Page 72 of Her Viking Guardian

Then Mary went to Sven, with the ease of apparent long practice. He took the cloth from her and placed it on his lap, and then he drew her down across him sideways so that her knees rested over one carved arm and her shoulders against his chest. She made a small sound as he arranged her atop the cloth, not of protest but of intimate recognition.

Henrik looked at me, holding out his hand.

“Come, lille en.”

My body obeyed before any part of me could entertain alternatives. With a flare of heat in my cheeks, I handed him my own cunt cloth. He spread it over his thighs, then guided me down onto his lap facing slightly inward, mirroring Mary’s position opposite me. The movement made my battered bottom and the tender place between my legs complain at once; I couldn’t keep back a tiny wince despite the slight comfort the mortifying cloth gave. Henrik’s broad hand settled first on my hip, then traveled with grave deliberation between my thighs.

I sucked in a breath, becoming acutely aware of the pendant that represented my only covering. It had grown warm again, as if sensing my mortification.

Sven did the same to Mary at almost the same instant, his right hand cupping her bare pussy.

“No speaking yet,” Sven said. “Not until your bodies are ready.”

I almost laughed from nerves. Ready? My whole lower half felt used nearly beyond endurance. My anus still remembered my master’s thrusting penis with a vividness that made the notion of any fresh stimulation seem impossible. But his fingers, calm and experienced, found the soft, swollen folds of me with humiliating ease. He did not thrust. He merely parted, stroked, weighed. He reached a little further, under me, to move his fingertips over the tender flesh of my backside with a gentleness made more dominating by its confidence. Across from me, Mary’s lips parted as Sven’s hand worked in the same slow, claiming way.

I knew I ought to focus on holding still, on conserving strength, on the intellectual urgency of remembering the vision intact.

Instead I watched Mary.

I watched the color rise in her cheeks. I watched her eyelids lower and then flutter. I watched her try not to squirm under her master’s fingers. The sight was so intimate, so indecently sisterly, that my own body responded in direct betrayal of every soreness it contained. Wetness gathered almost at once under Henrik’s hand, as if my pussy had far less pride than the rest of me.

His beard brushed my temple when he leaned in.

“Responsive little thing,” he murmured, for me alone.

I shut my eyes, then opened them because keeping them closed made me imagine too much. Across from me Mary had begun to breathe through her mouth. Sven’s fingers, buried more decisively now between her legs, made faint movements I could read from the changes in her face.

Henrik tested me once with two fingers spread just enough to feel what his handling had produced. I felt the slickness with shameful clarity. So, obviously, did he.

“She’s wet,” he said.

Sven’s answering tone carried satisfaction. “Mary too.”

Neither man sounded as though he had discovered anything other than that a mechanism was functioning correctly. That, perversely, made the heat in my body worse. I had become knowable to them in this way, measurable through lubrication and tremor and the involuntary lift of my hips.

We were both moving now, Mary and I, despite ourselves. Little shifts. Tiny arches. The kind of motions one might once have believed private and spontaneous, but which under male hands revealed themselves as reactions, as service. I saw Sven slide two fingers lower over Mary’s soft, helpless sex and then back again, lingering where she must be most swollen. She bit her lip. Henrik’s thumb found the same place on me, and my whole body gave a traitorous jerk.

“Good,” he said quietly.

I had an absurd fear that I would lose the vision entirely this way, that there could be no scholarship, no coherent recollection, with a man’s hand slowly making my body into an instrument of dominant pleasure. But the room had already begun to change around the edges. The pressure between my thighs, the sight of Mary similarly handled, the facing masters, the silent observers at the side… it all formed a pattern my nervous system recognized instantly.

Sven looked at me across Mary’s red hair.

“Now, Ilsa.”

My mouth felt dry. “I⁠—”

“Begin.”

I thought, helplessly, that I could not possibly do it like this. Then Henrik’s fingers stroked once through the slick folds of my pussy, deep enough to make my breath catch, and the first words came out of me in a low, unsteady rush.

“At first there was only the branch,” I said. “No… the feeling of arriving on it. The sense of height before sight properly formed…”

As soon as I started, Mary made a soft sound and picked up where I faltered, not interrupting but joining, as if we had both stepped back into the same current.

“And the bough was enormous,” she whispered. “Larger than any branch I’d ever traveled on the tree.”

“Yes,” I said at once, though I had never seen Yggdrasil properly, as a vǫlva, before Henrik had broken me on the bride saddle. “And we were together there… immediately.”