5. Remembrancer

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The first meeting she remembered- the one from which she counted the span of their friendship- took place in the twilight of her childhood, on the cusp of her adolescence. She had known more stars than they, this was obvious to her at once. Taller and sturdier than either prince, she had felt pride and disappointment almost equally. Pride that she was bigger and stronger than they were, even though they were boys, and not just any boys but the princes of the Realm. Disappointment that they were just children like she was and not some more exotic breed of life. Expectation of their majesty had grown to giant proportions in her mind as the importance of her presentation before them was explained to her.

Besides, Sif had heard many tales of Odin's doings and formed impressions of what a prince should be. Small boys standing in a peaceful palace garden, fidgeting and making grabs for a lethargic bumblebee when the Queen's watchful gaze turned away, had not featured in her imagination.

Nonetheless, as she had been relentlessly drilled to do by her mother and by all of her servants, she completed the specific form of the warriors' obeisance that their station demanded. It was a kind of curtsey, halfway to the movement of taking a knee as one would do before the King, and the same clasp of hand to heart with the head down in reverence.

She bowed before Thor first, hearing her mother introduce her to the Queen as a worthy and comely companion to the first-born. Sif's young tongue was only mildly awkward when she delivered her well practised greeting, "Your sword sharp and your arrow straight, Your Highness."

Thor smiled at her as she looked up and in so doing he seemed a shining sun, the halo of his golden hair like an aurora. A child though he was- all chubby cheeks and a sweet, short, upturned nose- his features were strong and his startling, sky-blue eyes were bright with life and laughter. Sif felt the power of his personality as a warmth emanating from his person, and she found herself genuinely smiling back. Now she saw his princeliness, his will; the easy confidence in his stance clearly came as naturally to him as breathing.

Her mother then commended her to the second son, and she repeated the bow. "Your path narrow and your burden light, Your Highness."

Loki did not smile. Not quite. There was a slight quirk of his mouth at the corners and the fleeting impression of tiny dimples in his pale cheeks, but his eyes glittered with apprehension and his lips remained tightly pressed together. Already noticeably more slight and shockingly dark in contrast to his brother's blinding brightness, those marshy grey eyes looked enormous in his slim, pointed face. Where Thor was aptly likened to a lion cub in her mind, she was tempted to compare Loki unfavourably to some small woodland creature.

He touched her hand with his skinny fingers, as if she were a new play thing and he wanted to test her reality and his ownership. "Shall she play with us a long while?" He turned a mournfully entreating expression up to his mother. "Not like the other girls?"

Sif felt chilled by his shy, imploring tone. This was a prince of Asgard?

The Queen ran an elegant, be-ringed hand over her son's unfortunate pitch-black hair. "Sif is not to study to be my handmaiden, Loki. She is to be a warrior alongside you."

The prince turned to look at her again, studying her with disquieting intensity. He touched his fingertips to his lips and drew them away, greenish purple mist swirling then solidifying between his pointer finger and thumb into a miniature sword in delicate wrought gold. He held it out to her solemnly, his eyes on her long, flaxen curls. "Pin up your hair, or they'll pull it in the practise ring. It hurts."

She looked to her mother, then to the Queen, then took it, bewildered and discomfited. "Thank-you, Your Highness."

He ducked his head and turned to run away from the small gathering, pulling free of his mother's grasp and tossing his stately green cloak to the ground without ceremony. Babyish. She did not like him. He was only a little second son, he couldn't tell her what to do.

She slid the sword-pin into a pocket on her girdle.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.

Thor had his first of many growth spurts shortly after Sif was formally introduced at court as an apprentice warrior; his head now level with hers and his shoulders already broader, she became his frequent sparring partner. The sole heir of a blood brother to the King, it fell to her to take up the family honour and with it her father's sword. It was not a thing unheard of for an only daughter, but it was rare enough and the fightmasters put her through her paces before they believed she was worth their teaching. Some still had their doubts.

But she was solid and quick and she learnt quickly. Her footwork and technique were always superior to that of her royal training partner, but Thor's swiftly growing strength and greater weight still gave him enough advantage that their bouts were evenly matched.

Loki had not grown and remained small and thin, his dark head and perpetually colour-stained fingers (he was forever drawing) leading her to dub him 'soot' and 'muck-frog' and to chase him around the ring as Thor watched and shrieked with laughter. Little though he was, however, he was faster than the older children and nimble as a cat. He could nearly always outrun her or out climb her until she became too frustrated to follow and stomped off in a fit of temper.

"If you would stop pulling her braid, brother," Thor called up from the base of the tree they were both currently climbing, "she would not seek such vengeance!"

"It's her!" Loki used magic to pull a rope out of thin air and slid down it from somewhere far above her in the canopy of the tree. He was soon just a dark blot next to the light blot of Thor on the distant ground. "She said I was sleeping in the cinders and rolling in the ashes. She said no son of Odin could have ugly black hair."

"You told her she made oxen look clever."

"She couldn't read the runes on her own sword. She's stupid."

Thor squinted sceptically, not one for academics any more than Sif was and unsympathetic to Loki's repeated attempts to prove his unnatural, musty interests could help win a fight. "Did you change them with magic?"

"She could never read it! She memorised the inscription!"

Bored of the argument, Thor pushed Loki over and tried to pin him. Loki, slippery as an eel, wriggled free and put his brother down with a well-placed kick to the solar plexus. Knowing the fight would turn earnest and that he would definitely lose when it did, he took off toward the palace. Thor blinked after him from the ground until he had regained his breath, then started shouting abuse about cheating and cowardice at Loki's back.

Sif sat in the tree and glared at his retreating figure. It wasn't right for a warrior prince to do such wily magic as he did, to always slide around the edges of a real fight and retreat wherever he could. He was elegant and precise with a practise sword, but he kept his distance and his guard up in spars; he never pushed in for the attack, he never won without sly tricks. He had no love for battle and no aptitude for berserker style, his cool temperament ill-suited to his birth.

He set traps for her and tricked her into saying mortifying things, he ran away from her just anger and set more traps still. He mocked her in their lessons, even in front of the Queen. He sometimes allowed her to persist in humiliating misunderstandings when he helped her with her studies. It couldn't be denied that he did almost always help, his quick mind and gift for words making him an invaluable if impatient tutor. He carved her flowers out of ice, he spun her dragons from sugar, once in a great while he jested and she laughed in spite of herself.

It was a real question in her mind whether he had honour. Whether he were worthy for his station. Whether they were friends.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.

He had been among the Elves, studying magic, for much longer than she had thought. Not having much missed him after the first few shocks of his absence, she had lost track of the stars and herself in a comfortable routine. She finally had Thor's complete attention, undivided by his secret amusements with his brother and the annoyingly impenetrable conversations the two would have, giggling together like a pair of old gossips. The Loki whom Thor praised to her, that Loki who was forever witty and cunning and sportsmanlike in games of both mind and body, did not much resemble the sullen, quiet, quick to offence, and boringly bookish little boy with whom she was acquainted.

He was playful to her only in cruel games, though she still pursued them. She reasoned that at least he was the best possible person to get into such a one-upmanship contest with, because he never tattled to his parents or his tutors. She'd blacked his eyes and drawn his blood, but when the Queen would ponder his injuries in dismay, he kept his lip steadfastly buttoned. Sif did the same the day he accidentally broke her arm knocking her from a fence, though he had wanted to try to heal it himself with his magic and this had provoked a screaming row the like of which they'd never had before. Thor, in the middle, had tried uselessly to placate both sides. It had only ended, after Loki's tirade about the thickness of her skull, with Sif's proclamation that the touch of a cowardly witch like him would dishonour her arm forever. Loki had stormed away in silence, white-faced with rage.

He had left for his training only days later. Things were still frostier than their wont, but he had come to take his leave of her all the same. He said he must go to the Elves to meet with adequate instruction, elaborating grandly about his innate magical abilities being the greatest on Asgard since his father's childhood many ages ago. She had dismissed this as his vanity. He was jealous of his brains and his magic, hoarding his small, uncoveted gifts, resentful of she and Thor for their bravery, their honour, and their fair hair. He'd called her a flaxen twit with a great golden dog for a companion. She'd said it would be good to finally shake all the soot from her clothes. They'd glared and then grinned at each other.

It was an uneasy friendship and she was glad he was going away. She preferred the simple, natural bond of like-to-like she shared with Thor to the prickly truce between herself and he that should-not-be-as-he-is. Thor was what a prince ought to be. Trustworthy to his bones, unmatched in strength, never conniving, no deceptive magic: one always knew where one stood with him, he always took the straightest path to every end as a warrior should.

She only realised how long Loki had been gone when she passed him in a palace corridor on the day of his return and did not know him. He called out after her and, his voice having fallen, she would not have known that either if he had not addressed her as 'both sooty and rude'.

For the first time in her life, she was forced to look up to meet his eyes. No longer a child but a willowy youth, he was so grown that he must be quite as tall as one of the King's Guard and stood nearly a head above her own height. How odd and how disconcerting to lift her chin to someone who had always been, and likely would always be, little in her mind. At least he did not loom over her as men sometimes did, he was too self-conscious in his stance to be intimidating, overly aware of his awkward length without proportional breadth. He did not present quite as large a figure as he truly was.

What baby fat there had ever been in his face, it was all but gone and his was a new leanness of feature, a painfully raw quality of expression. Studying him in her shock, she felt sure this would only become more pronounced with time and that the planes of his face would come together as sharp as flint when he grew into a man. He was far too fine-boned and slender to ever be handsome like his brother, but he was arresting. His unseemly raven's-wing hair was iridescent with shades of blue and purple in the beam of afternoon sunlight streaking in from outside. It framed him captivatingly, the soft black waves having grown long and being worn loose around his face, making luminous his pale complexion and bright his eyes, more blue than she remembered though still shot with silver-grey. Not clear and cloudless and radiant as Thor's were, but like a rime of frost on a bubbling spring: shining, still.

His unlovely parts took on a kind of eerie fascination as a whole.

"How cruel we are as children, how cruel and thoughtless." She groped for familiarity and found it lacking, falling back on a more formal tone as she struggled to see a boy she knew in his lanky elegance, "I was wrong to malign you so about your hair, Your Highness. I see now that it suits you."

His playful look and shy smile were instantly shattered by an aloof coldness, his lip drawing back from his teeth in a discreet sneer. "I am afraid I must go. I shall see you at the feast, Lady Sif."

Injured and bewildered at this rejection of what she'd half intended to be a blanket apology for whatever fault she bore in the tumultuous nature of their childhood friendship, she frowned ferociously at his back and wished he had not returned.

She wished it much more earnestly and with all her might when she rinsed out her hair that evening, pulling free the tiny gold sword pin which would hold it fast with no flying tendrils no matter what wind or heat or stress came to bear upon it, and it tumbled down her back no longer blonde but black as tar. Black as pitch. Almost as black as Loki's own.

Dark and terrible in her rust-red chemise and heavy, maroon dressing gown, she exploded into his chambers still dripping bathwater. She was out for blood and she tore through his receiving room into more private areas like a violent whirlwind, making certain that she knocked over or damaged as many of his things as she could in passing.

She was so furious that she could barely see. She cared nothing for the impropriety of her intrusion when she burst into his cabinet and found him even less suitably attired than she was, only too pleased that she could scratch at the exposed skin of his bare chest as she tackled him off of his bench.

"Squirrelly, ugly, frizzy-headed soot demon! I'd kill you if it weren't treason!" She smashed him in the face with her elbow on the way down, breaking his lip against his teeth. They crashed to the floor in a heap and she scrambled to get on top of him, pressing his arms to his sides with her knees.

He drew a leg up to where she sat on his upper chest, hooking his heel under her chin and dragging her backward so he could get his hands free. She scrawled ugly lines down his torso with her nails as she went, satisfied to hear him hiss in pain when she broke the skin. He snarled as he came after her, pinning her briefly until she got a leg between their bodies and leveraged them over again. He caught her fist when she reared to punch him and, to her tremendous shock, he was now stronger than she was and held off the intended blow without great difficulty.

"Turnabout is fair play, My Lady." He grinned unpleasantly at her, his teeth red with blood. "Cease this assault or I will see you in the stocks for striking a prince of Asgard."

Her rage was rendered impotent when she moved to attack with her other hand and he seized it too, so she pressed down against his restraining grasp with all her might. His block didn't give and her eyes welled with frustration as she struggled uselessly. "How dare you, how dare you!"

"You said you like it now," he purred at her. "You've learned to appreciate the dun. The filth of the less favoured."

"You wretch! I said it suited you. Change it back! I'm not a cheating, devious, sickly freak!"

His nostrils flared and he glared at her with burning indignation. "You told me you threw my present away, you told me that! If that had been true nothing would have happened. If you weren't so spiteful to tell me something awful that wasn't even-!"

"So I lied! I was a child and we were arguing! I've grown up, I know better now. How can you still be nursing your minuscule, insignificant wounds after all these years have passed? Everyone else must come into their maturity, but you are an infant to this day. Mewling in your crib for your trinkets!"

"You never wore it, not once. Before I did anything to vex you." His face was twisted up in hurt and anger and petulance, blood dribbling down his chin with every emphatic word, "I vexed you because you never wore it!"

Stony-faced to hide her discomfort and uncertainty, she stared into his eyes for a long moment before getting off him and walking a few steps away, pulling her robe more tightly about her as if it could shield her from his sudden honesty. It took only a few breaths to retrieve something that looked like calm. Sif had discipline. She heard him stand up behind her and hoped he'd cover himself quickly and try to regain a little dignity. "I suppose I must be sorry for that, but we were children and it was so long ago. Loki, please let us try to be friends for Thor's sake. Why does it matter? It was only a tiny thing."

She glanced at him over her shoulder and saw that he'd made no move to dress, looking ridiculous with his thrice-damned hair in a curly tangle and his gangly arms crossed over his skinny adolescent body. He was making a face like he'd tasted sour milk. "It was my best magic, all the girls before… I just wanted to…. Of course. For Thor's sake. I must remember where import lies."

She cleared her throat, blushing at the havoc she'd wreaked in his room and on his person now that the heat of anger had passed and she was feeling a returning awareness of the significance of their more advanced ages, the new roles they would soon be playing at court. Feeling distant and strange with him again as she fully accepted that he was emphatically not little, nor was he her playmate, any more. Even if she had still been able to overpower him like she used to, she'd said herself that they were not children any longer and should not act as though they were. "I am glad that you do."

He followed her eyes to the deep red grooves on his torso and sighed. "I won't let it be known, Sif. It would hardly be to my benefit if I did."

"Thank-you, Your Highness," she said stiffly, his title helping her to centre herself and push away the boy he had been. Still, she hesitated. "I knew you wouldn't. You have never betrayed me."

Loki shrugged, but his gaze was intent. "Loyalty is reciprocal."

.,.,.,.,.,.,.

Sif joined Thor as he stared down into the sprawling cosmos at the lip of the broken bridge. His great shoulders were slumped and the fierce light of joy and will that ever lit him with irresistible charisma was dimmed to a flicker by the weight of his sorrow.

"He was not wrong about everything."

She started, not having expected to hear him speak. "About what was he right?"

"He was right to feel slighted and belittled these many years, he was right that I was not prepared to be a king. I was blind to the harms I did in my arrogance, and from my impregnable rightness of place I could not fathom that he felt such terror of having none. My banishment has been a most timely education. What I cannot conscience, what delusion I cannot absolve him from, is that which I suppose must have been what he most could not bear. That he was not loved." Thor turned to her, his handsome face drawn and haggard. "How could he imagine it was so?"

"He took terribly small things to heart, Thor, so long as they were awful. A thing you had, rightly, forgotten altogether he would be using to fuel a simmering stew of his resentment. It is not your fault."

"No," he said firmly, his hand falling heavily on her shoulder, "it is. It is not mine only, but it is mine. I am the eldest and I led by poor example down the very path he tread in his madness, though I may not have walked so far. I have many times I can only too swiftly recall lived down to the worst possible expectations my brother could have of me. For far too long, I lived thoughtlessly."

Sif grumbled in disagreement, finally muttering a repetition, "He took everything to heart."

"He did. But there were still many such things to readily take." Thor dashed a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand. "I mourn my brother, Sif, seeing him clearly for the first time. Had I looked sooner, I might have aided him. I might have rescued him from a prison of his own making. Perhaps he would not have allowed it and nothing would be altered, but my soul would be easier knowing I had ever tried. That I had ever seen trying was needed."

Any further objection was chased from her mind in the face of this insight. She stared at the shards of the Bifrost.

"Loki once offered to restore my hair if I would agree to wear a certain pin in it every day until your coronation. I refused, I said he was too petty to be indulged." She ran her hand through her long dark hair, silky strands slipping over her fingers like water, stardust glittering in its shiny length. "It was greater pettiness perhaps to resist such a trivial arrangement, but in truth I think I had grown grudgingly fond of this black soot."

She didn't realise she was weeping until Thor's arms embraced her and pressed her to his broad chest, his voice murmuring warm comfort in her ear.