Noble Son
Part Two in the"Loki's Redemption" series
originally written late 2012/early 2013
". . . your noble son is mad: Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?"
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The guards stood outside the door to the private chamber, a dozen strong, armed with Asgard's most potent weapons, each and every one trained on Loki. Odin had insisted on that as a condition of this interview; Frigga had well known he had shown remarkable forbearance in permitting it at all. Even Thor had argued against it, as if he thought his brother, violent as he had become, might attack her.
And he might even try. It was not beyond the realm of possibility, for there was as much madness as mockery in Loki's pale eyes, a burning hatred that seemed to strike everything in its path indiscriminately. But when Thor had insisted he remain to protect her, Frigga had protested once again.
She did not know why Odin had at last relented. Loki was to have no comfort. He would stand his trial as soon as the gods were assembled to join in the judgment. The inevitable judgment.
The one he deserved.
Frigga sat in the single chair. Loki ignored her, staring at the wall as if she did not exist. They had removed his gag, but he was still chained, his shackles fixed to the wall. Another of the All-Father's conditions.
She gazed at his profile, strong and almost delicate at the same time, the deep hollows under his eyes, the wild black hair, the hard set of his mouth. He bore almost no resemblance to the son who had thrown himself from the shattered Bifrost in despair of his failure and the ruin of his schemes. She could still remember the agony of pain in his eyes when he had asked her why his father had failed to tell him the truth of his parentage. She remembered how he had stared in confusion at the scepter when it had been offered to him, how he had looked back at her as if to ask how he, the child of frost giants, could be permitted to hold the throne for even a single day.
And yet when he had taken that scepter, when she had been most proud of him, she had failed to see the change in his eyes. The moment when pain became anger. And the desire for vengeance.
"Loki," she said softly.
He continued to stare at the wall.
"I know you hear me," she said.
The corner of his lip quirked up. "Why are you here, Queen of Asgard?"
"I am your mother, and you are my son."
"There is no mother here," Loki said, "and no son."
But Frigga heard that his voice was not quite steady, saw how his cold, wild eyes glistened and the muscles jumped in his cheek. He had always been too sensitive, her youngest child, subject to starts at noises and sudden movements, alert to small things others failed to notice: the flash of a bird's wing among the trees, the slight change of the flow of water in the fountain when a stone was shifted, the minute alteration in a man's voice when he was on the verge of anger.
But then he had always known he was different, long before the day his father had told him the truth, the day that had marked the beginning of his fall. Thor had ever been volatile, impatient with subtlety, blind to his details Loki so easily detected in the world around them. Loki had been secretive, a thinker, a schemer, a watcher behind doors. One had been easy to love, carefree and happy, the other a challenge that required a mother's full attention.
They both had changed, her sons. One for the better, and one …
One perhaps was lost forever.
"You can unmake yourself," she said, "but you cannot unmake me."
He turned on her so suddenly that the guards raised their weapons as one. Loki looked at them, baring his teeth in a grimace of a smile, daring them to strike. Begging them. His chains clanked, pulling him back, the shackles—never meant to be comfortable—digging into his bare wrists.
He knew he could work no magic. The shackles bound him in more ways than one, and the entire chamber was warded against him. For a moment, … for a single, terrible moment … Frigga wished the guards would end his misery.
"Why are you not afraid of me, my lady?" Loki asked her, that wolfish smile like a bloody slash across his face. "How do you know I haven't more tricks up my sleeve, to take you hostage and make my escape?"
She rose and walked toward him, her simple gown sweeping behind her.
"My queen," the captain of the guards warned her.
"He will not harm me," Frigga said. She took one step, then another, and yet another, until she was almost within the reach of Loki's bound hands. "My son will never harm his mother."
Loki held her gaze for a moment, that stare she didn't recognize, and then looked away. She had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of mortals, they said. And yet in that brief, final glance she had seen no killer, but a lost child. The damaged, wounded child she had helped to create.
A child who must be punished. Who must be made to understand what he had done. And if he could not learn by that punishment ….
"Speak to me, Loki," she said, laying her hand on his arm.
He jerked away. "What would you have me say?" he asked, his voice hoarse with the effort to conceal his emotions. "Would you have me apologize? Beg for mercy, perhaps? Is that what you think of me?"
"I think you have done terrible things," she said.
It was the voice she had used when the boys had misbehaved. It had always caught their attention, because she called upon it only when there was no other means of reaching them. Loki flinched, though he hid the reaction with a toss of his head.
"Terrible things," he said. "Yes. Terrible as the creatures of earth judge them."
"As all honorable beings do," she said.
"Have I ever possessed honor?" He looked at her again, spiteful as a serpent. "Was I ever permitted to?"
"You pity yourself," she said. "You place blame on others to justify what you have done." She caught his chin in her hand. "You have killed, Loki. You have murdered innocents, and tried again and again to take the life of your own brother."
"He is not my—"
She struck him across the face. His head snapped to the side, and he held it there, his teeth clenched, frozen as if he had turned his own body to ice.
"Your brother," she said, "has forgiven you again and again. He brought you home to face Asgardian justice, but not because he hates you. Because he hopes you can be saved. Because he knew you when you were—"
"I was never anything but a monster," Loki said. "And now I have become what I was meant to be." He laughed. "A writer much revered on Midgard once said, 'to thine own self be true.' For the first time in my life I am true to myself." He spun, striking so quickly that Frigga never so much as glimpsed the movement, and seized her hand in his. He squeezed, and she felt the first stirrings of pain. The guards ran into the room, and the captain struck Loki's side with his spear, sending a jolt of searing energy into Loki's body.
Loki grunted, dropped Frigga's hand and curled away from the blow. It should have driven him to his knees, but he reacted as if it were only one small discomfort to be endured, not a punishment meant to disable.
"Now you know," he said, grimacing as he straightened. He smiled at the guard and stood facing him, spreading his hands as far as they would go. "Strike again, Captain," he said. "I stand ready. Shall we place a wager on how many blows I can take before my body fails me?"
The captain's expression didn't change. "We must inform the All-Father, my queen," he said. "It is no longer safe for you here."
"I will determine when it is no longer safe," she said, holding the captain's stare. He hesitated, glanced at Loki with undisguised contempt and bowed to Frigga as he backed way. But the guards retreated no farther than just inside the door.
"Did that amuse you?" she said, turning on Loki. "Do you think these servants are as eager to inflict pain as you have been?"
"Shall I be sincere, Queen Frigga?" he asked. "Great Thor once told me I was incapable of it."
"I have never believed so," Frigga said.
"Then I will tell you that these men are as eager to inflict pain as I ever was. As …. Odin was, when he slaughtered frost giants by the thousands."
She held up her hand. "Take it again. I will order the guards, as their queen, to stand back. You may hurt me, Loki, and I shall not draw away."
His gaze dropped to her slender fingers, gleaming with rings given to her by Odin, by Thor. And by Loki. She still wore the first gift he had brought her, when he had first come to awkward manhood.
"You are a very foolish woman," he said, his voice growing hoarse.
"Mothers are often foolish," she said. "They never give up on their children. They hope some good remains in even the most rebellious and cruel. They pray for redemption."
"Redemption?" Loki turned his hands over, flexing his fingers. The pale skin began to gray, becoming rigid and cold. The strange, crystalline darkness crept up his forearm, under the long sleeve of his plain servant's tunic, rising to his neck. "Redemption for this?"
She caught his hand in both of hers, willing him all her warmth. The gray receded, beginning again with his fingertips and spreading upward to the raw hem at the neckline of his tunic. Loki closed his eyes, as if the reversal was more painful than any shock by the captain's spear.
"You see?" she asked softly. "You can change. You must pay. You must make amends. But you can change."
"No," he said, a tear leaking from the corner of his eyes. "It is too late."
"It is never too late." She cupped his sunken cheek in the palm of her hand. "Perhaps you can never be entirely other than you are. The Norns have decreed that some things cannot be altered. But you can walk back from the brink, my son. You can recognize the evil you have done and vow never to repeat it."
He leaned into her hand. 'It is too late."
She stroked the tear away with the pad of her thumb. "If it is a madness you suffer, as your brother believes, then it may be cured by healers practiced in the arts of the mind."
Loki stepped back, his face feral as a wolf's. "There is no cure. Do not torment yourself by seeking one. I would do nothing differently. Nothing."
"Yet you ask me not to torment myself. Those are not words of hate, my son. They are words of one who wishes to spare another suffering." She searched his eyes. "Do you care so much? Do you care for my feelings?"
Shaking his head wildly, he turned and slammed his fist against the wall, cracking the stone. The captain and guards moved in. Frigga forestalled them with a lift of her hand.
"There is a great war within you, Loki," she said. "There always has been. It may be there will be no clear victory for one side or the other. But there must be a place of truce. A place you can always return to when you slip too far from what is right."
"What is right," he said. His voice cracked, and he fell to his knees. "You will never have that from me, mother."
Her heart stopped. Mother. That one word gave her more hope than any noble promise of reformation could have done.
"My boy," she said, kneeling beside him. "My little boy."'
She held him in her arms as he wept.