14.
. . .
Frigga took Loki's arm and smiled for a passing Einherjar, her fingers giving him a pinch along the back of his cloaked tricep to indicate they needed to meet more privately. The guard bobbed his head and strode on, seeing nothing more than a Queen politely greeting an unremarkable young lord in lieu of the All-Father's personal audience. The lord was from the northern edge, maybe, or maybe even Vanaheim. Hell, he could have been one of the light elves for all the guard cared. The guard would forever be unable to recall anything specific, except a dimly annoying itch in his eyes. It all seemed unimportant.
She pinched again with her bottom two fingers, then let him go and continued on down the hall, her hand reaching out to clasp a healer's in equally friendly greeting. Loki knew what the signal meant. Not to meet at her solar - instead, one of the private gardens, where it was difficult to be observed. He slipped away and went dim, picking his path towards the meet, and found she had already left a wrapped parcel for him to look at. Frigga had been busy in the hour since he'd passed her a secret message of his own.
There was a note in her handwriting laying atop it. Be careful, my son.
It tingled under his fingers, that parcel. The weight and heft of a thin book - a journal, most likely. Or even, he realized, some personal, disposable grimoire. He plucked it out of the white parchment folds the Queen had sealed it with, still wearing his riding gloves from his hurried pre-dawn arrival, and glanced at the tan, unremarkable cover.
The tome seemed inert. He wrinkled his nose, then looked again with a whisper through his teeth. Still nothing. He turned it over in his hands, looking at the engraved silver clasp along its side, and he looked for a key rune among its intricate details.
There. He put his focus on the simple thing, nothing more than a line and a few swirls more striking than the rest of the decoration.
A sickly, faint aura licked along his in a defensive response and he nearly dropped the book.
"It's trapped, Loki. I haven't tried to open it yet." Frigga slipped into the garden from one of the side doors, a deep blue cloak flung over her shoulders and a shadow all around her form. He looked at her, then blinked as his eyes fought him. She shifted, letting aside her own second cloak of dimness, then crossed the garden to sit on the bench close to where he stood.
"Where did it come from?" He asked the question honestly, but he also knew.
"Amora's chambers, in line with your warnings. It was hidden, but not so well as it could have been. She expects no visitors normally, save for her sister. And they two are still out for a ride with Thor as we speak. Strange you knew where she keeps her second key." She gave him a wry smile, one tinged with knowing good humor and no judgement.
"Lucky guess," he muttered, studying the mundane lock and the curse that lay underneath it. Then he looked at his mother. "Good odds we open it and it's coded inside."
Frigga laughed, unworried. "And if it is, it'll be one of the five common whisper-codes old mages in the Nine Realms like to use when the witch-hunters get hot under their collars again. Loki, my son, not everyone is as clever and as suspicious all the time as you and I."
He couldn't resist a snort, handing the book over to her. Frigga took it with fingers wrapped in the hem of her cloak, and she whispered a few words in an elegant spell that would be decades before he could mimic, and the lock of the trapped book popped open. She scanned its contents, her face tightening.
"And?"
"And you were right. Right about it being coded. Right to be alarmed. Right to slip straight home and come to me." Frigga's voice was dour as she kept flipping through. "Second-era code-chant. Popular among the old Nornheim sorcerers that preceded what we face now. There's accents to it, so to speak… linguistic motifs I can identify."
"You learned this from her first war?"
"No," said Frigga, distracted. "From an old Norn woman that came to Vanaheim when I was little. I bargained the code out of her over years. I collected such things, then." She looked up at him and her eyes were intense. "And there's other traits to this particular variant. Loki, my son, this is Karnilla's own cant-work. A kind of private version of the language, something I did see a handful of times the last war during intercepts. I'll need to study it further, but the gist already lies plain to me. The girls are working directly for her. No intermediary. No handler."
He sat down beside her, silent.
"They are trusted close for this. Her true first act of war was not the soldiers at the breach, but slipping the girls into our home among the frightened." She snapped the book shut, tossing it onto the bench across with a ferocity that was rare, but also familiar. "Cunning little bitches."
That startled him to the bone.
"Don't have that stricken look too long, my son. Even I'm capable of feeling utterly infuriated and utterly finished with bastards and traitors when I find them under my roof. I too can be sometimes imperfect in how I phrase that anger." She exhaled through flared nostrils, her hands finding each other to begin picking carefully at her palms. "All right. I've had my outburst. Now we need to respond."
Loki leaned back on the bench, feeling the grit of the hard stone of the plainer carving through the thin leather of his gloves. In her tone was the familiar request, put the wheels and gears of his mind to the test and lay out the matter plain. "The issues at hand are sizable. There are two of them, they know not to be together long - not to mention they don't much seem to care to. We don't know yet their full capabilities, we don't know how Lorelei managed to worm her way into Thor's attention so neatly, and we don't know how they're communicating with Nornheim. Now, the basic answer to several of those is simple: Magic. We can handle that. The repercussions are grander. We can shut them down with a little study, but when we do, we have to do it fast, before either of them can send word back to Karnilla. Much less escape to her with all they've learned."
Frigga kept picking at her palms, her chin tilted towards the sky. "All good points, but let me add a wrinkle, my son - what if we found through them a tunnel, so to speak, straight on to the old sorceress?"
Loki turned his head to look at her, surprised. A direct response, subtlety left aside. The sort of thing that could end a war by striking clean at the head. "Is that even possible?"
"Might be." She pulled in the corner of her lip, biting at it as she thought. "But first we'd need the rabbits to flush out and run home to their warren. Give us the trail to follow."
"One whiff of danger and they would. They're not fighters. But not wise to face both of them together, mother, that's too much open risk to us and the rest of the palace."
She nodded. "Fair point. But my best suggestion comes under a clinging mother's old fears. I don't want either of my sons in danger."
He laughed, small and tired. "I've been afield for a scant five months and it's felt like five years. Bit late for that."
Frigga took that in, silent. "I tried to warn you."
"You did." He clasped his own hands together, a fingernail immediately going for an assault on another one despite the layers of glove that kept the habit from being effective. "It helped."
"There are no long eras of peace in Asgard, Loki. For all our wisdom and our power, the call for blood draws a kind of hunger deep into our warriors. We seek out trouble, and our men forever think to hone themselves on it." She shook her head, her eyes closing. "May this be the end of another small and bloody era, and may we have a little rest after. Just a little. I can ask for nothing more." She looked at him. "I need you to unseat Lorelei tonight, and see what she's done to Thor. She won't expect your interference, not so quick and so soon."
"Not Amora?" By virtue of the journal's existence alone, Loki realized he'd made at least one mistake. She was the elder and the leader of the pair. But something about Lorelei had given her the edge on caging Thor.
"No." She said it curtly, but not unkindly. "I've got my own eye on her. And Karnilla, too, in the end." She reached out and curled her arm around his, in her particular kind of gentle hug. "But I ask you to be careful. In this plan, I am putting you in harm's way, if only for a moment. When she breaks and runs, Loki, let her. Protect yourself and your brother first. Neither of them are going to get far. The flush of the hare is all I need." She squeezed his arm, harder. "You are not facing this alone."
He nodded. "Tonight. Until then?"
"Remain hidden and dim both, but within range of my signals. I'm going to continue to study this journal while they three ride the field near, find some clues about what we might be dealing with. Where their particular talents lie. When I know, you will know - and you take that knowledge with you when you lunge for her."
. . .
He had no interest in holding a night's court, but Asgard's All-Father had been noticeably unreliable of late and Loki realized he had no choice but to sit upon the throne and listen to Odin's council. Their patience with him was on the edge of strained as it was. While they were all loyal men who would never turn their hand or their thoughts against the crown and spear, it wouldn't take much for them to start casually bringing up Thor's coronation again. To comfort and ease the old man, of course.
Thor may have turned away from the seat of power at his last opportunity, but he could possibly still be pressured by older, wiser warriors who would talk to him nervously and in low, serious tones about the fading king and his grief for his queen. As if Loki himself had become doddering and forgetful. Tired, yes, and strained, but he refused to entertain the idea that he was failing.
There were small voices in his mind that had questions about his faith in himself, but they were behind those old, locked doors, not a few of them scarred recently fresh by events he thought about even less than his possible royal mistakes. Sanctuary, and Thanos, and all his creatures and strange family, that stayed down deep. If his sleep was further restless because of these things, he did not acknowledge that, either.
Meanwhile, he had not sent guards into the warrens that led to the Queen's sanctum. His hunter, that somehow unsettling and faded memory come back to life, had not sold him out immediately. He reckoned it fair he did the same for her. For one night, perhaps, while he considered questions whose shapes were still vague to him.
Five, maybe six hundred years since… Loki shook his head and its crown of illusive grey mane and glowered at one of the younger jarls instead of the prince, who stood in the back of the hall with a considering expression on his face. That had all of Loki's annoyance, discovering at the last moment Thor was to attend tonight. Deeper irritation nestled deep against bone that if Heimdall remained in position at the Bifrost gate, he wouldn't have been surprised.
Those same councilors that looked at the king almost pityingly glanced now and then at the prince, as if relieved by his presence. Loki tried not to snarl, realizing he could no longer ignore his brother's arrival. The bearded chin raised, formally acknowledging Thor. "You travel again. Do not the humans need their champion?"
Thor shrugged from the far end of the hall, casual if now standing at proper attention. "There is much of the realms yet to see with new eyes, and much even of the galaxy. Our threats will always be expansive, and sometimes new and strange. I have been many places, Your Majesty. And sometimes all one wants, for a little while, is to go home."
Councilors nodded approvingly, murmuring to each other.
Loki leaned back against the throne, feeling its cold pressure against his back. Is this home? The angry question threatened to come out of his mouth and he swallowed it. It was not what Odin would say - and the small voice that asked it knew that the question was not meant for Thor. "And here you are." He gestured to the council. "The wise fret and the warriors mutter. Politics, in our season of rest between our wars. It is perhaps no wonder we go for blood so often." He laughed, dour and guttural, remembering Frigga's old words.
"I suspect we are not truly in a season of rest, Father. Only a lull, the eye of some greater storm." With his arms crossed, Thor walked closer to the king, his brow creased. "Some of the places I go, we hear words and whispers. Legends of eras before ours. Patterns changing between suspicious merchants in the deeper reaches of space. Warlords seeking Death Herself, on the gleam of something stranger yet." Thor shrugged, unable to see how behind his illusions, Loki's stomach had turned to acid and ice. "That all may be nothing. But nonetheless I fear something is rising on the wind."
"So should we fret at your ghosts, meanwhile?" It came out colder than the king might have ordinarily said, but at least it was that instead of fearful. Loki's hand curled within the edge of a broad brown and gold-embroidered sleeve, angry with himself. Angry with that same warlord. This was not a topic he wanted raised. Not now, while he was tired and too many other memories rippled along the currents of his chaotic mind.
"No." That brow furrowed again, just for a moment, as he studied the king in a way Loki didn't care for. "But we should be aware. Things are changing, Father. Even for us."
"Asgard does not change quickly, my prince. We withstand, we are steel and stone. The river changes for us, not the other way around." One of the elders shifted on his bench, looking between king and prince.
"And both of those will erode in time, if not cared for. Steadfast and strong doesn't mean immutable." Thor looked evenly at the old warrior, not annoyed with him. Such had been the way of life for millennia. "We must care for our futures, and for those futures who rely on our steadfastness. And that means we must remain alert. The best warriors never rest on laurels alone. They practice. They stand ready. They keep the blade sharp."
"Does my son come home to lecture our kingdom, as if we forget who and what we are?" 'Odin' cocked his head, Loki burying his rising fury with his brother within a mask of colder irritation.
"No…"
"You are young yet, and you are not the king." Imperfect, still riskily angry, drawing the eye of Thor back towards him. Loki realized he didn't care. Still, he swerved himself away from his own traps as best he could. "You have rejected it in favor of understanding all our realms better. This is noble, and useful, but perhaps you might also recall understanding Asgard itself in such context."
"As you do?" Thor stared back at him, just as hot now, contrasting with the frozen gold of the throne under his bones. "Father, when last did you ride out to look for that greater context of all our realms?"
Murmurs began to shiver from councilor to councilor, the old men uncomfortable as a subtle war began to clash open. Thor and Odin, or Thor and Loki. The tone and the fight was the same. Loki's palms sweated ice, losing sense of who he was, what he was trying to say. He sagged in the throne instead, unsure of his next volley. He was tired, and he hated, and he cared about what Thor said entirely too damned much, and he resented that most of all. "Cold days, when we war with each other instead."
Thor stood quiet for a long time before nodding. "It's true. The old civil wars were the worst, Father." He paused, thinking. "Better we never face such things again, though neither history nor the future are ever that kind."
Loki thought of Karnilla's fate, the memories coming back refreshed, wrapped in black leather, and he stayed silent. If there was some warning, some suspicion in Thor's attack, it was subtle enough to not be found easily.
"I will think on our small argument, Father." Thor stepped back with a dutiful nod of his head. "And it is that, small. Between us is our love of Asgard above all else."
"And I," said Loki, quiet and tired. He waved off the councilors and their glances. "Let us both rest and think for a time. Enough for now."
When he rose from the throne, he felt the weight of the illusion around him as thick and real as if it were his true form, and he knew the old men of the palace watched him leave with speculating eyes.