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“I’m sorry – I’m sorry – we didn’t mean it – please—” The voice that leaves my throat is no longer my own. It’s deeper, rasping between sharp teeth. “Too late.”
At least the sight of her is the last thing I shall take to my grave.
Olaf, Ivar and I look at her as though she were all that was left in the world, a shining figure perched upon an abyss.
This. This is the praxis of my piety. This will fill her as she needs.
Her pleasure rings in my ears like consecration as she takes it.
I will mark her as proof of my piety. Claim her as my goddess. And she will mark me as her own. Like the land wights burrowed in the nooks of the trees they inhabit, I shall be her creature, endure the seasons with her, call the bark of her skin my home.
He isn’t pack, not in the same way, not when he is still so new to me. But he is mine, too – mine in a way that is inevitable.
So many times I have wished for the same power that men have; the right to violence, the right to anger. The right to take and take without guilt. To devour. Last night, I devoured. Without shame. Without mercy.
I wonder as I lay there in the biting silence, whether this baptism will unmake the first; whether I will emerge again as a full-blooded monster, leaving the wide-eyed girl behind under the water’s rippling surface.
“It’s been a pleasure indeed. If you’d be so kind, I have a message for your Queen.” Causantin arches his brow. “Oh?” I hack up a wad of bloody spit, raking it in my throat until he looks suitably disgusted. Then I spit it at his feet, where it splatters in a mess over the grass and his leather boots.
We all bear the aftertaste of her godhood on our tongues. We know we are hers; I can see it in my brothers’ eyes, the same afterglow I feel.
She is both things. The terrifying goddess and the uncertain, frightened girl. How can a woman manage to be both? How does she manage it in her head?
“Did you sleep well?” I ask her, trying to act like this is a normal conversation, like my men aren’t leaning into every word. Like we did not ravage one another last night to such an extent that the sounds we made terrified everyone.
“You saw a monstrous thing,” she says.
“We saw divinity,”
“That is what I was most afraid of, I think. That the circumstances might force us to remain on opposite sides. I have wanted to be on your side from the start, in a way that matters. And now I am.”
“Just promise me you’ll be honest with me,” I urge him. “Promise me that. I’m yours, first.”
I’m tired of demanding things. Of desiring things. My desires feel too big, too heavy; they drag at my feet.
“You think I did not enjoy watching you both? Him pinning you down as you arched on the floor… what you looked like with his cock planted deep inside you? And the sounds you made. Do you even know what it did to me, to hear those pretty songs from your lips?”
“The sight of you both was a spectacle for the gods,” he hisses.
“We have not taken her,” Ivar snaps at him. “She has taken us.
“And she begs so prettily, too,” he purrs.
Gods, why does she smell of home? A home I have never known, a home more familiar still than mine?
You can try and fold yourself into a good girl as much as you like, it will not earn you their love in return.
It isn’t allowed, says my rearing, the education that I have written in lines across my back.
We aren’t allowed to do this; but what if we did it anyway? What if we chose each other? What if I chose to say yes to it all?
I can only stare at her and wonder that a woman as beautiful as her might exist.
“Fuck me,” he commands. “Before you drive me insane.” I smile at him. “Are you begging, Thrain Mordsson?”
“I have wanted you since I first laid eyes on you.”
The gaze we share across my naked body is eloquent indeed as he kneels there at my feet, the great wolf of Dublin tamed and docile.
“Here is the tale of how we came to meet Thrain Mordsson, beloved son of the Vestfold, known thereafter as the Great Wolf of Dublin…” “Oh, may Mjölnir drop on your head,” Thrain rants, pushing himself up. “I’ll tell the damn thing.”
