11.
. . .
"Gods be good, my prince. How often must you come and visit me?" Heimdall grinned down at him, grim and cheerful both, and his teeth sharply white in the yellowed gloom. "You look weary. You look weary much of the time now." The corners of his lips deepened, widened, eye teeth glinting like the fangs of a wolf. "Does the golden robe wear so heavy as that?"
Loki looked around for the stool he seldom used, an old thing left there by the guards for the comfort of the equally old king. He picked it up and nearly threw it to its place centered before the bars and the golden field and the man behind them both, and again he felt unreality strike him as he sat down, the bars tight around himself instead. Then he looked at Heimdall for a while, quiet, his head cocked and studying the man's grinning face long enough for that grin to falter just slightly.
In the distance, the creak of old stone and the steps of guards so distant they might as well be in another realm entire. The dungeons of Asgard were good ones, even these stone crypts. No moisture trickled, no damp chill to torment the nose. The stones around them here were cool and sometimes noisy, but even the worst cell held a little warmth. Loki took a breath, holding it, remembering long, slow months. Heimdall waited in his cell now for his chance at freedom almost as long as he had.
How oddly fitting, Loki thought as he looked into those glowing eyes, knowing clearly all the ways he could be setting a trap for himself in the end. Some buried part of him wondering if he cared anymore. "You're going to tell me where my hunter goes to ground."
Heimdall blinked once, slow and unimpressed.
"They might be able to move among the court during the day, unmasked and untouchable as I can prove nothing of them yet. I can feel the eyes on me hot enough to suspect that's true. And at night, they come and taunt at me to get what they want. But in between, they've got a lair. You can see it, because you're waiting for them to slip out of it and destroy me if I don't give them what they've come for. You're going to give that hidden place up to me."
"Why?"
"Because if you do, and I find them there, and I survive what I find, I'll give you back the sky. If I don't survive, you no doubt will regain your freedom entire. I see no downsides for you in this."
Heimdall went still, paler palms pressed tight together as the strange eyes narrowed at him.
"Either a small victory or a grand one, that's your simple gamble. It will be another cell I put you in should I live, watchman. But no bars on this larger one. Only the force field, and above you, beyond another such field, the stars. In the eastern wings of the prison, where the walls begin to expand past the pala-"
"I know the cells you mean, prince. Older kings made them few for the winged ones they once warred with, to torture them with a wind they could not ride." Heimdall wrinkled his nose. "They smell fresh. The doors seal tight and the guards are silent and humorless, but the grass gets in anyway. Even the rain, just a little. Enough for that good clean smell."
"Yes." Loki stared at him, his face bare. "No weevils in the food, Heimdall, and the sky returned to you so that you may look easily again beyond Asgard itself. I am a bastard and I am your bastard tormentor, but I keep my word when I choose to give it." He lifted his chin, defiant and holding this one truth out to be seen like a light. "This is my word and my oath. Give me my hunter, now. And I will give you back your stars."
Heimdall blinked, once. Then he lifted his chin to look at the grey stones above his head, the lengthening beard along his chin veiling his expression from view. Loki could never guess what the man was seeing when he stared like that, wouldn't bother to try. He stayed that way for a minute that stretched into another and more, watching a comet or a bird or simply thinking his secret thoughts. Then he lowered his face again and those eyes met Loki's plain. "It tempts me to reject your offer."
"I'm sure it does." Loki tilted his head, ironic. Heimdall didn't need him to outline the way the bargain was weighted, and not fully in Loki's own favor. "But?"
Dark lids narrowed around that strange light, and still Loki couldn't read his expression. "There are few sealed halls in our palace. We rebuild, or let them sit empty, or find some other use for these rooms. Only a few stay locked, and often for good or private reasons. Of these, one has been cracked to make a path for a shadow who cleverly keeps their face from that sky of mine."
"Where?"
Heimdall told him. A set of passages that went from private chambers to secret gardens, sealed for royal security scant centuries hence - and nestled within them, a set of empty and forgotten storage rooms.
Loki nodded, then smiled for his prisoner, small and dour. "I would say you have my thanks, but you wouldn't want that from me me. But you have my oath, for whatever you think that's worth, and it will be paid full. One way, or another."
"I will pray for the best outcome in this matter. Prince." Heimdall bowed his head, serene and silent mockery, and he stayed that way as Loki swept out of the prison, laughing bitterly in response.
. . .
Ago ~
Loki watched the evening star twinkle near the purpled edge of Asgard's horizon, feeling the night's breeze trace itself over his bare shoulder. Without thinking, he tugged the thin silk sheet over himself a little more and kept looking at the sky instead of back into the cozier room with its single candle.
Not his room, of course. He kept an unspoken but equally unbreakable rule of privacy. One thing that was his alone, guarded jealously as best he could. He couldn't keep family from crossing the threshold, didn't try, but they all at least knew to speak first before touching his door. Palace staff waited patient before being allowed in where he kept his books and his collections, and strewn among them those magical experiments that, within the confines of the palace, only he and Frigga understood.
But the palace was vast, and a prince could call anyplace mostly private. Within reason.
Amora shifted on the borrowed bed, and he glanced back to see the curve of a milky, lily-toned hip bared to the night air, and the rest of her underneath the silk. Then he glanced back at the sky. "Most men sleep after, Your Highness," she said, amused. "Even you have, nights before this one. You seem taken elsewhere this eve, pulled elsewhere as if by an ox."
He knew where he was. Or rather, where his body would soon be once after his thoughts finished scouted that vast line of the dead and took a night's rest. The front of the war, the now-scorched roads that led to Karnilla's dug-in demesne. The boundaries of Nornheim were written in fresh blood.
He heard Amora roll over, knew how she lay on her back in the way he liked and realized that now he didn't care. "Tomorrow for you then. I know you're leaving." She sounded mournful. "Damn this war."
"Your family's information has been most helpful to the tacticians." He sounded neutral, almost cold. Couldn't stop it, didn't bother to try to fake the warmth. "It's a shame Thor is not at the line instead this season. I would be better remaining with them, the planners, but we need someone to carry the colors. Morale has been wounded too much to let the soldiers fight alone, we need the people to stay strong a while longer."
Yes, Thor. Lorelei's charms finally won his eye, at least partially, and though there had been some mutterings, he'd set aside some of his war parties and held the front now and again on Odin's word more regally than before. A small but remarkable shift. Loki couldn't put his finger on why he felt so unsettled about it. He approached one of Thor's good friends at first to ploy for another opinion - slender young Fandral - and gave up when Fandral suggested it was good old fashioned envy they were all feeling.
That wasn't it. But Loki didn't know what else it could be. Certainly he couldn't ask Thor himself - he was busy of late with one thing or another.
Something tensed hard in the side of his face, a muscle meant for grimacing, twisting his lip as he thought and chewed at the inside of it and looked out at the world he knew instead. Realizing it wasn't always as familiar as he believed, and hadn't been for a long time.
"Well, Thor is another hearty young man. If he finally wins my sister, well, 'tis what it be. As hot-blooded as he is, it's a turn he might need. Even in war, a soldier deserves a rest." A cooler undertone under Amora's words. He almost turned to look at her, settled for a scant glance instead, a trace of his eyes across hers. He knew the sisters still had their own little war between them - and he'd come into Amora's targeting the last few months even suspecting that hot jealousy of theirs might have been a factor in why she'd come to him. The runner-up. Second place.
He would have liked to have been wrong at first, but Loki found that assuming the worst preemptively soothed most wounds. It didn't matter much to him, then, the more he'd watched her bare face as she slept and realized there was nothing here he truly wanted. That he was not what she secretly wanted. Lies needed life to work, and sleep often tore away even the best mask.
Amora shifted again and he saw her, the spill of unbound gold hair across a silky brocade pillow, a lithe, bare form slipping further out from under the sheets. She was beautiful, and she wasn't what he wanted, and he suspected also that mattered very little to her for she felt entirely the same.
Something was off. He looked at the dark places between the stars and wondered if that was true, or if once again he was off, trapped out of joint, and thus overthinking a matter of nothingness.
"If I knew you less than I did, I'd think you dreamed of some other pretty girl in between these thoughts of war." The tease hid a pry underneath. Amora was a clever thing. She tried to pick at him every time time they met, tried to figure out for herself how he thought. Like he was a clockwork toy. Sometimes he even let her crack a seal of his to watch her grasp for that new information, but only small surface victories. The rest of him stayed down deep, where his doors all lined up inside his soul. If one such lock rattled at her statement, he didn't acknowledge it. The last festival and all its moments, pleasant and not, were now well in the past. She kept teasing him. "Don't tell me it's Lorelei you dream of."
Loki snorted, readjusting the sheet across him as if it were a loose, old-fashioned tunic. Finally he turned to look at her, leaning his back against the cool stone of the sill. "Thor and I are not quite so competitive with each other as you two."
He hadn't meant it as a knife, but he could instantly sense the chill that rippled under her skin regardless. A tug of her hand resettled the blanket as she sat up slightly, burying some of her curves under bunched silk again. Amusingly, Loki doubted she was aware of that particular tell. They were touchy with each other, the sisters, but the boundaries of that heat… he hadn't known their vastness. She was not the only one that pried at another's mind during these visits. Here was a clue he hadn't been seeking. He tilted his head politely, thinking carefully before he spoke. "In any case, Amora, I'm only thinking of the stars. And the war. Nothing else." Not the entire truth, but most of it, and good enough to pass.
She looked at him, artfully dozy through half-lidded eyes, and she laid back amidst the pillows again. The offer was clear, but he felt nothing he liked but that good cool breeze from the window behind him. "You'll be writing, of course. And you won't be out there for ages, I expect. Weeks, maybe. A few months. And then we can visit again." Amora paused, sounding distant. "This war can't last forever. There's simply not enough resources. I never thought a witch queen could stand so long on an open battlefield against the All-Father."
He continued to watch her, those almost mechanical thoughts of his still grinding on. No, it truly couldn't. He realized now that he wanted to go, in a way. Not because he was going to take any pleasure in the war itself, but because the walls of the castle felt too close lately and he wanted to get away. Find some open air, and stand in it a while. Feel something besides the ticking of his own mind. Pleasure had been a distraction, but only that. It left an emptiness behind, a game with no prize that would give him joy.
Amora watched him back, realizing she was not going to get anything else she wanted from him tonight, and had the art to not look disappointed. Loki gave her the best opening he could. "There'll be more in the morning," he told her. "Word from the war council. Another line of refugees coming in on the eastern road. Not many this time." He frowned and didn't say why. He didn't need to.
Amora sniffed, showing a trace of distress. "Why do innocents get caught in battle so often? Why do they pay so much of the cost?"
"Because in war, warriors sometimes forget to look for them." That odd feeling came over him again, distant and cold and alien. He glance up at the small red stars, the ones that made up the heart of some of those constellations of legends and gods he'd grown up with. "We forget, and we trample them underneath."
"Haunting words, my prince." He heard her shuffle gently, her hands finding her dress and the sound of her hair being tamed back into something that belied her secret evening. She took the hint, made it her own."I best slip off, then, and rest while I can ere they arrive."
He felt her hands pass over the skin of his shoulders, and the brush of her lips across his temple, and then she was gone, leaving him just as alone as he'd felt while she was there - if now a little warmer.
And in the sky, he didn't find the answers he was looking for.