Loki stayed still for a few moments more. The cart was quiet and still while the woman settled back and Thor sat down again. After what seemed an eon, he reached out with one arm and hauled Loki back onto the narrow bench.

He might have been imagining it, but it seemed like Thor was trying to keep the contact between them to a minimum. Loki considered trying to catch his arm again, but was too afraid to see him pull away to dare. A little hope was better than nothing.

And in a moment, Thor reached over and pushed Loki's hood back up, as though a desperation to hide the unbearable was an ordinary foible of little brothers. He even smiled, and if it was a brittle, unpleasant smile, it meant not everything was lost. Loki wasn't Asgardian, wasn't a prince, wasn't Odin's son, perhaps not even Frigga's, wasn't even a sorcerer at the moment, but he was brother to Thor, and maybe it could stay that way a little while longer. Until it all sank in. Loki leaned on his brother's shoulder shamelessly, feeling very small, and Thor didn't move away.

His heart could still beat for now. Little a thing as it was, he wasn't all frost while there was hope.

Searching for a less morbid occupation before he lost his mind entirely, his eyes fell on a gap in the floor. It was only a fingersbreadth wide and a few long, a ragged hole where a bolt had come out of the frame and the strain had ripped into a weakness in the iron. The little gap showed him nothing at all but a blur of dirty white when he looked straight at it, but if he turned his head a bit, he could resolve movements of shadow, at least. All that was telling him at the moment was that the wheels were spinning fairly regularly, but it was a potential source of information, something to focus on when he had no other schemes to spin and he didn't dare let his eyes or mind rove anywhere else.

The giants kept to each other for conversation from then on, and neither prince had a thing that seemed safe to say. Thor eventually dozed off, leading Loki to wonder how long they'd been in their cell while he slept. He wasn't particularly tired now. Physically weary, yes, but mentally he was tragically alert, and Thor was always the hardier of the two.

The light from his crack in the floor faded a little, but he could still make out the spinning shadows of the wheels. It didn't do much to shore up his sense of time. And for all the turmoil and pain, nothing had ever been so toxic to Loki as boredom. Circumstances could make him miserable, but nothingness made him angry, and that was more likely to lead to trouble.

So he was rather pleased when the wagon stopped. At least it meant something was happening.

There were voices outside. More voices, new voices. And then a large shadow passed by the wagon, one that moved organically and not mechanically.

Loki bent his ear toward the conversation outside. He didn't understand a word, of course, and the walls of the cart distorted it, but he thought he heard tension. When he turned to look at their jailors, he saw disquiet there, too.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Did he dare call out? He and Thor would be safer in the hands of the king's soldiers, defended by self interest if nothing else. If this were some sort of patrol, it'd be wisest to get into their custody. If they were bandits of some sort, though... Better wait for more information. At least he was sure that chaos was afoot. The raw stuff of trickery.

Someone shouted and the woman stood, arming her bow with the smooth grace of an expert. Her companions seemed not to know whether to stop her. Goading her into making a mistake was a possibility, if he could only be sure her anger was directed somewhere other than their corner of the wagon. Loki elbowed Thor awake as subtly as he could, mind spinning eagerly. He could do this.

"What?"

"Shh, let me think."

An answering shout. What sounded like a trumpet, most incongruous and unnaturally loud. The other two giants stood, but regrettably had a little more sense than Loki would have liked. One of them kept his eyes on the captives. Loki scowled subtly, forgetting his troubles as he looked from jailors to the gap in the floor, calculating. In tricks there was a sublime serenity beyond even magic, provided you were born to be the breaker of rules.

The back of the wagon was thrown open. Three Jotun stood without, barbaric and poorly kitted out to Asgardian eyes but far more uniform and disciplined than the ones who held them hostage. Even with the coming night and Loki's hazy vision, he could tell these were soldiers, not renegades or criminals. Hope swelled for a moment, and then the woman fired.

The range was point blank and apparently the soldiers had expected cooperation. She hit one of them straight in the eye. It was useful to know she was entirely willing to kill her own presumed people should they stand in her way, but the rescue of sorts that Loki had been hoping for wasn't going to be smooth, if possible at all.

That trumpeting sound came again as the two soldiers standing shouted, their comrades answered, an audible fight broke out in front of the wagon, and the doorway was abruptly the scene of a skirmish.

Loki pretended to hide behind Thor and whispered "There's a gap in the floor. Do you think you could break through?"

"Wha-"

"Hush. There's a bolt torn out. The construction seems crude and the whole edifice is on the edge of crumbling between rust, cold, and ill-usage." Loki tried to have a working knowledge of anything that seemed relevant, and had the crabby wherewithal to deal with dwarves when a royal word was necessary. He knew a bit about these things. "I've seen you snap chains to show off to your friends. Strength of Odin and all. If you give it a good kick where it's compromised already, it might open a crack large enough for us to slip out."

"I... yes."

"Good. Do it." Loki leaned out from the protection of Thor's broad back. Too fast, he suspected. It should have been a subtle movement, but no help for it. The woman and the larger of their two jailors were struggling with four soldiers now and the remaining guard clearly wanted to turn and aid them. Loki only had to wait a moment to see one of their guard's two companions imperiled, a sword about to come down on the male, and simply gasped in horror.

It didn't exactly overtax his flair for acting. There was plenty of horror floating free in his mind that he could call up. And he suspected seeing the reaction in a face like his own might have more of an effect on the guard. It worked. He turned, leaving two trapped and unarmed boys unattended to help his friends once he saw their danger.

Loki instinctively tried to draw on his magic, forgetting himself for a moment as he saw Thor strugle to choose his point of attack. The foreboding lack of rising power made him shudder, and that twitch kept him from being skewered by a stray crossbow bolt. It whipped by him to bury itself in the wall, opening a gash on his cheek rather than excising an imprecise section of brainstem.

He wanted to be distracted. Bleeding was a very curious sensation when the blood ran cold and the skin was tough and unyielding. Like wounding a stone. But he'd worry about that disquieting idea later. He tore the bolt out of the wall, wrenching his wrist a bit, and spun to force it into the highest point in the crack. Thor quite outmatched him, but he had more strength than his little frame suggested, and it lodged deep. He closed one eye to adjust the angle, then nodded, and Thor gave it a brutal kick, sucking in air through his teeth. It must have hurt a lot to draw even that from him and his conviction that warriors ought not admit to weaknesses like having nerves.

The gap widened and a wavering crack traveled a few feet up the wall of the wagon, but rather than spreading upward and out as he'd hoped, it stopped. They were just short of the tormented metal's breaking point, and the sounds of the fight were dying down. Damned combat and its thrice-damned quickness. Loki gave in to a moment of uncharacteristic temper and smashed his palms against the wall.

The metal screamed and groaned as impossible coldness shot through it. Ice formed in the crack, strange, opaque ice that was more like stone than anything akin to water. That pressure and the rapid contraction of the metal widened the crack and drove its progress to one side, ultimately knocking the whole corner of the wall out onto the snow below.

Loki wasted a second in staring. He had no magic. That wasn't magic. It was something great and terrible from an entirely different part of him, one that he'd never encountered before and wanted very badly to bury again. He hadn't made it cold, exactly, hadn't summoned ice to hand the way he would working in elemental spells. He'd stolen the heat, the memory of heat, any hint of warmth that sheet of tormented iron might have ever known again, made it as cold as anything might be. The burning cold at the end of everything.

He'd always been a fanciful child. Swallowing a new revulsion, he grabbed Thor's hand and leaped through, hearing a cry as they did that suggested they'd been spotted.

Thor, who'd apparently noticed nothing at all amiss, clapped him on the shoulder as they landed and took stock. Their captors were beset, outnumbered and the worse armed, but they fought with the mad energy of true believers. Or maybe cornered animals. Loki suspected the fight would go to the renegades, and the soldiers looked like a simple patrol, not a large company the princes might flee into. Loki made to lead the way and turned from the sounds of fighting. They'd wait it out and return if the soldiers won the day.

The trumpeting sound up close nearly shattered his eardrums and he found himself facing what he mistook briefly for a hairy tree trunk. Mammoth. He'd never seen one alive, though the tusks and skulls were accounted fine war trophies in Asgard. But he'd asked his tutors, because it seemed to him that a creature of such immensity would be impossibly dangerous to its handler in so much as a slightly bad mood, and he'd been told there wasn't much harm in them, that they were largely for intimidation and toting supplies. This one seemed agitated, but it wasn't attacking them. Just waiting for its masters to give it a command or finish their battle.

"Right, forward."

"Loki, isn't that...?"

"No, you can't keep it. Come along." Not giving Thor any more time to argue—honestly, he'd been doing well and the objections were tiresome—he darted ahead. As he'd hoped, Thor either trusted his judgement or was unwilling to leave him, and they ran unimpeded alongside the towering beast. He nearly got bumped by an incomprehensibly massive leg, which probably would have flattened him, but they were hidden by its bulk well enough to run full tilt into the rocky waste beyond the road.

"Whoever wins will be after us," Thor pointed out as they moved behind a jagged boulder, both more tired than they wanted to admit and telling themselves they stopped for the other's benefit. "Have we gained much, would you say?"

"Options. Directions. In a world of infinite possibilities, I like having as many before me as possible." Loki inhaled slowly and shakily.

"Still. We've no supplies. Even if we did get away, how would we travel? How would we hide?"

"We would not. I, however, will hardly raise alarms. From the sound of it, no respectable person would so much as look at me. If we need to approach a settlement to steal food..." He frowned at Thor's shivering. "And gear, at least we needn't worry about my being spotted. And you've trained for winter and mountain campaigns, have you not? We'll do, between us."

"Yes." Thor's usual expression was creeping back, that barely suppressed grin and all the confidence behind it. Loki normally tried to tamp the irritating habit down, but morale was important. "Well done, Little Brother." Loki swallowed self-consciously. Thor probably didn't notice. "We may make it home after all."

Home. What could that possibly mean anymore? He tried to smile back. "Doubted me, did you?" He threw out his hand in a playful shove.

Perhaps it was the slightly pointed teeth in his smile, or the cold, tough skin, or even just the first contact in a few minutes not muddied by fear of immediate death, but Thor pulled away from the teasing hand. All Loki's mad exuberance fell away in an instant. Cold again.

Thor immediately reached over and tugged at a lock of Loki's hair, but it was a sick parody of the old, annoying habit, a clumsy attempt to make it up. He'd jerked away involuntarily, but that was worse. Loki ignored the gesture. "I hope you've your breath back. We'll put more ground between us and the road before it gets darker."

Thor followed him without a word. He'd taken one step to Loki's hurried retreat when the female Jotun appeared behind him, stepping around the boulder with raw madness in her eyes, unmasked for the moment. Her crossbow was gone, one of the soldiers' heavy broadswords in its place. The horrors could be quiet as any child's nightmare coming on when they wished it.

Loki didn't think. He simply moved, the most graceful step he'd ever taken in his life, long and quick and elegant, and set himself between her and his brother. The sword was already on its way down. He didn't care a bit.

Rather than in nothingness, he landed in Thor's arms, aware that his shoulder was dully throbbing with considerable pain, but that everything was still attached. While the woman's companions dragged her back with loud, unintelligible remonstrances, he reached up and winced at the contact, but confirmed it. Not a scratch.

"How in the nine realms, Loki?"

"The chain," he reasoned. "Remember how it resisted all your strength? The blow would have demolished it were we obeying ordinary laws of matter. In defending itself it defended me. In truth, she ought to have shattered a few bones, not just battered me a bit, even if it had only nullified the blade. Talented little artifact." Ah, lecturing. What a comfort.

Thor laughed. "My clever trickster! How did you know?"

Cold again. "I didn't."

Thor's grip tightened, then relaxed, and when he helped Loki back to his feet, it was as delicate a motion as he was capable of. "...You can hide here."

"Thor?"

"You'll be safe. Safer than with them. I'm the one they think is valuable." He stepped closer. The giants didn't seem to care, confident that they'd recaptured their quarry and interpreting the gesture as natural when Thor hugged him gently, refusing to hesitate. "There's a ditch fifty paces ahead, blind little bat. I'll hold them."

"You're no use dead. It doesn't mean you're no use blind or crippled," Loki said, trying to force acid into his voice when he wanted to cry.

"I love my little brother. Don't dare doubt me." Thor pressed his forehead to Loki's, then shoved him away, toward the ditch Loki's eyes couldn't begin to pick out of the undifferentiated gloom.

It was a mad, stupid plan, the kind of thing only Thor could think well reasoned. Loki didn't know why he bothered to run. He told himself that in the very off chance he escaped, he could come back for Thor, make sure both of them were free and safe. Before something terrible happened.

He didn't notice the upwelling of the cold this time, the way desperate need dragged untapped power from him, stealing the warmth from the world and erasing any possible trail with ancient, dead ice, shrouding him in the kind of mist that belonged better to Niflheim as he ran blind. He plunged into the ditch undisturbed by bolts, dashed along the bottom for a half mile before he ran out of space to run, and clambered out to collapse beside an ugly hill of snow, repulsively showing tufts of dark fur that meant he was sheltering beside the mouldering corpse of something to foul for Jotun to eat.

His lungs burned and everything ached, his shoulder worst but not by very much. He wasn't sure he could get up again. The distance wasn't so much, but the terrain, the injuries, the weariness that cut deeper than the wind... Alone and helpless, without supplies or succor in a world that thought him worse than nothing.

And yet somehow he could still swear he heard Thor, insisting doggedly that getting himself brutalized was fighting to win his little brother time to escape. A little brother he couldn't touch without flinching. Sweet, stupid, perfect fool.