The memory begins on a day like any other in her youth, in all that child's play of taking things for granted. During the days her hair grew out as glistening as yellow fruit that ripened with the jewels of morning's frost.
In those times she would have taken the two boys along with any other friends, indifferent to their status as heirs rather than respectful of it. She earned a slap on the hand more than once for calling them names, but in the absence of their elders they laughed as equals. Even then Loki's amusement was smartly contained, but when he did smile truly his teeth shone as brightly as Thor's; then and only then could one fancy a resemblance.
As for other friends, Thor had them. He traced a scattering of acquaintances on his frequent route racing Loki through the village, and Loki made a game of putting them off one by one. Between Thor's bullishness and Loki's jests they needed Sif's pretty words to wear down the company, but she never bothered with the fisher folk or the brothers' sneaking across in the raft to the wilder woods on account of the locals' superstitions about women cursing the docks, and finding the wood beyond hardly special enough to bother arguing with them.
"I still think it would be funny to tell them you're a mage looking to scare off the fish for the whole winter," Thor said with a pout.
"Only whenever you think of something funny," Loki drawled, "it never seems to go your way, does it?"
Fleinn, one of the blacksmith's sons, stopped playing with his ball to glance at Loki. "I thought it was a good laugh when he convinced you to make a fool of yourself swinging from my grandfather's tree..."
Thor laughed. "He only thought the whole flock's wool would soften his fall, I'm sure," he said in sniggering reminiscence, and Sif smiled with him but tended to get bored when the boys fell into these never ending taunts, and thought a peace offering might spare her that.
"You boys go," she encouraged. "Loki and I will play here."
"Aren't you coming?" Thor asked Loki.
"No," Sif said, and lied, "He promised he'd show me that new trick of his."
"What?" Thor exclaimed. "He wouldn't show me no matter how many times I asked."
Sif was meeting Loki's eyes, and some test was passing harmlessly between their thoughts; finally Loki agreed he was staying with her, a small smile turning real under his smart eyes.
Sif didn't ask about the trick for a while. They sat with their feet in the water, splashing idly, until Loki's mischievous look turned ponderous. He said, "I can only do this once, you know. It's not a trick...more of a spell."
"What's the difference?"
"It has to be prepared, not learned."
"You don't have to show me," she said, disappointed and bored once more.
Loki didn't need long to relent. "I'll show you but you have to really want to see."
"That's stupid, of course I want to, I said...oh!" She gasped, twitching back: something was happening to her garments and she was alarmed by the tickle of it until she looked down.
Between every keyhole or pinhole-sized gap between the laces and buttons and catches she resented wearing, flowers bloomed as quickly as a sigh, showing up the layers of muslin with natural vibrance. The illusion was that they virtually sprouted out of her body as some natural force unable to be contained by the feminine draping. She giggled profusely in the shock of it, pushing her hand into Loki's arm, and then frowned as the flowers immediately began to wilt and blacken.
Looking satisfied with himself, Loki said, "Put your feet back in the water."
She'd moved back in her excitement but in response to his encouragement she edged her feet back over the dock and delicately dipped in one toe at first, delighted at the magic's sense of humor as the flowers slowly grew full again as if watered at the root.
"Wait a minute and then you can pick them," he said proudly, and she grinned.
"You couldn't have done this anyway, with your usual illusions?" she asked.
"I could've made you see them and possibly felt them, but it wouldn't have been so…"
"Real," she finished absently, marveling still at the myriad blooms down her upper arms and torso. Then with a confused pout she said, "But the other day when you imitated the schoolmistress you kept flicking at Thor's wrist and he certainly felt it…"
"When the illusion is myself…" Loki gladly changed into a pink-cheeked Thor wearing garish jewels, to demonstrate. "It is only me."
"...Is it only you?" She raised a hand, and his palm was raised to meet it. They touched as if practicing a formal dance, and his skin felt sun-warmed, not surprisingly cool as Loki's skin sometimes did. Only as Loki drew his hand back did she realize she was surprised by his cavalierly reaching out to her. He was often more reserved, and it was like his comfort was easier in his brother's skin.
They fell quiet, and finally Sif plucked one of the flowers from her lacing to see it more closely. The petals were long and a flaming orange. Turning to Loki still under his disguise as Thor, she teased at his distracted stare by tickling at his bare shoulder with the flower. When that got no response, she switched the stem at his ear for a moment, and stopped in surprise when even that didn't tickle him.
His head turned back to her and his eyes sparked at the proximity of the flower; he gave a convincing laugh, batting her hand away, but the reaction was too late.
She said, "You can't…"
His eyes met hers in a collision of irritated intimacy, and she understood with confusion that he had been so clumsy as to let her learn a secret.
"When you're doing that—you can't…"
Just then some gleeful holler erupted from the slow cog coming up the river, Thor whooping before he took an impatient dive off the side to swim to the dock. When Sif looked over again, Loki was wading in to meet him. Not wanting to explain the flowers, she backed quickly up to the shore and turned to run home.
It was some time later, on a night when her family was allowed to sleep at the royal halls after a huge feast, that she had strange dreams and then awoke bald as a stone. She raged however she was permitted to in the realm of the divine, which was with choking sublimated humiliation, her father's hard grasp a warning at her shoulder even as Frigga became livid on her behalf. Loki was angrily ordered to fix it, but in the end he didn't know how; when Frigga made her hair grow back in it was the color of ink. Sif ran the following morning to the spring by herself, caught her reflection in the water, and sobbed with fury.
It was long after all of that, after all the grudging pleasures the slick-minded bastard gave and took with her, and before she had the chance to force all of this to make sense in any way she could acknowledge, she felt the end of her youth in Loki's demise.
As much as she had long feared that the tension in him would some day snap and surrender him to the disorder of his darkest wishes, his breaking from his brother as well as the company of his fellow warriors was like the end of an age she had taken as eternal. Knowing that emotion in herself, she couldn't even imagine Thor's dismayed grief at the betrayal, at his brother falling into the cold abyss. In the joyful aftermath, as Asgard celebrated being safely in the hands of Odin and his true son again, the Warriors Three suppressed only slightly their relief to be rid of Loki. She was rather numb to it for a time, and sometimes took to Thor's company out of a longing for what was once normal.
But his mind had split and changed. His heart half lived in Midgard, not just out of love for that wise maiden who studied their stars but for some other responsibility that troubled him still. Sif was proud of him, achingly, and there was still a fierce and cheering love to their partnership. But when he left and came back again with the woman this time, she knew in her bones that he wouldn't be kept home for very long. And true enough, when he returned with news of his brother's second death, it was to forsake his rightful place in Asgard, and leave.
When he came to tell her she didn't ask, but she had reason to believe that she was only the second person to know of his departure, after the king. The thought meant something to her, but when she reminded herself his mother and brother were not here to be told, she was suddenly welling up inside with the emptiness of the kingdom around her.
She stood strong and smiling as they exchanged farewells. And when she was left with nothing else to do, she found herself descending into what still stood of the dungeons.
With no maintenance from the mage guards, the confinement charms had fallen from the chamber where she stepped carefully inside. She recognized some of the books Frigga had brought down here to Loki, strewn about close to the splintered furniture.
During his imprisonment here, she would never have been allowed to speak to him even if she had requested a visit; it had been comfortable for her not to have the option. She had asked Thor, only once and without any implication, if a world of mortals had really earned so much loyalty to be worth silence between him and Loki forever. "Is he still my brother?" he'd asked her, and she had wondered for a while afterwards if he'd really meant for her to give him an answer.
When they'd parted earlier that day, they hadn't spoken of Loki at all.
One by one she picked up the books, somehow imagining there would be more of them. Perhaps others had already been collected by Odin, though that would surprise her, considering he had never had much understanding for the price of Frigga's arts.
She carried four altogether as she ascended back up the steps, and soon found herself passing unexpectedly by the king. His glance at her might have only been curious, but it felt piercing.
"Last I knew," he said kindly enough, "you were nobody's chambermaid."
"My lord, excuse me, but these belonged to Frigga. I thought…"
"Of course," he said with a slight change of tone. "She saw much to admire in you. You may have them."
"I didn't mean…" She stammered, "Sir, I have no use for such texts."
It came in something of a shock when he guffawed, briefly but loudly, the sound echoing down the hall. "No, I could never accuse you of such things, Lady Sif. Not of those transgressions."
The smirk already fading from Odin's face, he went on his way, and she paced away to the uncertain rhythm of her own thoughts.
Some part of her remained distracted, delayed by instinct, for the rest of the evening. She took to her thoughtful solitude for the next day as her duty under the king had yet to be demanded, but a couple hours after the sun fell, she finally showed her face at the tavern to the welcoming cries of her warriors. The three were drinking to the departure of Thor, naturally; it was customary to toast the losses as well as the gains and in much the same manner.
She had a couple cups herself, but the loosening of her thoughts only slowly closed in on her intentions. Even as the group rumbled out songs and shared memories, she was observing the three of them in a thoughtful question, finally landing on Volstagg. Yes, it would be him. He was the least capable of intrigue and therefore a good balance to herself, who was in need of the last one anyone might suspect.
She managed to beckon him over to a separate table with a toss of her head. He came eagerly.
"I need you for an errand, my friend."
Shifting into gallantry, he gave a brief sliding glance to the surrounding company, asked, "Only me?"
"I fear it's not exciting enough to need more than one partner. Listen...weren't you privy when we received that messenger from one of the farther realms, someone sent from a…'Collector'?"
"Some man who gave no real name wanting to know if we had any relics we'd like to sell. I heard Odin sent the messenger away without even an invitation to dine."
"But he did leave some information about where we might find this man, yes?"
::
And so she managed to take Volstagg, and—by timing her lies with the members of the guard who were most trusting of her—the Aether stone, on her journey with the pretense that it was her last assignment personally given by Thor before he departed. She managed this without fully taking a moment in the midst of it to explain to herself the gut feeling that the two stones had to be separated, if they couldn't both be safely sent out of the kingdom. Perhaps it was thought that Asgard was not the most suitable stronghold for such things; that was what she would have said, if challenged to explain her mission.
When they arrived back home, however, her unsettled vigilance was forced closer to the front of her thoughts when she found Heimdall not only replaced at his station by a second-rate soldier but banished from Asgard.
She went straight to Odin where he was lounging on the balcony, taking a knee but not waiting until he spoke first.
"My king. I must inquire about the grounds of Heimdall's banishment."
Sounding bored, Odin answered, "I should not have to explain that I question the loyalty of a man who recently committed treason."
It was like some game; he knew how preposterous it was. Odin had even admitted to Thor that his inaction in the Marauders War had been reckless.
It was a game she would have to play.
"I must assume I too face banishment as my station is lower and my betrayal of your orders was the same."
"Actually," he said at slow leisure, "I have an assignment for you. I need you to go to Midgard."
Momentarily unseated, she asked, "Is Thor…?"
"I'm sure Thor is quite occupied. No; before his departure, Heimdall did divulge that he saw a member of the Kree intruding on the planet. He considered it our duty to investigate. After all, Midgardians have proven to be defenseless against powerful visitors..."
"Of course," she said after realizing it was her turn to speak. "I can leave at once with the Warriors Three."
"Actually, Lady Sif, you will handle this alone. I trust you can, so that our security is not compromised here."
She was sent away and did what she was told, but her mind burned. That Odin would heed Heimdall's warning even after banishing him could have been a concession, an acknowledgment that his loyal gatekeeper was still trustworthy in some ways, a demonstration that the punishment had been rational rather than a grudging blow.
But Sif knew all the while that it felt like something else, like an opportunity had been seized to isolate and suspend her from his company. To get rid of her.
Could it have been the same, with Heimdall? What reason could he have had to dismiss his most oracular of faithful Asgardians?
She put away such thoughts for the duration of her voyage to Midgard. But when she returned, she was ready to deal with them.
The king was in the middle of throwing an absurdly lavish feast when she approached at the main palace. Most of the local court was gladly taking to this celebration of nothing in particular, but she sensed subtle confusion on the part of a few. Asgardians, though they valued peacetime whenever possible, considered indulgent cabals to be something that was earned through battles and victories, or the occasional rite of passage, not something to be made up as whimsically as a child's flower chain.
Twice having attempted to earn her laughter, Fandral gave her a scrutinizing look that finally took her attention away from observing the king a little too closely. "I'm sorry," she said as he popped a berry into his mouth, his eyes glittering in a teasing question. "I can't stop thinking that Odin has been acting very strange."
"I would agree," Fandral considered, "if I presumed to know the king very well. Or how he deals with grieving the loss of a wife and son."
She sighed. "I wish Thor were here tonight."
"Naturally," he said, agreeing with a lighter tone. "One too many conversationalists here for my taste. Even Odin seems to be showing off his wits more than usual. At least they're cracking open the next barrel, it looks like…"
The mirth and indulgence carried on long into the morning, casting Sif across several tides of conflicting moods. She laid a bet on Volstagg's drinking game with one member of the guard, laughed, became only a little sick, fell asleep over one of the tables, woke uneasy to the brightness. All along was the feeling she was watching for something.
Finally as she was helping some merchant's child toddle between the crowds on the outer terrace, some muddled crescendo of enthusiasm came over the people. Looking down to the solid road where traders took their deliveries meant for nobler society, there was a remarkably abundant row of wagons, all carrying bright cargo behind the large whinnying mounts. Squinting, she made out the glitter of the sunlight on the countless stock of stone: white marble, and a sharper and shinier rock riding next to it. A fortune's worth for sculpting.
They then received Odin's brief speech about his intentions to have a shrine erected in honor of his heroic fallen son, Loki.
The reactions were mixed. It seemed only those who were still far into their cups had the spirit to show any exaltation, but it went far enough into rippling some obedient applause. The king gave a few more words and then finally took his leave of the celebration without the clearest of commands to get back to their normal day's work.
When he retired to his rooms, he found Sif's staff at his neck.
Odin's eyes slid over to where she'd hidden around the door to the inner royal chamber. His face or intentions housed no question, of how she'd gotten in, what she intended, what she was doing. After a brief time the moment felt slicked with oil, like a misstep could lead to a violent strike.
Finally the eyes fell, knowing, sly. "I would've been disappointed if it had taken you any longer."
"Where is the king?" Sif demanded.
Loki made as if to shrug off the staff; she pressed it to a tender contour of the neck.
"Loki."
"Would it reassure you to be told I haven't killed him?"
"I asked where—"
"I only know where I last saw him."
"Lies," she spat, and poked him hard so that his back hit the wall. "Take off that ridiculous glamour and explain yourself."
"Explain?" Loki's own face shimmered out of the illusion into its usual smirk. "Explain...How to explain this: I am the king now. Your king is here, Sif. You need not worry about anything else."
She backed up, pacing away in restless motion. She was supposed to plan, she was trying to act. "I will go find Thor and when he finds out—"
"—finds out that you left his father at the mercy of whatever I was doing with him?" Loki ticked at his teeth.
"You would never tell me," she shouted, the frustration going inward in a futile outburst. "If he was dead or gone or he was here and you had him—you'll never breathe a word."
"Or I could just tell you," he said, conversationally. "...Tomorrow."
Some bell was struck in her mind, about the next day. "You were meant to help escort those prisoners through the bifrost tomorrow."
"Wonderful. Thank you for reminding me. As you know, they are under an imperial asylum and would have to be released without further mercy as soon as it were revealed that their refuge was never approved by, as you would say, the actual king of Asgard."
So continued Loki's game. Knowing that his manipulations to suspend her from the kingdom would no longer work, he was impelled to entertain her demands and questions with detached derision, as if considering a yapping dog as political counsel, while she could only aggressively plead for some clue as to Odin's wellbeing while he constantly searched for the next thing in Asgard he could threaten to set up for his own indifferent sabotage.
Over time, neither of them quite would have admitted that the snare was being pulled across both directions. The possibility that Sif could simply set the warriors upon him with a strong enough suspicion of his identity was never an explicit threat, and therefore her ability to influence was never outright acknowledged either. She was over and underneath layers of pretense with clenched teeth, and the fact he hadn't challenged the ultimate contradiction in her intentions was nothing to take as granted. He was only biding his time.
But so was she.
The palace was fairly sparse in the early afternoon and she slipped into the king's chambers unseen, and she was free to wait there until her absence might be investigated, should there be any reason for anyone to notice it that day. Loki would either way.
She wore a fine but common shift of a dark color, tied at the waist with a sheen of rope. Her hair was down. She watched out the balcony as a flock of birds took shape and her mind became a sluggish cloud, landed with brisk finality on that day so long ago with the flowers blooming out of her dress and that hooded caution in Loki's eyes, a long song of her life with the notes of these two brothers ever repeating. They had been children once.
She could not forgive what had become of all this, but she took no pleasure in her plans. Her resolve felt tethered to something sunken too deep to see.
"Somehow I doubt this is a pleasant surprise."
She wasn't startled at the sound of his voice. At her leisure she turned to see him pouring himself some mead, tilting a second glass in offer.
"No," she said, and her refusal intoned something that made his curiosity just a touch more cautious, or so she thought; she could swear she had that small power to make him doubt his hold. Had to, or else she would not be here.
He barely nursed the goblet, swishing the drink around but only having the slight sip. "What is it today, Sif?" The aloof question wasn't right for the newness in her appearance, in her air of resolve, and he knew it.
With that strange determination binding every movement together, she turned fully away from the view of the skies and walked slowly up to him, until their faces were close. She looked into his eyes, the proximity making it seem as if she could drink something out of them, catch the glint of light they caught like snow on her lashes. When she tipped up her head to bring her mouth close to his, she stilled, sensing the slightest flinch in him.
"Stay," she coldly commanded. "Stay just as you are."
He did, and with her heart doing an uncertain trip in her chest, she lifted her face to kiss that mouth, his own mouth, for the first time.
It was soft at first, edging upon something in anticipation, their lips almost unmoving as there was only the slightest fluting of air gasping through his nose, a light gust of wind heard brushing through branches outside.
In her mind she was crept low like a cat on the prowl, for the very second she sensed the slightest surrender. Only, when she received it, it took her breath away.
Strong hands grabbed her hips to pull her in, setting her mind to a startled blaze, and then her mouth met his fervor, parted for it, allowed his taste.
His kiss was lethal. Of course it was. This one joining point and yet she felt his entrance with her entire body, allowed herself to rock and rest against him as he made the deeper demonstration of his clever tongue. She allowed this, until she didn't; she stopped and pushed him back at the shoulders, a harsh pestered motion that brought him back to sense.
"What is the meaning of this?" he demanded, as if he felt collected still, but there was too tight a hold to his shoulders.
She stepped in close to him again, this time more as she did on that first day she ever made herself an exploit to him, with the same insistence. She said plainly and quietly, perhaps even gently, "I would have your humiliation now."
The understanding swept over, very slowly, to transform his eyes into something she had never seen before. There was fury burning in them but with a kind of trapped, feverish attention. And something almost like fear. Or a lust defined by all these things.
She didn't even ask him to do it: His eyes turned down to the floor, and it seemed he had now begun to tremble, and when he began to kneel, for a moment she stopped breathing.
The floor touched one knee with a soft thud, his arm crossed over the other, and his eyes were cast down.
When, after she simply stood still above him for a long moment, he would have finally heard her unsheathe her dagger from her thigh, he didn't look up. Bending down, she tapped the tip of it at his chin only enough to make him glance up one notch; then she drew the lightest touch from his chin and up the line of his jaw. Her other hand roamed a little less gently, rubbing back along his hair, at first lazily and then with the conviction of grabbing a solid handful, at the same time bringing the dagger to where his hair began at the back of his neck, braced to shear it off. His breath had caught sharply at this, but he continued to stay at a kneel, tightly braced.
For a moment, she wondered what it would feel like to cut off his hair. She imagined a raven-colored clump of it in her hand, sending it away on the wind. The feel of sawing through every strand. Had this transaction really taken such a bizarre obedience from him that he would allow it? She didn't know, but relented. She took the dagger away, tossing it on the floor and beginning to disrobe.
"Undress," she said, "and get on the bed."
He complied, not slowly but with concentration, as if taking care not to slip out of some posture of submission. She didn't remove her underthings, instead stripping down to thin white linen, slinging one of the ties around like a rope in her hand for a bit before finally turning away from her lofty pacing to see where he was now backing up to the head of the bed, naked. His throat bobbed in a thick swallow.
He was not beautiful. He was not ugly. He was propped up on his arms, his chest rising and falling in expectant rhythms, his expression even still downturned. Something about this rare silence inspired her desire and one hand began to lift at her skirts. "Lie back," she said, almost at a whisper, beginning to kneel onto the bed. He began to do so, and she noticed his eyes stealing a look as her thighs came naked. "Oh, yes, you will look," she promised.
He made some tiny guttural noise as she used a hand at his scalp to force his head back, moving up and then seating her thighs around his face. His eager kiss met her in that deeper place, and suddenly Loki could perhaps be beautiful, in his own uses.
She used her hips to rock her sex in and out of the pull of his lips as his mouth worshipped it, craning her neck back with a shaky gasp and noticing how his hands trembled to move up and touch her, but he knew to keep them grappled at the blankets. "Yes," she growled, her teeth clenched in rough excitement, "yes. You are good for nothing but this. You may as well be dead but for my pleasure. I would empty you of any other purpose—You are vermin without it—"
Loki made a pained, ecstatic noise, and his tongue took a deep lick down the curve of her wet folds, his lips never ceasing their perfect pressure on the pinnacle as he did so. She moaned restlessly through her teeth and her hand reached and pulled even harder on his hair, until his gasps were wracking and shallow. Behind her his cock was flushed; continuing to rock her hips into him she walked herself back on hands far enough to grab it, and when she gave a rude and slow few strokes his groans picked up in a tone of harsh belting, like he would be cursing her in whips of insults even as he became even more eagerly pulsing in her hand. Having bent his neck to stay settled deep in her legs, he suddenly gave a hard sucking kiss between her thighs, and her groan was high and angry-sounding, maddened. Then she flinched up and her foot came down on his forehead, his mouth soaked and wantonly hanging open for a moment. She backed down, pushing firmly at his ribs as she moved to lower herself onto him.
"Hands on the bed," she reminded him, before lowering all the way, sheathing him inside her.
It was just as as she expected: the totality of this mocking intimacy swept over him as if in one brief tremble, and he was then as nakedly caged inside it as she'd intended to have him. His jaw clenched hard, and an icy agony shot through the air that seemed to spin between them; she could feel how much he wanted her and also wanted to escape, to transform, to be somewhere else, someone else. But as she began to move him inside her with the canting ride of her hips and this emotion only spooled this predicament of lust tighter and tighter, as she recognized her own angry humiliation from all these other times before now, she finally found she needed to look away.
His cries were let out in tight noises as her motions became more and more of an impatient impersonal rutting, as she sped up, wanting it to be good and thorough but wanting it to be over. His pain was there, and it inspired her pleasure, and yet she wanted this to end. It was too intimate to even be with herself, experiencing such a vindication that melted hotly into new ecstasy, a feeling pushing out from deep inside of her.
Angry at her own relenting, she slapped him hard across the face. He groaned and his hips began to flinch up into her, his muscles tightening beneath her, either because he thought it was what she meant to command or because she'd struck out his ability to hold himself from doing it. Suddenly crazed with that impatience, she grabbed up one of his hands and sucked at two fingers, brought the hand down to where their bodies met. He moved it slowly, then quickly, then perfectly, and suddenly it seemed there was so much of him, so much of him that her mind blew over with pleasure. She almost shrieked with it. The force of her orgasm balked her into some other unnameable feeling; he was still erect and she danced her hips atop him in a few quick movements, a teasing pause, a few more, then again she slapped him in a lightning strike. His profile wiped hard to the side as he gasped and came, in short shivering heaves that she briefly nursed at until he was spent, and then with a disposing push at his shoulders she rolled off of him and out of the bed.
In the next moment she went and leaned again into the threshold of the private balcony, while she could hear him replacing his garments. She did not look back at him as he left her alone there in the bedroom, once a regal chamber, now a place for counterfeits and conceits and a stale, sad quiet.
::
She tried the axe in a rounded swing, switched hands to test it as a quick side weapon.
"This will do just fine," she surveyed in a pleasant surprise. "And I think it's worth another fifty for the trouble of your travels."
"More than fair," the smith replied gratefully.
"And would you happen to have any arrows I can buy? I only have time to make so many."
"I could fetch a few from the inn..."
"I'll be here. Thank you."
Growing up, she'd learned to resent her station, but now home was sometimes comfortably close to common. Her family had never wanted for anything, but there were items they'd made themselves, sometimes imperfectly, ruggedly. The gardens didn't always thrive as intended. Their bush berries had grown beautifully sweet this year however, and she was eating some as she strapped her tools into her traveling things, packed up the dry food.
She took a dozen arrows from the merchant when he returned later, and then waited for the morning to turn brighter. It was midday and she was trying a knife throw into the trunk of a tree when the visit finally came. She turned away from the gardens and saw Loki in his riding leathers, the astonishment not shown but plain in his mere presence. She had made the only play that he couldn't have expected or deciphered.
"You're leaving," he said.
"As I'm sure you've heard." She nodded at her equipment. "As I'm sure you can see."
"You are an honorable guardian of the kingdom," he sneered, the protest heavier on his brow than in his cynicism. "You will not simply abandon Asgard while you find it burdened by corruption."
"I will abandon you to your own solitary responsibility for it," she said, not caring how premeditated it sounded, how graceless she was in her own plots. She was not like him. "I will not help you shoulder the burden of however you may uphold or destroy this land for our people. If you allow disaster, I will know; I will find someone to listen to my suspicions and that is the threat. But until then, take your throne and take it alone. See what it gains you and know that I was not here to save you from yourself."
He swallowed hard. "You're abandoning your king."
"Should you tell me now that you can materialize your father I might hesitate, but you would have said so. By now you'd have said."
"I can't—" He suddenly shouted, "You threaten me now? And I should believe it? The truth of the disguise was at your disposal since the beginning—"
"That is not victory."
"Even now you would imitate Thor's condescension rather than admit I've won your weakness, Lady Sif. Even now you cling to the idea of your devotion to a man who hasn't looked at you as a woman ever since he saw you were a warrior."
"That is not victory," she repeated, feeling she'd expected every word of his attack. "That is not victory. You have seen my weakness of which I have no shame left, Loki, but you cannot claim to have won it. You have not won some truer perception of my greatness or my beauty by desiring something your brother never glanced at, by only seeing its very worth as something he never understood."
Loki's expression shifted and he was striding forward, struck. "Sif—"
"How long ago was it you gave up any chance of your own life by making it all a game against him? Who has trusted since then that anything in your heart could be something other than bitter poison?—You suggest you have won something from me?!"
His hand reached to grab her arm and she backed away in a quick step, turning away, then back to him in fury.
"You may have tricked and coaxed my desire, but you have nothing of me. Nothing for your petty prizes—"
His frustration tapped to its limit and he grabbed for her face and kissed her.
It was a true and firm kiss cleft apart from that other first time she'd known his mouth, and so unexpected that after a second she yielded, something turned loose, a sigh falling against his lips.
But it seemed in the very motion of her surrender, as if that was somehow the blow that made the truth of her words quake within him, or simply wasn't enough to fight against it, he shoved her away with the defeated grunt of wounds long agitated. In abandon he stormed past her.
She only watched a brief moment, breath heavy in an aftershock, as he left, and finally stole another glance after her limbs had taken back their full posture to see that he had disappeared in the trees. She recognized that his absence was final and yet he seemed to haunt her right through, to hide in the wind.
She only abruptly realized that in some state of ruin Loki could behave in ways she wouldn't anticipate, and either way they had a sort of ceasefire, a rough strike of consensus that she would be gone before he had the chance to make any real upheaval. And so she turned back to her preparations, and made quickly to leave home.
::
It had been, she would guess, their third show of a tryst. She remembered that by then she was resigned to the strange arrangement, no longer moving to cover herself right afterwards like some modest new bride; during this particular twilight the atmosphere was almost relaxed as she lay back down on a woven cloth in the grass, listened for the breeze murmuring through a willow tree. Loki made to ignore her the very moment he looked like himself again.
She was half ashamed and half trying to enjoy the moment, striving to savor the thick sensations of heat and heavy breaths from a moment ago at the very tips of her drowsy lashes. The very effort of indulging in an illusion brought her to a pleasurable haze during the act, but left her tired and barely sated afterwards.
She sensed it was not like this for him. Not for the first time, she dared to touch the thought that it was not pleasure to him at all, except in some twisted meaning.
She would have usually been grateful for him taking his leave so promptly, but there was some restless tugging at her mind that evening. She had thought of it earlier, when Thor had made some casual recollection about her old fair hair, the resemblance she used to have to a certain maiden in a painting. That bitter tinge, an ancient feeling to her now, had ran anew through her body, the feeling a dizzying breaker against this different use for Loki, the secret between them that made her look away in his brother's presence.
It was against her better judgment when she interrupted his leaving. "Loki."
He had moved almost out of sight but then stopped, his back resting against a tree as he examined something in his hand. At her word, he pocketed whatever it was. His garments shifted.
At length she asked, "What was it that you did with my hair?"
The question had always been tangled in the edges between them, unspoken in the state of being both painfully taboo and painfully obvious. They had both taken for granted that the answer was assumed to be unspeakable, if there was an answer at all, and had mutually taken that reason for silence on the subject. Even as little more than children the nuance of the situation had been insurmountable. She'd lived a long time, but it had been as then that she had learned denial as the reaction to such an unforgivable act from such an inconvenient source.
Loki's response came, measured. "Haven't you already assumed the crudest motivations?"
"It is easier, isn't it, to assume the worst of you?" she speculated. "That's how you seem to like it. It helps you keep your secrets."
"My arts were often disparaged into secrecy, as you well know."
"So it was…?" She trailed off, quickly realizing he'd slipped a bit of the truth.
His glance met hers in an irritated start; it wasn't in his reflexes with her to demand or deny what she meant, but he would wait for her to drag it from him.
Though she'd already suspected, it came out in a low stammer: "It was some kind of spell, some kind of magic...What for?"
Having it confirmed only opened her mind to other lurid possibilities. Her chest felt tight. All in a second it had become a bigger mystery than before, and impossible to ignore. He simply could not walk away without explaining, and if she decided in a moment she would have to rip something off of him for him to have earned further tolerance from her, so be it.
For a second she chastised her own mind: she wouldn't catch herself begging as this confrontation was vicious enough to herself already. She clenched her teeth. Finally he spoke.
"Do you have any memory of that tree beyond Frigga's old groves?"
Brow furrowing, she said, "I've never been…no. You mean that dead thing Thor would mock you for trying to tend into health again and again."
He did not correct her.
"I never saw it myself."
"Oh, if you had ever seen it, you would know," Loki assured with a heavy certainty. It was another moment in the increasingly cold breeze before he elaborated bitterly, in a distant tone. "It was under very specific, irreproducible conditions that such a tree could be planted. I'd heard it was said that if you planted a prized source of vanity next to the roots of a Draumeik and later slept below the tree, it would bring the sweetest dreams of one's deepest desires."
"But you tried to cheat it," she said for him. "The sacrifice wasn't your own."
"Even the beauty of its growth was not shown to me. Or to anyone else, for that matter. I tended to it, and tried to feed it further spells, but there are times I wonder if the tree was never black and withered but simply...disguised."
"What are you telling me?" she asked.
"You were the one with the question," he demurred and, as was her weakness, back then, she pushed him no further.
She could well remember the teasing Loki had gotten for his errands out to the prized giant weed, settling for laughing at Thor's description rather than seeing it for herself, but it seemed clear there had always been a puzzlement underneath that mockery. Loki had taken to tending to the plant as other boys his age might have cared for their prized elkhounds. He took to it with a stubborn hope that Thor must have observed. It had gone on like that for a while; when Loki's visits out there had stopped, no one had commented on it. He had simply outgrown the interest, and meanwhile Sif had, once burned, disposed of too much curiosity about his everyday concerns.
But on the day of her leaving, a couple hours before the sun would set, she hoisted up for the journey and first went past the royal gardens and then through the fruit groves, and beyond.
::
Without much of an idea of where to look, her little quest became more frustrated than she could believe it was worth.
The thing had probably died; it would look like an old shrub of no consequence, or someone who lived nearby would have cut it down for kindling. The area was barren of company, not like she remembered it being described, adding to her sense that she had no reason to be here.
She stopped for water at a thin sliver of a creek at the edge of a clearing, and crouched, taking in the sound of the birds for a brief rest. It was then, as an immensely still feeling seemed to come over her and the glade itself with no direct cause, that she felt something upon her shoulders. Something like the instinct of being watched, but not quite like she was the object. As if she were only translucent to the greater concerns of something or someone.
Just then she was seized by a small urge to go back the way she came, take a closer look around that bend of large branches. It was only a mind's mumble as good as any other, seeking so listlessly like this.
She did as she was inclined, brushing underneath and past some large pines, seeing the caves of shade they formed for the play of children who didn't come.
The path gave way to illumination. Her boots brushed through patches of softer grass. Where the view was no longer blocked, she turned, an idle tired frown breaking away from her, dissolving into something else all at once.
It was unmistakable. The tree lit a torch at the center of its small clearing, the foliage and grass below seeming to brighten just from being nearby. It was narrow at the trunk but just large enough to sway into a loud shush in the wind, to house heavy birds without its branches breaking. From its rounded tops, gleaming vines came down with small leaves all over that glistened like the palest diamonds of dew. When a breeze came in at her approach, it danced and whispered for her in a way no other tree moved, tossed in thin rivulets that looked magically light, underwater.
It was not green. It was a color she'd lost long ago, a glowing effervescence that thrived only for her eyes, her loss.
Her hands came up to her face. She turned away from it.
::
That night she dreamt of three children, all noble and naive. Two heads were golden and one was black, a black as essential as their shadow; all components and needs were etched beneath each other's image. They slipped the motions of their games through light meadows and dark forests, giggles glimmering in the early sunshine.
One went away to find a hiding place. He haunted the other two with the grinning possibility of his eavesdropping, his eyes in the trees, and the two with their fair hair hunted him when they were older. A black fox, a black elk, or something they never saw beyond a shifting glimpse through reeds and foliage, and the beast took his mystery farther and farther, spurring their sport.
In the lazy clearing, on a break from the hunt, they weren't children anymore. He settled his head in her lap, and her hand rested on the warm treasure of his brow, his slowing pulse. She pinched away a sapped leaf that landed in his hair.
She told him the stories the way they'd really happened, understanding somehow that this was the place where she could tell them, and later only the right part of him would remember. His eyes were relaxed and warm as he gazed up at her. They nearly bid to love her.
She asked him if he would come back. She told him he was needed in Asgard. She told him she never knew what to do.
The distance between them felt like it was traversed, yet fragile, disintegrating into echoes. The words could be robbed by gravity. Time was stirring as twigs in the wind, and his hair flew lightly against hers as he leaned up to plant a kiss on her head.
He said, "Do not hunt for me."
::
She awoke to a feeling of her very skin glistening in patches under the shade of the Draumeik's vines, cradled in a balance between darkness and the sharp sun. There was a flattened calm where its stirrings whispered against the tittering of the surrounding woodlife. The dizziness after a long sleep was more profound than she'd felt it before.
Surely it was the sensation of being transported back to her own body. It was impossible to shake the feeling that she had been with someone else's, made a contact of souls across vast space.
She broke her fast on some bread from her satchel, sitting far apart from the tree much like she had for hours the previous day before finally finishing her discovery of it with resignation. The wild sounded around her, the forest still strangely free of the intrusion of boot steps. Her isolation seemed to emphasize an overstaying of her welcome.
She allowed the noises and the warmth to blanket her into a daydream, but not for long.
Later she returned to the tree by its other side, passing under the gap in the long vines to its most exposed place. Her hand splayed over the supple feel of the trunk, its yellow wood faintly cracked.
Her head bowed, as in her own reflexive breathing and concentration of a fighter in a dubious place, stripping off sight to concentrate on the unseen. Then, eyes open, she took a step back.
Her hand made the mark for her eye to follow. Her other hand held slack, then tightened on the handle of the axe, bringing it into both clutches and propping it up over her shoulder. Breathing tightly into the twist of motion, she swung.
The wood split on the first strike; stung, she stepped back in reluctance, as if surprised at the vulnerability of it. She heaved a few thoughtful breaths in and out, reasoning herself back to the same sense of possession and authority, the same resolve and release. It was altogether a short hesitation. She took a firm stance forward, swung again. And again.
It took tiring work to throttle into one side of the trunk, and then cut the notches deeper into the incline of the fall. She barely paused to brush the sweat off her brow or readjust her grip. When the wood finally gave a groan, she only struck harder into the cut. A few more swings, and she thought—perhaps imagined—the ceasing of a sound that she hadn't noticed before, the muting clap of a watery bell note.
And then the leaves and vines appeared to grasp for impossible purchase through the air in its slow collapse, falling with the shrill chorus of a waterfall, then were choked into silence on the ground.
The tears had been joining with her sweat for several minutes. Overtaken by the task, she let her axe fall and hunched her posture, bent over by the cascade of emotions, of finality. It was as if she'd cast her blood out for someone else's, done something invisibly irreversible. She cried, for those children and what should have been, for her own foolish hopes and acts, for the woman she was who could not and would not take them back. For the way she'd lost more than she'd ever held onto.
Over the course of some moments, the wind seemed to change slightly, that still serenity brushed away by breezes touching softly through dead leaves. Clouds streaked light and shade across the small clearing nearby where she'd broken her fast.
Finally Sif picked up her axe and returned it to the bandolier worn across her back. As she did so, she saw the steed.
She'd heard her wild noises all morning, the clap and crunch of hooves and her frothing breath through the trees, and another noise unlike any horse she'd mounted that surely was the flinching of wide wings. As she dared to look upon it directly for the first time, she was spellbound by the size of her wingspan just now spreading in a restless motion before tightening back in.
She had seen the Valkyrie steeds from far away before and thought they were a grey color, but in the turning light the mare's coat and mane had a shine to it like polished steel. Sif's breath ached in her chest at the sight of her. Old wounds seemed to open at the greeting of this challenge, as if they had all been earned in preparation for this one purpose. The sting of tears still drying on her cheek, she cast away every color in her heart but the warm beating center of determination.
The steed danced a few steps through the leaves, and took a path going roughly by the reach of Sif's left arm. Sif bowed under the wing to miss the touch, showing pliant patience and respect, and as she rose to turn to this aloof taunt, the mare slowing again with a brisk noise, her hand went to her belt.
Watching the steed run an anxious half circle around her, she wound the end of a long fine rope around a strong hand, pulling it slowly out and crouching into a careful soft step, putting up a calming gesture with her other hand. Her eyes surveyed the glint of dangerous hooves and measured every sound of the mare for her own way and time to strike. She went forward, for the taming.
.