• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1118 0

following her footprints. They were shallow, often so faint as to be virtually undetectable; she must weigh next to nothing. I recalled Chopsticks informing me, not long before he died, that the Vanir were airy, spirit-like beings. Unlike their junior cousins the Aesir, who were all too physical and fleshy, the Vanir belonged to a loftier order of existence. The word he used for them was "evanescent." Freya's barely-there footprints proved it. That and the way she could move across snow with scarcely a whisper of sound. That time she sneaked up on me at Yggdrasil, I hadn't heard a thing. No wonder she was such a good huntress. Her prey never had a clue she was coming.

Finally - and I'd sort of begun to accept that this would happen - I lost her. Or she lost me. One or the other. Her tracks faded to invisibility, she herself had long ago sprinted out of view, and I was left panting in the depths of the woods, alone.

I leaned against a tree while I caught my breath. Silence descended around me - the utter silence of a snowbound forest. Nothing else like it in the world. Every noise, even your own breathing, deadened. Nature's soundproofed booth.

Which meant the snap of a rifle bolt being racked right behind my head seemed as loud as if the rifle was actually being fired.

I groaned. She'd done it again.

"Nice one," I said without turning round. "You got me. Don't I just feel like a clumsy mortal oaf."

"It was too easy," said Freya. "I couldn't resist."

"So are we going hunting or what?"

"It depends."

"On?"

"Your definition of hunting. And of prey. Look at me."

I did as I was told.

And gaped.

She was stark naked, apart from an amazing, intricate golden necklace. It had to be the one Odin told me about, the one Loki had tried to nick off her. Complicatedly braided.

Not that I was paying the necklace much attention, mind. Stark naked, remember?

"Ah," was all I said. Power of speech all but gone. A babe in the nuddy with a rifle pointed at your head could do that to you.

She was perfect. Not all inflated and plucked like a porn actress. Lean, curvy where it counted, everything in proper proportion, real. The cold air had done to her nipples what her nipples, in turn, were starting to do to my dick. And her skin was smooth and pale, like the snow her feet left hardly any impression in.

She lowered the rifle.

"Well?" she said.

There was heat. Burning breath. Skin flushed pink. Rough bark against my back, then against hers. A handful of hair, gripped so hard it hurt. Tongue thrust into wetness. The pressure of thighs around hips. Gasps rising to screams - cries to startle every animal within a three-mile radius and put it to flight.

She did weigh next to nothing.

Afterwards we meandered back to the castle, rifles slung over our shoulders by their straps, and we talked. I wasn't normally a fan of postcoital chitchat. More the roll-over-and-start-snoring type. But we weren't in bed, and we had distance to cover, and not saying anything would have been awkward. More awkward than talking.

Freya revealed that she wasn't just a hunting goddess, she was a war goddess, a fertility goddess, a goddess of lust...

"In charge of nearly all life's essentials, then," I said. "Unless you're a goddess of pizza as well."

"My attributes haven't always made me popular among my own kind," she said. "I am frank about my needs and appetites."

"So I noticed."

"To earn my necklace" - she patted the front of her anorak, where the golden necklace lay beneath - "I slept with the Brisings, the four gnome brothers who owned it."

"All four at once, or one after another?"

"Does it matter?"

"Kind of. Not necessarily."

"They weren't terribly prepossessing individuals but they made up for it in other ways."

"How?"

"Do I need to spell it out? Let's just say attentive. And generously endowed."

"Gnomes are well hung?"

"Creatures of such poor physical grace and stature must have some redeeming features. It was... a memorable experience."

"Sounds like it."

"Odin was peeved at me, of course. He felt I'd debased myself. Which I