Winter's Treasures
By Rey
Chapter summary: Can deadly sacrifices repay the debt of deadly blunders?
18. Sacrifices
Arms wound round Loki, blanket and all, and lifted him away from the wall, away from the cot, away from the tiny room that turned out to be just a small part of a larger room, sectioned off by temporary ice walls. He was pliant as a wet rag doll, leant against one broad, blue, muscled shoulder, but the shoulder that he had not sought for.
"Bump," he breathed into the side of the thick, short blue neck whose muscles visibly tightened like a bowstring on that little proclamation, with hysterical laughter bubbling in his wet voice. "She called me Bump." `She planned to have me for much longer, hoped to do so. She wanted to have me, in whatever small capacity, and I spited her in return.` He tried to swallow a sob. `She promised me a breakfast and a bath. She promised to walk me to the library.`
`I did not see her being her bumbling, stupid self for the last time. I was too busy trying to best her,` he realised, as one huge, blue, black-clawed hand gently moved his face away from the shoulder it had been draped over, and he witnessed the large but not-so-huge being laid in a coffin-like box wreathed in strips of blue light before them.
Jötnar were not supposed to be white.
Unconscious people were not supposed to be still in pain, especially when no scar – no new scar, apparently – was to be seen.
But Eðlenstr was of a bluish white colour now, and the cragginess of a jötun's features could not hide the rictus of agony carved deeply into that face.
"We were waiting for you, little one," came a gentle murmur through his suddenly ringing ears, back in the æsir language that now felt quite out of place, almost sacrilegious. "Eðlenstr is the lastborn in their family. – Their parents have given their consent, and so have their siblings, womb-kin and otherwise. We cannot reach second-Regent Voðen – their shield-sibling – away in Asgard, nor do we have enough time to reach the Royal Family in Útgarð, who sheltered them for much of their childhood and adolescence, and that leaves only you, little princess. You were Etta's first and last nursling, at that, and such status is prized even above royalty among us."
"What…," he heard himself stutter faintly, as if from a great distance in a cave of rushing water. "What do you want with me? What do you want with her?"
He was enveloped more thoroughly in the arms that caged and supported him at once, as if the action could shield him from a terrible blow – more terrible than the current reality, than this utterly wrong sight.
And then he knew why.
"The healers and priests would like to ask for your consent, Princess Loki," his holder spoke distantly, but still with the tinge of grief that could not be thoroughly eradicated by the formal tone. "They would like to terminate the life support and–."
"No!" Loki surprised himself by the swiftness and vehemence of that one statement. But if anything in his life was a lie, if anything in his life was unsure, this was not.
"Every moment spent in this state is more torment for them, little one." The thin veneer of formality in his holder's voice was beginning to crack, as was their voice. "The land suffers for the lack of its anchor, and tapping into its lifeblood now is like crashing into a thick wall of thorns on full tilt without any protection whatsoever… and still we try to do so, instinctively and by habit, when we are spent. It is what Etta has been doing subconsciously, and it only hurts them more, while their seiðr is yet wounded and unhealed from the effort to bring you back."
"Bring me back," Loki repeated numbly, his breath hitching.
"You died, little gem, for half a day, from the leeching spells placed on you by those traitors." No pretence of formality was audible anywhere in the ragged statement, now, nor did his holder speak in Aldska anymore, and Loki surprisingly appreciated it, very much so. Avoiding the petrifying tableau before him, he cowardly lay his face back into the nook between the shoulder and the neck that was even now jumping spasmodically in the – very, very unprofessional – mighty effort to stifle the onrush of grief.
And he listened, as his holder stuttered through the recounting of what had happened three weeks ago by Jötunheim's calendar, starting from when his seiðr had failed him under that mini-avalanche hideout he had made for himself and Avlar, on that distant day.
Avlar – young, trusting, earnest Avlar – had jumped out of the protection of the mingled snowdrifts on the first sign of adults approaching. But the adults coming there had only pretended to be concerned for Loki's wellfare. The four of them – the very same four battle healers that Eðlenstr had called in for that disastrous so-called medical examination that morning – had brought the two children away from the paediatrician's office instead of towards it, and the boy had quickly noticed it.
Unwisely, he had screamed for help.
Koðrati, who had just finished cluing his imbecilic underling about all the suspicious aspects of the purported medical examination, instead of overseeing the training of the recruits as they had told Loki earlier, had caught up with the foursome only after Avlar had been beaten up into silence, nearly to death, and that was also just because a riot had broken up right on the spot between the insurgents – more than the four of them, it turned out – and the loyal citizens.
Eleven loyal citizens had died, faced with the power of the mostly militaristic and military trained rebels, and one of those dead had been one of Avlar's tutors. One of the librarians who had so warmly greeted that boy when he and Loki had arrived at the library that morning, in fact.
Avlar had spoken not a peep since then, and removing him from Loki's side had proven as impossible an endeavour as getting him to talk. So he had been there when the healers and priests had tried to resurrect the only – false – companion he had left from the desperate, disastrous journey out of his ghost village, and witness to how Eðlenstr had desperately offered herself to be the conduit for the largest harnessing of seiðr they had ever attempted after the Casket's loss.
Many had offered up their seiðr – their lifeblood – for the endeavour, including Loki's own erstwhile tutor Lúkra, although Koðrati was sure none of them had deduced who Loki was despite the death-triggered failure of the magical cocoon of identity obfuscation that he had unknowingly been wrapped in his whole life, and many had come to near-death for that. And still, more had come for the same reason, on that day and the days afterwards.
Eðlenstr, with hands laid on his body skin to skin, had indeed become the vessel that would store, purify and channel the offered seiðr from so many different sources into his body, for the hours that it had taken to finally restart working. – Jötnar were creatures of magic, truer to that fact than many peoples out there in the universe, even more than the vaunted æsir, so it had been hoped that, with such transfusion, Ýmir would grant Loki's return to the magically spent body he had fled from, now that it had been resoaked in seiðr.
A ludicrous concept to Loki, but a sound one to Koðrati. And with how he was living and breathing and moving and thinking now, even when his saviour lay dying before him, Loki had to concede to the jötun's perspective.
And Eðlenstr lay dying in that hated state in that hated coffin-like thing because, in actuality, however magical they were in nature, or maybe because of it instead, jötnar were not supposed to be emptied and filled repeatedly like common jars, by seiðr that was not their own at that. At the same time, there was also the strain of bending those alien powers far enough to force them to be compatible with Loki's own seiðr, whose echo was preserved in Eðlenstr in his bond as the woman's – the young woman's? – nursling.
In short, according to the memory that Avlar had provided and Koðrati had supplemented, remmnants of insurgence from the last war – which last war? Had there been a civil war inside the realm itself after the one with the æsir? – had deduced who Loki was in general terms despite all the obscuring geas, wards and enchantments wrapped round him and his sense of self, and sought to kill him slowly but surely with a malignant but largely undetectable spell. The effort had born fruit, if only for half a day, at that. However, to Loki, the deadlier result was the uncovering of his identity through the failure of his pocket dimension and the magical cocoon not of his own working.
Avlar had unknowingly given out his hideout among the snow to his temporary killers, just as Eðlenstr had unwittingly helped to kill him. Still, both had paid for their respective mistakes much more than they had deserved, and Loki had no energy to hate them all the same.
Just to grieve for them.