5.

. . .

Ago ~

Prince Loki pulled the black leather riding gloves from his hands, barely hearing them snap in the air as he assessed the growing crowd outside the sealed palace gates. They looked frightened and weary. Some had blood on their faces. Not something he'd ever seen this way, not so close to home. He turned his head slightly away from them at the sound of footsteps fast on the approach, seeing the healer Eir on the run towards him. He nodded in brisk greeting to the queen's fast friend. "I came back from my ride as soon as I heard the horns. What is this?"

"Refugees, my prince." Eir pulled herself together, the slightest bit wild-eyed but otherwise wholly in control. Other healers were tumbling out the door where she'd come from. She was a stoic in most things, reliable and sturdy, but field actions brought out the whirlwind in her. Then she was a mobile terror, high-strung and perfectionist. He realized Karnilla's distant, slow war was at last drawing tight enough now to touch, despite Odin's order to keep the family itself away from its front lines. An order that Loki knew Thor was ignoring and had been for at least two years. "Nigh two hundred of them today. I must needs sort them out, assess their health… the king's allowed me the open field of our gate for triage, and the queen says I might ask thee for help."

He wasn't a particularly good healer, but he also knew that wasn't what she was asking for. A triage clerk, an organizer, and a royal face that held command - that he could do here, valuably. Loki stuffed his gloves into his belt, looking around for someone he could ask to bring him ink and a sheaf of paper. There was a servant at the side door, wide-eyed and frightened by the noisy crowd that was even more frightened than he, and he beckoned to the boy regardless. "You've got it, lady Eir."

. . .

Nigh two hundred turned out, by Loki's first and also correct estimation, to be one hundred and eighty-three frightened people that lived along the very fringes of Nornheim. That made them witnesses to the first new frenzied battles Karnilla was giving their warriors, and also that boundary gave them a chance to flee its wildfire while they could. Loki passed up and down the neatly-organized rows, double-checking his work and doing the deeper investigation of establishing identities and what supplies he needed to arrange to make them individually comfortable until they could be temporarily homed.

Wails interrupted him as he was soothing a lone mother and her small child, her husband still at the front. He turned his head to see a pair of sisters clutching at each other, freshly frightened into tears by the healers working right by them. They themselves were fine, his notes already marked them as minor nobility and thus placed a little closer to the palace by way of a visual note for himself, but that also put them close to the emergency triage.

Eir ducked into the healer's fray from where she'd been finishing with another patient, her hands immediately slick with new blood. This was a warrior who'd gone with the refugees to protect them on their way to safe territory, though he was already badly injured himself. A way for a man of Asgard to save face before their traditions, even though those same traditions suggested not very subtly that he should have died mid-battle instead.

Loki made a face at that, then watched the darker haired noble girl bury her face in the golden braids of her sister as Eir began to weave healing magic in the air. Pretty girls. Clearly a touch protected, shocked now at beholding the first strike of a battle. Thor's friend Sif would have little time for them, and Frigga sympathetic if privately weary, but not all women could be either of them. Some people held together best they could. Sometimes that best was a bare thread to cling to, when there were hard times.

Loki glanced at his notes to remind himself who they were, looking around now and then to see if they were disrupting anyone else. Wouldn't do for them to start a panic among the injured. Lorelei, the dark haired one. And Amora, the elder. He didn't know them, and as far as he knew, they had scarcely ever visited the city before.

Loki folded his notes shut and placed his hand on the head of the little boy that he still knelt next to. "You're going to be just fine. You're safe now, right?" A small smile found an answer from the boy, and a wider, if still shellshocked one from the mother. Then he cut through a few rows to the ladies, coming down on one knee silently as they continued to sniff. "You're worried for the warrior there?"

"Oh, my gods." The blonde one, Amora, looked up from where she'd been bent over and gently stroking her sister's dark hair. "He was so kind to us all, hiding that wound as he kept us moving through the coming dawn. He saved us, he truly did. I didn't know how badly he was hurt!" She bit her lip, looking at him through eyes that were clearly blurred from tears. "Will he be well? Will he live?"

"I don't know," said Loki, forced to be honest. "This is the hard part of triage. If they can stabilize him now and then get him inside to the medical bays and the soul forge, it will look very good. But first…" He let his voice trail off, the sounds of healers muttering fast and profanely to each other replacing him. Ladylike coquettishness had no place in a healer's mouth on a busy field. He'd learned some of his best coarse language from Eir herself, on those Muspelheim stones then fraught with demons. No few of those words could scorch the tongue. "We can hope so," he finished. "We may ask the gods for their favor."

"And I do sir." Amora blinked away a handful of her tears and wiped the sleeve of her torn green dress across her eyes. She blinked again as she looked at him again, seeing him clear this time. "Oh, gods again," she said, startled enough to miss her courtesies at first.

Lorelei looked up, her round face with wide eyes and a trembling lip seeing Loki with the same shock. "Your Majesty?"

He could not hold back the laugh that fell from him with rare lightness as her sister gently pinched her at the overdone address. "Highness, little sister. He's not the king." Amora looked up, a feeble but real smile on her face. "I have seen him before, to my blessing. Majestic is our All-Father, my lord, but a touch older than thee."

"Just a touch." Loki tapped his old-fashioned feather pen against his notes. "I know you've had a terrible ordeal, but you must know you're safe now, within these gates. And that you care so much for the wounded who helped, you have my gratitude on their behalf. But please, think of their care alone, and don't share with them overmuch your fright. It will help ease the others, that strength, if you can muster it."

Amora looked stricken, a shocked light sparking alive in those green eyes, and he immediately wondered if there'd been an even gentler way to put it. "Your Highness, in such regard I thought of no one but myself!" She inhaled a breath and put a hand out towards him palm up, as if supplicating. As she did so, she seemed to calm herself. "Of course, my lord. Of course. And if there is anything we can do to help our people further, please…" She shook her head, her brows drawing in defiantly. "Our nobler kin is silent and our own father will say near as little, not wanting to draw an eye to where they all are caught in this conflict. But my sister and I will give everything, if we can but know it will help save another."

Lorelei reached up, sharing her hand in supplication by placing it atop her sister's. Charmed despite himself, Loki took their joined hands with one of his for just a moment, bowing his head politely. They might do well helping to keep the refugees organized in the next dawn, once the first orders of their bloody business was done. He noted that idea dutifully in the back of his mind, then took his hand away with another informal bow and moved on.

. . .

Loki threw the damp towel he'd used on his hair into the pile with the rest as he finished rising from the private bather's pool next to the king's chambers, remembering an age where he would have been comfortable having someone else standing by to offer him a robe or a warmer towel, or really, just to have the presence of another person. As the phantom he was forced to be, he needed to be more self-reliant than ever. And continually find new explanations for why the All-Father wanted such deepened privacy.

Grief worked well. But grief would not work forever. He had stopped wondering aloud how long he was going to win at playing this game of his, though the question still nagged the back of his mind.

He plucked up his robe from where he'd draped it across a chair, finding it cooled from the night's breeze. Loki sighed and slipped his naked form into it anyway, deciding he wouldn't spare the energy to warm it by magic. The skin along the backs of his arms prickled at the chill. The illusions he wore so much of the day were too intricate now to allow him much other use for his energies. If he pushed, his body would take the brunt of it. That would hasten the answer to quite a number of his questions. Magic was not given freely.

The black old thoughts came to him as he stepped away from the puddle that had formed under his feet, thin rivulets of water still dripping down his bare calves - if he were carrying that jotun secret behind his grey-green eyes, why did he mislike the damned chill so much? Old habit counted, by way of one possible answer, and perhaps he turned out he was even a freak of a damned Frost Giant.

He tied the silken robe around himself, knotting the belt at his slim waist, slimmer now than he'd ever been, with far more viciousness than necessary. Thor's growth and wisdom still had him upset, not least of all with himself. But it was a familiar enough anger that it might help coax him into sleep.

To hells with the gowns and the curtains. Hell with the papers he still ought look over, and the candles, and all of it he'd asked for, all what he'd taken. He curled up atop the thick covers of Odin's bed like he did when he was a child, and for once, drugged by his hates, drained by his own magic, and weighed down by the thought of the looming face of his brother, he passed out dreamlessly.

. . .

Loki snapped awake, but kept his eyes shut and his breathing just as regular as a moment before. Trained habit from years sleeping in enemy territories, and he was smart enough to think of Odin's room as the same. The rest of his senses prickled; a different lick of air across a chest more bare than usual, the whisper of something that wasn't the wispy curtain, the even vaguer, almost psychic recognition of a presence. Someone was in the room with him. By the care, by the silence, it wasn't a servant or a guard.

The nape of his neck felt the shiver first, then the rest of his spine. Loki was curled around one of the thick, downy pillows, and under it was a blade just within reach of his fingers. He was never away from at least one. There were three more in range if he moved his arm, but he didn't budge. Not yet.

He cracked the eye mostly buried in the pillow just a sliver, the curve of his face hiding it from almost all easy view, and saw the very edge of a profile near the window. Someone smallish, a lithe figure, but not much more there for him to see. He studied the shapes anyway, teasing free what he could.

Armor. Leather, black, soft, he calculated, that cold feeling spreading and starting to squeeze his heart. All black, possibly deep grey trim. Mask, wrapped fabric and more leather - wait, small motion. On their heels, light as crow feathers. Damn, they're going to be quick. But they haven't struck yet.

It's an assassin, and they haven't killed me yet.

His eye tried to flutter out of his control, full wakefulness telling him the answer to his question. Odin was the target. Not him. The figure was trying to puzzle this fresh mystery of theirs out. And just the knowledge of who was sleeping in this tower, really, could kill him deader than any blade.

Shit.

His fingers curled around the hilt of the knife. Almost silent by his reckoning, and yet he knew his nails scraped the silk sheets, just barely.

The figure froze. Beneath the wrapped fabric of the mask, he thought or imagined he saw the gleam of an eye, its gaze flickering all along his form. Now or never, he thought. Fight or flight.

Instinct and training took over for any bodily exhaustion. He slid upright in a single rush of motion, the blade at the ready in his hand, the robe whipping around him with a dip of his hip to confuse his own outline if they struck back.

The assassin dipped back just as smoothly, their arm wrapping around the side of the tall window in a hug, and they swung out into the night breeze with improbable silence.

He stood for a second, shocked. Logic said his assailant was now going to plunge to their death for their failure to strike while they could. Odin's private spire was the tallest in the palace, smooth gold along its outside wall, no handholds, nothing. It gave the king both safety and the luxury of that boldly open window with its rich curtains. But he didn't hear the rush of a body succumbing to mortal gravity.

Right. That's impossible.

The knife still in his hand, he crossed the room and leaned out over the balcony, aware that his neck could be in danger. He looked down first, and indeed there was no corpse dotting the ground far below. And then he looked left, at the black figure moving spider-like and fast away from his tower to the lower one next. Stunned, he realized they had made handholds, not found any - some suctioned tool suitable enough for even near-frictionless gold. Not mundane work. Some magic or technology baked into it. That was a specialist's device. He traced the path they seemed apt to take, towards another balcony, an empty one that led to a wing of the palace nearly as empty.

If they got away clean, his arse was still on the line. They had priceless information in knowing who slept in Odin's tower, and he had no idea if they had a network with which to sell it. He realized abruptly that he didn't know anything about his attacker. They had all the advantage against him, a thing he hadn't had to face in months.

The cold gripped tight at his chest again and he looked around, picking out a plan. Pure folly to chase their route along the rooftops and gleaming towers. That balcony, then. There weren't many other avenues for his attacker to take. If he could get past his own damned guards to it.

He spun around and dug for Odin's thicker robe, grimacing as he thought. Magic, then. A little bit of costly invisibility, just to push him through the closest Einherjar. Worth it for this. Make his way through the secret passage to Frigga's as the first dogleg of his route, then down the stairs he could get to at midpoint and on after the shadow.