Page 60 of Her Viking Guardian

Ilsa went very still beside me. I felt certain she understood what I meant. From one point of view, as wrong as it might well seem to someone of less intelligence, she knew she was a trade good, just as the naked bed thralls on the longships had been, long ago.

A very valuable trade good—one with whom I had no intention of parting.

When the car finally stopped, I got out first.

The air carried salt and pine. Capo Zafferano stretched before us in hard Sicilian light, the sea below immense and brilliantly indifferent. The driver opened the other doors. Giovanna emerged with sleek urban poise intact, her heels entirely unsuited to the rough ground. Mateo followed, narrow and watchful. Then Ilsa stepped out.

For a moment she simply stood there, the light on her hair almost too bright to look at directly.

I watched the place touch her.

I saw the change at once. Her breathing altered. Her eyes moved past the visible landscape, not unfocused exactly, but focused at a depth beyond the ordinary one. A small shiver went through her that certainly hadn’t come from any physical chill; it could only, I thought, have come from recognition.

* * *

Ilsa

I had come here only two days before, but though I recognized everything, to the level even of individual boulders and thickets of scrub pine, it all seemed different and new—and yet also known to some other, deeper part of me. We started down the same path I had taken, in the direction of the rocky beach below, but Henrik quickly began to lead us an entirely different way.

He put one hand lightly at the small of my back and guided me around an outcropping I could have sworn would take us right over the cliff. We passed through a narrow cut in the rock screened by scrub and shadow. Giovanna had her heels in her left hand, looking as fashionable barefoot in the wilderness as she had at the agency office in her expensive shoes. Mateo wore a stoic expression, as if he couldn’t even feel the emotion of surprise.

I could, though: I turned my head to stare back at the path with a little shock of professional humiliation. I had been here before. I had studied the terrain. I had found the cavern, the ship, the carvings, and still I had missed this approach entirely. The hiddenness of it felt deliberate in a way the rational part of me instantly wanted to analyze and catalogue, while some lower part simply accepted that a man like Henrik would know the truer way in.

The stone cooled the air as soon as we entered. The light changed. The world outside dropped away with startling speed, replaced by the mineral dimness and the smell of dust, salt, ancient damp. My pulse jumped.

Henrik walked ahead of us with the confidence of someone returning to a family property. I followed, Giovanna and Mateo behind us, and as the passage widened and the chamber opened, I felt my whole body recognize it before my mind began naming what I saw.

The longship… the drake… with its dragon prow… waited there in the half-light.

It did not look less impossible at my second viewing. If anything, it looked more so: the worn timbers, the ribs of the hull, the benches, the stern rising with that carved austerity that had already entered my dreams. The sight struck me in the chest with such force that for a moment I had to stop walking. Henrik did not comment. He only went to the ship and laid his hand on the gunwale as if greeting an old accomplice.

“There,” he said, to Giovanna and Mateo. “And here.”

He showed them the carvings first along the wall and then the panels nearer the bridal chamber, the women bent over saddles and benches, men behind them, the stylized branches rising above, the visual grammar of submission and voyage and use.

I watched Giovanna’s face while she examined them. For the first time since I had met her, I saw something close to unguarded interest. Impressed attention, even, sharpened by rivalry with the very idea of a tradition almost as old as, and perhaps deeper than, her Roman one.

Mateo stepped nearer to one carved panel, scarred hand raised but not touching. “This is older than I expected,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Henrik replied.

“And explicit,” Giovanna murmured, her dark gaze moving over a figure of a woman displayed in the midst of having her anus penetrated by a warrior’s enormous phallus, her expression somehow a mix of rapture and agony. “Not decorative. Instructional.”

Henrik glanced at her. “Exactly.”

My master had left me to stand a little apart from them. I listened, and I became aware with growing clarity that something had begun to happen inside me the moment we had crossed into the cavern. My mind clothed it instinctively in spiritual language because that seemed the easiest vocabulary available to consciousness for this kind of total bodily recognition. The place felt charged. It felt as if it had itself awakened, and then awakened something inside me. It felt as if some old, feminine thing in me had lifted its head and remembered itself.

But I knew perfectly well that there was no reason to invoke anything supernatural, and the resulting cognitive dissonance almost felt cruel… as if I were being forced to shatter the lovely illusion of enchantment that a deep part of me wanted to cast over the fact of my helplessly submissive sexuality.

My body had been trained. My mind had been trained. Only for a scant twenty-four hours, but with incredible intensity and, apparently, incredible efficiency. The rituals, the fear, the shame, the orgasms, the beatings, the collars and benches and commands had built a pattern in my nervous system, and now the cavern, with its ship and its carvings and its association with everything that had already been done to me and discovered in me, struck those hidden strings all at once. My unconscious answered symbol with symbol. My flesh answered the sacred-seeming context with shameful need. It felt mystical because human beings are built to experience the deepest operations of their own embodied minds that way.

Knowing that did not diminish it in the slightest.

If anything, the explanation made it more intense. More helplessly real.

I looked at the rowing bench.

I could see, with mortifying clarity, my own body over it as it had been before, and at once I wanted more. Desperately. Something in me wanted to go further into this system of meanings written directly onto the body. I wanted to know what the old rite actually did to a woman’s mind when her intellect was no longer pretending to stand outside it.