her own language,” my master said. “Together, she and her Herra discover how to read that language: some matters are clear, others darker. At the same time, though, we have also—rather to the surprise of many of our sages, Sons of Odin and the experienced vǫlur we call our mœðr alike—verified the importance of certain universal symbols, handed down to us in the annals. A dream in which a new vǫlva sees Yggdrasil from the rowing bench, on a longship, where she has been shared is one of those.”
“And what does it mean?” Giovanna demanded. “This seems like a lot of Nordic nonsense to me.”
My eyes traveled to the woman I had learned to call my mistress. On her face I saw an expression that seemed to mingle skepticism with something else I took a moment to identify.
Envy? Yes, absolutely: Giovanna, somewhere deep down, wished she had the gift I apparently did. I felt a tiny smile play across my lips. I quelled it immediately as a thrill of fear of my mistress’s mastix traveled through my body.
Leo Aetnaeus spoke next.
“Our Ostia agents, like the bellatrix here, are often employed as intelligence analysts. We know the power of the submissive intellect and imagination. We have never identified anything so… mystical about it.”
From the monitor, Sven broke in.
“We must ask you to trust us. You may also verify. Henrik, do you have any objection to Bellatrix Hestiaea continuing to witness your training of your bed thrall, and to participate as the bellatrix chooses? We, like you, have a tradition of teaching our girls to pleasure one another.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t know whether to dread my mistress’s continued role in my mortifying, thrilling development as my Herra’s fuck toy or to welcome it.
“I have no objection,” Henrik replied. “And to answer your question, bellatrix, this symbol has been found to mean that there is a world-changing event on the metaphorical horizon. New vǫlur dreamt that way before Sweden invaded Russia in 1707, and before the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940. You may call it coincidence if you like, but if you allow me to do as I wish with Ilsa, we may well be able to prove the symbol’s validity to your satisfaction.”
“And what is it you wish to do?” Leo Aetnaeus asked.
“I want to bring her back to our longship cavern,” Henrik said. He had his hands on the back of a chair, and his voice had shifted into the register I had learned meant the proposal of something formal. “To the bridal chambers. I want to remove these leathers, and break her, nude on the bride saddle, with strap and reðr.”
He looked at the leo first, then at the screen.
“If I take her properly—whip her well, then take her røvhul with the proper authority on the saddle, entirely naked as the old rite demands—I think she’ll go to the upper branches. I think we’ll get the full vision. Not fragments. Not the horizon.” He paused. “The tree itself.”
The words took a moment to reach all the way through the warm spell his theoretical account of dreams and visions seemed to have cast over me. When they arrived, they arrived all at once. Whip her well… take her røvhul… with the proper authority… on the saddle.
The bride saddle. He meant to do it… what he had promised in the cell… the thing he had said would open the path upward, the path to the branches… and he meant to do it in the cavern, near the longship, in the place where the carvings showed women in exactly the posture he was describing, with exactly the expression on their faces that I now understood from the inside.
I bit my lower lip very hard. My fingers found the edge of the bench and gripped it.