"I should not have left him."

"Thor, Thor," Fandral cooed.

"I should not have left him," Thor muttered again into the pewter lip of his tankard, his voice anguished.

Volstagg tried to offer him a hunk of his game pie, dripping gravy down dirty fingers, but Thor shook his head dumbly, refusing. Volstagg shrugged and returned to eating with an expression like a kicked hound.

Sif, the tavern wench, walked by with an entirely new game pie, which she thrust under Thor's nose, a no-nonsense expression on her face.

"You're nursing that ale like it's mother's milk," she said bluntly, completely ignoring Thor's baleful, red-eyed glare into his beer mug. "If you don't eat, you'll drink yourself into an early grave."

"Here, here," Volstagg added, gesturing with a bit of pie crust and showering Fandral with flakey crumbs. Fandral wiped himself off daintily while quaffing his own ale, looking towards the door and not the frighteningly defeated slope of Thor's shoulders. Because of that, he was the first to notice the tavern door swing open and Hogun stalk in, grim as ever.

"Will you not leave me in peace—" Thor began wretchedly, anger and pain freezing his usually warm and boastful voice, but Hogun merely walked around the table, ignoring the others' shouts of welcome, and gripped Thor's shoulder, finally drawing Thor's bloodshot eyes from his tankard and the rough-hewn wood of the table.

To the general tavern he announced, "The royal entourage rides through our village in another rising of the moon. There will be a festival and a holiday."

Even Thor looked shocked at that. For the peasantry, a glimpse at their betters' faces was so rare it may only happen once in a lifetime, if that.

"What are they doing here?" Fandral asked wonderingly.

"We follow the bifröst," Sif guessed. "Even royalty must use the road."

An awed silence stretched until a free-ranging chicken walked into the tavern, clucking, and Volstagg rose to kick it out.


A man with gamey eyes and a forgettable face strolled down the grimy streets, horseless, well past the official city and the massive wall that marked it, a thick stone artifact from the days of the grandfathers of King Odin's grandfathers, which turned red-gold in the sinking sun. That was the cutoff point where upscale Ladygate became lowscale Diremoor. The difference was stark, now that he'd passed the Jotun's side of the city. The buildings were no longer prosperous, but clumped together and leaning on each other like old peasants who'd left their farming days beyond them, all tall and thin and rickety, firetraps, which continued down into the mire of the Stink.

The Stink was a slum. Asgardian families of twelve lived there in one-room shacks not fit for a single Jotun's goat, raised by stilts out of a swamp which the city's cartographers called Bluebell and everyone else called Swindlers.

This man's name was Coulson, and he'd grown up in one of those shacks.

Skirting peddlers and venders, beggars who grew more and more ragged and pitiful—since only ones who could not make it high enough in the Thieves Guild to secure a spot in Ladygate would beg in Diremoor—Coulson turned into a shop.

There was nothing abrupt about it. He greeted the grocer with little familiarity, browsing the stalls for all the world as if he was there to buy his family the makings for stew. He turned into a corner as if to inspect the curiously tall wall of parsnip barrels which blocked all views for those out the door, saw the grocer reach up to scratch his chin, and Coulson was ripping open the trapdoor concealed below his feet and climbing down the ladder into the crypts in moments.


They had talked politics and shop—they had gone over all the new knowledge and eventualities—and it had come to now, with operatives clustered on upturned crates in the strategic room of the rebel stronghold, kept under the Jotun's very noses.

"Are you sure he's the one?"

Recognizing that Fury needed the assurance, Coulson, all business, said again, "Carac was the right servant. He can't disguise blond hair and blue eyes, or the boy's age. Personally, with his looks and his . . . lack of foresight, I think he'll make a great figurehead."

Nick Fury's one good eye squinted. "Your opinion is unnecessary. Seek him out, Coulson. For the good of Shield."

"General," Coulson acknowledged with a quirk of his brow, and then saluted, a little late.

The dull, brave boy couldn't possibly hope to stand up to a master manipulator.


"My prince, you know, this might seem a strange idea—just truly mind-boggling—but perhaps we shouldn't have necked on your father's throne."

"It was just a bit of mischief, Lord Stark," Prince Loki laughed with a devilish smile, narrowing green eyes at his sometimes-lover.

"Mischief, well," Tony Stark said, grinning, "may we further our mischief indefinitely and do it again next week." He toasted Loki with his wine goblet, arching his eyebrows suggestively at the Prince.

Lord Stark was the son of a High Lord of Jotunheim and an Asgardian noblewoman with no royal blood. His mother had nonetheless been executed for colluding to save her family when he was a child. His father had continued on for many years, buried in his painting with nothing left to give his son, but finally perished; of a disease or a broken heart, no one knew. Baron Tony Stark had his mother's darker skin, his father's darker hair, and a smile that made the other nobles fume just looking at it.

Loki loved that smile.

His favor had kept the Stark house from falling into obscurity. Because of the Prince, Tony could pursue his writing, painting, and scientific theories unchecked. Because of the prince, Tony had everything he could have ever wanted.

And Loki, who was mercurial and tempestuous at the best of times, never let Lord Stark forget it.

"Up for a game?"

Loki's eyebrow cocked. "What kind?"

Stark snorted, stroking his beard. He'd have to play this joke carefully. "What do you mean, what kind? What kind would we play? A bedroom game, you dolt. You have to call me King."

Loki, to Stark's relief, began to snicker. "That's foul. You want me to pretend you're my father?"

"I'm actually thinking you'd be in the role of a pretty milkmaid, myself."

Loki snorted and looked away, disdainful.

Stark laughed ruefully, seeing the signs not to press this one, and collared the prince with his arm anyway to begin dragging him to his royal bedchamber, dismissing servants left and right for all the world as though he were the prince, and Loki, the Lord. Tony never had been good at denying himself.

It set Loki's teeth on edge. Abruptly, the amusement at Stark's joie-de-vivre began to seep from Loki's face. "Guards," he snapped, and Lord Stark released him with the color draining from his face. Seeing the sudden fear, Loki smiled. "I've thought of a new game, one more to my liking." He turned to Heimdall, the watch commander who now knelt before him, and gestured at his comrade. "Throw him in the dungeon. You know the room."

"I do, sir," the man said with a put-upon expression, his voice eery from a long-ago throat injury.

"We're not really going to play prisoner and torturer again, your royal badness?" Stark pleaded.

Loki just laughed. "I'll be down shortly."

As they took him away, Tony yelled over his shoulder, "You're a real royal prick, you know that?"

Loki smirked mirthlessly, turning away. "I know," he muttered, below anyone in the hall's hearing. He said it softly; he said it to himself.