Page 69 of Her Viking Guardian

The word took a moment to settle. Rouen. Sven. Mary.

Mary.

I tried to sit more upright, wincing at the protest from my battered body. “I saw…” I began at once. “In the tree, there was…”

My master lifted one hand, not harshly but with complete authority.

“Not yet, lille en.”

I blinked at him.

The urge to explain, to report, to turn the whole impossible experience into language before it dissolved, felt almost academic in its intensity. My mind wanted field notes. It wanted immediate transcription. It wanted to say Chinese network… women as conduits… energy extraction… tower-tree… detection risk. It wanted, perhaps most of all, to say Mary and I saw each other, Mary and I knew.

“I need to tell you,” I said. “Before I forget, or before it changes in my head.”

“That,” Henrik replied, “is exactly why you must wait.”

His gray eyes held mine with that grave steadiness I had come to associate with pronouncements from the annals rather than ordinary opinions.

“We’ve learned,” he said, “that after the breaking is finished, speaking a vǫlva’s vision too soon can alter it. The act of narration begins interpretation at once. Interpretation has consequences.”

Giovanna crossed one long leg over the other. “How scientific of you.”

Henrik didn’t look at her. “Sven and I want the two of you together when you tell us what you saw. Your accounts may hold one another in place.”

I stared at him, breath shallow with discomfort and frustration and the lingering weakness of exhaustion. The idea made enough sense to infuriate me further. Of course one account might stabilize the other. Of course language itself might shift the shape of memory. Any anthropologist, cognitive scientist, or historian of ritual would have found the proposition fascinating.

Part of me hated that I was beginning to think of their practices as methodologically interesting.

“Mary’s all right?” I asked.

Something softer came into Henrik’s expression: an acknowledgment of my concern for my fellow bed thrall and vǫlva.

“Yes,” he said. “She’s waiting for you.”

I let my head rest back against the seat for a moment. Relief moved through me so powerfully I nearly cried again. Not because I knew Mary in any ordinary sense. I didn’t. But I had met her where it mattered now, in some upper branch of consciousness and degradation and impossible communion that left ordinary acquaintances seeming almost secondary.

A flight attendant—perhaps attendant was too weak a word for a woman with such polished discretion—appeared as if from nowhere, with a cup of water. I drank greedily and then more carefully. Even swallowing seemed to remind me of things I had done with my mouth… of what dominant men had done there, for their enjoyment and my education in service as their fuck toy. My face warmed. Giovanna noticed, of course. Her dark mouth curved very slightly.

“You continue to be very responsive to training,” she said, evidently meaning it as a compliment.

I might have answered if I had felt sure either that I did like hearing myself praised that way, or that I didn’t. Instead I simply held the glass and watched cloud light shift across the cabin wall as the jet descended.

The next part of the journey blurred into a sequence of managed discomforts. Standing. Walking. The humiliating delicacy with which I had to arrange my body to sit again, in the shuttle van. Henrik’s hand at my elbow, efficient and possessive, and his quiet instructions to the small staff who never once seemed surprised by the state of me. Customs, if there was any, passed invisibly around us. Wealth and secrecy formed their own corridor through the world.

By the time we had left the airport in the dark van, I had begun to feel less like a person moving through events than an artifact being transported under controlled conditions. I sat beside Henrik in the back while the city and outskirts and then less legible industrial spaces passed beyond the tinted windows.

Rouen, in the thin northern light, looked entirely ordinary; even the cathedral seemed just a cathedral. That offended me somehow, as if having been to Yggdrasil I had the right to a more interesting world, rather than finding that after traveling the boughs of the Worldtree everything in reality seemed even more mundane.

I kept wanting to ask questions. About Mary. About Sven. About Aksel, apparently another Son of Odin. About the Sons of Odin’s archives and whether anyone anywhere had ever described a Chinese tree. Each question pressed at my lips and then stopped. The prohibition on speaking the vision seemed to spread to the whole territory around it.

At last the van descended a ramp into an underground garage so nondescript that at first I thought there had been some mistake.

Concrete, white-painted columns, numbered spaces, fluorescent strips overhead. The place had the aggressively characterless quality of urban utility everywhere on earth. I frowned as Henrik guided me out. The soreness in my body made my steps short and careful. Giovanna emerged behind us, immaculate as ever, her heels clicking against the cement.

“This,” I said before I could stop myself, “is Rouen’s ancient, sacred, hidden Viking center?”

Henrik’s mouth twitched.