18.

. . .

"All right, what'd I miss?" Thor shrugged his way under the thick cloak Loki summoned for him, glancing back at the stone marker that was the only sign the Bifrost had jolted through with iridescent force. The ice reclaimed its territory all too quickly, even on this sheltered outcropping marked and tended for all new diplomatic travels between the realms.

"Could ask you the same. How does a fae end up smelling like a New York pizza?"

"We were hungry and bored and Leamhan had bolted town because of whatever you did, so there was nothing else we could do. We bonded over cheap beer and one of those lying pizzas your friend Miss Daisy told us about."

"Lying pi- oh, those." Loki shook his head. He hadn't bothered with a cloak of his own this time. It was as cold as ever, but the evening sky was bright with stars and the wind wasn't biting. Comfortable, as far as Jotunheim's residents marked it. He had to privately admit, it wasn't bad out. "One of these mornings I'm going to go into the offices and find out they've all died from a strain of mutant botulism off one of those monstrosities. She did mention that place fails their health inspection at least twice a year, didn't she?"

"No, she didn't." Thor didn't sound particularly concerned by this.

"Didn't mention the time I had to pick up a night shift in Ops at the last minute because someone whom I should politely lie about and say was not named Daisy but absolutely was named Daisy was locked in her bathroom after eating a calzone?"

"Never came up, brother."

"Yeah. Well. Hopefully you haven't killed your new fae friend."

"I think she'll be fine. She's made of sterner stuff than she looks. Has a mouth on her like a Kree dockworker when no one else is listening." Thor rubbed his hands together and squinted up at the ice spires in the distance. "Am I out of line to say that the Queen of Alfheim seems… particular?"

"Thor. You have no idea." Loki took a step forward onto the snow, hearing a satisfying little soft crunch under his boot. Nostalgia hit him, childhoods at play among the drifts of the rare Asgardian winter. He never did think about how much he'd liked them then. Suppose it made sense, really. "You missed a lot. But it'll take a long telling, so let's just leave it with this: You're in the clear, I'm not in any trouble I can't handle, and whatever the hell you do in life, don't get on that woman's wrong side. She's a Queen for good reason, and still a Queen for better."

"From you, that's a pointed warning. Anyway, yes, I suppose I can leave it there for now. I'll ask again some other time. Over good pizza, maybe."

Loki could hear the cheeky grin in Thor's voice, and flapped a rude gesture over his shoulder at him.

Just like old times. The better ones, even. Loki stepped away and forward, ready to get on with the business of finding out at last what nonsense Odin had thrown them all into before either of them were even born, and stopped when Thor's hand reached out and gently grabbed his upper arm. He turned to look at his brother, one eyebrow sharply arched. "What?"

Thor peered at him, at at first he looked like he didn't know what to say. Then he grimaced, in a particular way that meant he wasn't trying to upset someone, but felt the need to speak. "I can't say what it means that you came back to help, brother. That you made the choice you did."

"Yeah, don't worry about it." Loki tried to turn away, not wanting to deal with it right now. He was tired. His mind swirled from essentially having both won and lost in his duels with the Queens. The hand was still on his arm.

"Listen to me." There was a moment of paradoxical quiet before Thor continued. "It doesn't matter what Odin's got to say. It doesn't matter who gave birth to who. We're going to find out, because we deserve to, but it doesn't change the important part, Loki. We're a family. We have always been a family, because we-"

"I know." It came out shortly, bitter in a way that wasn't true, it was because the knowledge hurt to share. He tried to say it again, softer. "I know that, Thor. Always did. Why do you think I came back?"

The hand fell away, hearing the rest of the meaning there. "You're my brother."

Loki shook his head. "Honestly, if we're going to get all soppy about this right now, I'm going to stab you on principle. You know I will."

"Gods, you're still so damned defensive." It got Thor a look, squinting and narrowed. He grinned at Loki, then turned a little to scan their surroundings. The bluing ice, the buried stones. The horizon was clear and pretty, black and iced and full of those glinting stars, all of them unlike the ones seen from Asgard. "This is where it all began, in a way. Isn't it?"

Loki took a breath and he didn't say what he could have said. Being him, he spoke around it. "Every story has to begin somewhere, Thor. But where it starts for me isn't the same as where it starts for you. Or anyone else, really. That's the point of stories. One of them, anyway. Building a perspective, showing something someone else might not have ever seen. I'm going to have a different view than you. Sometimes that's painful. Sometimes it's even necessary."

"Is it painful for you here?" It wasn't prying at the center of his words. Thor sounded like he genuinely wanted to know.

"Not anymore," said Loki, and that was, oddly enough, the truth. "I do think it's strange, though, that to get to the root of this mystery of yours, we're drawn back to this old one of mine. It feels deliberate, and I've got some reasons to think on that." He did, too. They were vague and threaded thin, but much of it came back to Imda, and also Queens that knew far more than they let on. He reached back and knuckled at Thor's arm, not grabbing. "Come on. Let's get this done."

. . .

It was Loki's turn to stop suddenly, as they approached the massive arch at the mouth of the jotun fortress. "I would ask if you sense that, but you probably don't." He looked at the ground, feeling both the rhythm through his feet and the tiniest hairs raising on his neck.

"I do, actually. Like a drumbeat. That's not bad, is it?"

"Well, shit. I thought I was being oversensitive." Loki looked up, first at his brother's quizzical look, then at the palace, considering. "It's strange, is what it is. That's magic, Thor. That's an awful lot of magic - a Great Work in progress."

"Like one of the orreries I've seen?"

"Sort of, yes. I can't…" Loki trailed off, feeling the magic tingle over his skin as he took another step closer to Queen Farbauti's sanctuary. "It's intricate. I don't dare try to touch it to figure out what it is, not for certain. But someone's creating something incredibly powerful nearby. The sort of creation that takes weeks, maybe even months to complete." He frowned. "I don't sense danger, Thor. There's a certain sublevel to the aura of weaponized magic that I'm not feeling. This has a harder pattern, like shielding or repair. At a guess I'd say it's a binding, there's… I don't know how to explain. I could show you the glyphs it reminds me of, but it'd mean nothing to you. A paradoxical feeling to it, like ribbons in the air. A net cast into an ocean."

"The giants are building something, then?"

"If it isn't them, I can't imagine they wouldn't know about it. The shaman kin hold majority sway now due to Farbauti's crown. It might in fact be something they're making, but again, it's not hostile." Loki called an old meditator's trick into his mind, preparing to dull his magical senses slightly before he got a headache from the sheer intensity of the work. Just as he finished charging a silent word, he sensed the approach of one of those shaman. A familiar one. "It's odd, Thor. It's not necessarily bad, but it's very odd. We're going to be greeted at the gate. You remember him. It's fine."

. . .

Gymir smiled broadly at the sight of the brothers, azure lips on a face almost as darkly blue, and his crown of small horns peeked out from under the loose woolen cowl he wore. The mute old shaman dipped his head in a greeting, a tattooed hand waving away the gate guards as he approached. He was still massive, towering over the two, but without that passive sense of menace that other giants in his size range often gave off. It was hard not to grin back.

"Gymir." Loki bowed his head back, and yes, he did smile for the grand elder giant. "We were suggested to visit by one of the Queen's ambassadors, regarding a family matter. Is Her Majesty available, by chance?"

Gymir peered at him, and that eye, almost the size and color of a good ripe apple, gleamed with dry humor. He gestured at Loki, beckoning for his smaller hand, and when Loki gave it over, familiar with the way he did sometimes communicate, Gymir held it gently in one of his huge own and tapped at it with another finger. The rhythms were musical, a kind of ancient stacatto language. Loki had taken the time to research it because he liked this shaman a great deal, and surprised the giant not all that long ago with having picked it up so quickly.

Surprised you do not ask the obvious, little kin.

"I was brought up to be polite. Whatever's in progress, it's not hostile and it doesn't seem to violate any treaties. I'm curious, absolutely, but, you know, rules."

Rules in eight realms or more are, to you, flexible, but here we get the very abiding young prince. Gymir winked at him. Now I know you better than that.

Loki rolled his eyes. "All right. I'm actually dying of curiosity, particularly since everyone's been quite good about communicating major moves between realms and a Great Work qualifies as something that would at least get a note in a procedural briefing." Which he had access to, and sometimes even offered input on. He was guessing at a future where a formal ambassador between the two realms would be something valuable to have, and it wouldn't be a boring fate for a once-hungry prince that had learned to set his expectations to 'reasonable but still anarchistically fun.' "So either something was hidden, which I don't call likely, or there's something a little weird about us showing up so soon after one of her ambassadors was in a position to realize she could drop a brightly lit sign reading Go Here Now."

Now that's much better. Gymir chuckled, soundless even as his aura and his belly both rumbled gently. Kinqueen Farbauti is not within the palace. Do you feel the center of the working?

"It's not far, but to be honest, if I try to focus too hard it's going to give me a whacker of a headache. The Glaze?" The Glaze was a permafrost field just beyond the palace. It appeared to have been made by a meteor long ago, a shallow impact crater that filled with ice and became a smooth bowl crowned by stalactites reaching towards the sky. A good place for magic to collect. In old days, seers used the ice to create sprawling patterns to connect their prophecies and match them with the stars.

Gymir nodded, another grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. She knows you're coming.

"Of course she does. What's one more Queen tugging me around on her terms this week?" He felt Thor glance at him at that and once again sensed bad pizza and even more unwanted talking in his very near future.

I feel the breath of a good story, but one not ready to tell. I would be happy to walk with you and your windkin - Loki knew the jotun had a concept for adopted siblings, and that was as close as they could translate it - to announce you to her, and we can talk about the old ley under the palace on the way. You asked about that last time we met.

Loki quickly muttered what had been said to Thor, looking for his nod. Thor grinned. "We'd like that, Gymir. Thank you."

. . .

Once upon a time, it was a rare thing for visitors to enjoy a pleasant walk on the permafrosts and glaciers of Jotunheim, and it was rarer still to look at the sky and not feel that the world itself is hostile to all that live. Yet under the new Queen even the eternal snows felt a little softer, as if the world itself knew the old wolf was dead and there was no longer cause to be as mindlessly cruel as he had been.

Gymir listened as the brothers talked to him about various things, Thor shoving in to tell at least one embarrassing tale about young princes wreaking havoc and getting threatened with another stabbing for his trouble. That got a laugh from Gymir, the huge head thrown back in delight and his belly quivering happily, and he told them about how young jotun dared each other to go into the oldest caves, which had been given over to the semi-sentient argiope, and not come back until they recovered a bundle of precious silk.

"I would pee myself," said Thor to that story, without an ounce of shame. It was obvious he was still thinking of the orb-weaver back at the village inn.

Most of them do, said Gymir through Loki, and once again it was known that many people of many realms could bond together over the universal fear of spiders. The smart ones eventually realize they can stand at the mouth of their caves and ask politely. It works, usually a good spindle's worth gets tossed their way and all go away happy. The argiope don't like fear but they understand, in their fashion. They are peaceful and they keep the caves safe from the things deeper down. It's a silly dare, but it teaches a wise thing. It is better to ask than to take.

Naturally, Laufey killed a great many of them during his reign. It is a fine thing that he is gone. The argiope have been coming back to the caves recently, and they are forgiving. Gymir paused by a stalactite twice as tall as he, and the starlight gleamed off a field ahead of him. Even through his dulled senses, Loki could feel the central mark of the Work, a singular rod of power thrust into the ice. Ah, we are here.

Gymir lifted his head and he smiled, and he waved the brothers by. From here, they would meet the Queen without him.

. . .

Queen Farbauti didn't rise when Loki and Thor passed into the vastness of the Glaze and took in the scene. She sat on an artificial rise of ice and snow, her black skirts bunched comfortably around her and her bare blue hands clasped together at her knees, and she tilted her head politely with a sardonic grin as they first looked at her - and then looked at Odin himself, at the center of a bizarrely complicated set of etched runes, with Gungnir thrust into the ice at his feet.

Odin suspended the work with a mutter and immediately the pressure against Loki's head eased. He looked at them, his posture as stiff as his jaw under the beard, and his lone eye met theirs in turn, dull and aghast and completely surprised by this turn of events.

Farbauti shifted, drawing attention back to her, and she tossed a glance over to Odin, her expression now somehow even more dry and amused. "I did warn you, old king. Thrice over. I told you outright that I would not be complicit."