It's a Long Boat Ride Home Part II (v1.3)

Tags: Male Raider / Female Villager, consensual this time, happy ending


With everyone rolling their eyes at him, Theodor shamelessly brought Helena with him to land at Desfjal. He scratched his chin and imparted a few new words when she asked. Sea lion, fishing net, harpoon.

On the dock, she didn't run away. On land, she didn't run away. She wouldn't even stray from his side as he wandered through crowded markets. The language here was a close sister of his own, and he understood it very well. The culture was not quite so close, but it was close enough. People saw Helena's collar and they neither disturbed her nor were they disturbed by her.

"You need new clothes," he told her, indicating her dress and calloused bare feet. "It will be too cold for you very soon otherwise."

"Clothes for me," she said, clarifying.

Theodor nodded, and she looked pleased. He picked clothes for her based on pragmatism. He decided that she would wear warm things with long sleeves, and never dresses. She would wear socks and boots. It was for her own well-being because it would keep her from shaking and he believed that her dress brought too much attention to her from his fellow raiders. That aside, they were harder to move in. He'd never met a single shield maiden who would even think of wearing a dress.

They bought paper. It wasn't a new invention by a long shot, and it could be mass produced efficiently, but there wasn't much of a market for it outside of scholars. Nevertheless, they found a merchant selling paper. You could always find a merchant in Desfjal to sell you whatever you pleased if you looked hard enough. Candles were easier to find. They passed men selling slaves, and Helena cowered close to Theodor, holding onto the bearskin cloak he wore over his shoulders.

"Not me," she said, looking at the line of people in collars. Her green eyes were wide.

"Not you," he reassured her, and they hurried on back to the dinghy. Only Sjef was left next to it, faithfully keeping guard of the small boat so it could not be stolen. They gave him some dried fish for his diligence and waited for the others to finish their work.


Helena fell asleep in the boat while they were waiting to leave, leaning against Theodor. By now she trusted him to watch out for her, and understood enough of the circumstances of her kidnapping to know that when he had raped her, he really had not wanted to. Sometimes her mind wandered to other questions, about how she could reconcile the fact that he was a killer and that he and his people had utterly destroyed her home without shame, but she was avoiding those questions as best she could. It wasn't pragmatic to think such things, and Theodor's kindness and her own pragmatism were all that kept her alive. He had already been forgiven, somehow.

Men returned with barrels of lard, bags of salt, and more rations. Theodor and Helena took a boat back to deliver the food to the ship while others got more supplies.

Theodor communicated to her that there would be lots of back and forth and delivery. She rubbed her hands together to keep them warm, but decided to stay on the ship with the new paper.


Desfjal glowed in the evening with lamps at every street corner. They burned on oil that the fishermen harvested from the bodies of enormous fish with enormous mouths that were common in the waters when krill were.

Through a stroke of miserable luck, Randell was the man that Theodor was stuck waiting at the dock with, and polite silence was apparently not an option. Randell talked, and talked. He had bought ale today, he said. He'd seen a man selling an enormous cat with stripes in a cage, he said. He'd seen a woman walking around with reindeer hooves where her feet should have been. Theodor wasn't sure which of these stories to believe, but it was all plausible in Desfjal. He nodded along and stared at the street lamps.

"And to top it all off," Randell told him, "I was with a prostitute this evening, just an hour ago."

Theodor saw his chance to retaliate for past annoyances and took it. "You paid for a fuck?"

"Hardly," Randell said defensively, sitting up straight and pushing some of his white-blonde hair from his eyes.

"But you did pay," Theodor said. He didn't much care what people did in their spare time, but he knew an opportunity to annoy a man he hated when he saw it. "We were just on a raid, you could have taken a girl there and you didn't. You could have just wooed a girl here--oh, or maybe you couldn't? Is that why you had to pay?"

"Shut up," Randell said. Theodor laughed at him and watched the other man's lip curl with anger. It was so satisfying to anger the man who had angered him, and he was pleased when Randell took the next dinghy back to the ship.


Helena had fallen asleep when she heard the door open to Theodor's cabin. She had done some drawing and decided to lie down, but when she heard him return she sat up.

And found that it wasn't Theodor. She froze like a frog in lanternlight and stared at the man. She knew him. Randell was the man who had most pressured Theodor on the day she had been kidnapped, and that he was utterly despised by her protector. Helena had never forgotten his face and had always avoided him on the deck of the ship.

"Out," she told him severely, and pointed to the door behind him. It was Theodor's room and she was Theodor's slave--in here, she had more legal authority than even a free man like Randell. Helena's grasp of the laws of the new culture was flimsy, but she understood enough to know that she could tell him to leave without being in the wrong. She repeated herself. "Out."


The short white-blond hairs on the back of Theodor's neck tingled and stood on end as he helped unload the supplies for the last time. He tried to place his feelings of concern to account for his instincts, and two pieces of what could possibly be considered evidence occurred to him in the same moment as he was unloading a barrel of mead.

Helena had not come out to greet him. Not suspicious in and of itself, only when coupled with another element. Randell had excused himself from the group and wasn't unloading anything. That was it. Theodor walked briskly--but lightly, even in his heavy boots--to the door to the decks, and went down softly with his ears straining through the dark corridors. He stopped in his tracks and held his breath to listen.

He heard someone masturbating down the hall in their own room. Ulric in his room napping, snoring. And a tapping from his room. He drew his knife from his boot and wasted no time on pulling his door open and driving his knife through Randell's shoulder and hauling him back by his hair into the hallway while he screamed in pain. He glimpsed Helena--safe, with clothes on but looking frightened. She was not his concern.

With surprise on his side, Theodor stabbed Randell in the shoulder twice more before kicking him to his knees. "I did not give you permission to enter my cabin. What the hell were you doing?"

Randell's reply was something groaned, and other cabin doors opened as people looked out at the spectacle. A passing slave stopped and looked to see if he should interfere, and after a moment he ran back out to the deck to get more witnesses. Theodor kicked his most loathed shipmate in the chest, then backed off a step so that he stood in the doorway of his room, still holding the bloody knife.

He wasn't sorry, and made that abundantly clear when questions were asked in the following minutes. Halli helped Randell away to the deck to pack moss in the wounds and sew them up, Ulton and Niko stayed with Theodor and the other witnesses to ask what had happened.

"He was in my cabin without my permission," Theodor said. He added pointedly (to imply as much as he could without directly accusing Randell of impure intentions), "My slave was there as well."

They tried to ask Helena, but she fumbled with her words and sentences and they gave up trying to clarify too much. "Randell room in. Say out, not. Theodor out."

"Did you have to stab him so much though?" Niko asked Theodor under his breath. "I mean, that was a lot."

"He was on my property without my permission. I could have killed him."

Niko shrugged, and Theodor was finally free to check on Helena with the door closed. She didn't seem shaken or upset. If anything she looked frustrated, with her hands balled into fists.

"Are you okay?" He asked her as he sat down at her side and pulled off his boots and bearskins.

"Okay," she nodded. Then she grinned vindictively. "Randell not okay."

It made Theodor grin as well. "Atta girl," he told her in a soft growl, and patted her on the back. In the next moment, she had climbed into his lap, sitting facing him. There was no thinking about it for Theodor, who immediately relaxed and wrapped both of his enormous arms around her waist and smiled.

He wasn't surprised when she kissed him, but he hadn't expected it either. The man smiled as she nipped at his lips to egg him on.

Helena wanted him. He had rescued her from Randell, and Helena could not have been more elated by that fact. She wanted sex with Theodor and she wanted it on her own terms. Last time she'd had no choice in the matter and it had been awful. This time, she was eager. It would be different. It would be a celebration.

She made Theodor chase her tongue with his own, and she pressed down against his crotch to grind against him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and felt him reach for her rear and give it a squeeze. His other hand was pulling at his pants because the front had become uncomfortably tight.

He broke the kiss. "You want this?" He seemed skeptical.

With a vigorous nod she gave her assent, and Theodor lifted her dress and tossed it behind her against the wall--the last time she'd be wearing it. She had goosebumps on her arms with excitement, her brown hair falling forward over her pale shoulders. Helena egged Theodor on with her eyes, so pleased to see him smiling back at her. He reached down between them and ran a probing finger between Helena's legs. His touch made her shudder and she crooned softly in his ear as she leaned forward and welcomed him to push his finger up inside of her.

"You like this?" he rumbled gently in her ear.

"Yes," she breathed on his neck.

He kissed her on the cheek because he couldn't reach her lips and played with her. She held fistfuls of his tunic tightly while he pressed, rubbed, stroked a place up inside of her with two fingers, and his thumb played over her clitoris. For a time they were both quiet except for Helena's heavy breathing, and then Theodor withdrew his fingers.

"I don't want to wait anymore," he told her by way of apology as he reclaimed his finger with a loud, wet sound and quickly replaced it with his erection and pulled Helena down his shaft slowly, inch by inch, until he was all the way engulfed by her hot, wet tunnel.

"Theodor," she groaned, still clinging to him but with her head tilted back now, her chest thrust forward. He took a breast in one hand and an ass cheek in the other and squeezed, fondled, and rubbed both as he thrust his hips and bounced the girl in his lap.

He could tell by the loud noise she made that she enjoyed it as much as he did, having her trying to hold him as tightly as possible while his cock forced her walls apart. They quickened the pace, then slowed, then sped up again. Helena didn't have the stamina for this that Theodor did, and she came first, explosively. A gushing of clear fluid from inside of her covered his entire crotch as she shuddered with her mouth frozen in place--a silent "o".

Theodor kissed her cheek and kept going. The way she seemed to spool up as he went on, becoming more intense to the point that she shook with delight, he thought that she might even pass out if she came again. The thought wasn't enough to concern him, however, and he pulled out of her only briefly (again with a very satisfying wet sound) to roll her onto her back on his cot so he could be above her where her hair spread out on the pillow like a halo. He kissed her again when he reentered her, and made it four thrusts before she came again and smeared the clear fluid all over the cot by her uncontrolled twisting and gushing around him. It didn't bother him a bit, and the thought of the two of them being comfortable enough to simply sleep in a mess of one anothers' fluids was the thought that he came to, jetting his seed as deeply into her as he could manage. He was careful not to crush her when he collapsed onto her.

She wanted to cuddle immediately. He did too, but played as though he was less interested than she was. He touched her bright pink cheeks and pulled up a blanket. Already she had fallen asleep.


When they were finally home, it was a relief. Theodor immediately began teaching Helena the names of the white mountains that lined the horizon now, teaching her which ones had gods living at their peaks and which ones were inhabited by fire-breathing drakes. His estate was close enough to the port that they walked home with Theodor dragging an ox cart behind him full of his spoils in gold, salt, furs, and tools as well as his other possessions.

"You want help?" Helena asked. He laughed at her, not unkindly.

His house was stone and wood. Bears were carved on the outsides, along with images of famous ghosts known to protect travelers. The door was open, as it usually was. His slaves, men he had grown up alongside, greeted him with handshakes and hugs and a polite curiosity for Helena that grew when he told them she was moving in.

"She could have mother's old room," suggested Sedin. His mother had been a slave of Theodor's father's household. She had outlived Theodor's father, but Theodor had outlived them both.

"No," he told them. "Helena will share my room."

They cracked sly smiles and nodded to him, leaving to unpack the cart. When they came back in, rolling a barrel of salt, Lysandr asked, "When's the wedding?"

Theodor hadn't given that much thought.

"Soon," Helena answered for him.