15.

. . .

Ago ~

Loki stayed close in the shadows that night, watching the trails and keeping his own utterly masked until he knew Amora had peeled off, leaving Lorelei and Thor alone in one of the private family lounges. He could still hear their laughter, his brother chuckling broad and loud at some simple remark of Lorelei's, and he wondered if it were a true laugh or not.

Frigga had torn a few clues loose from the hidden journal. Amora was an enchantress, and a good one. The journal itself and its traps were her work, certain other of her belongings had tricks to them her captors needed to watch for, and she apparently controlled the communications with Karnilla's fortified Norn holding. Her spellcraft wasn't shabby, either, specializing in aero elementalism and not a few charm spells. As for Lorelei, with a laugh, Frigga had indicated she had actually been in the city before, roughly a century ago - if briefly, then. Trained initially as a healer and then running off back home, dissatisfied for reasons Eir and her other scholars of the art never quite figured out. Frigga suspected Karnilla in that.

Lorelei also had a specific talent she'd trained above all else, some kind of transfiguration of her voice, itself already invested with some sort of gift.

According to Frigga's warnings, it was that skill to watch for most closely. There hadn't been many notes on it, the sisters both taking Lorelei's gift for granted and not exactly writing for the spying eye. But again Frigga assured Loki that he was not handling the issue alone.

Certainly he felt alone, lurking in the hall and waiting for a moment he knew would result in the three of them, with Amora well away and being braced for a trap once he'd caused a ruckus here. But there was nothing else for it. Loki slipped closer, now seeing the profile of Lorelei's pretty, almost heart-shaped face as Thor's gaze followed her around like a puppy.

His magical wards were already in place, across his spirit, his sense of personal focus, but without being quite sure of what she was capable of, this was still going to be a risky stunt. So, there was nothing else for it, really, but to swagger in his most obnoxious of ways, as he did so well, and hope his other armor of mischievous audacity gave Loki an extra inch of safety. He looked down at himself, still in rider's leathers gone grey from road and wear, and hidden scraps of effective but unlovely armor and decided no, that wouldn't do at all.

It might be vanity, but by Gods, simple transmutations and shifts through his familiar wardrobe had been one of the first things he perfected at Frigga's knee as a child. Just not the first.

"Hi!" chirped Loki merrily, swerving into the room in a prince's regal black silks slashed with green. He now looked as if he'd just woken from a refreshing nap and was ready for a fine feast. "And how is everyone doing tonight?"

Thor blinked, looking as if someone were punching their way into his thoughts through a good dream. Lorelei froze with her mouth hung open in a fished-out, absolutely shellshocked way that Loki's memory captured and carried gleefully for years after. "Brother… I… I thought you were yet at the front?" Thor sounded muddied, as if the words were hard to string together.

"I was!" Loki clapped his bare hands together once, just as if he were taunting the handmaidens instead, watching the Nornheim girl flinch at the sound of it. "But you were unable to come and I thought, my gods, what is so wonderful here that you set down your favorite blade?" He grinned at Lorelei, manic and openly malefic, because really, he figured, why the Hel not? Get that rabbit good and spooked, just as requested. "So I rode right on back to come and see. And what do I see? Why, perfect love and perfect charm! I'm jealous, Thor, really."

Lorelei's mouth finally closed, and the color rose high in her face. "And you come to us and not visit sweet Amora first? She misses you so."

"Didn't see a need, Lorelei. Should I have?" He smiled again, teeth bared, not at all friendly. Her fingers were crawling at the folds of her dress. Probably she had a knife. It was Asgard in the season of war, everyone had at least one. He deliberately flicked his gaze to those hands, not worried about a little thing like a blade. "What would she have waiting for me? Something special, I expect."

Thor looked between the two, still fuzzy - yes, charmed - and he shifted uncomfortably. "Loki, I hear concern in your voice, but I'm not certain about this tone you take with my be-"

"She's not anything to you, Thor. Not really your type, if you'd just stop to think." He arched a thin black brow. "But in her defense, I do expect she at least knows about the pointy end."

She didn't lunge at him with the blade, but it was in her hand. "Get on your knees," she said, and her voice was raw musical threat.

Loki opened his mouth to say something sarcastically clever right back before he realized his skin was crawling like it belonged to someone else and the room was shifting perspective. Oh, shite, he managed to force through greying thoughts, realizing his knees were in fact approaching the floor, his hands resting on each thigh in easy supplication despite himself. Yes, I think I just might have underestimated this play. Please gods, let there indeed be backup not far behind.

He took a breath, attempting to focus his thoughts inward and fight back against the nature of this new type of magical charm, but he realized he was completely captivated by the high color in Lorelei's cheeks, the way her long brown hair swung over her pale shoulder.

In the back of his mind, far and wee: oh you've got to be ruddy kidding me, I am not one to be led around by my-

A sharp-toed shoe connected with the thought he was now incapable of finishing coherently, and the cool floor came up to meet his face sideways. Forget the knife, Lorelei went for brute effectiveness in the end. Entranced by the swivel of her calf under the dress and that inner part of himself screaming in absolute fury and primal pain at the distraction, Loki watched her whip around on Thor. "I need to go, love, and fast before someone else comes along to snap you out of my grasp." She reached down and kissed him, full and hard, her voice still honey sweet and full of poison enchantment. Thor continued to look stunned. "But we did have fun!"

The pain in his groin shook Loki back into some focus, and he dug with shaking fingers for one of the throwing knives he always kept hidden along his waist. Lorelei saw him move, went for another kick to his belly and he managed to roll out of the attack before it did more than brush him. "Gods, you're an annoying boy. I don't envy Amora at all."

Loki half-groaned, half-laughed, his lower belly twisting acidic offense at him with every motion. He flicked the knife out as she swept by him and nicked one of those perfect calves. Blood trail. He hoped it helped, if not at least annoyed the hell out of the girl. Lorelei stumbled, turning on him like a cat, complete with a hiss. Her own knife pointed at him again. "You stay there, and maybe I take a trophy after all."

Something rustled in the hall. A guard, maybe. But the harshness of her voice began to shake Thor loose. "Loki?"

"Thor, stop her!" He couldn't move, trapped within himself and watching that knife in her hand.

"No," said Lorelei, venom and mead, and Thor sat right back down again.

Oh, come on. Loki bared his teeth, knowing full well the trophy she had in mind.

Something clanged outside the lounge, and then Loki heard a soft jingle, like a bell. Loki realized it wasn't a true noise - it was a message-spell of some kind, hearing it as well as its intended target by chance, or by training and proximity. Lorelei turned towards both sounds, the knife faltering. "Amora?" Shouts from the windows and the fields of the palace instead of the answer she sought. "Amora!"

With that, Lorelei seemed to forget all about her groaning prey and the other prince sitting primly on the chaise as he waited for his next command. Her free hand gathered her skirts as she fled from there, and Loki was glad to see the arse end of her, and gladder yet to realize he was already no longer unwillingly focused on that view.

"Loki?" Thor seemed to come back to himself, rubbing at his head and now leaning towards his prone sibling, looking both worried and righteously pissed off.

"Hello, brother. Before you go get your weapons, could you pass me that goblet of iced mead, call for Eir, and don't tell anyone else about how I look like I'm about to vomit down here?"

"What in blazes has been going on?"

Another wounded, bitter laugh. "Well, I seem to have lost one hell of a battle, brother, but if we're lucky, maybe we win a war."

. . .

"He was right, you know. You're not very up on what else is going on around the galaxy." Kara sat in the windowsill, flipping a small blade the length of her finger as she looked out at the night sky.

Unadorned by the king's illusion, Loki sat, tired and angry, in the chair next to the broad desk. She was there when he walked in, and obviously she had somehow observed the evening's council. He could have turned around and alerted a guard, but then with that same weighty weariness that he carried from the throne room he decided why bother? So he sat instead, regarding her in mutual silence, until she chose to pick at him with sharp words in the shape of his brother. "I'm busy," he said, curt. He turned back to the desk, looking for the final night's work of authorizations and other such small reports that needed a king's pen.

"Busy at the rulership of a kingdom that isn't yours. Disregarding that last bit, I would say this is still your business." He heard the soft scrape of fabric against the sill, knew it was a shrug. "But surely it isn't mine."

"No. It is not."

"You used to be far more talkative. I can't tell if this is an improvement." Another shift, another soft scrape of fabric. "My borrowed rooms are untouched. You didn't tell the guards. Again, I cannot tell if that's good or no. It's foolish on the surface, to be sure. Curious decision."

"I'm not your target."

"No, but you're between me and him. That won't save your skin forever." In the last words, the slow, dragged out drawl of temptation. Just tell me what I want, and this can all go away. It was a pleasant lie, and possibly not an intentional one. No, none of it would. Even if Kara left him alone in the end, the threat would remain. Sooner or later someone else would find him. Thor would look close eventually, find a crack, something to recognize. He wasn't the easy, affable idiot of their childhoods anymore, not entirely. Heimdall sat in his new cell, and Loki knew he would continue to nurture his anger until he found a way to force his freedom with it. Something would be missed. He would make a mistake. He was tired, and he was beyond caring.

Or it would be Thanos, come 'round for debts and blood.

Memories he didn't want flooded into his mind and his hand jerked, spilling a fat drop of jet black ink on the table. He stared at it, seeing the distorted reflection of his drawn face, not recognizing his own eyes. They looked blackened in the ink. Broken.

A scrap of fabric landed by his hand, some torn piece of linen bunched and marked and bearing the telltale signs of having been shoved in utility pouches and belt cases for ages. "That's heartswood, isn't it? Probably hasn't been waxed in a decade. Porous stuff. It'll stain if that ink sits."

Loki grabbed the scrap and mopped up the ink without a word. His head pounded, drums from the depths of his cerebellum, the music of old screams.

"Still so tired, then." Back to that familiar, chilly neutral. Even without the way the mask muffled her identity, her cadence could change in an instant, becoming nigh unrecognizable. "Something more than the drain of magic? Most guilty men sleep just fine, I've found."

"That is also not your business." The blade in her hand might as well be digging under his skin.

"Ah, but 'twas you yourself that reminded me of my duty to the kingdom." A chuckle, just as cold. "So I suppose kingdom matters are my matters again."

"Again." He nodded, remembering what she'd said. "Her weapon."

"Mm."

"What did you do for her, exactly?" He stared at the place where the ink had been. "Where did she point a blade like you?"

It was Kara's turn for silence. He could sense her watching him, a gaze with the physical weight of granite. He thought in that silence, putting together the few scraps he had. "Karnilla, you mentioned. You came to the palace shortly before she ascended again." Loki turned in his seat, regarding her. No mask tonight, but that rounded, once gentle-looking face was a blank in its own right. He thought he could guess around its edges, at least a little. Not as easily as that white costume with its twining vines and flowers she wore once. He realized there had been a parallel there with her blacks now. Some private joke. "You were involved in those matters, then. That long ago war."

"Karnilla." A softer laugh, bitter and grim. "That overeager old bitch. Didn't know what she'd really walked into, by the end."

"With you?"

Kara snorted, disdainful. "With the Queen."

Loki absorbed that, the face of Frigga still causing a sharp, painful tug inside his chest. "Tell me."

"I don't owe you tales, prince."

"No, but I've got something you want." He leaned back in the seat, wondering what he was really trying to bargain for. Like Heimdall, this seemed right, but also there were risks to be discovered. "I keep my promises. Tell me that tale, and eventually, but reasonably, I'll tell you about the All-Father. Alive or not. To be clear, it's a conversation I'm actually buying, Lady Kara." More of the old memory struck him, and he found an echo. "I don't get many of those of late, not honest ones."

She shook her head with a laugh, unconvinced. "Go befriend a innkeeper's girl and sell her your woes, I'm not for your purchase."

"I'm not giving up my woes, they're mine and no one else's." He lifted his chin. Sleep was a long time coming, his weariness aside. The time meanwhile was his to pay with. "Tell me. At least a little."

"Why?" She wasn't angry. The curiosity in her voice was probing, distrustful.

"There were pieces of the Queen that I didn't know." He frowned, realized he'd hit on a small piece of the truth. It hurt to give it up, but it also might buy what he wasn't sure he wanted. "Give me that much to renew my memories by." A laugh of his own, small and grim. "Before I get myself destroyed."

The knife in Kara's hand disappeared. She looked at the stars again, and he could see the crease of her own weariness at the corners of her eyes. "All right, prince. All right." Her voice went soft, still cautious. "Been a while since I told a story, and never told this one. But for a king's marked head, how small a coin is that?"

"Take a chair, then. It's going to be more comfortable than that sill."

Kara looked into the depths of the room, freshly wary. "I like my safe exits better."

Loki flapped a hand. "I'll stay where I am. The seat over there, across from the bed. Won't be anything between you and that window, and I've got five full lengths to get to the door. Good enough?"

She studied the room, eyes narrowing a little as she assessed. Then she slipped down from the window, hesitating, before crossing to the narrow little chaise and sitting in it with creaky decorum. All her grace was still there, but that trained caution of hers kept her wound tight and alert.

Loki rested his elbow against the desk, making himself more comfortable. As promised, he didn't move otherwise. "And I don't expect to hear everything." He smiled, small and lopsided, realizing he wanted to grasp for as much as he could. Someone else's voice, seeing him true. Whether they hated him or not. "A good bit of wisdom says start as close to the end as the storyteller's audience can reasonably still follow the tale."

"Close to the end, then." Kara looked at the ceiling for a moment, then an improbably light smile crossed her face. "I'll tell you a little, Prince. But not all. Some of it is my own business, and none of yours."

"Fair enough."