Annnnd here's the other chapter.
/
I spend a solid forty-two hours building my own pyre boat and rallying kingdoms around the blaze. Loki the Vile has betrayed all of Yggdrasil for the greatest enemy our realms have ever known; no, Asgard will not sit still for that.
The High Council petitions his father the King—or, Odin, at any rate—to Unname "the Traitor". With the public clamoring for blood at their side, I have no choice if I want to maintain my cover but sign the damn documents. Loki is stricken from all records, blotted from his family line, made nothing. In Asgard's eyes he is no longer capable of owning land or thralls, unfit to find employment, unfit to wed. He has no ancestors. He is no longer a person. Legally, he is nothing more than a walking, talking, bag of meat. It's ironic, but hatred for "the Nameless Wretch" is what motivates Asgard to do what I need them to do . . . to protect myself. Thank you, Asgard.
Alfheim, meanwhile, has slotted into place with promise of my erstwhile brother's hand. All that remains to secure this bond is the wedding itself, which means recalling Thor from his happy mortal honeymoon to palm him off with Smirna—who hates him. Destroying Asgard-Midgard marriages is becoming a time-honored royal tradition, it seems.
Nithavellir, on the other hand, is doing everything in its financial power to help solidify the inter-realm alliance by contributing the absolute minimum required not to make Asgard declare war on it instead. If I hadn't already taken a downpayment from them by way of sending Black Tower guards after a suspected pirate fleet on its way to the Fringe, I might be seeing a darker shade of red than I am. I am worried, however, that this minimum-contribution plan is evidence of worse than greed. Nithavellir has no forthcoming wedding to bind their fate with ours. Nithavellir is a free agent. They could be planning to betray us.
So. In between all the logistical puzzles that go into planning a four realm joint invasion, plotting to stab my not-brother in the heart—enduring Frigga's sour mood because I erased one of her sons and engaged the other against his will—, and keeping one eye on King Nibelung's court . . . there is the actual matter of going to war.
The two Councils vote to annihilate the Chitauri Hive, rather than negotiate a surrender as we did with Jotunheim so long ago, and I am more than happy to stamp this decree. Chieftain Tyr advises me to make our genocidal campaign twofold: first, a ground force will drive the Chitauri to Vorsgard's surface, then an aerial fleet will smash the survivors. I opt to command the fleet. Thor can lead the ground force, when he returns. Thor is good at that kind of thing. However. All this planning leaves aside one very important problem. Vorsgard has a single drop point due to its ward system, and the Tesseract could be anywhere on or under the planet's surface.
Asgard usually relies on the Black Tower to solve these issues. Aesir and Vanir mages can pinpoint a powerful magic artifact, which in this case would give our invasion a specific target to aim for. Thanks to the spy in our ranks, I can't have the Black Tower privy to martian details. I don't want to worry that the coordinates they give me are a trap. But shunning the Black Tower means relying on Elven mages. The Councils like this idea about as much as if I'd asked Laufey's sons to supper. When I further tell them that upon recovering the Cube I will hide it from us and from everyone else at the farthest edge of the Universe . . . they—
Hmm.
They submit a mass-approved petition to my personal desk. Tyr tries to corner me. Odin-King does not have the right to steal the Tesseract from our hands. Not when the weapons vault is gone. Jotunheim has the Casket, the Chitauri have the Gauntlet and the Tesseract. We need whatever advantage we can grab now that we will go follow our invasion by war with the Frost Giants.
Assets, Lord Aumdyn repeats ad infinitum. Assets are important. Assets win wars.
None on Asgard understand what that blue cube does. It isn't a weapon, or a power source—like the mortals thought. I cannot let Asgard have the Tesseract. The Tesseract would never stay on Asgard. Someone somewhen would make a powergrab, and that would be that. I've got to find time to plan my flight with the Cube. If all is successful I've got to snatch it and go before anyone figures out what I'm doing. But if tomorrow's joint invasion fails and Thanos's curse is broken, we need to mount a fight for our lives.
The Tesseract is an object, infinitely powerful, able to render faraway visions or tear holes in space. Imagine a sorcerer having the power to spy undetected upon his enemies. Imagine seeing what plots the rebellion is up to just by willing it. One could march a legion to war with no more effort than crossing a room. Infinite teleportation. Not sorry world-gates, a handful of Jotnar or Aesir at a time. Imagine teleporting an assassin into your enemy's bedchamber past any wards they care to construct. Imagine teleporting the enemy army from the battlefield into a volcano. Such a sorcerer would be a god. We're lucky the Chitauri aren't sorcerers. And Thanos never showed the Other this power.
Thanos showed me the truth. He showed me many truths.
Some grisly eternities into my stay with the Chitauri, he had me brought to his private sanctum in a palace built from space debris. For the first time since my rebirth I had darkness, cool soothing air, no watching eyes. Thanos did not touch me. He let me rest, strapped to my pallet in one corner, while he worked nearby. My life had ordinary sounds again: data canisters and soft voices, quiet meetings, lunch. He gave me food every time someone brought him a tray.
He spoke to me, too, until I uncurled from my hiding place. He asked for my opinion on this public matter or that, as if I were anybody.
I loved him.
And yes—He told me about the Tesseract, because he was a prisoner just like I was. The Tesseract was his window. Even from afar he could use it to conjure images from other places. He showed me how it worked: There were battles raging on worlds I'd never heard of, and we could be a private audience to people I'd never met dying by the thousands. He could slither into anybody's life he wanted. We watched the universe dance like a pageant show of private horrors. We watched War, and
I should have taken the damn thing with me when I raided Odin's vault, but the thought of touching it makes me feel deeply unclean. There is no water in the cosmos that can wash away all the faces I've seen through its lens in Thanos's sanctum.
With the invasion drawing near, memories meld with nightmares and I wake up shivering in sweat and worse, torn in a warped dreamworld that doesn't entirely abate once I figure out I'm still on Frigga's divan. I see faces in the mirror that aren't mine. I forget where I am. Sometimes, I wake up in places I know I didn't go to sleep in. I find myself standing in a corner with my head against the wall, wearing my original face and not Odin's. During the day, my heart starts pounding hard in my chest and I can't get enough air. My chest and brain do not belong to me. They are a separate parasite inhabiting the space that used to be mine. I have to cast silencing spells least I rouse her from her bedchamber down the hall, or draw the guards for the noise I make.
It is a terrible thing to not be in control of your own body. I fear sleep more than I fear the spy in our midst. A spy must play her part in the same way I'm playing Odin—we are kindred, she and I. I can shunt aside our magic-casters and pretend it's in shame for my Unnamed ex-son. I can't shunt aside my nightmares.
I can't let Frigga know about this.
I can't let anyone know about this.
Odin-King shouldn't be white-faced from insomnia, trying to keep his heart from exploding. He shouldn't be pacing the Royal Tower, invisible, hiding from the patrols as if they are his captors and not his trusted defenders.
Tomorrow's invasion may be eating my schedule and weighing on my nerves, but this sleepwalking thing and panic-y thing needs to stop. I have to visit Eir.
/
The Healing Tower is shoved as far from the council towers as one can get without leaving the palace. Guest halls, kitchens, servant quarters, storage, barracks, the royal tower, the royal library, more kitchens, more servant quarters, and Frigga's indoor garden all separate the War Tower and its lesser twin, the High Tower, from having to acknowledge that we Aesir are not truly immortal. The walk from one side to the other is a tedious humiliation, mitigated in my case because I could always pretend I'm really heading to an important meeting with the King or to my favorite pastime-cum-sanctuary, the library. I'm not the only one who does this, either. I used to have fun inflicting my company on any councilor or warrior heading "to the Royal Tower" with his back unusually straight and a thousand-yard stare. My walk from Odin's private suite to this place of shame passes in furtive isolation, thank the Fates. Odin-King has even less room for weakness than the Vile Traitor did.
The Healing Tower itself is a dark maze-like structure, built so that patients can be shuffled out of sight upon entering lest they compound the ordeal by coming across anyone they know. Drab stone walls lit by torches give the place a sober, silent heaviness. The healers dress in grey to be unobtrusive and are strictly female-shaped persons, that everyone's pride remain as intact as possible. No male-shaped persons are permitted to work here.
I-Odin-King am ushered behind a wall into a receiving room by a red-cheeked grey shadow, who assures me with her head down that the Matron Healer will be along in a few moments. When Eir does step into sight with her equally drab, sober brown hair piled upon her drab, eternally-scowling head, I throw on an affable grin and say, "On Alfheim the Healing Tower is a sunlit, open-air conservatory full of children's laughter and song."
"Perhaps Your Majesty would prefer the healers of Alfheim," Eir retorts. Her unimpressed expression never falters.
O . . . kay then.
I resist the automatic twitch that tries to hitch my mouth into a disquieted smile. There is one thing you can say about Eir, however: because she so obviously doesn't care, it is easy to believe that she will not breathe a word to anyone about anything admitted to her in private. The Healing Tower is a crypt of buried secrets. I should very much like to plunder the vaults, one day.
I compose my face into a belligerent Odin-scowl and say, "I cannot sleep without waking up in other places. Both in the real sense and . . . otherwise. In my head. My nightmares intrude into reality." I am oddly detached, telling her this. As if I'm relating someone else's troubles. I take a breath. "There's more. There's . . . something wrong with me."
"Wrong how?"
"I don't know. I'm living two lives, somehow. The one where I'm here, and the one where I'm . . . still somewhere else. I think the most urgent solution I need is an ability to sleep through the night in one place."
Eir skips over the prickly taboo of my confessed weakness without so much as flinch. She says: "I have a potion to numb your memory and one to cauterize the wound. Which would you prefer?" and that's the end of it. No startled frown. No embarrassed smile. She doesn't ask for more information. This is why I've gone to Eir, rather than Frigga. Frigga could make me a potion, but Frigga would also make the aggrieved face she's been wearing a lot around me of late.
"Not a sleep aid?" I say.
Eir considers me for a full half minute in silence before jerking a hand to indicate that I should follow. She leads me through more twisting, turning, branching, fire-lit passages to a sad brown healing room with a single white table.
The table is a soulforge.
I freeze on the threshold. I cannot let her use that on me.
Eir says, "First I am going to make sure that the problem is not magic-based. Could you have been hexed, or the target of—"
"No."
Eir switches on the soulforge with a wave of her hand. The instrument hums to life. Bright flame-colored stars rise from the glowing pearlescent surface, rippling into a spectral graph that maps first the spell used to wake it, then residual magic evaporating from Eir's palm.
"There is no need," I protest. "The cause is not magical."
"It's a precaution, Allfather."
A precaution that will show her my face is an illusion.
"I know exactly what happened," I say. "I am merely looking for a solution."
Her unimpressed scowl flattens into irritation.
I take defense in Asgard's machismo. In Odin's fiercest voice I say, "You will stop wasting my time. There are four royal courts in this city all vying for me at once. Before this day is through I must attend six different meets in two different towers plus the royal hall and private council room, inspect Alfr's newest military advancements, make sure Nithavellir doesn't try to cheat their contribution to the war, sign off on Vanaheim's reshipments, deliver a rousing rally-speech to the common people, apologize for a tax-raise upon said people, inspect our dark energy generators, and plan an ill-timed wedding for my absentee mortal-chasing son."
Eir turns off the soulforge. I hide a sigh of relief.
She gives me a hard look. "If magic is involved, any potion I give you may mix with the effects in dangerous ways."
"Fine," I say.
"It may cause you not to sleep at all, or muddle the line between waking and sleeping."
"There is no magic involved."
If Matron Eir had emotions, I get the sense she would be smiling. Instead, Eir studies me as a person removed from the social and political context: with an expression of purely scientific fascination. She says, "I am concerned about prescribing you a sleeping potion if you are having nightmares. You may find yourself trapped in a frightening dream and unable to wake. I would rather treat the root cause with a potion to cauterize your mind or a potion to numb the memories responsible."
"What that they do?"
"The cauterizing potion is for cleaning and sewing wounds shut," Eir recites. "There is pain, but sometimes pain is good. Wounds itch when they heal; this is how we know we are getting better. The other one, the numbing potion, is an anesthetic. No healing is involved."
"Can't I have all three? A potion to make me sleep, and—"
"No."
"What if I take one now and the others later?"
Eir's frown deepens. She folds her arms below her thin bosom. "If you anesthetize what's troubling you, the cauterizing potion will be unable to find a wound and its effect will become generalized. Rather than integrating your healing wound into a control matrix, it will completely rewire your mind."
According to Thor and all of Asgard, that might not be a bad thing. "Cauterizing first?"
"The anesthetic will interrupt the healing process as soon as it is applied."
Damn magic. I say, "How about if I use the anesthetic for now and take an antidote later, when—"
"Antidote?"
I blow out a breath.
Eir withdraws a small booklet and taps the top page with a stylus. The dark, secretive room magnifies her impatience into fractured echoes: tap ta—pta—ptap-p.
"Just the sleep-aid," I say. "Thank you."
"My healers will have that prepared by this evening. You should take it no later than moonrise, if you want to be alert for battle in the morning." Without shifting demeanor even the slightest bit, she adds, "those admitted into the Healing Tower are not permitted to visit with others seeking treatment, but I will allow you to see to your wife if you wish. She is in the next wing."
"Frigga? Why is she here?" Delayed, introspective backwash makes me very glad that I stopped thinking of her as Mother. Eir might be a social and political null, but she isn't stupid.
The sour-faced Matron puts on a smile. Her smile isn't quite natural, and anyway I can see the strings. "She's fine. It's a routine examination. Everything looks nice and healthy. We're about fourteen weeks along."
"Fourt—" my brain catches up with my mouth, and punches me in the face. "Child?"
"Everything's fine. You shouldn't worry so much."
"Take me to her."
Eir leads me through winding, dark corridors to the Women's Wing, which is not as harshly gloomy or furtive as the rest of Healing Tower and so naturally a subject for derision. Frigga is in a private room on a scrying table, which makes my skin curdle just to see. My indomitable ex-mother should not be mapped or prodded.
She sits up in alarm when she sees me.
"Thank you, Eir," I dismiss the Matron Healer. "Leave us in private."
"Your Majesties must sound a chime when you wish for escort from the tower," Eir warns, and flits out as one ghost from another.
I shut the door.
Frigga draws in a startled breath.
I can't help but stare at her, sitting there. The make of her gown hides all indication that there is a knot in her belly.
"You are really with child?" I blurt.
Frigga nods.
Another sibling. I am stuck, dumb, by the door. My hand still on the knob. I used to wish for another sibling, long ago. For some reason the picture in my head looks like half-Thor and half-me, which, on second thought, doesn't actually make sense.
Odin Allfather's last child.
Odinsdottir. Or Odinson.
It is a reverent horror, gazing at Frigga and knowing whose life is blooming within her. Did Odin fear for his wife and unborn babe, when he faced me back on Svartalfheim? I'm sure he did. What panic must have seized his chest, after the Einherjar guard vanished and the Unnamed One appeared.
He never understood me at all.
I let go of the doorknob and risk a step farther into the room. "Is it . . ?"
"It's a boy," Frigga says.
Blood rushes from my head until the room swims. "That child will be King?"
"Yes."
"What is going to happen," I ask, meticulously, "when it comes to light that Odin-King has a third child? You made me vow to come out from hiding and stand trial. You must retract that. No one, not even the King, is permitted more than two children."
Frigga shakes her head.
Stubborn, witless honor.
"Thor has abdicated the throne," I point out. "The Nameless Wretch is not a contender. This third—"
"Please." Her face is so pale she's ghost-like. "Don't."
"You know I'm right."
She shakes her head. "You should not have done that. Why did you do that? Odin would not have Unnamed you."
"Yes he would have."
The regret in her eyes pulls ripcord in my heart. Frigga holds out a hand for me. I entwine our fingers.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"Release me from my oath." I kneel so she has to look me in the face. "Once we have ensured Thanos will not escape, let me leave the city in secret. You have two children: Thor and—and that one. There is no crime committed here."
Frigga strokes my hand with a thumb. "You vowed to stay until Odin returns. Odin will decide that to do. You are my son; I will not let you break your oath."
"Fourteen weeks?" I repeat, examining her middle. I remember being with child.
"The gown hides it." Frigga smoothes her layered finery.
"Does Thor know about this?"
"No. Just my husband, and Eir. And you."
And select member of the Hall of Judges, I'm thinking. But he didn't tell you that. How else, in this day and age, could you accidentally get with child?
To you it was accidental. Possibly. Unless you're lying to me again. To him, it was planned. He needed a second heir. He'd already written me off; I was slated for life in prison; if Odin-King made an appeal to father a third child Forseti would have given him permission. He must have known you would balk at so publicly disowning me, so he kept it from you. Considerate, wasn't he?
I clasp both of the Queen's hands in mine. "Listen. There must be some legal loophole we can exploit. I can speak with Forseti about it, if you like."
"Do not tell him."
"Wha—?"
"I wish you had consulted me before naming yourself accomplice to the greatest evil our realm has ever known, but I can not let you burn yourself alive." Frigga squeezes my fingers. "Loki. This burden is my own. You will not tell Forseti that this is my second child, you will not tell him that you are dead. I hope this invasion is successful." She grips my hands, glares at me. "I want you to step down a hero when my husband returns. I dreamed last night that you saved the kingdom. I was so proud of you. In that moment, all of Asgard and Vanaheim knew that you had traded your freedom for their lives and they knew that it was you, not Odin, who stood before them. I want that moment. I want to be there to watch that happen. You saving the entire court as Loki, as a hero. I will pray every day that it does, so do not add more wood to your pyre."
I give her a smile, because I have no words for that sentimental rubbish.
Frigga draws me close and plants a dry kiss on my forehead.
I won't embrace her.
She kisses me again, tugs my chin like I'm a child, and summons Eir.
I go through the rest of the day in a terrible humor. I can't shunt Frigga's pregnancy from my mind.
She is with child, I think while the common people applaud my speeches. King Nibelung presents me with a treatise on why Nithavellir's financial and military contribution to our alliance is twelve times lower than agreed upon—ha-ha, isn't that fine, Allfather? I pass this suicide note over to Svaldir and Forseti for prompt legal ravaging.
She is with child.
The Vanir delegation is just as bad, albeit in a different direction. I want to drop them into the Void rather than listen to one more person ask what it was "the Unnamed Creature" stole from the vault.
I remember being with child.
Children grow faster than should be allowed. Children make even the most invincible hearts mortal. If my death didn't break through Frigga's serene composure, her new son's birth will crack her mask in two. I wish he would go away. I am a ghost inhabiting another person's body. All that's left of my life is filling in for Odin. My reward for success is that he gets the credit.
Queen Daina of Alfheim seems to think the entire war is a joke, which is somehow worse than Asgard's ecstatic hate, Smirna's snide comments about her looming farce of a marriage, or Nibelung trying to wriggle from my hooks. I can't tell if Daina doesn't believe my reasons for a joint invasion, or if she's just being a shit.
Frigga is with child.
Asgard is going to love him, whoever he is. Her new son will be a golden-haired, pink-cheeked glory. Frigga's unborn child replaces me. They will sit out on the balcony in the afternoons when he's finished with his studies. She will read to him now, instead of me. She will teach him how to cultivate life from warm rich dirt. He won't need to care about me one way or the other—I will be long gone by the time he is born. He will be blessedly impervious to my existence. He will be the hope of Asgard.
I wish I could start over as Frigga's new son.