Chapter 3 - Release


Sigyn could only assume that Loki remained in the hall outside her cell as some twisted nod toward courtesy, given how easily he had breached the barrier before. The sash of his heavy black housecoat dangled untied; beneath it she could see his loose-fitting nightshirt and trousers, forest green silk. One of his trouser legs was half tucked into his boot; he hadn't bothered with the other. His hair looked as though he'd been running his hands through it agitatedly for quite some time.

Sigyn ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. "What time is it?" Then she dropped her hands into her lap, wincing in anticipation of his blistering response to her poor etiquette. But Loki seemed not even to notice; he began pacing outside her cell. "Two hours til dawn," he said.

"You should be sleeping," she said. "Or... dancing." Sigyn smiled wryly despite herself, thinking of the stammering, reluctant women he'd coldly and expertly swept around ballrooms all his life. His hands never wandered; he never made eye contact; nothing mattered to him but perfection. He treated dance as though it were a competitive sport, his partner the disappointing runner-up deposited at the side of the room afterward like a spent horse.

But now his steps traced a mindless rut outside her cell, and his fine-boned hands were laced tightly together behind his back. The dream had muddied her thoughts; she was still seeing him through her adolescent filter, admiring what she'd once thought fine. She forced herself back to the present: here was the man responsible for her father's death. It was particularly hard to see him as the menacing villain now, though; the unbuttoned tops of his boots gaped open as he walked.

"Anyone I might dance with is asleep," he said distractedly.

The ball was a three-day affair; room and board had been arranged for the women and their families in the guest wing of the palace. Sigyn's alternate accommodations had thus far failed to impress.

"All asleep but one," he went on. "Jolinn Sveinsdottir."

The name meant nothing to Sigyn. She stared at Loki.

"The dark girl with the shorn hair," he said as though this should jog her memory. "Some distant relation of Heimdall's. Plays harp fit to make a jotun weep."

"You said she's not sleeping? Why? What is she doing?"

He stopped pacing and looked at Sigyn flatly. "She's dead."

"Ah!" Sigyn pressed a hand to her mouth.

"Her heart gave out," he said, beginning to pace again. "Her parents are taking the body home; her lovely sister Jora is still hoping for a chance at my hand, it seems, and is staying." He made a scornful sound, still pacing. "Asgardians have a very strange way of grieving lost siblings."

"I'm so sorry, Your Highness. Was she-"

Loki didn't seem to hear her. "They're saying it was too much excitement, a terrible tragedy, but-"

He stopped, laying his palms flat against the glass that wasn't there, his face drawn. He seemed to look past her; he spoke so low she was obligated to rise and move nearer. His nightshirt was slightly askew; she could see one edge of his collarbone.

"She told me it would happen," he said. Then he pushed back from the barrier and began to pace again, slowly, pensively. "I didn't think anything of it at the time. 'My heart feels as though it will burst,' she said, with the most radiant smile. And then not two hours later, it did."

"She smiled when she told you she was going to die?"

Loki gave her a withering look. "It's a figure of speech. She meant she was happy."

"Why?"

His expression melted into one of affronted incredulity. "I was dancing with her, you lackwit. I had just said she was the finest woman in the room."

"Did you mean it?"

He blinked. "That's an intensely personal question."

Sigyn ran a hand back through her tangled hair, still a bit crisp from the serum she'd baked into it. "This whole conversation is intensely personal. You're in your nightclothes."

He looked down at himself as though someone had undressed him while he wasn't looking.

"So I'm only trying to understand what it is you need from me," she said. "If I should be... comforting you, or-"

A laugh escaped him, much as hers had escaped the night before, wild and unbidden. He, by contrast, was not in the least apologetic. "You, comforting me. Does a flea comfort a wolf?"

He did, however, take a moment to tie his housecoat.

"Then why are you here?"

"Because it helps me to think aloud," he said, giving the ends of the sash a final sharp tug, "and you're the only person I'm completely certain didn't kill her."

Sigyn drew in a quick breath. "You think it was murder? But... how? Why?"

"What did you say about me last night? What wouldn't I do to be king? What wouldn't some women do to be queen? Many of Asgard's highborn are gifted with great power. I call Jolinn the finest woman in the room, in a room full of other women, and now she's dead."

Sigyn gave him a reproachful look. "If you called her the finest woman in the room in a room full of other women, I'm surprised you aren't dead."

"Yes, well. As fascinating as it is to receive an etiquette lesson from a woman who called the crown prince of Asgard a 'man-child' in front of a thousand of his subjects, right now I would like to find out which of forty-nine seemingly innocent highborn ladies thinks she can get away with murdering the most beautiful woman in Asgard."

Was this his way of grieving? Had he cared for the girl, and needed a villain upon which to focus his rage, rather than passively accept another tragedy so soon after his mother's death? Or was there really something sinister afoot that only Loki was clever enough to suspect? There was no way for Sigyn to know, hearing only his version of events.

"Do you intend to bring her to justice?" Sigyn said, folding her arms over her chest. "Or do you intend to mete out your own twisted version of revenge?"

Loki turned to her, smiled his slow smile. "Neither, you slack-jawed cretin," he said with savage glee. "I intend to marry her."


Sigyn had never seen the appeal of marriage. She had virtually no memories of her parents together other than the few times she and her father had sat patiently at her mother's bedside in her final year. The wed women she knew seemed harried and tired and older than their years, worn out by work and children and husbands whose hearts and eyes wandered. What companionship and affection Sigyn needed, she found in friendship and in her father, and that had always been more than enough.

Her friends, though, had other ideas. Long before womanhood her friends played at weddings, using discarded tablecloths as bridal trains, arguing over who got to marry Thor. One fight between her childhood best friends Sissa and Katla had escalated to hair-pulling and crying, and Sigyn had stepped in to intervene.

"There are two princes," she said reasonably. "One of you can marry Thor, and one of you can marry Loki."

"Loki?" they gasped as one, momentarily unified by their shared disgust. Katla straightened Sigyn out immediately. Loki was not acceptable. He was too skinny, too pale, he turned people into toads with womanish magics he'd learned from the Queen. Thor was strong and kind and handsome and could wrestle a bear to the ground. He would be king. There was no comparison. Each protest strengthened their unity until they ended as friends again, arms linked, smug in their mutual correctness. Sigyn was pleased, at least, to have ended the fight.

But Katla's horror at the innocent suggestion had been so instantaneous that it left Sigyn with a crawling sense of shame. Because she had never thought to judge the princes that way. They were so different, each with his own beauty - but no. She'd been wrong, it seemed. She never mentioned it again.

She should have felt vindicated, now, to see the finest ladies in Asgard recognizing what she alone had first seen. Except that over the years the beauty she'd seen in Loki had been gradually swallowed by bitterness and malice, and by the time Asgard had finally decided to give him a chance, it was too late. He was the monster they had always imagined him to be, had perhaps made him to be.

Tragic irony or not, she could not allow this collective blindness to continue. Especially now that Loki was plotting to rule beside a murderer.

"How will you find her?" she asked him calmly, standing in her gray prison clothes and watching him carefully through the barrier.

"That is the challenge, isn't it, my ugly little duckling? Ah, such a glorious challenge." He rubbed his palms together, then wrung his hands gently as he continued to pace. "She must have great power, to slip invisible fingers inside the body and ravage it so mercilessly. Perhaps there is a way to trace her use of magic... But that would require her to kill again, which might cause a panic, and furthermore a woman with this much power would likely sense my blind groping and outmaneuver me before I could pin her down."

Sigyn wondered if Loki was aware of the double entendres that littered his speech. His hands continued to move as though each were washing the other, thumbs gently massaging the fingers of the opposite hand, over and over, a fluid motion that Sigyn belatedly realized had hypnotized her. She lifted her eyes to his face.

"If I may make a suggestion?"

Loki stopped his pacing and gave her much the same look he'd given her in the throne room when he had first noticed her refusal to kneel. This time the look settled firmly on the side of amusement. He swept an arm aside in a mocking little bow. "By all means, my lady."

"As fond as you are of subterfuge, a little honesty might be the simplest and wisest course here," she said. "You've already chosen the fifty most beautiful women-"

"Forty-nine."

"Forty-nine, now, yes. But you cannot marry them all, and so you must find other means to narrow your choice. Mention that you are interested in a woman who shares your gift for magic. Name a few other skills that interest you. And then ask the remaining women to prepare a brief display of their most impressive talent."

"Why Sigyn," Loki said with a gentle smile. "You surprise me. That seems a plan not only effective, but immensely entertaining. Well done. I shall implement this idea immediately, and you have my gratitude." And with that he turned to go.

"Ah... Your highness?"

Loki, lost in his thoughts, didn't seem to hear as he strode purposefully away down the hall.

"Loki!"

He stopped then and turned, startled. "What is it?" His scowl held more than a hint of warning.

"I have your gratitude, you said, and yet you leave me here, locked in a cell?"

For a moment Loki merely stood in the hall, staring at her flatly, not even seeming to see her. But then his eyes sharpened, and he smiled. He strode back toward her cell.

"Yes," he murmured, half to himself. "Yes, of course not. No, I will need you close." Loki opened a panel on the wall next to her cell, his fingers busy with some mechanism she couldn't see. Sigyn blinked. Surely she'd heard him wrong, but if she hadn't - she only hoped that they'd not destroyed her dress. Ah, but she'd never get her hair right again without help.

"I beg your pardon, Highness?" she said politely.

"I need you," he said, eyes still on the panel. Then he closed it and turned to her, eyes glittering with mischief as the barrier between them shimmered and disappeared.

He stepped forward to where it had been, as though to demonstrate her freedom; the move put him so close to her she had to tip back her head to meet his gaze. Pale green, those eyes, like a meadow touched with frost.

"You need - me?" Her stomach rolled over.

"Of course!" he said brightly as he stepped back into the hallway, gesturing for her to do the same. "Who better to serve as an extra set of eyes than someone utterly invisible? I'll order the kitchen to assign you to help cater in the sunroom. In exchange for my act of mercy you will attend to my guests, and put your love of eavesdropping on your betters to good use. You will report any suspicious conversation or behavior to me immediately."

Sigyn hated herself for the sinking feeling that overcame her. "Of course, Your Highness," she said, as she stepped free of one prison and into another.