Winter's Treasures
By Rey
Chapter summary: Who knew, being proven right could leave so bitter a taste.
6. Vindicated, Part 1
Loki did not sleep. Hence, he was fully aware of the occurrence when a shady group of figures stole past the rock formations nearby amidst the nearly overbright light of the land's "night" cycle, all too close to the campsite. He held his breath, added an extra silencing spell on himself and his companions, and prayed that the defensive and concealing wards he had put round the little ice house would hold.
They did.
The camp was safe, for the moment.
And then, reality crashed into him with the weight of a rampaging bilgesnipe.
`I have just saved the lives of monsters. What did I think?`
His eyes roamed the four battered, mostly makeshift bedrolls of varying sizes laid on the ice floor. Nothing suggesting who – or even what – their occupants were was there to see. It was as if he was just going on a camping trip with four particularly tall Asgardians, or four shorter ones who for some reason stuffed their belongings in addition to themselves into their bedrolls, therefore making those longer. It would fit, even, if he imagined that those bedrolls somehow contained Thor and the Warriors Three in their rare all-male camping trip. A touch of home in an alien place, as it were.
`But Asgard is not home. Nowhere is home. I am Loki of nowhere and nobody's son. I am in the company of monsters, and I am a monster myself.`
As much as he liked to lie to people at times, especially when they had been too nosy regarding his private affairs, he was never one to lie to himself.
`I am a monster. Maybe, I do belong with them.`
The black claw-like nails poking out of the finger and toe holes of his gloves and foot wraps confirmed it, and so did the azure of his visible skin, marred with white marks that somehow did not have the feel and texture of old scars.
"Ovrekka, they are not going to allow us into their village," Loki insisted as, just when the golden light of yet another "night" began to encroach on the horizon, their tired, heart-sick, starving little band finally approached some sign of… well, civilisation, or maybe the remnants of one, given how debris littered the outside of that huge blue-grey wall.
"They will! We are children," came the reply, so obviously trying too much to be firm and reassuring that Loki grimaced to himself. `Blatant bravado destroys one's will faster and harder than cowardice, do you not know that? And you call yourself our leader….`
"Storm," Derek piped in quietly from up ahead, as they looked up and shaded their eyes with one hand. "East. Shelter. Must."
Ovrekka tensed up. Loki sighed. It was fortunate that the two of them were once more the rearguards of their little, pitiful procession. Ovrekka might be the oldest of them all in age and body, but not in mind it seemed, or in experience, despite that jötun's claim of the most training. If the others saw them being fearful….
What of it, though? Why would he care about any of them, even himself? He had intended to end his own existence, had he not, when he had let go of Gungnir down the broken Bifrost bridge?
Still, he took over guard planning as Ovrekka stepped forward and gave a few strong knocks at the faint outline of a door among the expanse of ice. Avral was to his left, Derek to his right, and Đorkyn behind him. All faced different directions and scanned the surroundings for possible dangers, while Loki himself watched Ovrekka's back.
These were just companions in the journey, he told himself, and they would soon part ways in Tora, wherever it was, if the land was willing to let them pass. He could always dispose of them after the goal had been achieved, if necessary, especially to protect his identity.
After all, he was a monster, was he not?
But the monster that cracked open the door on the wall was at least twice as high and wide as Ovrekka, and they lifted up a huge spiked ice club as if about to strike,
While Ovrekka was entirely unarmed and unshielded.
His ticket to salvation and escape from this wretched place, he told himself. Seiðr pooled surreptitiously in his hands, ready to be flung ahead.
Apparently, there was a figuratively bigger monster than he was, out here, not only in the literal sense.
The apparent doorkeeper with the spiked ice club had not landed a blow. The things they bellowed in these monsters' untranslatable native language at Ovrekka, then at the rest of the tiny congregation yards away behind the much smaller monster, those were blow enough, Loki saw.
Ovrekka returned to their little group stumbling blindly through the debris.
"They didn't believe me! Why wouldn't they believe me?" they jibbered almost to themself, nearly passing by their wide-eyed audience without stopping. "Didn't Elder Rava pass through here before Tora? Didn't these people know about the destroying light anyway? They should've known! The early storms should've been an indication that something was wrong. Why would they accuse us of trying to trick them into letting robbers in there, too? They should've just said no and leave it at that if they didn't want to let even children in!"
Loki sent the door that had just boomed shut before him a vicious glare.
There was no pleasure in finding his pessimistic prediction coming true, this time, even though he should have expected it from the land of monsters.
Well, then, before he fled this land, he would happily demolish this village.
The dejected company walked – no, stumbled – all through the night, continuing their way to Tora without the respite Ovrekka had hoped for. With how much time he had spent walking along these paths, Loki had begun to notice some subtle markings of a path to either side of where they hobbled and wobbled onward. Most of the lines and hip-high stone posts were covered thoroughly by mounds of snow and ice pellets, but then again those mounds oftentimes became the new, more visible markings, most probably having been swept aside from the middle of the path by giant feet. Ice debris and patches had previously blurred the borders to him, too, but now no longer.
What did it say, then, to his oath-keeping capability, that he had ended up learning something about this land anyway despite his promise otherwise?
Liesmith, indeed.
When "midnight" came, Loki taught his travelling companions about how to shield their eyes from the sun's reflected glare on the landscape with seiðr. In turn, they taught him about how to form a body-shield from his own ice.
"You should have known how to do this from a long time ago," avlar chastised quietly. "Did your parents not teach you how? Or your dam, at least, if you did not live with your sire?" But they were surprisingly also the most patient and attentive in teaching him, despite the rebuke, and despite his repeated failures and lack of progress, too, so he withheld any kind of return he might have shot back otherwise.
He was too busy being frustrated with his own incompetence, anyhow. Forming his own ice might be a monster's skill, but it was useful; and if Odin had been correct that he was Laufey's son, this skill should have been as innate to his makeup as his seiðr.
Maybe, this was proof that he was not truly – or at least entirely – the son of the king of ice monsters…?
The storm that Derek had seen earlier hit them well before "day" came, sudden and ferocious. Sharp, icy wind howled and whipped round everywhere, while ice pellets – sometimes even the size of his fist – pelted them mercilessly. Now he knew why they were all wrapped so thoroughly from head to foot, and why the jötnar had always regarded the heaps of ice scree they had encountered with trepedation.
He wished he had still been ignorant.
Listening to Ovrekka and Đorkyn and Derek whining and whimpering in pain, being stoned relentlessly and mercilessly by the hailstorm, it was a torture of its own, although he and Avlar were almost totally safe otherwise, shielded by the backs and interlocked limbs of the bigger bodies all round them.
And then a sharper, fiercer wind came into play, and they were tossed about like rag dolls in the hands of a child in a tantrum, and it was only his belated use of seiðr that saved them from fatal injuries.
The monsters had been right to fear the heaps of ice scree, if those had been brought about by storms similar to this.
He really, truly wished he had not known.
The two moons of this world – one silvery grey, the other silvery brown – were already high in the sky when the storm finally dissipated, bringing the gale with it.
None of the five wretched companions moved for a very, very long time yet, however, interlocked with each other in a big, misshapened ball of scuffed leather and old fur and rough cloth.
And then, unable to help himself anymore, Loki released his hold on Avlar and Ovrekka and flopped into a dead faint, thoroughly spent.
He woke up an indeterminate time later on a stretcher of ice with railing on all sides. It seemed to be carried by the tallest two of the smaller jötnar on their shoulders, judging from the not-so-noticeable imbalance of height between the head and leg ends, and how far the ground seemed to be from where he lay swaying.
"You did not leave me behind," he remarked quietly when, apparently noticing his state of consciousness, the said jötnar – Đorkyn and Derek – rested the stretcher on the debris-strewn ground.
"You are our companion," Avlar, confused and exasperated, said as they helped him up. "It would be a poor gesture of gratitude as well, would it not, if we abandoned you whilst the reason for how you were in that state was because you had helped us through the worst of that storm?"
`Gratitude and honour, from monsters,` he thought, flabbergasted.
Maybe, he would not dispose of them when it was time for him to flee this land, despite the danger they posed to the leakage of his identity, as a show of his own gratitude for their unlooked-for, honourable assistance….
"How long until we reach Tora, Rekki?" Avlar asked timidly, as they huddled in their temporary ice house when the next "night" came; a far smaller construction than the one Ovrekka had made before, misshapened to boot.
"Amma and Abý and I spent two days on the road before the Anchor was stolen," was the tallest jötun's quiet answer, with eyes firmly nailed on their hands laid on their lap. "We did not have a skiff, but Amma and Abý managed to buy a transport raft from their military salaries. There was an inn and a few houses on the half-way point to Tora, a day's journey from home when we did it."
"I went there again, but this time with Gannha, as my begetting-day gift – to Tora, I mean, not the half-way village – when I turned two-thousand," they continued after a brief, uneasy pause. "We spent four days walking on the road, and that was because Gannha was carrying me, and they used to be a soldier on a long march."
"We dead before there, then," Đorkyn predicted darkly.
Ovrekka just clenched their fists, with a soft hiccup whispering deep in their throat.
"But we have to try, still, do we not?" Avlar interjected hastily, desperately. "ymir be kind, we will reach Tora soon."
"Spirit, not body, maybe," Đorkyn sneered. "Stop dream. Nobody will not pass and help. Nobody like storm. They safe in Tora, comfortable."
Avlar burst into tears, in response, instead of arguing back.
In moments like this, it was hard to refute the assertion that they were all children, Loki thought, withholding the automatic sneer that he had been about to unleash on such a display of weakness.
They might be monstrous children, not at all what people would have called "children," but still children. And they were out here alone, battered and starving and hopeless and most likely lost, in the company of a murderous, spiteful Asgardian hiding in the guise of their own skin.
What a childhood.