2.
. . .
"You've something dour on your mind, Mother." Loki went to his usual seat, a low stool with just enough cushion to be forgotten underneath him when he tranced for magical practice. His legs folded aside, not the most elegant look, but comfortable. "We're not starting the morning cants right away today, I think."
Frigga looked away from him and glanced at the stack of letters resting on her desk, her fingers picking and plucking at each other in a way he knew all too well. "You and your brother have not yet seen war."
"We've fought," he said, now cocking his head in puzzlement at the flat tone in her voice. "I've fended off demons at the edge of Muspelheim, and there was that incursion of rogue Elves a while back, and-"
"Yes." Frigga interrupted him, gently. "You've both been bloodied. But you've not seen war." She turned away from him completely for a moment, putting away her pens and the fine black bottle of ink. "You're not children any longer. But you're also not quite men full grown. You're barely out of your third centuries."
"Don't tell Thor that, he'll pout a decade." Loki leaned back, pulling a knee forward so he could drape a wrist on it. "True, it wasn't all that long ago he was trying to pass off a little fuzz as a warrior's full beard."
A smile flitted across the queen's face as she turned to glance at him, a small but amused thing. "You'll both know when adulthood has come, when you understand better that such battle isn't a thing to crave so hungrily. I expect you'll figure it out quicker than your brother will, in certain respects."
Loki frowned. This was unusually bare, even for their private talks. "What's going on, what's this about?"
Frigga sighed and took the stool across from him, her hands still clasped before her in that taut and worried way. "I've told you the stories about Karnilla before."
The sorceress with aims to shape a realm of her own amongst the nine, a realm primed to eventually cut out the heart of Asgard itself. A traitor, and the shadow queen of those darker magics he knew to be wary of. "In context of a sorcerer's warnings especially, yes." His brow furrowed. "That her ways of magic are not ours, that there is a seduction in that kind of… but she's been gone a long time, Mother. And with her fall came your marriage and the restoration of Asgard's newest golden age."
"Gone but not dead, Loki. She was smart enough to leave her ego aside and run to ground when her allies left her. We were never able to hunt her down, knowing full well that in time her corruption would take root again." She flicked a hand towards her desk, where a thin sheaf of papers lay not far from her own. "It's begun. I've seen copies of the intercepts. She has allies again, and we don't have all their names. We plan to hunt what we can, and let others run trail for us to follow, but the war she made before will come 'round again sooner than anyone will like. We don't know yet what she knows. She'll have new weapons now. And her greatest will still be at her call - Karnilla was always a brilliant woman. She's a slow blade, and a sharp one. That, my son, makes her a terrifying threat."
Loki shifted on the stool, uncomfortable now. He licked his lips, considering. "How can I help? Do you need a messenger? If not battle, I'm fleet enough-"
"No, dearheart." She smiled. "My letters are well arranged, I've no need of another to tend them. What I need from you is for you to remember your own cleverness in the days and years to come. That's your weapon, and I want you to wield it. Let Thor have his steel, and we both know he is no fool either."
He kept his mouth full shut, thinking better of the tease he had in mind. No, Thor wasn't a fool. But he could be prone to foolish things, and it seemed the older he grew, the more he followed that urge. War was apt to pull a lot more out of him.
"He'll see the war he thinks he wants, I'm afraid." Frigga looked away, unaware she was echoing his thoughts. "You'll both have dark lessons to learn from it. I pray they keep, and quickly. Such things ought need only the one teaching, and yet too many of our warriors gratefully seek that knowledge over and over again." She looked back, a small if slightly weary smile on her face. "No, this morning I thought only to warn you, so you may consider what's coming with fuller wisdom. Odin himself will make further announcements in due time. You'll know when."
He offered a wry smile back. "And now the day's meditations will be a touch more challenging than usual."
Frigga laughed. "Well, that's one good lesson to repeat. You never know how much you'll have to fight for a moment's peace to ground yourself. Muspelheim was one such teaching, yes. The real difficulties come when you think you're safe at home, but yet your mind's storm is still ever with you." She beckoned to him to resume a sorcerer's centering position, doing the same herself. "Now stop fretting and focus."
He couldn't, not yet. "You'll be safe, of course, if war comes? And Father."
She sniffed at him, still amused. "I am the very picture of safety, Loki, and any who come for me would do well to consider carefully before they strike. Odin, however, still has a fain amount of fight left in him, though he is also clever enough to be careful about it when he rides afield. Now focus. There's still plenty of morning left to us, and to magic."
. . .
Loki left the Queen just before the noontime, his mind muddled and weary from attempting to absorb something new about aetheric links and the ways they might mirror reality itself. He nodded absently to the waiting handmaiden, the new one again, and glanced at the neatly arranged piles of silks and embroideries that would be the day's later work for the ladies. The festival season would be coming 'round, but not for a few years yet. And by then, likely tainted by a new war. He paused and frowned at the fabrics, blinking blearily. It would be another hour's nap and a good meal before his mind wholly snapped back into alertness. Magic required a different kind of muscle, and even though he had been training at it since he had been a little boy, there was always more to learn to endure. It would be a few centuries before he had an echo of Frigga's grace and strength at the art.
War, then. A cloud's brief shadow passed between him and Asgard's sun, turning those fine fabrics grey. He shook his head, disturbed again, and by the time he blinked away the fuzziness in his vision, the sun was bright again.
Another of the handmaidens swept by at her errands, quieter Helena. She didn't disturb him, never stopped to ask if he had a need. They knew he preferred the quiet after morning practice. Weapons training would be next, in the cooler hours of the late afternoon. All of it routine. For now.
For the first time, he began to realize life's comfortable daily routine didn't mean they were safe in their golden palace. In time, danger would come to them. The shadow seemed to remain on his face as he trailed a finger along the edge of the whorled balcony railing, thinking for a while. Then he slipped off, silent, attempting to at least pretend nothing in his life had changed. For a little while, anyway.
. . .
Loki stirred in the silence of Frigga's solar, realizing the stars still gleaming outside were in position to mark the deeper night. Hours had passed while he let the ghosts take him back into old history. The shadows seemed heavier now, close and thick like the rough woven cowls draped over battlefield dead. He tried to shake them off, feeling like they were watching him. Judging him.
He realized he was breathing heavily, as if he'd gone for a run instead of simply lost himself inside his own mind. Paranoia was striking a bone deep inside him, a rib close to his heart. "I need to sleep," he whispered to himself, clinging to logic. His voice sounded like it came from someone else, some species he didn't recognize. Now he rubbed at his face, the skin feeling raw under his fingers. But it was his. His own.
Another prickle of alienated sensation struck him. His own? He tore his hands away from his face before he could feel the lines, wonder if his eyes had gone that monstrous shade of red, hating the chill that suffused his body. He buried all his thoughts, slamming the door of his mind shut on everything except a frozen, controlled silence, forced himself to look at his hands. They were pale. Shaking, bony white, not blue, and he flexed them until they came back under control. When they did, no sooner, then he strode from the room at too fast a pace.
It wasn't fleeing. He did not run, he told himself. He would not run from his own past, it was dead. Dead the night he fell from the rainbow bridge, dead the day he failed Thanos, dead the hour he pretended to pass for a corpse in Thor's arms.
But yet his steps called him a liar, on his way back through the halls to his stolen room.
The shadows left behind didn't bother to judge.
. . .
Safe in Odin's private chamber, Loki realized he was still heaving for breath. He forced himself to calm, remembering all the ways Frigga taught him to center himself, and that worked well enough to slow his thumping heart. But despite that, he knew he would require a little more time yet before he would find the sleep he needed so desperately. Adrenaline and its aftereffects took effort to drain. There was a place past exhaustion where the mind flickered too lively, and he lived there far too often now.
He pulled one of Odin's heavy chairs over to the desk, where the guards placed the younger lord's papers after the evening parley. That Eirund, that's who he was. The name came back to him at last, an unimportant man who thought himself grander. A snap of Loki's fingers lit the candles along the edge of the desk, just enough light for him to read by, and he grabbed a thin blanket to drape in his lap, like an old man might. The words on the page blurred together for him at first, but he soon began to piece together the fragments of what he'd barely heard in the throne room.
A young lord with what should have been a private matter on his hands, some tricky issue of political and personal balance between one of his own vassals and a lord of Vanaheim. Loki sighed, instantly bored and annoyed with what he was reading. Mundane, but yes, it was also necessary business for a king. And also not as prone to obvious solutions as he might have liked at that moment.
He pushed a hand through his snarling hair, and looked again at the matter, putting together the timeline in his mind to try and find the problems. The dominant one was easy enough. Love had a way of dashing apart arranged plans. That much was clear by the reports. He shook his head, knowing that was important, but also clearly not enough. "You've left some details out, Lord Eirund," he muttered. "I can tell. A good lie starts with a framework and not a tapestry. You're right on the edge of that, and I can see where you've forgotten some holes. What's the other side of this stupid little story, hm?"
Loki rolled his head back along the chair, staring at the tall gilt ceiling. At the edge of Asgard, the young lord who supplicated to him had a lady friend - not one of his own courtiers, but his cousin's vowed fiancee. And despite previous arrangements, she'd found a courtier of her own, a young warrior from Vanaheim. He recognized the village name, not far from where Thor's friend Hogun hailed. He wrinkled his nose at the thought of them, pushed it away. Not an important detail right now. So now the young lord claimed offense and bad dealings from Vanaheim's little village, and the lady caught fast in the middle, to say nothing of the warrior, had no say in the issue thus far.
Asgard no longer trafficked in strongly arranged marriages, but there had been a deal, apparently, freely made when the lady was a much younger girl. Loki reread the papers. A land deal, naturally; a grand dowry of property and thus a future's investment. The sort of unnecessarily complicated thing that could - and obviously did - crawl up the food chain to the king's own desk. He frowned, recognizing it would definitely need deeper investigation before he could attempt any sort of fair judgement.
There was a single, small painting of Odin himself near-hidden amidst the knick-knackery and the trophies Odin kept in his sanctum. To his meager credit, the old king had not been all that self-glorifying. Loki glanced at it, as he did some nights. "And what would you do this time, you old goat?"
The painting said nothing back.
"You'll leave it all to me, then? I'm tired, and not inclined to make the best decision for all involved."
Silence.
"Well, to Hel with you, anyway." Loki snorted at the portrait, then started to laugh at his own conversation in a way that echoed eerily in the large room. At hearing himself, he choked off the laughter and shoved an irritated hand at the papers. Then he slumped gracelessly, deeply, in his seat. The flames wavered, flickering shadows across his haggard face.
An hour later, he was asleep like that. The thin cover in his lap had been flung up to mask his face, just in case an enterprising soul came into the room in the morning to tend to the king despite his command. The candles flickered across that, too. Another cowl across the slack faces of the dead.
Drained and empty, Loki didn't dream. There was nothing instead, barely a rest, barely a chance to escape the trap he'd set up for himself for a few hours. Here lay the new king, once proud, now lost. He shifted in the seat now and then, finding no solace.
And all through the night, the shadows that stayed to haunt said nothing to comfort him.