Eir's sleeping potion sucks me into oblivion and holds me there until some black hour in the morning. I wake up plastered to a bed in the dark, but in the wordless dreamscape that's followed me into consciousness I can't remember whose bed I'm in. There in an innate . . . bed-ness . . . that suits me fine as a feature of this universe.

Consciousness is a haze of sensations: bed, heavy covers sapping strength from my spread limbs.

I understand that if I want to go back to sleep I must drift into the weightless null that precedes sleep. A grimy, mealy paste seeps along inside my skull, promising itching eyes and sludging thoughts tomorrow. I must return to sleep, but I don't dare take any more potion. I can't miss the invasion tomorrow.

Weightlessness.

Make myself weightless.

After a little while I surface from the oceanic dark in my head to become aware that my left arm is levitating a few centimeters above the bed. I'd expect a floating arm to be forced down by the heavy covers, but I can't feel the covers any more. Some muffled, slumbering part of my head is thrilled because this is the first time I've ever levitated. Ah-ha . . . This must be the weightless feeling I'm going for. Right? This must be a step in the journey toward sleep. Perfect. I'll be asleep in no time at all. Also, levitating is a bit exhilarating. It isn't possible.

After a little while longer, I surface again to find my right arm levitating, now. When I think about it, I notice that my legs are also a few centimeters above the bed.

Good, I've achieved weightlessness. Sleep is around the corner. I hunt through Vorsgard's brown skeletal ruins to find it, but all I've got to help my search is a dirty glass lens.

The Chitauri springs up from nowhere, invading my consciousness like a parasite. It's on top of me—a cut-out image superimposed over my invented world.

Harsh reality splashes up my spine in a wave of pain. Cold truth breaks over my face. I have one knife-sharp glimpse into my surroundings as they really are: searing white lights, the paralytic pumping through my veins, a frenzied clawing in my soul for the only escape I have: my mind rejects this place utterly and in full. I sink back through the pretend door which is—

Which is—

I spasm upright in Odin's sheets, gasping—and come eye-to-eye with a pale reptilian face.

A real one.

The Chitauri is still on top of me, dry hands pulling a syringe from my throat.

My mind shrinks to a point. I blast the creature across Odin's room.

Flames burst from my curse's epicenter. My magic explodes in the stifling air, lighting up the ceiling, ripping through the far wall. A vortex consumes the drapes.

The Chitauri collapses in a hollow aurora—illusion.

It's an illusion.

Holy Fates below, an illusion.

The illusion burns out. Dirty eyes and long teeth, grey skin, and syringe fade.

Pounding on the door.

Black soot and green fire ignite the bed's end.

My limbs are locked in place. I can't move. I can't think. My head is empty.

A second magic burst. Yellow sparks hiss through the gaps under the door, joining the furnace around me. The ward system buckles. Royal guards and the Queen rush into the flickering smoke-filled bedchamber.

Frigga casts a spell upon me and then I am seized and dragged, without resistance, from Odin's bed. Burning sheets crackle past my legs. The private corridor appears, ghost-like. Cold air douses my face.

Warm, armored, Aesir hands pull a thick cloak around my shoulders. I am forced onto a chair.

"Your Majesty! Sire, the blaze is contained," Guard Leader Dagg tells me. Why is he shouting at me? His green eyes are made brighter by the soot smeared up his round, pockmarked face.

"Stop screaming, my love," Frigga says.

Who is screaming? Through the haze in my brain I can't hear a thing.

Dagg pivots to address the Queen. "Shall we send for the Black Tower? Healers?"

Frigga looks at me. She looks at Dagg. ". . . No. I will tend my husband myself. Guard Leader? Do not tell my son of this."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"And do not file a report until after the invasion. His Majesty the High King is well and able. We will be a terror upon the cowardly Chitauri, who hide in the rubble of Vorsgard."

"What report?" Dagg says, expression blank.

"Thank you. Dismissed."

Dagg tries to station two guards outside the royal suite, but Frigga shoos them away. I can see the inferno raging behind Odin's re-warded door; beautiful, boundless emerald sparkles just out of reach, licking between door and ceiling and door and floor. Green forever. It's a deadly black magic curse. Soul's Pyre. I wonder if Dagg or his guards will spread rumor that the Nameless One has cursed Odin-King's bedchamber from beyond the grave?

Frigga sits down beside me.

"How did I get into Odin's bedchamber?" I ask, when the haze retreats. My throat is raw.

She pulls my hair away from my face, and my illusion's longer grey locks dutifully follow course.

"I have no memory of going into his bedchamber."

"You slept there last night. Remember? In case Thor came to see you."

I don't remember. I can't tell if that scares me, or if it scares me that it doesn't scare me.

"Do you want to tell me what just happened?" Frigga tucks my cloak tighter around my shoulders in galling motherly affection . . . which, just now, I don't mind.

"How long have I got until the invasion?" I say, instead.

Frigga blows out a breath. She sounds very like me when she does that. "Odin. You are shaking."

No, I'm not.

"I don't think—" She squeezes her hands together. "Loki. I do not think you are well."

"I am fine."

"What were you doing? Were you sleeping?"

I make a no sound.

Frigga presses a warm palm to my forehead, pushing me back against the cushions. She flips the hand over to check for fever. She picks up my right arm, turns my wrist, checks my pulse.

"How long have I got?" I insist.

She places my hand in my lap, then places the other beside it. She draws the cloak snugger. "Stay here. I'm going to undo whatever spell you cast."

"You can't."

"What do you mean, I can't?"

"It's a curse. I've got to undo it."

Frigga wraps her arms around me and now we're standing. My chin is smooshed against her collarbone. I'm pretty sure I don't have legs. She guides back through the corridor toward the place where green starlight is shimmering. We stop in front of a blistering, smoke-blacked door.

"Now what?" Frigga says.

"Open."

She releases me to cast a holding charm against heat and backdraft, then tugs the door handle with magic. Green fills my eyes.

It's beautiful. It's raw chaos. It's creation and destruction, wild, frenzied, bodiless, leaping, swirling flames. The drapes are gone. The far wall is a rippling sheet. There is no separation between ridged, unyielding shapes like bed, desk, dressing room—there is only the kinetic freeflowing dance; places where glittering light chooses to whirl upward or bloom into massless energy more profound than anything so course to have a name. The static universe is consumed, dissolved.

Dissolved in light.

Frigga hooks her arm around my left elbow. She pulls me against her.

Thoughts slug back into my head. I'm supposed to banish the fire.

The inferno dies in an instant.

"Bath," I say.

Frigga banishes the smoke, casts sealing spells over weakened walls and the ragged ceiling. She closes the door and Seals that, too.

"Bath," I say.

She has to help me cross the royal suite, which is unbelievably huge and empty in the moonlight.

Odin's attendant Sigg arrives some hours later. "Your Majesty? I have brought your armor."

Thor's mother and I have eaten already, soups and pastries as if I'm home sick from my lessons, but Frigga is toying with a second bowl and pretending she doesn't need to return to her own bedchambers. She looks up at the word armor, lips pursing.

I say, "Please leave that here and get Tyr for me."

Sigg reverently lays out Odin Allfather's astrium plate and crimson warrior's cloak. He bows low to the ground and makes himself scarce.

"Son," Frigga murmurs. She's been speaking in a near-whisper all morning, as if in fear that an unexpected noise will strike me down. Even with every hearth, lamp, glowsphere, and sconce lit I have to be under the luminescent white lights in Frigga's herbalist's room. This means that Frigga has moved her seedlings to the floor so she can play with her breakfast on her apothecary's desk and I've got to avoid stepping on them while I pace. The moment I shut my eyes I forget I'm in Asgard.

She says, "What of the fleet?" It's not really a question posed to me, but I answer anyway.

"Do you think me a fool, Your Majesty?" I shake out my right hand, which is trying to freeze into stone. "I'm going to have Tyr command the fleet. If I take the center ring now I'm liable to slip up. I can lose my Odin-Mask. I could say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Ah!—Odin wouldn't say please to Sigg, I wasn't thinking. I should summon him back so I can yell at him properly."

"I do not think you are a fool."

"What am I going to tell Tyr?" I spin around. "What would Odin tell Tyr?"

Frigga gazes at me, her face growing red with determination.

"Your Majesty?"

She sets down her fork. "Odin would command the fleet."

I have disappointed her. Weakling. Coward.

The Queen is talking.

"Hmm?" I say.

Silence.

My eyes hurt. I come back to myself and realize I've been staring at the ceiling, where the lights are. I wince, look down to face Thor's mother, and find the red heat in her face draining to be replaced with terrible grey.

"What did you say?" I demand. "Just now. I'm sorry, I was . . . thinking."

The Queen shakes her head, as if it is she and not I who am failing. "You should not command the fleet," she says.

I give an apologetic shrug. "I told you. I've had to learn which days are good."

A real Aesir would argue with her, demand to be allowed into battle. If I was half the person my not-brother is, I would activate Odin's armor and let no man or Fate stop me finding glory behind a sword.

Coward, I snarl at myself. Weak. Unworthy. This was to be my moment. My revenge.

Coward.

Nameless Scourge. Be glad that she's got a better son on the way.

"Anyway," I say, "wouldn't it help my case when Odin returns if he finds me staying out of the glory? I suspect he'd be even less pleased coming home to find the Unnamed One playing at command rather than sitting on the side cheering for Prince Thor."

"I wanted to be selfish," Frigga says.

I give her a small smile. "I can't exactly fault you for that."

Frigga brushes her night-cloak straight so it hangs like a maiden's veil from her shoulders. This is a nervous habit she has when she's been defeated and knows it—when Odin forbade her from visiting Thor on Midgard during her son's banishment, when she wanted to relax the restrictions on Vanaheim-based magical items sold on Asgard; a million smaller battles in eleven hundred years of marriage. It was Frigga who advocated for me when Heimdall finally caught up to my little farm on Midgard. I'd run away; eight years later they snatched me back like I'd been a wayward toddler rather than a consenting adult, a wife and a mother. Human lives are very short, she'd told the King. Give him fifty years.

Human, said her husband. He has brought disgrace upon the House of Odin. I ought to give him fifty stripes. The filthy uneducated barbarians.

Please, I said. Let me go back. Let me say goodbye. Just for one day. Just for five minutes.

Frigga says, "Tyr will lead well."

"I'll be on Overwatch," I say. I'm glad she's coming around. "I'm not out of the fight. I'll be the one telling them where to concentrate strength . . . so Thor had better be nice to me or I'll send him out of the battle."

"Lord Aumdyn will be honored to have your command." Frigga places her hand on the back of mine.

I hesitate. My instincts tell me to jerk my hand away, but I can endure her touch for the moment. We've built so much upon this fleeting trust, her and I. Today is the day we see whether this treason of ours is made from stacked brick or stacked cards. "Thank you," I say. "For everything."

/

I take my seat at breakfast to a standing salute. I've already eaten, my stomach is roiling, but the Great Hall overflows with warriors from four armies so appearances must be maintained.

The dense air smells like excitement and bloodlust. When the warriors sit, impatient armored hands chew through wooden bowls overflowing with flaky black bread stuffed with seeds and fruits, eggs by the thousands, hot cheese pies, and spiced meat.

Every light looks a little too bright.

Every shadow is the wrong shape.

Thor looks up from his breakfast on my right. He and his idiot friends Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, and Sif—whom I have thankfully not had to deal with for an entire week—are boiling over in cheerful conversation.

Thor says, "Good morning, Father." Good morning, Your Majesty, chorus the idiots.

"Good morning." I take my time choosing among the meat rolls and stuffed bread, to delay my having to force anything else down my unwilling throat. "Where is your mortal?"

Thor glances at his hands to avoid meeting my bloodshot eye. "In her private rooms."

He's learning.

Thor without Jane looks somber, small, misplaced. He nods along with Sif's loud tale detailing the horrors in finding Dwarves in the practice yard, but has nothing to contribute to Fandral's lovelorn assertion that Princess Smirna is the sweetest creature in any branch of the World Tree.

I hypnotized myself last night, I want to tell him.

Thor would raise his eyebrows in the baffled, affectionate way he does when I mention some new intellectual or thaumatological accomplishment.

I don't understand smart things, brother, those eyebrows say.

But I haven't got anyone else but Thor. Thor and Frigga.

It wasn't on purpose, I'd tell him anyway. Actually, I was just trying to go to sleep. Eir gave me a sleep aid and it wore off. Well, more or less. I think I was still pretty drugged, so I started hallucinating and then I hypnotized myself by accident.

Thor would laugh and glance sideways at his friends, to make sure this nonsense isn't being overheard. Hypnotized yourself? To do what?

Nothing. I thought I was levitating. Then I accidentally conjured an illusion of what I was seeing in my head. And then I thought it was real so I blasted it with magic.

You are mad, brother.

I furrow my brow at this. I'm not sure he's wrong, but . . . I'm not ready to bow to the inevitable failure just yet. I . . . think madness would be if I thought it was real after I woke up. I know it was a hallucination.

Hallucinations are madness, too.

Yes, but I was hypnotized at the time.

He thumps his fist on my shoulder and changes the topic. You should come by the practice yard tomorrow, after this war is done.

I don't want to go by the practice yard, I want to tell him but can't. I'm not feeling very well. I keep seeing things that aren't real.

Thor continues: I will tell Sif to go easy on you.

Go easy on him yourself, Sif cuts in. I have but two ways to fight: a fast kill, and a slow painful kill.

Volstagg says, He could fight an Elf. Elf women fight. An elf woman would be a better match for Prince Loki.

The idiots laugh.

My brother would not fight if he faced the Elves. Thor slings an arm around my back as if this could take the sting from his words. They would sit in a circle reading books and weaving feathers into each other's hair.

Fandral interjects, Perhaps he can introduce me to the Princess. I can help pull the feathers out of her hair.

Have I angered you, Father? Thor says, inexplicably.

No, I quite like this idea of Elves, I sneer. I keep my tone light, to match theirs. Perhaps I can lead them in a warband against you. What do you say? You and your friends against me and mine—

"Father?" Thor repeats. "Have I angered you?"

The table is quiet.

Sif, Volstagg, Fandral and Hogun are glancing between us.

I've been staring at Thor without speaking.

Oh, Nine Unholy Realms. I've been staring, mute, at my not-brother for Fates know how long. At least, I hope to Helheim I haven't been saying any of that out loud.

Thor's handsome face is stiff with worry.

Red-faced with shame under my illusion, I make Odin clear his throat in a brusque regal way. "I was only thinking about the past. The mortal, the Chitauri. I have placed Chieftain Tyr in command of the fleet."

Thor's mouth opens in surprise. "Tyr is a good and noble man. But I had heard that you would fight with us."

I make Odin set down his uneaten roll. If the Allfather's lost in thought it's got to be for a damn good reason. I invent one. "My time is done. Asgard must look to its future."

His son's neck muscles constrict. "I thought we had reached conclusion to this. Father, I—"

"Leave us," I command his friends.

Fandral, Hogun, Sif, and Volstagg rise, salute, and depart. Fates Below, to have had that power while I still lived.

To Thor I say, "We have. You have refused the throne—so be it. In the wake of your brother's arrest I had sought permission from the Judges to father another child."

Thor scrapes back his chair, eyes wide blue suns. He says, "Forseti would have refused."

"He did not."

Thor is frozen to his chair. His voice is low, almost a growl. "Is this why you Unnamed my brother? How Mother let you do such—"

"Your Mother is my wife. She understood the necessity of my actions."

"His name," Thor spits out, "was Loki."

Mania fizzes up through my chest, flipping a switch somewhere in my head to become perverse delight. I fight down a lunatic smile. "That name is nothing any longer."

Thor smashes a fist on the table between us.

"I am sorry," I say. "I did not mean to have this conversation with you before you go to war. Forgive me."

Thor leans close. I get a whiff of armor polish and the unperfumed soap from the common barracks. Thor's face is dark with effort to restrain himself. "I will. But I will not forgive you for what you've done. Sif told me. Father, Loki would not have allied himself to Thanos."

"Should I perish before my new son is of age to take the throne, you will rule for him as Prince Regent," I say, ignoring this blithering.

"All he ever wanted was to please you."

"Did you hear me?"

"Loki was mad," Thor says, "and cruel by the end of his life. He would never have betrayed you. You must retract this slander."

Listening to this fool try to defend me to me is too much to bear, right now. I make Odin shout, "You will not tell me what I must do in my own hall."

The High Table looks over. Thor turns away and lets his fist slump onto his knee.

Fates to have been able to command him before I died.

"Thanos," my not-brother repeats in a much softer voice, lips curling around the name. "Who has fed you this story about Thanos? Whatever Loki's Chitauri want with the Tesseract, they have nothing to do with Thanos."

I don't want to talk to him about this right now. There's a small sharp pain in my head, and I've already wound him up to the point where another argument might compromise him in the field. "You need to focus on the coming battle," I say. "We must recover the Tesseract. We will speak more later. Tomorrow. Nothing will change between this moment and tomorrow." Except I'll be gone.

Thor bows his head.

After breakfast I break for the Healing Tower, running over and over what I'm going to say to Eir. Thank you for the potion, is a good way to start.

Did you sleep well? she would ask.

Yes.

Good, she'd say.

Yes. One problem.

Yes?

Your, uh, potion. I'm hallucinating.

I squeak to a stop.

No. That's no good. If I tell her there's something wrong with me that has a definite magical origin she'll try to make me lie down on the soulforge. I have no real excuse for her why I can't lie down on the soulforge, other than that she'll find out about my Odin-mask.

The hallucinations will wear off by tonight, I'm sure.

I grip my hair. My chest spasms. I think I'm going to sob until my teeth bare and I'm sniggering instead, wilted double in place. I'm drowning again. Gasping, giggling, soundless.

A knot constricts in my ribs where I can't shake it free. The fleet is preparing without me. Tyr has my place. I have no chance for glory. I never had a chance for glory, not even in someone else's name.

"Sire?" an ordinary, happy, sane man calls out somewhere behind me.

I let go of my hair. Bit by bit I stagger upright, until I might be in control. "Who is there?"

"Thor," says the unfamiliar voice.

I pivot hard on my heel, manic smile wrenching into place—

He's a guard. A guard named Thor.

Of course he is.

"Thor son of Brunigg," the young guard apologizes, evidently for the look on my face. "Shall I escort Your Majesty to the War Tower? The Lord Guardian gives us all clear to begin."

"No." The last thing I need is to lose my senses in front of four armies and every war-councilor in Asgard. "Send an Alfr mage and some low-ranking member of the Red Council to my private solar. I will be in communication there."

My will is carried out without question. The wondrous Odin-King is a fantastic tomb.

/

/

A/N: Wow, that was a much longer delay between chapters than I ever intended to have. I swear an Asgardian oath it had nothing to do with the story and everything to do with suddenly finding myself without a job.

Reassurances all around that my enthusiasm for this story has not waned in the slightest. Updates will be a bit slower than my usual once-a-week until I'm able to find more work, but they will come. All forty (plus?) more chapters of this are strenuously outlined. Next two chapters are the invasion (part 1 and part 2), and after that . . . things get wild.

PS:

Thanks so much for the kind feedback! Don't worry, Jane and Loki will have their moment . . .