19.
. . .
Kara witnessed the execution of Karnilla at dawn the next day from her place by the Queen's silent side, knowing even as Odin approached Karnilla's bound body with the ancient hammer in his hands that the old sorceress would feel nothing. Frigga bade her slip the prisoner the cloudy vial during the guard change. By her judgment, Karnilla had been broken enough to be permitted to die never knowing more pain. Most of her had already left when the Norns pulled her into wherever it was they slept and ruled over such prophetic dreams. Kara had seen the lost dullness in her eyes even before she drank down the soporific. The Queen of Asgard won the war, unconditionally.
Odin crossed the green field before the palace, the rainbow bridge gleaming in the sun behind the crowd and showering them with its light. His sons stood at the palace doors, proud and at attention. They had met the Queen at one of the forward lines the eve before as a late message commanded them to, and guided they her and her prisoner home. Once she'd seen them all safe from the thickest part of trees, Kara slipped away to ride ahead to the palace and resume her hidden place.
The All-Father lifted the hammer with its starborn heart with hands that were old but still strong and powerful, and it was done.
Messengers would ride out next to be sure the realms knew the traitor queen was gone, and in time the last rebel holdouts would dwindle. The war was now over, but not everyone would understand that at the same time. Such was the nature of these things.
The last battle of Asgard, however, came when Kara stood later, still at the side of the Queen, listening along as Odin absorbed the tale of how his prisoner came to the altar of slaughter. When Frigga finished telling him what she would, it was Kara in her handmaiden's dress that one eye stayed on.
"And you permitted my wife to stand afield, put herself in the way of danger despite your contract to avoid exactly that."
"Your Majesty." Kara felt Frigga stiffen next to her, angry with her husband. "I cannot command my Queen, nor my King. I made my recommendations known, and then I did my job at her side in the halls of Nornheim to the best of my ability. The Queen is home, safe, by my blade and my word."
"Your recommendations." Odin flicked that lone eye's gaze between the two women, all three of him knowing his anger was unreasonable, all three knowing it burned hot, regardless. "Fortunate for you she does indeed return home safe." He looked at Frigga next. "Are you safe, my love? If the Norns awakened as you both say-"
"The Norns are our people, in their way. They heard their Queen and did as they were bade." She was stone, not letting his anger touch her, her own kept bottled inside. "Kara served as she always does, perfectly, and at my command."
Odin glanced at the girl again, distrusting. "I would again have it said that, to me, the real protection would have been not allowing such danger in the first place."
"You would have me cage your own Queen?" The words fell out of her, an angry and thoughtless blurt at the way he tried to shift blame to her. She felt Frigga grab her arm, cold fingers against her hot skin. Odin stared at her while she tried to temper her tone. "Your Majesty, I could never. Her will is her own. I must guard life with my own life, but I cannot be her warden."
"I am forced to repeat my maid, to be certain you understand what you say. Would you bottle me up, like Laufey did his Queen?" Frigga's hand was still cool on Kara's arm, and her words were meant to draw his ire and his eye back to herself. "I warned you, my husband. I told you outright we were going to see Karnilla's end this time. You must not chide Kara for my decisions, not when they were made with the protection of all of Asgard in mind."
"I trusted to your wisdom, and to your cunning, as I did the last time we warred with her." The heat was on his lips again.
"And your trust is repaid in full. It is over, Odin. She is gone. Peace will return to us for a time."
"At what cost?"
"At the cost of the innocence of our sons, at the cost of traitors proving they could embed themselves among even us - which your councilors missed, even as one of our sons tried to warn them - at the cost of new scars and this anger, and now living in an era in which the Norns woke, which is always a dark tiding. I could do no else but pay my own price. With my life if it had to be, with my neck on the line. Such, my husband, is our way. A warrior's way."
Odin looked away from them both, burying his anger under the furrow of his brow. "One of those traitors has survived. We hold the one. The other is gone aground, as Karnilla herself did long ago."
"So she has. In time, little Amora may become her own new threat. Maybe she even will come for her sister." Frigga bowed her head once. "And when she does, we will see her destroyed for it. As we did what made her."
Odin grunted. Countless battles behind him that marked him a god of war itself, but against his Queen, he was outmatched. "As you say, Frigga. As you say." He lifted one hand, outreached, in supplication. "We will send another word out then. For peace. For victory. For parades and flags and for the memories of what we lost. We will cherish what we can, in the quiet you have earned for us."
"My husband." Frigga bowed her head, sounding pleased with his elegant acceptance of defeat. Kara did the same, but she felt Odin's one eye coming back to her, as ever placing the remnants of his anger anywhere else he could but where he loved.
. . .
"I never knew how easily she'd be willing to go afield. Risk herself so completely. Certainly I knew she could be fearless against any family threat, but…" Loki couldn't help sounding troubled. There were pieces to the story Kara didn't tell him, things he could sense were not his business. Private moments, memories. He could extrapolate much, but in his ears, the end of the war with Karnilla pieced itself together, mostly intact.
"That was not the first time she fought on her own terms, prince. And it certainly wasn't the last." Kara sighed from where she'd retaken her chair at the far side of the storage room, rubbing at her arms and looking tired. She managed a laugh, however, small and wry. "I was there for much of it, mostly standing interference between her and her chosen enemy. On the whole, I'm not certain if she wanted a protector and blade at her side so much as an accomplice she could rely on. And whether she intended it or not, I was also often her buffer from the king's anger."
Loki absorbed that, the room full of the soft scents of warm honey and warmer earth. "You won't believe me, but I'm sympathetic to such things."
She snorted, studying the irregularities in the rough hewn floor. "I shouldn't believe, no, but she also gave him hell on your behalf for more than one oddly similar tale in my hearing, so it passes by virtue of outside reporting. Gods, she was furious with the councilors for setting aside your missive regarding spies in the house of kings. There was a reorganization after that, by Odin's command. It wasn't all due to the end of wartime."
It hurt to be reminded of that. Hurt to remember her faith in him. "I recall some of that. Frigga personally asked for Jarl Ulf to be sent to the high table, for his service to the family." He hadn't asked Frigga to do it, didn't think he was permitted. But she'd paid attention to his tales, and that had been the result.
"She knew you liked the old man, and set stock in that. His twilight years must have been comfortable ones. A good ending for a fine old warrior." Now she was studying the candles, while he remembered the somber but also warm ceremony granted Ulf's last voyage to the end of the realm's magicked sea. He'd personally given the command to the archer and his flaming arrow, and the grief he'd felt had been honest, then. "I think his grandchildren still hold those border fields under his name. Never transferred it off to another lineage. Not common. Not entirely rare, either, but he was liked by this palace, and that meant a thing then. When the glitter and the gold was no facade."
"It isn't a facade." His voice sounded heavy even to his ears. "Never was, never is. Asgard is what it is, Kara, despite whatever's holding the throne." She glanced at him for his choice of words, but she also didn't remark on it to interrupt him. "But there's always more to it than the glory. Even golden towers cast black shadows."
That hung in the silence for a time, the air clogged thick and still with the fragrance of all their memories, of the ghosts watching them. If they judged, Loki couldn't guess what those judgments were.
"Yes. I suppose they do." Kara shifted in her chair, breaking the stillness, if softly. "What really happened to you?"
"I assumed you knew." He forced himself to sound neutral, feeling the ache.
"What, your fall from the bridge? The great family secret that led to it?" Kara shook her head, not looking at him. Her hands hung loose between her knees, and she studied faint scars at their tips. "I learned some of that, yes, ever at my place at her side. It explained a few things of old. I used to pass a lot of sealed messages between her and Jotunheim's imprisoned Queen. Others, too, and even on behalf of the King now and then, so it wasn't unusual for me to commit such journeys. But of them all, I saw the ice the most. Never really questioned it. Their warriors were our oldest enemy, and their shaman prisoner was a wise woman. Frigga would of course speak to her, try to mend what the warriors of both realms never could. I never guessed there might be another reason underneath, not then. She's come to new rule, I hear, Farbauti. I wish her well of it." A flick of her gaze, a gleam at the corner of her eye. He heard no learned hate of frost giants in her voice, itself a wonder. "But you were changing before that."
"I don't know what you mean." Liar. He didn't fully want to lie, but it was an old one that laid atop countless marks he didn't want to start bleeding again.
Kara sat in her chair, still examining the faint lines across her hands, and she didn't challenge him.
By her face, Loki could see she knew what he knew. That ached, too. The crease above her eyes was clear disappointment. The bleeding began anyway, all the old hurt, so he snapped it out. "What do you want me to say?"
"The truth is always a good start, but perhaps it doesn't matter anymore." She got up from her chair and crossed to the shrine, tracing her fingertips across a bundle of dried flowers. They sprinkled bright pollen to the wooden shelf underneath and he recognized them with a twist under his rib. "You've got your story, prince. The Queen, like everyone that's ever breathed, was more than any one person can know. I knew one piece of her, the king another, Thor another yet, and you knew your own version. Sometimes these shards overlap. Sometimes that's how we try to remember the lost, piecing together what we can until we see the whole a little better. But never all. We only know ourselves, in the end. If even that."
Her voice dripped irony as if it were that same honey scent that filled the room. "A shame you won't speak to the others who might tell you more of what you could use to honor her. Not just one bridge lay broken."
He sat there, pain pulsing under his skin. And how little do I still know of you, he could have said, but he knew the counterattack he'd get for the attempt. He'd earned none of that. They didn't know each other, because she was not just a handmaiden and he'd been a prince. And one of the few times it might have been more valuable to disobey the Queen, his mother, he hadn't. He'd done what he always did when he'd been chided, rightful or not. He buried it down until it festered. Like every scar from Thor's friends who saw him a little strange, or accidental slight from that brother that would always burn brighter than he could. Like being set aside by Odin, always questioning. Why he was never quite good enough.
No, she was right. He'd started to break well before the mirror split at the reveal of who he really was, confirming every black fear of his life, telling him he really didn't belong. All those years feeling just a little out of place, always wondering why. Until he didn't have to wonder any longer. And by then, he'd made sure he was alone to try and bear it. Ulf was long dead, the handmaidens were not his friends, nor did he share Thor's love for his shield-kin.
All he'd had were dead, dry books. And Frigga's hope.
And what had he done with that?
"I…" Loki didn't know what he was trying to say, so he stopped himself and looked at that bundle of dead fae-flowers instead. That same crack of the mirror was now in his voice, and he hated it more than he hated himself.
He realized Kara was looking at him strangely, and the curiosity in her expression was even worse. There wasn't any hate in her face. There was the disappointment, old sorrow, weariness, and even anger. But still, she didn't hate him. Like Frigga never had. This last living piece of some hidden legacy of the Queen's. Someone she'd left behind, who carried the same sorrows he held, for much the same reasons. Someone that could have understood, if he'd just spoken up. Long ago.
Or now.
Something was boiling inside him, threatening to choke. Everything hurt. He didn't know what he wanted. Also a lie. He knew exactly what he wanted. It was something he would never have, and never earn, and so it went back down in the hole and he covered it all up with what was familiar. What was safe in its way. Being alone, where no one else could touch him again, or hurt him, or break him.
She was still looking at him, and she didn't hate him, and it was driving him crazy all over again. His mind, once an ornate but effective machine, snapped and ground itself to pieces in chaos.
You need to hate, don't you understand, you need to. I am not safe. I am the monster.
"It's late, prince, and I don't expect you'll give up your end of the deal tonight. I want to go rest," said Kara, not hearing the way his thoughts roared at him. "You might as well try, for your own damned sake."
"Damned," said Loki, and the laugh rattled its way out. He slid from the boxes and stepped once towards the door, upright but unsteady. There was a wall close to his side, and he put his hand out to feel its coolness under his palm. "I'll give you something better than Odin, Lady Kara, in return for the gift of your tale."
She looked at him, and her eyes were uncertain at the changes in his voice.
"Wouldn't you rather have her real killer?" His words now turned into liquid smoke, half-mad, hating everything. Under it, the request. Same request he'd made in the past. Same thought he'd held, letting go of Odin at the edge of the sundering bridge. Do it.
"What do you mean?"
"It wasn't his fault, Kara. It just wasn't his. I'm going to tell you the truth, exactly like you wanted, and if you look at me closely you'll know it. I'm vowing you this, under the eyes of Gods, before Frigga's shrine. I'm going to be honest."
She was watching him, and something stayed shadowed behind her gaze.
Loki laughed, hollow and cracking, waiting for the second her hand would go for the dagger, and he knew he would be glad for it. His voice rang out, full of that self-loathing, that itself the granted gift that would tell Kara he spoke in honesty.
"It was mine."