Winter's Treasures
By Rey
Chapter summary: A promise is a promise is a promise. But there are shades and interpretations to a promise, too. And still, how would a beleaguered faux ás with large chunks of information missing, topped up with an askew sense of expectation, make of such a promise?
25. Homeward, Part 1
Being abandoned once more would have been the least – the most lenient – of all possible responses to the confession, Loki knew it well. After all, he, as second heir to the throne, had caused the death of a few jötnar for the sake of disrupting Thor's coronation; he, as King of Asgard, had both tricked and killed Laufey – King of Jötunheim – in a desperate bid for Odin's approval; and he, in the proceeding madness, had sought to destroy Jötunheim using the Bifrost. He, Laufey's son, had been raised wholely æsir, and thus viewed the jötnar as monsters fit for merciless slaughter, living on a barren, icy wasteland as savages ever thirsty for war.
Being abandoned should not hurt. It should relieve him instead, being spared the immediate death sentence, allowing him some little chance to flee elsewhere and hide – maybe forever.
It should.
It didn't.
His captor had gone tenser and tenser further into his "introduction;" and the tenser they had been, the more their cradling embrace had felt like both a cage and a crushing devise for a death sentence. He had been shucked off like some slimy, leaky, highly odorous rubbish, then, at the end of that torturous spill; and there he still lay, dazed and impossibly hurt, an unknown length of time afterwards, on the ice beside a peacefully sleeping Avlar, whose eyes were half open but faraway.
`What possessed me, to say all that?`
He looked up blankly at the light golden sky, with the sun just a pinprick of intense light near… was it the west? Or the east? Or the north? Or the south?… and wallowed in homesickness for the expanse he had beheld for more than a thousand years before all this, before his life had been turned upside down and inside out so suddenly and so cruelly.
`What made me talk, when not even Mother – Frigga – had been aware of these thoughts, towards the end?`
He turned away from the sky and curled deeper into his now askew cocoon, vainly trying to flee from everything, vainly trying to find comfort in the strange feeling and scent that had calmed him so much, that had provided him home away from home.
Maybe they had calmed him too much, anchored him too firmly. But even as the thought passed across the fore of his mind, he still helplessly buried his face into the blanket, into the travelling attire not of his own that he had been clad in after the forceful bath in that stream, into the strange sensation of home and safety and bone-deep familiarity that had been haunting him all this time. He was pursuing something intangible, something elusive, something missing that he had never known as missing beforehand,
Something that made his heart ache with longing – and now, loneliness.
What – or who – could have such a grip on the deepest part of his being, the place that he had not even been aware was there? Or was this simply a particularly powerful Working of seiðr woven by a select few talented mages?
If the last possibility was the truth, then he, one of the greatest sorcerers in the Nine Realms, had been hoodwinked by spellworked – by his own speciality – twice in this land of monsters.
Clever, clever monsters.
Even now, his body and heart urged him to just lie there, passive like a lamb for the slaughter, enjoying the last moments that he had by curling up in this tiny home, with the illusion of safety and love that somebody – or a group of somebodies – had crafted for his entrapment.
His mind wished to rebel, to fight back, so very much.
It was defeated, yet again.
But it did not retreat without scoring a little bit of victory, paltry as it was:
He managed to gather the will to scrape himself off the icy picnic blanket and drag himself to the skiff, blanket and all. And there, on the enclosed back of it, guarded by two of the four remaining adult jötnar, he found the coffin-like box containing Eðlenstr's – still living – body.
His captor had had mercy – and even consideration – for his latest – and last, most likely – caretaker. It was good and heartening to know.
He set himself up on the far corner at the foot of the blue-light-wreathed open container: leaning back and sidewise against the bulkhead of the skiff, perched on top of the shorter side of the box, with his legs stretched over the corner like the last line of a triangle, and with his feet planted on the longer side opposite of where he had clambered in. This way, he removed the inclination to keep watch over the side entrance of the skiff for himself, could look at Eðlenstr's face without having to strain his neck, and was able to do both in relative comfort.
The warmth of the land's "night," doubled with the head-to-foot travelling attire and tripled with the luffy blanket, sent him into a heat-induced nap.
The nap was more than just a nap, it turned out. Loki woke up an indeterminate time later, finding himself once more seated in his captor's lap with Avlar, in the very same position as yesterday – `Was it really just yesterday? Did I miss more days, like before?` – and sans the blanket he had taken a nap under. He had been woken up by a sharp banking the skiff had taken, apparently, because now he found they were flying – at breakneck speed – in between narrow cliffs and valleys.
He did not envy Avlar – who faced forward unlike him – whatsoever, when they took yet another hairpin bend not long after, without slowing down.
That boy looked terrified.
Their next camp seemed to be high up on a mountainside, judging from how they had been steadily climbing all this time, in addition to weaving between tight spaces. The air was drier and cooler up here, in a small rocky plateau fenced on three sides by nothing but rocks; more a rocky nook on a cliffside than anything, actually.
The four jötnar guards scouted the plateau first, leaping out from the hovering skiff. This time they were equipped with some kind of tool each, Loki could see, which glinted weakly under the sunlight; something that regularly emitted bursts of energy, which purpose might be to detect concealment or, alternatively, to test the firmness of the ground at their chosen campsite. The skiff was parked by the innermost side of the patch of level ground, opposite their way in, once the all-well sign was given, maybe by the same guard as yesterday. Unlike yesterday, however, the bathing ordeal was thankfully absent.
Well, but also unlike yesterday, once the frost giants' version of a picnic blanket had been laid out a small distance away, and the guards had gone to their posts, and the packs had been deposited on the square of ice alongside Avlar and Loki himself, the leader of the adult jötnar told Avlar – in a rather stiff manner so different from their joviality yesterday – to stay put alone for a while, before simply plucking Loki back up into their arms and carrying him back to the skiff.
To the back of it, to be exact, and inside of it.
Now Loki knew why the jötun leader had ordered those guards to keep watch on all corners of their camp, not at all close to the skiff….
But he still did not know why the jötun chose this place to… `…Well, to do what, exactly? What is this giant going to do to me? Or to Eðlenstr?`
Because, for a very long, awkward moment, he was just perched on the side of Eðlenstr's boxy lifeline, with his feet firmly planted on the limited space of decking between the box and the open door, facing the said giant who stood just outside.
There was little space for that hulking adult beast to fit inside the elongated back of the skiff, anyway, with most of the available surface taken by the coffin-like box, which in Asgard might be equal in some respect to the life-support ward Odin used in his Sleeps. He could see how the four guards could have fitted themselves at the head and the foot of the open container, watching out even as the skiff was speeding by, since there were more available spaces there; but entering through the middle opening at the side like this, the giant would be too bulky to worm their way to either place.
Well, they could, if they would employ some physical creativity; yet somehow, he doubted such a dignified specimen astonishing for a brutish race – when they were not goofing out and cuddling random runts, that was – would deign to crawl and scramble and hop to either of those spots to achieve just a little bit more comfort, especially when being witnessed by someone who had foolishly confessed himself as the enemy.
And now, the distraction failed, because it returned to the earlier point of thought.
The Norns' way to nudge him to get along with the line of his Thread, maybe.
So he took a deep breath, braced himself inwardly, and raised his eyes to meet those of his captor,
Who looked back at him with grim approval and barely hidden darkness – of thoughts, of emotions, he dared not guess.
His heart stuttered in his chest. `This is it, then?`
And the beast said, "Well-met, Loki Laufey-childe; or rather, Loptr Laufey-childe. I am Angrboða Únraða-childe; First Regent of Ýmirheim; spouse of the late Bestla Bergelmir-childe, elder womb-sibling of Laufey Bergelmir-childe, Monarch of Ýmirheim."
Loki's thoughts snagged on the word "Regent," discarding the odd manner of the introduction that he had thought he would never get from his captor.
`Regent: replacement of a monarch for a time. – Ymirheim equals Jötunheim? – Laufey is dead, so… so…? This giant…. Spouse of…. But….`
"What do you want?" he whispered through dry everything – throat, mouth, tongue, lips….
If it were even possible, the gaze of the jötun – Regent Angrboða? King Angrboða, now? – turned darker, more menacing. And now Loki could feel the powerful, potant seiðr wreathing the hulking beast's form, lending additional size and grandure to it, as unnecessary as it was to such a fearsome figure,
And all to face such a defeated foe. Because he was acutely aware – and he was sure Angrboða was, likewise – that his own seiðr had been wounded from the frequent and rapid depletions he had been experiencing since being shucked off onto this harsh, barren land, and also from whatever cruel Working those purported rebels had put on him some time recently. No blades, no seiðr, bodily exhausted still, drugged up with this fake feeling of home and safety and warmth, lacking pertinent information to weave his words round – he was as toothless and powerless as a newborn babe.
And he could do nothing but cringe when the jötun breathed out, verbally expressing the darkness that had been just a silent carving on their broad, not-so-ridged face, "I want many, many things."
He was Laufey's son. Was he going to be made a puppet king of Jötunheim? Or was Angrboða going to kill him instead? Perhaps to avenge Laufey? Or to wipe Laufey's bloodline clear from the universe? To make way for their own children, born with Laufey's equally late elder sibling?
"What do you want with me?" he forced himself to clarify.
And as the response, a fearsome grin slowly broke across that broad face; frightening not for the ferocious show of sharp black teeth, but for the blend of wild grief and helpless rage and implacable intent in those red eyes.
"Tomorrow, you are going to nurse from your own dam, Ýmir will it."
`Dam. – Mother. – Laufey. – Dead. – I am going to die tomorrow.`
The confirmation to his ongoing fear was not unexpected. But still, his breaths and heartbeats stuttered for the longest time.
`I am going to die tomorrow.`