by James, Elle
The sheet falls to the ground between them.
“For modesty,” she explains.
“Mine? Or yours?”
“Both.”
“But you have already seen me unclothed.”
“That was different.” She pauses. “You were ill. You were asleep.”
“But then I woke. You saw me then, too.”
“Yes,” she concedes, with a blush. “I did.”
Ásgeirr strips off his clothing, exaggerating his movements, knowing that the barrier between them is no real obstruction. He can see Ashling’s silhouette through the fabric and knows she can see his, if she is looking. He hopes she is. He hopes he is not the only one goaded by desire.
When he eases into the bath, Ashling passes a bar of soap and some scented oil around the makeshift screen. A moment later, she hands him a square cloth, too. Ásgeirr rubs it against his face. Soft. It has been a long time since he has had such luxuries. “Will you stay and talk with me?”
There is a scraping sound as she moves her chair nearer.
“How is it that you know my language?” Ásgeirr asks.
“My father was a Gael, but my mother was from the North,” she says. “She taught me her language before she died, told me tales of the old gods.”
“Where is your father now?”
“Dead.”
“Husband?”
“I have none.”
“You should not be here by yourself, alone.”
“I am not unprotected.”
“Should I expect a band of angry Gaels, then, lining up to kill me at my bath?” Ásgeirr is only half-jesting.
“No.” Ashling snorts. “They would not come even if I begged them. Not for a halfling like me. I protect myself.”
“With what?”
“With weapons,” Ashling says, and then pauses, as if she is not sure whether to continue. “With the old magics.”
The curtain shifts as she leans forward, close enough that he can see the curve of her breasts, the elegant line of her neck.
“I answered your question,” she says. “Now answer mine, if you will. How did you come to be here?”
He would prefer to forget. So much blood. So much death.
“You do not have to tell me, if it is painful.”
“I owe you that much for your aid,” he says. “So I will tell you. But tomorrow. Or the next day.” He settles back in the water with a heavy sigh. “For now, I would like to enjoy being alive.”
He is about to start soaping his back, but then thinks I would much prefer her hands on me.
“What is wrong?” Ashling asks.
Like he hoped she would, when he splashes around and curses under his breath.
“I cannot reach my back,” he complains. “Not without it hurting.”
Ásgeirr knows there is a long-handled brush by her feet. He can see it, just under the screen. She could hand it to him. But she doesn’t. Instead, she twitches aside the screen and holds out her hand for the cloth.
Ashling had intended to stay behind the barrier. To stay where it was safe. Or at least, safer. But then she watched the Northman undress, watched his cock bob up and down as he stretched, and knew that she was lost. If he had not asked me to bathe him, she thinks, I would have found an excuse myself.
So now she is perched behind him, on the wide wooden rim of the tub. Dipping the cloth into the soapy water, washing his shoulders, careful of his wounds. Steam rises from the bath and swirls around her in a scented cloud. Beside her the hearth-fire crackles. As Ashling relaxes, her movements gradually slow, become more sensual; her touch is no longer that of a physician, but a lover. She sweeps the cloth over the Northman in elaborate patterns. Trails it up and down his spine. Draws rhythmic circles over his lower back.
After each pass of the cloth, Ashling rubs that same spot with her fingers, creating a wave-like rhythm that hypnotizes even her. The Viking’s eyes close in pleasure. Before Ashling knows it, the cloth has slipped from her hand and she is running her palms over the Northman’s broad shoulders, then lower. “What is this?” she asks, sketching the lines of a circular tattoo on his chest.
“A protection symbol. A compass to guide my way, to bring me home if I am ever lost.”
He shifts in the water and the serpent between his legs stirs. Ashling inadvertently grazes his nipple with her fingernails.
The Northman groans.
“Sorry,” she says, sure she has hurt him. She withdraws her hands, but he snatches them back, pulling her down until her neck rests against his.
“Don’t be,” he says.
The rough timbre of his voice sets her belly aflutter.
“It feels good when you do that.” With his hand atop hers, he shows her what he wants. “Pinch it,” he whispers, “the other one too. You’ll not hurt me.”
When she complies, he turns his head and nuzzles at her collarbone.
“I know your touch now, kjære.” He follows the endearment with delicate bites along her neck. “I know it was you,” he murmurs, “who brought me such pleasure while I slept.”
Ashling flushes with shame, but it soon turns to shock when the Northman yanks her into the water. She lands sideways, her back pressed firmly against one side of the bath, her legs hooked over the other. He gathers her hands in his and presses them to the center of his chest.
She struggles vainly in his lap, until she realizes what she is rubbing against. Her soaked garments do nothing to protect her from that thick ridge. Fear and excitement course through her in equal measure.
The Northman tugs the pins from her hair and once it has tumbled free, twists his fingers in the silken strands, winding them around and around until his palm cups the base of her head.
They are so close now that she can count the striations of color in his eyes.
“I remember everything you did to me,” he says. “I remember you kissed me. Like this.”
He tilts back her head, presses his mouth to hers, parts her lips with his tongue.
“Like this, too,” he says, mouthing her neck, tonguing the pulse that hammers excitedly at the base of her throat. “And then like this.”
Ashling knows what is coming next, but this does not prepare her for the reality. For how she feels when the Northman bends his head to her breasts and sucks the tight-budded tips into his mouth. Or when, a moment later, he twists both peaks between his fingers.
A charge runs through her—all the way to her sex—as if a sacred circle has been completed.
“I told you it felt good, kjære.”
Ashling shivers.
“But you did something else to me,” Ásgeirr says. “Do you remember?”
“I made you come,” Ashling says. And I will never forget it.
“Yes.” His voice is hoarse. “All over your fingers. And then you sucked them clean.”
“I like the way you taste,” she says.
“Well, min elskede, now it is my turn.”
Ásgeirr seizes her by the waist, hoists her onto the wide edge of the bath, and flips up her wet skirts.
Too late, Ashling recalls the twin daggers, strapped to her thighs.
“So this is where you hide your weapons.” He stops her when she tries to unfasten them. “Leave them,” he rasps and kisses the sheathed blades. “I like how fierce you look.” He shoots her a smoldering glance. “My shieldmaiden.”
Yes, Ashling thinks. His. She falls on him eagerly. This time it is she who takes the lead, who parts his lips, who sucks his tongue into her mouth. This time it is she who does the claiming. He is mine, she decides. She will fight anyone who tries to take him from her.
The Northman breaks away first, to crouch in the cooling water. He grips her ankles like a conqueror. Spreads her legs wide. Slides his hands over her calves. Such exquisite friction, his roughness against her softness. His palms are callused. Years of carrying a sword and shield. Years aboard a langskip. Such power he holds in check.
Ashling feels faint. From t
heir kiss or from the heat or from expectation? Likely from all three. Ásgeirr’s hands move higher, and soon he reaches the top of her legs, her swollen sex. With broad thumbs, he spreads her open.
“I’m going to kiss you here. To taste you, as you did me.”
“No one has ever done this before.”
“Then I am honored.”
The Northman’s dark head moves between her thighs. At the first touch of his tongue, she gasps. At the second—a long flat stroke that starts right at the bottom, then snakes up and over her pearl—Ashling forgets her manners and grinds against the Northman’s face.
He pulls away, blows a stream of cool air over her heated flesh.
She twitches at the contrast.
“Greedy,” he teases.
“Yes,” she says and pushes him back down. “Don’t stop.”
Nothing Ashling has done to herself, late at night, compares to this. This is some new kind of magic, she thinks. Surely it cannot be real.
But it feels real, when Ásgeirr starts licking her in earnest, with side-to-side movements, with up-and-down flicks, with twists and circles and patterns Ashling cannot begin to name. It feels real, when he tongues her bud until it is stiff, so stiff, that he can draw it between his lips. When he pulls gently on the frilled lips of her sex. When he tells her to split her legs wider, as wide as she possibly can, and rest them over the sides of the bath. When he slides his pointed tongue inside her, just a little, and makes her scream.
“You like that,” he gloats.
“I like it all. Whatever you give me, a stór.”
“What does that mean?”
“My treasure,” she says and smiles.
Ásgeirr puts his mouth on her again, flicking at her bud with the tip of his tongue, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
“Oh,” she cries out. “Oh, more, more.” She clutches at his head, presses him closer, arches her back, and shudders.
Ásgeirr crushes her to his chest, then, and takes her mouth.
Ashling can taste herself on his tongue. “Please,” she begs, against his open mouth. “Please let me touch you.”
“All right,” he says, stripping off her wet clothes, “but not here. This water is freezing.”
He carries her from the bath as if she weighs nothing.
“Your stitches!”
“You will mend me if they tear.”
He drops her unceremoniously on the bed.
“I like watching you bounce,” he grins and joins her. “Will you do that on my cock, too?”
“Later,” Ashling says, reaching for him, eager to have him in her grasp. But before she can touch him, he drags her up to the top of the pallet.
“What are you doing?”
“Kneel over me,” Ásgeirr orders, “but facing the other way. Rest your knees here, either side of my head.”
When she comprehends his meaning, Ashling is aghast. “But you’ll see…”
“Everything. I know.”
“But—”
“Elskling, I’ve seen most of you already,” he says.
Ashling shrieks as the Northman manhandles her, hauling her over his face. His fingers sink into the pillowy flesh of her buttocks. A second later, his tongue explores the furrow between them, finds the tight little hole Ashling wanted to hide. But she needn’t have worried. Her Northman is not squeamish, Ashling realizes, as he pushes his face into her and plunders her arsehole enthusiastically with his tongue.
“Yes,” she cries out. “Oh gods, yes.”
Her legs collapse, and Ashling falls forward on top of him. His prick is right in her face. She props herself up on one elbow and swallows him down to the root.
Ashling both hears and feels his shouts, reverberating between her legs. Tongue my bud, she silently begs, use your fingers in me. And he does. Oh, he does. Ashling’s whole body quivers. When he adds a second finger, stretching her deliciously, she breaks apart in bliss.
A moment later, Ásgeirr tries to roll her onto her back, and she panics.
He will split me in two without realizing it.
“No!” she cries. “I mean, not on my back.”
“But kjære,” he says and starts to sit up.
Ashling unsheaths her daggers quick as a flash and straddles his body, pinning him with her thighs.
“Only if I’m on top,” she growls, rubbing her sex against his flat stomach, “only if I’m in control.”
“I’ll take you any way I can, valkyrja,” says the warrior, surrendering.
She flings aside her daggers and lowers herself onto his cock, inhaling sharply as the bell-like tip breaches her. She wriggles back and forth, working it into her gradually, and the pain eases.
Beneath her, Ásgeirr hisses. “So tight,” he says, and then looks at her in surprise. “Ashling, surely you are not… Are you a virgin?”
“Yes,” she gasps and drops down onto him.
“Min elskede, you should have told me.”
“So you could refuse me for honor’s sake, because I saved you?”
“No,” he says. “So I could be gentle.”
Within a heartbeat, he flips her, and for a moment Ashling is frightened. But the Northman is true to his word. He moves slowly and their first joining is not a plundering, but a steady sinuous dance that is no less devastating.
Ashling soon grows accustomed to the singular pleasure of his thickness inside her. To the roll of his hips, to the unrelenting advance of him into her body, into her heart. She lifts her hips to match his thrusts, learning the way of it.
“I will take my time with you later, love,” he groans. “We will do it any way you like. But for now I am done.”
“Then come for me,” she urges.
“Look at me, Ashling. Watch what you do to me.”
His rhythm grows faster, his length burns like a brand inside her. Just when she thinks he will burst into flames, he pulls free of her tightness and spills his seed on her belly.
*
Later, after they have rested, they will talk of the future. And Ashling will ask to go with him when he leaves the island.
He will turn to her and say, first, we need a ship. And she will suggest they can build one or steal one—she is part Viking after all. When she asks which he prefers, he will laugh, and her heart will leap in her chest.
“That depends,” he will say, “on whether you are as skilled with a hammer as you are with those daggers.”
A Varangian Guest
Melissa Fuchs
Constantinople, 1036 AD
The smell of roasted meat, expensive spices, and rich fish sauce wafted through the house of Melite’s brother, Chrysion. Slaves rushed through the dining room, carrying plates and bowls full of select delicacies. Melite stopped a young slave girl, who carried a bowl full of deeply purple and dark green olives and took one to try before she waved her off.
Her brother’s wife was too sickly to care for the arrangement of the feast, and so it had been her responsibility to make sure everything was ready for Chrysion’s return from his troop’s campaign to Sicily. She made another round through the dining hall while the slaves scurried through the row of columns separating the room from the patio, and she put a vase that had been standing in the corner onto the small table below the large mosaic of some legendary ancestors of their family, one of which had gained sainthood. Quickly, she made the sign of the cross, once again thanking the Lord for her brother’s safe return, and again turned to the sumptuously set table.
First, cheese and olives and pieces of baked octopus, grey mullet roe, clams stewed with garlic, onions and olive oil, and wheat bread baked with anise and fennel then sprinkled with sesame and poppy seeds—those dishes were laid out on the table, accompanied by jugs containing three sorts of spiced wine. Then, the monokythron – their mother’s recipe, cabbage and slices of cold fish, eggs and rocket, a little celery, more olives and cheese—in a bowl and drenched in sweet wine. The meat would come after that. Then the saffron dish
es and the spoon sweets. No grilled fish—after so many months of hunting down pirates, her brother would likely be sick to death of grilled fish.
When she looked up from the table again, her brother’s wife entered the room. Callinice was pale and gaunt as always, but the dark blue gown she wore—the color of the Virgin, the divine patroness of Constantinople—endowed her with saint-like beauty. Once she had been an incredibly pretty girl, but since her sickness started after her third pregnancy, she faded like an eremite of legend.
Melite didn’t like to admit it, but the bad health of her brother’s wife had been a blessing. Her own husband had died five years ago before, leaving her in the house of his mother, a woman painfully pious. Melite had outright kissed the icon of the Virgin in her brother’s antechamber when his wife’s illness gave her a reason to return, if only to lead the household she had grown up in and to care for her niece and nephews.
Callinice’s pale grey eyes flitted over the laid table. “Do you think we will have enough?” she asked anxiously.
Melite smiled and walked towards her. “It will be just Chrysion and a handful of his comrades. We have enough to feed half a theme. Don’t you worry, Callinice.”
Her own four pregnancies hadn’t emaciated her like her brother’s wife. The Lord had already blessed her with wide hips and an overall elegantly curved body when she had bloomed into a young woman nearly fifteen years ago. Her hips had become more ample with her two boys and her little baby girls, but the looks other women habitually cast her in the bath house told her she still had an enviable figure. For tonight, she had chosen a ruby red gown, the neck and hem embroidered with pearls, a gift from her late husband.
Suddenly, they heard a commotion from the antechamber.
“Well, that will be them,” Melite said with a smile and motioned her brother’s wife to follow her through the patio and along a short colonnade.
She could hear her little brother’s laughter before they rounded the corner and her niece’s squeaks, as well. As she saw just seconds later, Chrysion had hauled his daughter over his head and was now spinning her around like a spear in battle, which sent the four-year-old screaming and squealing with joy.