A/N: Thank you for the kind review :)

Sorry for the delay, I got all the way through what was supposed to be "Chapter 14" only to realize that the chapter I'd planned to go after that would actually do better going before. I went back and quickly wrote this new "Chapter 14", and the original "Chapter 14" is now "Chapter 15". The upshot is that we have two new chapters rather than one, LOL.

Also: mild warning for Asgard's misogynistic warrior culture.

/

Chapter 14:

Interlude: A Lesson on Perseverance

This might sound odd, depending on what culture you are from, but being royalty on Asgard does not hold with it any inherit rights. Your father is King because he is the fiercest, most powerful warrior—or, in rare cases, the most venerated sage—but you, my friend, are neither. You have a title only as a courtesy to him. If you are a prince, this means that your father may one day pass the throne to you, if you are worthy of it; in the meantime you are just a skinny gangly youth who has not yet earned respect through prowess on the battlefield. You are certainly no better nor worse than the sons of your father's staff.

At twelve years old I envisioned myself worthy in a red cloak, and even if I had grown out of my Bor phase I still wanted to be Asgard's premier warrior. I lived for the dream that I would one day serve my father's honor in the War Council along with Father's closest friend, the noble Chieftain Tyr. One day, I knew, that most excellent hero would choose me from among all the city's warriors to serve as his War Leader. War Leader Loki, that's who I was. Being that I outmatched my brother in every way except crass brute strength, I would find glory in the War Council and retire only when Father would of course pass the throne to me in my turn.

How proud I would be, rising beloved through the Red Tower and then set to become warrior King of Asgard. I would command the most fiercesome army in the cosmos, at the head of a glorious empire spanning Nine full Realms (well . . . seven, really, but who's counting Svartalfheim or Jotunheim?). I would rule with a stern—but just—hand. I would be celebrated by legend and history. I would be feared by my enemies, and worshipped by my subjects. So, when I reached the summer of my twelfth year, Father sent Thor and I to War Academy where we joined every other boy of means in setting out to earn our place in society.

War Academy is more-or-less what you'd expect. The trouble is, knowing a thing isn't really understanding a thing. Yes, when a boy of status reaches his Age of Manhood—or soon thereafter—he is snatched from the gentling cradle that is his mother's house and handed over to the city's top fighting masters for intensive, rigorous training in field combat. I couldn't wait. Yes, the training lasts about twenty-five years. So short? Well, I'd enjoy it while it lasted. At graduation, he will be ready to fight for Asgard's honor should his King so command. Again, I couldn't wait. He will have reached his Minor Majority. He will be eligible for apprenticeship or find work as a councilor's attendant. All of that is glory upon glory. But—do you know what War Academy really meant? My day stopped being a fascinating buffet of interests from physics to Jotnar poetry and focused instead mind-numbing repetitive point.

Mock battles. Weapons practice. Hand-to-hand combat. Endurance training. Drills. Navigation. History of the great campaigns. Hero-worship of dead men. More battles. More endurance training. More weapons practice. More hero-worship. More practice. More and more, over and over and over. The same structure, the same schedule, these same activities at another person's whim, every day minus holidays for every week of every month for twenty-five years. No more poetry. No more physics. No more chemistry.

War Academy was a prison—and one whose inmates take it upon themselves to make living there Helish.

Oh, they told our parents we are learning important skills: wilderness survival, team drills, honing our fighting techniques, and for the most part that's true—but what we really learn is that your new friends will pour boiling water down your back if you cry in the sparring arena. Weakness is a curse worse than any other. Sigg Eimerson might thump your back if you call him a son of a Jotun whore, but if you call him weak he'll black your eye.

By age fourteen I had already reached the average height for an adult Aesir male, but to everybody's dismay my venerable size did not come with equivalent stamina. Worse, there seemed to be something . . . wrong with me. My lungs liked to give out if I ran too far too fast. My bones broke easier than they should have. I took longer to heal. I had to be careful with hygiene even in the field, because infection dripped from every neglected wound. I got every sickness that came around.

I was going to be King. I was going to be War Leader. When was my strength going to catch up to my height? Thor finally grew, and by our fifth year he could look over my head. When was I going to get tougher?

Loki the Sick. Loki the Snot. Don't touch him. He's w—

I was done for as soon as I figured out that playing alchemy with the opposing team's breakfast finished a battle in my hall's favor more effectively than fighting them. Retaliation from both their side and mine put me in the healing ward, where the Master of the institute refused to let me be treated so I could really, deeply learn my lesson.

You're a man, now. Stand amongst men. Manly, mannish, a matter for men. Live with honor, as men should. These were the mantras I learned. Have they sent us a boy or a girl? What is that clinging to his mother's skirts? Womanly, womanish, of women, go back home to your mother's teat. I spent the next year in more fights than I could count, and finally gave up playing the right way when playing the right way meant I lose.

Princess Loki, Loki the Girl, Loki the Snake, Loki the Sneak.

You brought this upon yourself, the matron healer said, and I hated her for it. Do something nice for them and they'll stop.

She didn't know what the hell she was talking about. Show my underbelly? Never. That's weak.

They have a right to take revenge. This was the other mantra I learned. Why do you keep provoking them?

But, but they—

Where is your honor? You bring shame upon your Father.

Sort it out yourself, Father said. War Academy is the place where we must learn how to navigate the adult world. How can you rule a kingdom if you cannot solve these juvenile disputes?

I had to win.

I had to win, or I would lose my entire future. My blood turned to bile with terror at the thought. I couldn't sleep. The other boys were stronger. There were too many of them.

I had to win.

Mother had the most practical solution. One night, she took me into her private suite and taught me the runic alphabet. Each rune had a name and thaumatological sound associated with it, and if I could learn the little twists of will the represented the sounds I could string them into paragraphs to preform a few simple spells.

She taught me a spell to make many illusions of myself, all standing together like a warband.

To deter bullies, Mother said. That should be enough. She had me practice until I could summon mirror images on command. The other Lokis weren't real, though. I'd been hoping I could make them fight for me, but the spell didn't work that way. They were for camouflage rather than attack. They stood in place, frozen in whatever pose I had been in upon conjuring them, so I could hide.

That's weakness.

I knew I would never stoop to using them in combat, but that didn't make the spell entierly worthless. I spent the midwinter holiday planting them where I knew Thor would be, because there's nothing like coming back from a run only to turn around and see three frozen Lokis on your bed diligently excavating their inner nostrils.

/

Doom weighed heavy on my soul the night before Thor and I were supposed to go back to our sixth year at War Academy. Midwinter holidays finished, we holed ourselves up in our shared suite to pack or—in my case—avoid packing. A cold listless knot swelled in my stomach, growing bigger with every passing hour.

War Academy was a black hole in the universe from which there was no escape. I slithered under my sheets only to peel my bedding aside and crawl out again. I sulked onto my balcony with a book, and spent more time making up excuses why I didn't want to read than actually turning the pages.

I ran water in our tub and climbed in up to my eyes to soak. The marble bath chamber echoed with voices: Why can't you fight like a man? Is he a man? They've sent us a girl by mistake. Let's find out.

It happened as a fire in my soul: I realized what I had been unable and unwilling to face for five and a half years. I didn't want to go back.

I never wanted to go back.

How was I going to be King if I didn't finish War Academy?

There was no way out. I couldn't just quit War Academy the way one might quit a lesson on songwriting or some other frivolity. Boys studied war. Whoever heard of a boy who couldn't fight? It would be like a girl who couldn't sing ballads. She might be ugly as a goat and cold as a Frost Giant, but if she could awe her husband's guests with tales of great warriors she was a good wife to have.

Girls had it easy. Memorize a few dozen songs and you're the grandest woman on Asgard. Charm some mighty warrior and spend the rest of your life in glory through his heroic sons. Girls didn't have to worry about being King. Girls didn't have to worry about someone calling them weak or fighting to prove they weren't. Girls didn't have to go to War Academy. Girls were lucky.

Why did girls get to be free? Mother got to sleep in. Mother didn't have to sit in a tub with her heart rotting in her chest because she was scared that she was going to fail in the thing she had wanted since she was a child.

Wea—

No. The word didn't belong to me. It didn't belong about me. Angry, I slugged out of my bath streaming water I knew I wouldn't bother to mop up. My legs wobbled. I caught myself on the tub's edge.

Weak.

I shivered reaching for my towel.

In the long mirror, across the tub from me, I caught sight of the unwanted skinny wiry youth whose muscles weren't grow—

What the holy hell—?

My fingers turned to clay. The towel slipped from my hand to flop lifeless on the tiled floor. Standing nude between two huge potted plants, my reflection in the mirror was a skinny wiry girl with sunburnt skin and a round mouth gaping wide in horror.

My sanity fell out one ear and splattered on the floor beside the towel. I looked down. I looked at the mirror. I looked down.

Eerie calm spread under my skin.

I called, "Thor? Thor? Get Mother."

Had I been cursed? This was a new low.

A few moments later—a lifetime in limbo, shivering in the wrong flesh with weird bits where bits shouldn't be and no bits where they should—my brother must have put his nose to the door because his voice sounded impossibly close and distorted. "Are you well?"

" . . . No." There was no fear. My voice came out all warbled but I couldn't stop that. Raw emotion, terrible and wild, filled me up from head to foot.

"You sound unwell." I could hear him frowning. Even through the door I could smell the wheels turning in his head. The next time he spoke, his voice was quiet. Almost reverent with worry. "Loki, have you made yourself ill?"

" . . . No."

He tapped his knuckles on the wood in a tentative knock. "Let me see."

"No."

The knob shook.

What was I going to do? There was nothing else for it. I shimmied into my clothes and opened the door.

Thor said, "What are you doing in here?"

"Turning into a girl?" I pulled my shirt tight around my chest so he could see.

His eyes got huge. His left foot crept backward, like he wanted to bolt. "Is this more magic?"

"No. I don't know. I don't think so. I think I'm cursed."

He started laughing. His panicked, breathy giggles snapped a tension inside my chest. After a few sputtering heartbeats, I joined him.

"You—" Thor said. He put a hand on my shoulder. My slender shoulder. He patted my collar, either to soothe me or himself. Possibly both. "You—you can't go to War Academy like that."

"I know." Muffled terror sparked somewhere under my ribs. Terror, and something poisonous and sinister. "Will you just tell Mother? She might know a spell to put me right."

His brows twisted together in a stern face destroyed but his ear-to-ear grin. "You shouldn't have been playing with her magic."

"I don't think it's me. I think this is somebody's idea of a joke. I can't even do anything with magic. Mother just taught me a stupid spell to make clones. Nobody turned into a girl by making clones."

"That you know of," he said.

We burst into nervous laughter again.

"Nobody!" I said. "Clones are just . . . clones. They don't even talk. They're not really real. Just shadows. Anyway," I added, because he still looked like he had a lecture burning a hole in his tongue between the giggles, "there are men sorceresses. I've seen some. If there are men sorceresses, magic can't turn a person female."

"Male sorceresses do not count as men," Thor said, but he began breathing easier.

He got Mother. Mother brought Father. For some reason, the sight of their second son lounging on his bed as a girl did not horrify them. Father's expression didn't turn thunderous. He didn't swear oaths about someone shaming the House of Odin. Mother didn't weep. Father nodded calm dismissal at my grey-faced brother and shooed him away easy as he would a servant. Mother closed my bedchamber door.

"Are we going to talk about periods?" I said.

"Loki." Father hesitated. He looked like he wanted to say something difficult, but instead he merely asked: "How did this happen?" so I took them through the past twenty minutes, skipping the part where I didn't want to go back to War Academy.

Mother and Father shared a glance.

They still weren't raging.

Father sat down on my bed with me. Mother gave me a hug and told me she loved me. Father seemed to be warring with himself about something. He looked at me for a long time without speaking. Then he gave up whatever he'd been thinking about and wrapped me in his arms too.

Father said, "I could try to force your shape into that of a boy, but I think you need time to work out how you changed so that you can change back if this happens again."

"You think I did this?" I recoiled from their duel embrace.

Father ruffled my hair. "I don't think on purpose, no. Your mother tells me you have great innate ability in magics. That doesn't surprise me. Your father was a skilled magician, in his time."

"You're still a skilled magician," I said obediently.

Father rubbed my back. I threw my arms around him.

This was what I had been burning under, in War Academy. The unspoken adult fear that their love for me might be gone, that I would reach for Father and he'd tell me to stop embarrassing myself. Grow up. That I might have never gotten to hug them again, that Father would never let me sit with him while he worked again, that Mother would turn her attention to other things—who would want to live like that?

Father let me go, helped me sit up. "Stay home for the next week. I will write to the Patron Master and notify him of your absence."

"Yes, sir." I didn't dare show any of the sunlight beaming through me. It wasn't victory, but it was a stay of sentencing. Suddenly, the sinister feeling had a name: relief.

Relief at a cowardly, unworthy thing. What kind of man took solace in hiding? Was I weak? What was I?

King.

Maybe it was all right that I wouldn't be the premier warrior, but I would still make Father proud. How could I not make him proud, when he had done so much for me? I was going to win. I had to win. It didn't matter if everyone at War Academy shunned me, I would make myself worthy in his eyes.

I would not lose my entire future.

I would rather die.