Winter's Treasures
By Rey

Chapter summary: Misunderstanding could be amusing, aggrevating, tiresome… or very, very deadly.

16. Misinterpretations

Darting between the blue, bare legs of giant monsters sent a strange thrill through Loki, caught between excitement of the simple game of it, terror of being squished flat by those swinging and stomping huge feet with their fearsome toenails, and rage – on principle – against the said monsters for obstructing the way. No familiar jötun – and was it not a ludicrous concept in the first place? – had come for him and Avlar outside the humongous library, and, meanwhile, there was still time before their physical training commenced in the evening, so Avlar had decided to go search for entertainment and maybe some food in the nearby marketplace, and he had merely tagged along.

At least, he had merely tagged along until they had arrived, just now, at the place that Avlar claimed was the said marketplace. It was an open square lined by various stone buildings just a little bit nicer and a little bit more spacious than the little dwellings Loki had first seen in the village that was now no more,

And it was packed nearly to the gills with jötun adults,

Giant brutes who were incredibly interested in the two runty newcomers, who were at least twice taller than he was, if not thrice… four times….

He had begun running long before the first of those humongous monsters had finished reaching out a hand towards him and Avlar. The unnervingly – comfortingly – familiar squawk and pounding light feet behind him told him that that idiot was following behind, if grudgingly and bewilderedly.

"Why did you run away, Lokyé? I wager that elder just wanted to pat your cheek or something!" his out-of-breath tagalong whinged, as soon as they had cut their way clear to what looked like the opposite side of the square. Loki himself was not better, breath-wise; in fact, he felt like fainting any second now from lack of air. But, well, the snow-strewn yet otherwise well-kept road running beside the square was blessedly empty at present, so, at long last, he could justify letting his body drop sprawling beside a nearby road marker – one of those square stones… or maybe highly packed ice?… that were as high as he was and twice as wide, which looked almost gleamingly new when found round this town instead of outside in the wilds.

Avlar mimicked him, too close to where he was parked for his comfort. But, like each and every time before, he just focused on the boy's voice instead of the said boy's form, to forget what Avlar actually was.

To forget what he actually was, for that matter.

Still, that boy made it so easy and yet torturously hard for him to relax, with how the topic of the monologue that ensued was never far from – dubiously – delectable meals and interestingly varied things to trade back in the heart of the square.

He ended up tagging after Avlar again, back into the square, back to where they had started, when the faraway rumbling sounds of busy jötnar had faded into a more tolerable level, just as the colour of the sky began to darken into a dim shade of gold. He told himself it was only because the roadside they had been ensconced on had begun to receive too much attention from adult jötnar.

Well, regardless, he was the first to demolish whatever the little cubes were in the incongruously flimsy stone container Avlar handed him outside one of the food stalls. Thankfully, for a child, Avlar knew when to hold one's tongue.

"Lokyé…. Come oooon. Elder Koðrati will be mad with us already for what we did. We need not tempt them further!"

But, again, Loki refused to heed the panted squawking from behind him.

They had stolen their way to what Avlar had claimed was the training hall, once they had been finished with their hurried snack. But the training hall, though a humongous thing that it was, nearly as beautiful-looking as the library at that, was packed with jötnar, too.

Armed jötnar, clashing with each other, though many of them were just twice his size.

And those monsters had noticed the two tiny loiterers by the humongous double doors.

And they had rushed towards the said hapless runts with ice weapons drawn.

What could Loki have done, then, but to flee with all alacrity? His seiðr – his trusty weapon and shield all at once – had not yet even half way recovered from the battering it had been receiving since he had landed in this accursed land, by then, and the physical exercion had not helped it.

He did not know where to go, what to do other than run and hide, how to shut Avlar up or leave that squawker behind on the worst case scenario. But he did know that he must go, or all the trials and tribulations he had been facing all this time would have been for nought, ending tragically under the mobbing weapons of semi competent monsters. After all, even when he had been well and hale and gone to Laufey's throneroom with his brother – no, Thor – and those four idiot parrots calling themselves warriors, they had been on the verge of a total loss when Odin had deigned to rescue them. Now, with him weak as a puppy and accompanied by a mostly worthless boy like this, he had laughably minus chance of success, should they be caught.

If only Avlar would understand – or just shut up.

"Lokyé? Are you well?" the said mostly worthless boy whispered, as the both of them huddled in between two steep piles of snowdrifts forming beside the rough-hewn wall of a modestly sized building – in Loki's standards. He amended the statement by himself afterwards, grumbling, "Huh. Of course not. Pale as snow like that. Why did you run away, anyhow? You did not seem to be fazed with the sight of a weapon before. Do you remember the village that rejected us? You placed me to the left, but I still saw how that wombless thing threatened Rekki with that club, and you were not fazed, then."

"Wombless?" Loki whispered back, faintly. His head was pounding in rhythm with his heart and – oddly enough – the circumference of his ankles and wrists, now.

"It means… well, having no womb, really," his interlocutor tried to explain, painfully obvious in their awkwardness. "It, erm…. Please don't let Elder Koðrati or Elder Eðlenstr know that I said that? – Well, anyway, 'wombless' means being less than even an animal taking care of its young. It means having no capability at all to care for living things, to nurture the young. It means Ýmir does not bless you to become their extension, to house and care for the souls they entrust to you, whether later on you would choose to accept the duty or not. Being called a wombless thing means you are worst than the bitterest weather, because even such weather brings renewal to the land afterwards, while a wombless somebody of course cannot help Ýmir bring remade Children back to the land, therefore they have no participation in the renewal, and thus totally useless."

"Sounds more religious and thoughtful than a curse word ought to be," Loki remarked, trying for his best flippant tone, even as he strained his ears in the attempt to listen for any newcomers to the alley they were occupying.

Avlar huffed a small laugh. Tugging Loki closer to him, practically cuddling the smaller, semi unresponsive body sidewise, he teased back, "And you? Whatever is wrong with you, huh, four-lines? Too much coddling at home? I thought you would be more accustomed to such explanations, your slushiness?"

Loki let out a thin, almost breathless chuckle. "Yet another insult, that, I'd wager," he mumbled, barely coherent even to his own ears and mind.

The bands of pain round his ankles and wrists had tightened considerably now, throbbing in time with his mercilessly wrung heart and brain, and he was barely conscious from the pain. He could not decide whether the whisper and crackle of huge, heavy feet on snow and ice that he was hearing belonged to just his imagination, either; but, to be sure of his and his idiotic companion's safety, he tugged the sides of the snowdrifts that faced each other into their hideout with a couple tendrals of seiðr, while forming a dome of air round their heads to give them enough air to break themselves free later on.

Avlar's squeak of shock – but oddly enough, not fear – was muffled by the mini avalanche.

It was Loki instead who got terrorised by claustrophobia.

But he could not do anything about it, now. The shackles on his limbs, in his heart, in his brain: they paralysed him more effectively than mere chains ever could.

With increasing potancy, each time he moved or worked his seiðr.

With the feel of somebody else's seiðr running in his blood, now he noticed.

He felt filthy. He felt violated. He felt like some fowl trussed up for dinner set beside a ready pan, somehow. – Whatever spell he was under, he realised now that it meant to sap him dry.

He was buried in a cool, powdery stuff in no time at all. It felt soothing on every inch of his burning, tightly stretched skin.

Something – or was it somebody? – stirred beside him, patted him – or maybe shook him? – but he could not even open his eyes by now, and breathing was a laborious chore that demanded all his concentration.

Then, as the heavenly cool powdery stuff was shifted aside from him and something – somebody? – sought to encompass him physically within it, the bands tightened to their limit.

And he knew no more.