Page 45 of Her Viking Guardian

Then Leo Aetnaeus moved to the monitors and touched a sequence of controls. One of the screens—the largest, mounted at the center of the bank—shifted from a camera feed to a different image. A loading indicator, brief and professional. And then a face.

I had not been expecting the face to do what it did to me.

The man I saw was perhaps thirty-five, broad-shouldered, with blond hair and a neatly trimmed beard and eyes that were a shade of steel blue so pale they seemed almost colorless in the monitor’s light. He sat in what appeared to be a stone chamber, maybe even older even than this one. I could see rough-cut walls behind him. He wore dark clothing that sat on his powerful frame with the ease of something chosen carefully, and for some reason I knew in an instant that he could only be a professor.

He looked, in other words, like an academic version of the carved warriors in the limestone cavern, as my Herra looked like—I supposed—a commercial version of them.

He also looked like what the men in my dream would have looked like, if they had put on contemporary clothing and sat before a camera. Perhaps my reaction came from knowing that my master did indeed have fellow Vikings who brought to life what I’d seen and imagined in the cavern. Perhaps it arose as well from the way Herra Henrik had referred to him with such respect… as his chief.

Of course a warrior would share his bed thrall with his chief, wouldn’t he? If he shared her with anyone, surely it would be his chief, who had the privilege to enjoy her alongside her owner…

Oh, God.

“Henrik,” he said. His accent was more pronounced than my Herra’s, the same Nordic cadence but less smoothed by years of international travel. “And this—” his pale eyes found me on whatever corresponding feed he was watching, “—this is the girl from Capo Zafferano.”

“Ilsa Matthews,” Henrik said. “Archaeologist. Doctoral candidate. Now a columba of the Pretorian Guard as well as my bed thrall. She found the cavern.”

“I know what she found.” Sven Hallstrom’s gaze remained on me, and I felt it the way I had felt the cold wind in the upper branches of the tree: present, indifferent, and somehow… beckoning, all at the same time. “She had a vision on the bride saddle, you told me. Without a warrior’s tól in her bottom.”

I closed my eyes very tightly and swallowed down the little sob that threatened to break free of my chest.

“Without anyone present,” Henrik said. “Last night, after I took her fisse’s flower, she dreamed a vǫlva’s dream. I have no remaining doubt.”

The reference to my defloration in the phrase somehow both graphic and figurative… my fisse’s flower… in my master’s mouth, spoken to these people, in this room, produced a heat in my face so acute that I felt glad the monitor’s blue light was probably washing out my complexion entirely.

“Tell me about the dream,” Sven said, and he said it to me. Not to my Herra.

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.”