When I climb the stairs to Odin's solar I find Smirna waiting for me at the door. Her moon-bright skin and dark amber eyes set her apart from the Allfather's clinically bland corridor—but less so than the gown she's wearing, which looks like ropes of seaweed dribbling from her scalp. Seaweed made from thin ivory beads that give a slithering hiss every time she moves. Elven fashion at its finest.

"Yes, Princess?" I say.

"I hope this is not interrupting." Smirna's tone is light, but I don't trust that at all. Smirna is like me: she learned her courtly lessons a little too well. "I spoke with my mother who is Queen after our meet today. She gave me permission to say what I am saying to you now, so I apologize for the late hour. Certainly Odin-King Allfather must get to his supper."

"That's all right." It's been a very long time since I've seen Smirna, today's fancy notwithstanding, even now that she is to be Thor's wife. She is every bit the pretty, polished young woman I knew. Something relaxes inside my ribcage. I'd been afraid that in returning from the Void I'd find my childhood playmate changed, that Smirna would be as different from my memories as Thor. I don't know what to make of my calm, thoughtful not-brother. Smirna had perfect.

She takes a breath, but doesn't speak.

I say, "It's all right, Princess. Please speak whatever is on your mind. The eve of battle is no time for secrets."

Her dark amber eyes flick up to mine. She straightens her shoulders. At full height, she is almost half a head shorter than I am: a compact, composed soul. "It is not good to have secrets before battle, yes. That is why I have come. Odin-King Allfather, our Queen might have played you otherwise but Alfheim's loyalty was already assured before you sat down to speak with my mother. I do not want this wedding."

"Thor may die tomorrow," I say, to see what she does.

"I am not won with sentimentality." Smirna's grey lips quirk in disgust.

"You would be Queen of Asgard."

"I do not want Asgard." She says, "Your—" and looks away. When she meets my eye, her gaze is frosty. "The Unnamed One won Alfheim's loyalty long ago. I would sleep easier tonight if I knew that when we fight tomorrow there is no weighing supposition that I am to marry Prince Thor."

A warm glow sweeps up my spine. In that moment I want to take her somewhere else, possibly to the Fringe, possibly into hiding. She and I could eke out a life away from her realm and mine. We could spend centuries in a palace we'd construct wherever we choose, studying books and playing puppets with the great civilizations. No one could bother us. We would be the King and Queen of our own private universe. That would be a good life, I think.

"Granted," I say.

She inclines her head, and her beads slither wordless music.

"Is that all, Princess?" I murmur.

"Yes. Thank you for this hearing, Odin Alfather. Good night."

"Good night, Princess."

Smirna drifts toward the stairs in a gentle percussive melody. The white noise jingle of her gown is like falling rain.

She is an anchor in my mind: then, and now. Unchanged.

Possibly, when the war is over, I will reveal myself to her. I don't know what might come of it, but I should like to find out. I have four thousand years left; I am young still; this may be exactly the mistake I need to put Asgard behind me. I'll just have to find another hell to giftwrap for Thor.

On second thought, I don't really want to go to my solar. Being alone with my thoughts is not a good thing, right now. I might get lost. I'd rather have supper and go to bed. Have supper, collect Eir's sleeping potion so I don't wake up tomorrow in a populated hall wearing my old face, and go to bed.

When I return to the royal suite after a long, horrible day there are savory smells coming from Frigga's rooms. A dozen odd aromas fill the entry hall with confections that are not simple, flat Asgardian fare. I shut my eyes to better enjoy. What has Frigga ordered for our evening meal? She would not be so coarse as to attempt buying my forgiveness with tokens. Possibly she feels tonight is a special occasion because I will be making her proud in the morning.

Two guards throw back the outer doors for me, and I stride home with my spirits floating above my head for the first time in . . . alright, with my spirits floating above my head while sober . . . for the first time far too long. I will be commanding Asgard's fleet. Smirna doesn't want to marry Thor. This supper isn't Mother's plea for forgiveness but I forgive her anyway; even pregnant with The Whelp, she is making a stand against her King by refusing to forget me. She and Smirna are the only people in Nine Realms who give a damn that I lived at all—That's worth a lot, nowadays.

I slip through the dining hall's double door into happy torchlit celebration.

"Father?" Thor says.

Spirits, meet floor.

Damn.

Frigga is standing behind her son, one hand on his shoulder; Thor regards me with clenched jaw. His eyes bore into mine. Jane stands up from where she's been sitting at the dining table's far end. She looks like she's going to bolt if I make a move for the guards.

Looks like I've spoiled Thor's happy Loki-free reunion. Clearly, they hoped I would be returning later than I have.

"Odin," Frigga says. She is curt, polite. Distant. "Thor has brought Janefoster with him. Please tell him that you do not mean to follow through with the sentence you put upon her."

The table is set for three. Delicious-smelling dishes have been scooped onto three gold plates. Three wine goblets loiter around the table's foot—two untouched and the third almost gone; Jane's face is pinker than I remember.

"Father?" Thor shifts his weight from one foot to the other on the Alfr rug.

Oh, he doesn't really think Odin means to execute his mortal even after we removed the Aether from her; no, no. The proper translation for all this tension is: Odin, remember how you got a sword up your arse every time your Unnamed princely son disappeared with a mortal commoner? Please reassure Thor that it's all right for him to bring his mortal commoner into your royal suite. Thor is not the Nameless One, so let's make nice with Thor's mortal wife. Thor can do whatever he likes and we'll throw him a feast for his troubles. Yes?

Hence Frigga's silent, pleading frown.

I could walk back out the door. I could go back to Midgard for a drink. Why couldn't my not-brother have swaggered home tomorrow?

They are all waiting for Odin-King to say something. I have to say something, or I'll stab my cover in the neck.

Don't feel. I blow out a breath. I force my comfortable slouch into the Allfather's blocky stoic posture. I give Thor a good hard look with my illusion's working eye.

"The sentence will not be carried out," I make Odin say. "Tell me, son: Why is the mortal here?"

"Thor said you have some kind of war going on," Jane blurts out. She glances at Thor, who gives her a reassuring nod. "I didn't want to be stuck on Earth if anything happened . . . I wanted to know." She looks at her hands. Her fingers have gone white. "I didn't want to not know. I mean, being stuck on Earth and not hearing anything for years."

"Father, please allow Jane Foster to stay in Asgard until we have recovered the Tesseract." Thor's eager expression tells me that Jane will be staying whether I want her to or not. Odin—the real Odin—would pop a blood vessel. The real Odin might insist that she take accommodations in the public sector, under guard perhaps . . . but I am not Odin. And I've got a soft spot for this masochistic phase of Thor's.

Damn.

Defeated, I say, "Dr. Foster may stay until we return with the Tesseract." But I can't quite disguise the barbed wire in my voice when I continue: "Since I am obviously not invited to this meal, I will take my supper in my bedchamber. I have more work that needs to be done." I excuse myself before I have to sit and playact being Odin Allfather in front of his wife and son—and his son's welcomed mortal—which to be honest, I do not see going well.

If this forced retreat strikes anyone as uncharacteristic for Odin, I don't bother waiting to find out.

No one protests my leaving.

/

Odin's bedchamber is repulsive in the way that all parents' bedchambers are repulsive: an overstuffed authoritative no-man's-land seasoned with affairs one would rather not consider. I squeak open the balcony door just enough to wriggle through, pull up the chair closest to the edge—but don't sit down. My legs don't want to bend.

I shot myself in the foot, in staying. I should have rallied Alfheim and Nithavellir to Asgard and then pulled a runner. I could have left Tyr in charge; Tyr could have launched the invasion without me. Let him command the fleet, and leave Thor to bask as his parents' son without me having to see it.

I knew this would happen, and I walked into the trap anyway. Why have I done this? Life continues without me. I knew it would. I told myself so, that first night when we all walked back after my funeral. There is no room here for me. There wasn't room here for me when I was alive; less now that I'm the Unnamable bad taste in everyone's mouth. I should have pulled the tooth rather than let it fester. A brief moment in agony and knee-watering fear, and it would have been done.

Well. Let me be done now. Let me hurt, if the hurt will give me the strength to leave. Let me be at an end. Let me be brave for one Fates-damned moment in my worthless cowardly life, and pocket the Tesseract when Thor retrieves it. Let me throw my oath to Frigga in the fire. I've had my fun—all right, honestly it wasn't. I've had my fill. Let me go.

Sunset glares between the city's spires, an angry orange eye soaking a few lost clouds lonely gold. The evening air is cool and fragrant with sweet scents from the Queen's garden. Night sweeps the palace charcoal-black all the way up and all the way down, but if I fell from the balcony I would drop into the garden's twinkling lantern-lit paths. I don't want to be here, anymore.

The balcony door creaks open a little wider. Footsteps click on the marble behind me. Cheerful banter slip out from the royal suite along with warm air that makes my stomach knot. The door is closed. I hear the lock click.

Frigga says, "I thought it would be too difficult. Please don't be angry."

Of course she knew that having both Thor and I present for supper would be catastrophic on the night before battle. Swollen, bitter triumph drags a smile past my clenched teeth. I can't fault her. She has made her choice.

Let me be glad.

I say, "If you think I am angry, you mistake me for Odin."

Thor's mother sighs. I hate it when she sighs. Sighing used to mean I'd broken something that couldn't be fixed, which is a moot question now.

I don't want to endure more platitudes on her part. There is peace now, and the fight is over. I am severing our ties.

"Thor is making a mistake," I say, to cut off any argument she might be preparing for my sake, or my soul. "Do you know that? Getting involved with a mortal. He should have left her on Midgard. He should have got away while he had the chance, told her anything. Told her nothing, and not come back. Thirty or forty years, that's all he'll have. Enough time to start to think that he can make something really worthwhile out of the time he's got. He'll have to watch someone he's spent thirty or forty years with die."

She presses her palm to the back of my head.

"No one could ever tell you what to do," she says.

Why are we talking about me? I jerk away from her. I don't want her comfort. It's broken. It's used up.

Thor's mother says, "Would you like for me to bring you supper? We could sit here on the balcony."

"No. Thank you." It comes out a growl, so I give her a close-mouthed smile that she won't worry. "I am not hungry. Nerves, you know? I am commanding the fleet tomorrow. I get to take my revenge upon the Chitauri. Restore my honor."

From the silence this brings, I can tell she doesn't believe my excuse or my excitement at vengeance. Frigga looks out over the railing, in case I'm going to be fooled into thinking she's lingering for fresh air. "What news from the High Council?"

"The Elven mages have found a power signature they believe to be the Tesseract," I allow, because easy conversation is the best way to get her to go away. "Queen Daina has assured me. Tomorrow, one hour before sunrise, we will see if they are correct."

"What does my son think?" she tries.

"You should ask him."

She touches my left shoulder.

"Please don't," I say. "Not right now."

Thor's mother is silent for a long time. She doesn't move to touch me again. Eventually she says, "I have never seen you behave this way around an enemy. You would not stop talking about Laufey, after the Jotnar force broke into your father's trophy room. Why do you avoid the Chitauri?"

"I avoid nothing."

"It is the eve before glorious battle. Will you not boast of how they will dread your name?" Frigga reaches out to brush my hair from my face, but her fingers catch only a double illusion. She has forgotten my real hair is shorn almost to my scalp. "I want to hear how my son intends to crush them. Mother Chitauri will warn their children of him for generations to come. What do you think they will say?"

I could tell her that the Chitauri have no mothers, nor children. They are grown in tanks at the behest of the Other, born to serve it and given a half-life millennia ago when the Other wisely placed them under their own command. They have a queen who controls the rest by telepathy, although as you might expect queen is the wrong word for this Hive-element. The queen is the Chitauri, and the Chitauri are all the queen. There may be Chitauri warriors, staff, scientists, and technicians—but only in the same way that a single Aesir has a brain and hands, legs, arms, and occasionally a sword. I could tell Thor's mother that, but I don't see the point.

In a deeper place in my head, I experience a vertiginous rush that curdles my stomach when I lose control enough to think about it. I want to believe they understood that I wasn't something else's hand. I'd like to think they knew exactly what they were doing to me.

They had to understand that the Other is a single organism, after all.

"What did they do to my son?" Frigga sounds angry. I don't look at her, even if I wanted to see that; I don't want her to read whatever is sure to be lurking behind my mask.

I reshuffle our easy conversation by ranting, "Do you know what the most irritating part about mortals is?" as if I've been dwelling on our beloved Thor's plight this entire time. The trick here is to put so much angry passion into one's voice that it looks like obsession. If it looks like obsession, it can't be an excuse not to talk about Chitauri. Nobody wants to show madness on purpose, do they? Now I only have to make up a grievance and go with it. "They don't learn from their own history," I spit. "Their lives are so short that they must rely on knowledge gained by their forefathers about everything from basic science to government policy—and yet they believe fiction stories as much or more than documented history. How is anyone supposed to keep up with such madness? Did you know that Henry thought I subsisted on human blood as the price of my immortality? Apparently some fiction immortal blood-eater book had gained popularity right around the time he noticed that I didn't age."

Frigga accepts this change in subject with another exhausted sigh. "What is it on Midgard that both of my sons find so fascinating?"

"Poetry."

"No," Thor's mother says. "Tell it true. I am really asking."

"I know. Poetry." I've spent some centuries thinking about this problem.

She frowns.

I explain: "If Asgard is home to warriors and Vanaheim to witches, Midgard is home to poets. As I said, human lives are very short. They have no time to thrive before they must come to terms with dying. All the stages of consciousness must be compressed into a scant few decades. That does something to the soul, I think. They reach adulthood only to then grow old and die. They spend the first half of their life growing stronger and the second half growing weaker, with no pause in between to relish anything. This . . . continuous waxing and waning affects every fiber of their civilization, whether they notice or not, from politics to friendship. They don't have time to learn who they are before they have to relearn who they have become. There is no fixed constant in their societies, even among its people. When everything changes from one year to the next, they can never get used to anything before it's whisked away. They are a species living in a literal Helheim—and yet, many of them are kind. That is the most profound type of poetry: kindness in the face of evil."

Frigga makes a strangled choking sound. "How do you do what you've done and then say things like that?"

"I think . . . the reason you are asking me that implies that you do not understand what I have done."

Creases mar her brow. I can see her gazing at me from the corner of my eye, an odd glassy expression drawing her mouth into a sallow frown. She reaches to take my left hand.

"I wish not to be touched," I say.

She touches her lips instead, like a child, and stares out at the drop into the palace's Royal Courtyard.

"This cannot have been easy for you," she says in a low voice, as if she's trying to reason to herself. "You are doing a good job as King. You are listening to Tyr and the councils. You have not made any legal decisions that would spark a revolt. You have treated the public well. You have been fair with taxation."

"I've only been playing King for a week. How much trouble could anyone get up to in a week?"

"You have been helping," she says, still as if to herself. "Oh, this cannot have been easy for you. Unnaming yourself. I am so sorry I could not protect you." Pity and excuses—aha. Not only does she not understand what I've done, but she thinks she does and that it's I who do not understand what I've done. Poor deranged Nameless.

"I don't want you to protect me." Anger tries to flare in my chest, but I stamp it out. Purifying self-hate surges up to wrest control. I say, "How far back, do you think, would I have to go if I wanted to rewrite history? Turn my life around, before trajectory and inertia took it so far off course. Maybe if I had let Thor be crowned, even though I knew he would have been a terrible king . . ."

But Frigga doesn't know that I interrupted the ceremony. No one on Asgard knows I plotted with Laufey to smuggle his people into the weapons vault in time to stop Thor being made King. I think, even though she claimed to still love me, she would have me arrested if I ever told her.

"What do you mean, if you had let him be crowned?" she says.

I wave her question aside. "It doesn't matter. I couldn't have lived with that choice."

"What choice is this?"

"Oh. If I had tried harder to stop him from going to Jotunheim," I lie. "When Jotunheim made a play to steal back the Casket, I was angry. Thor wanted to go after them, to exact revenge, and I went along with it."

"There were many choices along the way." Frigga states. "You didn't have to use the bifrost as a weapon against Jotunheim."

This again.

"Hey, speaking of—" I cock one foot behind the other and lounge sideways against the railing, so I can see her face, "why didn't you just tell me what I was from the start?"

She looks at me. "We didn't want you to feel unwanted."

"Maybe if I had known, I wouldn't have fought so hard to save Asgard. Let Thor-King get us into a pointless war. Let Aesir and Jotnar each throw themselves at the other until none are left. What should I care? What were you even planning to do with me? What was Odin thinking, when he brought me home? When he told you you were to raise a Jotun freak at your breast alongside your own son? I can't figure that part out."

"Compassion. Compassion for a little one who had nothing."

"I have nothing now," I say.

We are silent for a time. This heavy silence is unbearable.

I say, "By the way, I called off Thor's wedding to Princess Smirna."

Frigga jerks round to face me in full. "You did?"

"Yes. I'm sure she and Thor will be heartbroken."

His mother laughs. She hugs me tight around the ribs, forcing my head to her shoulder.

"The Elves are already loyal allies," I tell her embroidered collar, "thanks to their affection for one who is Unnamed. Daina's suggestion was a bid for power, and no more."

"Thank you." Frigga kisses my cheek. "Thank you."

It's tragic, in a way. I always could make Frigga believe whatever I wanted. Gaining her cooperation has ever been as easy as simply indulging her own hopes. Let her deceive herself. Play along as much as I needed, oftimes just by keeping my mouth shut.

I never had any intention of staying until Odin returns. Why should I? What purpose is there in waiting around? I know very well what Odin would say, if he returned to find me sitting in his throne wearing his face. Frigga mistakes ancient betrayal for everlasting love if she imagines that my vow upon Hallormr, Halldór, and Hallveig could mean anything at all but a whiff of her own fear.

I don't even remember my children's faces.