The babe was gone.

It gave Odin comfort despite the enemy spread before him, a thousand thousand men, as many as the stars, bordering him on every side. The undergrowth was alive with soldiers, their nickering horses and clanking metal, and farther into the valley, shouts and screams of men in combat.

Babes would die tonight, ripped from their mother's arms. They would die all over Asgard, wherever blood of Odin could be found. The orphan child secreted into his son's crib would die, too.

Laufey's eyes were on the soldiers manning the battering ram at the first gate, the Northern Gate, its stone pillars crowned by snarling heads of two dire wolves. Though his soldiers were doused with stones and arrows and the occasional vat of boiling oil or lard poured from cauldrons by starved defenders, still the ram battered, merciless. Laufey politely kept his gaze on this, the fermentation of his victory, and not his old enemy ignobly bound before him.

There was a strange camaraderie between the two men. They both knew it would come to this day. The war, so long, so cruel, could end no other way. The destruction would be absolute, whether this the ending, or Laufey lost in Odin's place.

Odin refused to weep when the first of Jotunheim's soldiers breached the hole, a few stumbling back with arrows in throats, heads, knees, but more dashing forward over their comrades' bodies, racing through the trees for plunder and glory. Men entered the keep with brandished swords and torches ablaze, the gate and its makeshift shoring torn apart by the ram. All of Odin's kinsmen, servants and guards would be killed on sight, hunted like wild beasts through the rush-matted chambers and tapestried halls. The keep would burn like hellfire, the flames licking the night, climbing the trees of the courtyard.

An infant was cast from the high walls, and fell screaming. Laufey smiled. Odin winced.

It took a day for the last survivors to be rounded up and put to the sword. Odin was beheaded in his own courtyard on an old trunk that had once held his second cousin Thea's favorite gowns. He died surrounded by scorched black rubble strewn over blood-clogged flagstones, sickened by the smell of roasted flesh and the aftermath of rape. Laufey never said a word to him. Odin, to his last breath, was thankful that it had never been in Laufey's temperament to gloat.

Castle Blair, the last defensive point of Asgard's royal line, was left in shambles. To Laufey's knowledge, and subsequent proclamation to his new territory, none now lived to claim a continuation of the line.

Jotunheim had won the war.

There was something peaceful about a forge. The bellows, the heat, the timing of it all, the tongs hooked under his arm as he beat iron against the anvil with his hammer, or used the swages, the bit. It was the hammer that was dearest to Thor: the length of rough wood hefted in his palm, the way it felt when a blow landed perfectly.

Thor's blows were damn near always perfect. He knew it, his father knew it; why, then, would his father not allow him to work with weaponry larger than a dagger or an arrowhead? They had begun to learn the making of armor, swords, lance-heads, the fine workings of war, but his father had stopped after Thor's first broadsword had gained recognition from a guild. The sword was gone, Thor knew not where. His lessons had never been completed.

That bitter recollection made Thor's face, broad and bearded, twist, and it was lucky that the cast iron pot he was creating was finished. He plunged it in the water, scowling, impervious to the hiss of billowing steam that stung his face. He resisted the urge to throw it.

"Thor." A familiar whisper of a voice, quavering with age, called him from his thoughts. Thor glanced back sullenly over a burly shoulder.

A lifetime of toil had not been easy on Carac Smith. His flesh hung from a frame that showed he had been a much bigger man, once. It was gone now, robbed by the wasting disease that threatened Carac's life. His skin was ashy and pale; today there was a strange yellow tinge to it, but Thor did not notice and Carac had no luxury like a mirror.

He leaned heavily on a staff in the doorway, blinking rheumy eyes at his adopted son.

"Father," Thor said, but stubbornly made no move to help him.

Carac had had a son of his own, but Borin had died as a lad. Not for the first time, Carac wished he hadn't treated Thor as indulgently as he had. It had given Thor a vanity that the young men and women of the town had reinforced, exacerbated.

Since the age of his apprenticeship, Thor's arrogance had been painful to watch. It would have suited him as a king, Carac thought; but Thor would never govern anyone more important than his gang of hoodlums and knaves at the local tavern, and his ill-conceived plans and tomfoolery had gotten all of them into messes that ranged from confronting the bandits in the nearby forests to insulting both the Sheriff and, worse, the Reeve of this land, all in one night.

Standing lost in thought as he was, Carac didn't notice Thor put away the pot and bank the fire until his son eased by him, still tight-lipped about something.

"Thor?"

"I go to hunt in the eastern woods, father. Get ye back to our home."

"Don't poach the deer, my son."

Disdainful as a lone wolf, Thor snorted and left, hefting a war hammer and his hunting bow, a quiver of arrows that had been fished from a corner of the smithy slung over his shoulders.

Carac tottered aside and watched the muscled back disappear down the road, Thor whistling a jaunty tune about a maiden and a beggar.

Carac sighed, and began the long limp back to his hut, where he tapped an ale cask for his afternoon inspiration. It was the gamey-eyed stranger's questions, Carac decided, that had disturbed him so. It had shaken him from his complacency like a dog from a deep slumber.

What point was there in asking whether the foundling was teething when Carac adopted him? What point to ask the color of the boy's eyes, and hair?

Quaffing ale fitfully, the old man put his feet up with a sigh, and stared out the narrow window at the filmy sun, feeling something darker than dread wind through his body.

He clutched his trencher when he fell, gasping convulsively, barely breathing. He was dead three hours by the time Thor returned to the house, a brace of conies slung over his shoulder that fell in the doorway, a knot of twisted, bloody limbs that Thor, in his grief, left there to rot for a week and a day.