13.

. . .

Kara didn't move from her chair. She seemed coiled in it, visible tension rippling under her skin like wolf fur in winter, though after a second she brought up a hand to lean her chin on it as if she held a small court of her own. "I'll be damned," she said, soft and thoughtful. "I might be regardless, but that's one bluff fair called."

Loki glanced at the shrine again, then crossed to it, looking at each of the small offerings again in turn. Wondering how long they'd been there. How many years had she kept these things, only now to leave them under the candles to honor what was lost?

"Don't touch anything." Her voice turned into sharp ice, though he didn't sense her move. Not yet.

"I won't. On my word."

"Way I hear it told from those that even now think you're dead, your word is not worth all that much." Cold, still. And that strange, flat neutrality underneath. Like a form of control hiding whatever she might have actually said or felt. "A man that secretly throws down a king, and for what gain? Has it made it you feel better about whatever it is that ails you?"

Loki ran a palm over the candles, making them flicker, feeling the heat build in his skin. "I find it curious that your first response to your discovery was to threaten and blackmail me for your own goals. Why not simply throw me down at your first opportunity? Reveal my life and my ruse?"

"Might do, Your Highness. This night's not over yet."

"But you didn't do it right away." He looked at her, closing his hand around the warmth in his palm. "You want Odin. Only Odin. Why?"

"I don't owe you a why." He could see her eyes, fine and clear, glittering bright at him at the sound of the old king's name, but she didn't move. The tension was back, stronger. "I don't see that I should freely grant you a why."

Loki licked his lips and said nothing, his fingernails tracing one of those thick lines that ran across his palm, the ones old mystics said could map a lifetime. Rot and nonsense - his palms showed no jagged falls and snarls of madness and the secret that had ruined him. Just pale flesh, itself a lie. There were a few boxes not strewn with old memories, and he found a sturdy looking one to sit on. Watching her. Recognizing that tension was entirely built on fury and grief, now that he could see her face. Only Odin, she craved. Something began to coil tight in his guts, and he think he knew the answer to his question.

She stared back, still coiled, and the gloved fingers of her other hand were dug tight against the fabric of the armrest.

"Why?" he finally asked again, seeing something familiar enough in that face to know that if he pressed one more time, she would answer him. "Why this revenge?"

Unable to resist the fury building behind eyes unwillingly damp, Kara spat the answer he expected, clawing at him with it. "It's his fault." Grief was fought back with a feral snarl. "Her loss is his fault."

He nodded, his chest tight, knowing a deadlier secret yet. "You weren't a handmaiden. What were you?"

Kara coughed out a laugh over her furious grief, brittle. "Oh, I was a handmaiden, Your Highness. Don't mistake. I poured wine and served food and carried messages and listened cheerfully to noblemen. I could dance just fine with young and frightened lords who needed a calming partner at their first king's court, and I knew all the curtsies and courtesies."

"Very well, you weren't just a handmaiden. What else were you?"

She looked away from him, staring up into the dusty corner of the storage room's ceiling as if all the past was snarled there. Having forced out the secret of her anger, there wasn't much point in hiding the rest. "I was the Queen's weapon, and I was her shield, prince. Since just before Karnilla's second bleeding war. And in her last hour where she needed me the most, I was not there. I was not there to stop that elven bastard's filthy blade from tearing her open, and it was the order and the fault of the king whose skin you wear in daylight." Her gaze crawled back to him, hot enough to make her seem on the fringe of some rational break. "Give him to me, if he lives. Keep your beshitted throne if you must, I don't think I care. And if he does not live, tell me, so I can fucking well go back to mine own life, such as it be."

Loki leaned back on the box, splaying his hands behind himself for support, thinking that of all the ways to gain the upper hand on his own safety, this was far from what he had in mind. Still - he wouldn't answer. He couldn't. The answers themselves were an all new danger if he were not careful, and he found he had so many new questions. It had been a long time since he'd looked at those memories…

She laughed again to interrupt his thoughts, wounded and brutally hostile, and then she shook her head. "My Gods. You absolute bastard. You're not going to answer me."

"Not yet," he said, temporizing, realizing he wasn't angry any longer, and only passingly afraid of the portent behind her rage. Grief hung thick in this room. That much was a thing he could still feel true. It paused him, a little, as it kept her weighted down in her own chair. "I suppose there were secrets left in Asgard, after all."

"A few. Did you really survive all this time thinking you knew all there ever was to know of the Nine Realms? Hah, no wonder you cracked whole." Another brittle laugh. She shifted, and he could see the knives glinting at her waist. The thin braided cord of a silvery garrote. Clasps and fine chains looped near to hand, and he knew Kara wasn't a fighter. Not like the warriors, not even like the sanctified Valkyries. She hunted from the dark, and she would kill if she had to strike. The Queen's blade, a careful tool meant for the right moments. No, he'd had no idea there had been such a dangerous secret kept so close to the family.

But then, for all the wisdom and pragmatic efficiency Frigga had carried within her, he realized he wasn't surprised. Memories came back, clicking into place, things making new sense even where the old hurts still whispered behind closed doors.

Stay away from my girls.

"I wondered," he said, still ticking through those faded pages. Everything before. Before the chains and the cells, before his fall, before his cursed self-discovery, out there in the grey of his mind and behind the doors where he'd tried to leave it all. "You served her a long time. Longer than any of the other girls. A few centuries at most for them, just enough to make a nice name and reputation. Like that Brigida, off with her useless merchant lord. But I remember you in the crowds, just before…" He trailed off. Before Thor's failed coronation, before Jotunheim. "I didn't know you were yet serving her at the end." When he was imprisoned. He hadn't noticed her in that throne room, the last open space before entering his cage. Odin's sentencing had been a close affair, and he himself had been, to put it mildly, somewhat narrowly focused.

Her fingers went pick-pick-pick at the fabric of the armrest, studying him, and he wondered if she snapped if she would go for his throat outright, or something just as vital and more apt to leave him without a way to strike back.

"You were there, then. When the realm thought I'd died." He didn't know what he was trying to find out. Prying. Prying for anything to help him understand, but he didn't know what he was looking for.

"I was at her side when Odin told her what happened to her son, and it was me there watching a queen grieve for months within the mask she wore for all others." Kara stared at him, still furious. "I was there as she discovered you were still alive, after all. And what harm that now meant to others."

Loki watched her fingers writhe, feeling oddly calm. Logically, the woman would despise him. Maybe even hate. He laughed once, soft, wondering how badly he wanted to be sure. One more enemy on the pile, the known quantity of all his destructions. Oh what he could say - but he wouldn't. Instead, he goaded. It was safer his way, he thought. "And now instead of protecting Asgard in her name, you'll light me on fire for your vengeance."

He saw eye teeth peek from barely parted lips. "I hardly think you get to judge another's motives."

"Oh, but as you've noticed, the throne room is mine own. False or no, I hold it, and I hold the spear of kings. Judging is my express privilege so long as I'm astride that golden seat." He smiled, disarming and pleasant and utterly false, watching her fingers fall still and not sure what that meant.

Kara sagged back against her seat, the tension fading. He hadn't expected that. She studied him with a look of raw disbelief. She shook her head again, a slow gesture, looking away from him into the darkness of the next storage room. Where she bunked, he suspected. An armory and a bedroll, and maybe a little more stolen food. Beyond that, more maze to take her where she needed. He understood now how she was slipping away. How she'd skirted him that first encounter. "You want to be hated."

Loki regained too much control of himself over the last several minutes to look stricken, but he felt the blow dig deep and sharp into his intestines regardless.

"You stupid fool. I thought you were the smart prince, gods know the queen believed it at every turn. I taunted you with it, even." She puffed a laugh, her gaze wandering every stone that made up the walls around them. "Not often I overestimate. Bright stars, is that really what all this was about? Stamp out every good memory in this place, make sure you've made every enemy, let the kingdom fall down around your ears because you got hurt?" Another laugh, weak. The hand that had been her chin's rest now unfolded to rub across her lower lip. "No one truly hated you then, Prince Loki. No one, until you decided to go out and make sure everyone did. My gods."

His fingers were cold. This was somehow out of his control again. Her hands were restless, but still, they weren't going for knives.

She wasn't going to kill him, he realized. He simply was not the target, would not become one. Unless he pressed the issue. He didn't understand why she wouldn't lash at him directly, so he watched her instead, absorbing her irritation with him until he felt as if it was his own. "I find that hard to believe."

"Of course you do. With the way you warred with the other girls alone, I always assumed you expected everyone's out carrying a grudge against you." Her hand left her face, snapping a gesture of frustration into the air.

He snapped back. "And I also find it hard to believe you think you know me even an inch."

Kara laughed, honest and light and gaily ringing it through her little lair. Familiar sound. It stung at him. "Oh, I won't claim that I know all your thoughts, but for shit's sake, I definitely know you're not stupid enough to think we servants don't notice what all goes on in the palace. You were using dozens of staff as some sort of ad hoc intel service for centuries. Not us handmaidens, though. The queen would have put paid to that."

That was true. He felt heat crawling along his throat, choking him from inside.

"Who watches the watchers? There's an obvious riddle. Sometimes it's a fat ruddy circle, Your Highness. We all watch each other. No secrets among the secret-keepers." Now Kara sounded amused, her own fury with him fading again. At least for the moment. Loki had the unshakeable sense of having lost yet another fight, set aside once again as no threat to her. "Do me a small favor, would you, Your Highness?"

He studied her eyes, glinting that faded but still watchful shade of dark blue at him, and he said nothing.

"Get out of here, now. Leave this space or I will. And bear in mind that my threat still stands, even if you should think to call the guards down here. You might have found me somehow, but they won't."

Did it, though, that threat? He licked his lips, now dry enough that he almost felt the cracks forming in the skin, and realized the anger was leaking back in. "Else what, if I don't tell you what you want? What can you really do to me, if you think what I seek is being hated?"

Kara snorted, sounding weary, and when she spoke, it was as if she was speaking to some other conversation entirely. "You remembered once to be kind, Prince. I never forgot that, either. Take that mercy back, just once, and get out of here before I change my mind."

Soundlessly, she rose from her chair and disappeared into that other room, sealing it behind her with a firm click.

. . .

Ago ~

Loki kept his hands on the maps and gave away nothing more of what he felt than a fast lick of his lips. "What exactly do you mean, there's been a delay?"

The palace messenger shifted his weight, hands clasped around the written version of the words he'd been given to deliver. "His Highness, Prince Thor, will be unable to rejoin the front for several more days, but assures his brother and camp command that he will be here before the next major engagement."

"The next major engagement could be in twenty ruddy minutes for all he fucking knows." Loki's fingers began to curl around the edges of those maps, crinkling them as his short cropped hair masked his eyes from the messenger. The new adjutant standing in the corner stiffened in surprise, but only him. Jarl Ulf, on his stool nearby, only grunted. Delicacy and royal comportment had long since begun sliding sideways. Battlefields had no time for silken language, and he was nothing if not adaptable. Loki took a breath, calming himself. It was not the messenger's fault. "Did he happen to give a reason for the delay?"

"I- Your Highness." The messenger shook his head, frightened. "I'm afraid I don't know. I was unable to speak with the prince directly. The letter was passed to me by the hand of the Lady Lorel-"

"Shit." Loki hissed the coarse word, the heat rising through his ribcage and into his throat. Anger refreshed, but under it was that acid worry and suspicion. This was unlike his brother. The front was holding, and even without immediate access to the tactician's table back at the palace, Loki's own sharp mind was managing a handful of victories he supposed he was proud of. But there was still that instinctive sense that something was deeply off, and had been for a while. It is not mere jealousy, Fandral.

Immediately after that first skirmish at the river ford, Loki sent off a barrage of missives to the Queen and to the King's court. To her, the notes on the dangerous magics at work here, observations on command structure, and coded but equally plainer versions of his concerns. To the court, his information was more terse. There was a leak, and it was in the palace, and there damn well wasn't much he could do about it from the distant camps with bandit raids and enemy sorceresses in his hair approximately every six hours. He had learned to sleep in forty-five minute bursts, and could now both fall asleep and wake up on a clipped silver coin.

The official response was a mixture of clinical concern and a more worrisome undertone of yes, thank you, we'll take it under advisement, but of course it's foolish to fear the royal house has been undermined by spies, you silly young prince. Now go off and play war like a good lad.

Parchment started to tear under his nails. It wasn't the pride in their own capability he minded, that was Asgard's way. It was the dismissal.

Fortunately the Queen's responses were more invested. He knew she was sharp, and that in the end it was her that had finer sway over the All-Father than many of the old war-band leaders.

But this, now. Thor drawn off in a rush of skirts away from a battle and all the thirst he could usually muster for it. Entirely out of character for him - and he'd been distant a while as it stood.

Something was wrong.

Loki looked at the maps and nodded, then straightened up, his face now calm. The suspicions had a shape. They had skirts and pleasant smiles and he'd dismissed it as too obvious, too simple, too loose a conjecture to fix on, but now he wondered fresh again, thinking they might have finally overplayed. Lorelei, keeping one brother from the front with a pretty lure. The better, more deadly warrior, a weapon they needed out here now, before the gathering storm within Nornheim picked out another wounded place to strike.

And Amora, who'd known almost exactly where Loki was. At the palace, the knowledge the younger prince was going to go to the front wasn't a hard secret, so he couldn't immediately put blame to her. The whens and wheres had been kept more vague, however. She was there, his last night. And few else would have had any sort of connection to Nornheim - where communication between the realms was now normally cut off.

But these magics he was seeing afield… Subtle. Powerful. Capable of misdirection and sway and a kind of deadly poison themselves. Something that might just be able to hide from him, if careful. Maybe even the Queen, unless she knew how to look for it.

Were the sisters somehow the spies he feared? And if they were, were they also something else under the pretty smiles and their attempts to court the princes? He licked his lips again, thinking of that first sorceress he'd killed. It was a jump.

But Thor's newest change in behavior was a sharp warning all its own, and his instincts told him sometimes it was better to leap.

From here, he couldn't know the answer to many of his questions. But from Asgard itself… Calm now, Loki glanced at the Jarl. "Jarl Ulf, I tell you before these few witnesses and no one else. Keep it within this tent."

"Your Highness?"

"I'm riding out tonight back to the palace, hard gallop. I intend to be back by dawn, if not earlier if my horse can bear it. I want no messenger ahead, no call to the ravens, no word to or from Heimdall, nothing. Hogun specifically is to be left out, and all my apologies in advance for that. I am acting on this not as soldier or tactician or prince, but as field intelligence, do you understand? I'll return if and when I can."

Jarl Ulf nodded, sedate and understanding. Loki had grown to like the old man very much, and as he had with Eir, Loki was learning all new language from him appropriate for those moments when elegance and finery simply would not do. Ulf looked at the palace messenger. "Sorry, lad. You're not going anywhere for a day. You sit in this tent, dead silent, and dumb as the proverbial rock."

The young man winced, but didn't argue.

"I'll get you a blanket and some mince pie, though. It's mostly fresh. Tastes a bit strong of horse."

The young man did not look any happier.

Ulf grinned and looked up at the prince, reaching out his hand to grasp Loki's smoother one as if it were just as old and strong. "Good ride to you, lad. And whatever you think you're hunting, fuck 'em, too."