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A mother’s love is unconditional. Imagine what a prison it must be to love a monstrous son. She offers; he takes; she must endure what he has become.
What would she think of all my noble promises now, if she saw the bestial desire I hold for her?
Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve desecrated a chapel.
I mutter the words into my horn as I drain the last drops: “I don’t want to dull the memory of her.”
Last time I worried about her, an important lord wound up with a seax in his gut.
“A woman cannot be ruined like a sheaf of spoilt parchment.
“If I were to ruin you, princess, you would have no hesitation about it.”
“You smell like a feast after a famine.”
While Thrain would be a deep warm gold, Ivar pulls me into the dark violet of night’s edge, filled with sharp blinking stars.
“You don’t want to touch a daughter of the gods? Everybody else does.”
“You are the ones who came looking for us,” I hiss at him. “Now that you’ve found us, are you regretting that we have mouths and hands that can grasp you as you grasp us?”
“You would draw the beast out of me,” I tell her. “I’m only trying to protect you from it.”
There’s something proprietary about it, how he claims every inch of me with teeth and tongue.
Sleep, elskan mín, he told me, so I turned and asked what it meant. And he smiled that lazy smile of deepest satisfaction and said, it means my darling.
My stomach clenches at the way he’s looking at me, like I’m someone he’s been searching for a long time.
I know I won’t ever find another man like him, capable of both calm composure and feral protectiveness, who forgives my own propensities towards excess. Who forgives me for everything. Who says my name with reverence.
Spite can be useful when it leads me to find alternative solutions.
“I don’t think any of my sisters waylaid a Viking warlord under God’s roof—
He must live with this fact, now, too; someone had to die so he might live.
Does it make me weak and unpatriotic, that I might still be reluctant at the idea of leaving him?
he is my guardian, my sanctuary, my friend.
They share the same pain, and they both turn to one another to try and sense the imprint of a woman who is no longer there.
She yells right back, “When you die I will shit on your graves!”
“You stay close to me, now.” She nods.
“It is the wisdom of your creative power,” he says. “You remind mankind that women are the ones who animate them. Not the hand of the carpenter.”
“It’s a strange god that must birth himself a second time,” Thrain rumbles. “Perhaps he knew he would not be entirely real until he was birthed by a woman.”
IKTR!!!!!
Somehow this reminder of how deadly he is only heightens the exhilaration of his company.
He would wield this, and yet be so tender and crushing with his kisses, his tongue as soft and warm as his weapon is cold and sharp.
What a lovely idea, to think that this life might simply stop, and that a new one may start again. No eternal damnation hanging like a knife over one’s neck as we struggle to be worthy of salvation.
There is something bestial about this midnight state, the tenderness of it, the urgency.
My teeth and tongue move clumsily around the syllables. They’re made for devouring flesh, not talking.
“The same reason anyone might hunt a myth that obsesses them since their childhood. To chase magic in the world.” “And to cage it.”
I want to chuck his fine blue gown back at him, wrap him up in all that sumptuous gold-threaded wool so that he might see what it’s like to be paraded, claimed and consumed; a body to be fucked and discarded while some greater scheme rumbles on in the background.
I don’t care that I’m having a breakfast of dried jerky with Vikings in the middle of a Pictish forest, basically naked with a cursed man’s scent-mark still clinging to me.
Gods, but she knows exactly how to torture me. I should do as Odin and pluck out my eyes. That is the only way I’d be able to stop staring at her.
Daylight shines upon us now with all its stark sincerity; there is no moon to blame our decisions on, no rut to precipitate our actions. There is only her and I, deciding this together, accepting this perilous closeness.
To think I would call this gruff scarred Viking sweetheart.
I would’ve expected some proprietary smugness, such as a man might express once presented with the gift of my body. But he’s quiet and almost reverent, as though he’d stepped into some holy place.
These breasts mark my silhouette as womanly, immodest somehow. Something to apologise for, to flatten in tight bodices, to hide from God under strict linen collars.
He notices my writhing and glances up at me, sky-blue eyes intense. He knows what I need. He always does.
My breaths stutter as I feel how hot and heavy he is, his balls weighing against me, his whole body poised to sink into mine. “You think you can be quiet?” he whispers.
“Touch me,” he murmurs. “Take it in your hand.” I whimper as I reach down. My fingertips skid along his length, the veiny mass that’s poised to impale me. “That’s it,” he praises. “Take it… it’s yours.”
“Is… is that… all of it?” He gives a scoff. “Just the head,” he grumbles. He’s… God. He’s going to split me in two.
“Friends,” he echoes. “You attach any more weight to that word and it’ll break.”
I know the simple honesty of our bodies cannot always translate into something livable.
Where Thrain is crushing and irresistible, Ivar is all sharp edges and stings of pleasure, and Olaf… he is solemn, leading me on, controlling the pace.
Olaf and Ivar are quite possibly the only ones with whom I could accept to share her.
Your place is not on your knees, girl. Your place is here; above them. Commanding them. Allowing them to serve you. And exacting your revenge if they will not deign to do so.”
I think back to earlier, how eager they were for me to kiss them even when they would call me a whore, a sinner doomed to Hell, a woman ruined. A witch.
These Alban soldiers – God’s men, God’s little soldiers – they look at me and see only a monster. But they have seen nothing yet.
