Trials

Chapter Seventeen: A Bitter Tonic (Chased With Sweetness)

"What is it?" Loki asked after several seconds has passed in silence. The chamber Tyr had led him to was sparse, a configurable table, eight chairs, a little corner cabinet with a water tap, pitcher, and set of glasses. Bare walls of white gold, for ease of displaying planning materials or evidence for trials of a more serious nature than this one. Trials that others would think were more serious than this one. "Why did you want to talk to me?" Tyr wasn't even facing him, but was still staring at the same blank wall he had been when Loki arrived.

"Why?" Tyr said, turning around, anger plain on his face. "Mostly I wanted to get you out of there before you made a fool out of yourself."

Loki's jaw fell open. "What- You can't just- You-"

"I am a plain-spoken man, even with your father. I have little use for the niceties of the Central Magistrate's Office. I'm going to speak bluntly to you, and I hope that one day you will appreciate it, because I will do the same for you when the time comes for you to lead others, if I have not yet made Valhalla my home."

Loki could do nothing but blink and stare. Tyr was blunt and plain in his speech; Loki knew that from the many hours training under him. But Tyr had never spoken to him like this before.

"You're used to getting what you want. To having all your wishes granted. To convincing others to turn all their no's into yes's."

"That's not-"

"I am in the recognition box right now. You are here to listen. You were already offered an opportunity to retake the battle trial, and you refused. You refused even to speak to either me or Sorkvir at all, and instead let your mother and brother come to us. You involved a magistrate in something we could have worked out among ourselves. Fine, that is your right. Your failure was overturned, but it still wasn't the result you wanted. Loki, I will tell you this even if no one else will: end it here. An official decision has been made, one that binds you just as much as it does Sorkvir and me. Since Finnulfur himself made it, not even you can come up with some way to elevate the matter further, except perhaps to your father, and I'm certain you've already asked him and the fact that you went to Finnulfur instead tells me that he decided not to involve himself, and wisely so, I might add. Accept this decision, Loki, with grace and every ounce of the maturity you wish to convince others you already have, and get on with your life. Your record will reflect an incompletion, followed by what will surely be successful completion. You have no other choice, and protesting it would reflect badly on you."

Loki stood there, wide-eyed, speechless even when Tyr finally paused. No one spoke to him like this. Not even his father, who could be hard on him at times.

Tyr stepped back and slid onto the table, turning one of the chairs around to prop a leg up on it. "Why do you think you failed, really?"

Loki frowned. This was just another battle for Tyr, but Loki was leery of it, uncertain of Tyr's tactics. Tyr lecturing him on his behavior was just as unfamiliar as Tyr relaxing on a table and talking casually to him as though they were friends. "Because I used magic."

Tyr shook his head. "That's not what you really think, is it? The truth, Loki."

Tyr loved to trick his trainees. Make them think the strike was coming from the right when it was coming from the left. Make them look up when the blow was aimed at their legs. Make them learn to sense a trap. Loki sensed a trap. But he didn't care. He was frustrated, and angry, and Tyr had just humiliated him. Tyr wanted the truth; Loki would give him the truth. "Because I won. I defeated you. It's not supposed to happen. It's not supposed to be possible. But I did it. I won."

"That's what I thought," Tyr said with a smile Loki wouldn't exactly call friendly. "You won. Here's another question for you. Do you think I was fighting you as though you were my enemy? Let me put it another way. Do you think I was trying to win?"

"I…no. But you-"

"Would you like to attempt it again, when I am trying to win?"

Loki looked away; he couldn't help it. Tyr's tone wasn't unkind, but underneath it was uncompromising strength and confidence and utter seriousness. For an instant, Loki pictured himself being squashed underneath Tyr's boot. He made himself meet Tyr's gaze again. "I know you're a better warrior than any of us that you're training."

"So you understand that were I really fighting to win, you wouldn't stand a chance."

"Yes," Loki said with a sullen look, though the memory of Tyr standing there, arms drawn in, defeated, flashed through his mind and tempered his belief in that answer, the one he knew Tyr expected.

"You don't sound convinced. What do you think my goal is, then, in the battle trial?"

"To keep the battle going for sixty minutes. Without letting anyone defeat you."

"No. You've missed the point entirely. My goal is to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your abilities against a worthy opponent in an intense, challenging battle, and just as importantly, to make sure you aren't hurt in the process."

Tyr stood again then. He wasn't that much taller than Loki, maybe three or four inches now, but it felt like a foot. Loki fought the urge to step back.

"You blinded me, Loki. Do you really think I couldn't have fought back? That I wouldn't have fought back, had you been my enemy? Do we train you to stop fighting and give up because you're startled, or given an injury or weakness? But you weren't my enemy, and I couldn't be certain of your exact position, and had I continued to strike at you, I could have done you serious harm. The rules…the standards, if you prefer, are meant for your safety. You stepped outside those standards, and in so doing you put yourself at grave risk, and prevented me from conducting a full sixty-minute safe battle."

Loki pictured those last few seconds of the battle trial. Tyr hadn't been injured. Nothing had physically stopped him from using his sword. Tyr wouldn't have just fallen still and stood there in a real battle. Of course he wouldn't have. Loki felt like a fool for how smugly confident he'd been that he'd defeated the great Tyr. He gritted his teeth, and prepared himself to concede his own defeat. "Tyr…I apologize. I…I haven't handled this very well. I just…I put everything I had into that fight, and it was everything I wanted it to be, even better, and then…and then it was a nightmare and I was angry and I just wanted it to not be true. I didn't think about it from your perspective, about your responsibility to keep me safe…" He struggled to say more, but decided he'd said enough. "I apologize," he repeated.

"Apology accepted. And that was handled quite well. In fact, on the whole I think you've handled much of it well. This whole trial before a magistrate…I confess, I thought it was an idiotic waste of a warrior's time at first. We don't violate anyone's rights in the Trials; the goal of every single one of your trainers is to prepare you with all the skills you need to pass them, and in turn to be an effective warrior. But…a warrior should never stop learning, either. And I learned some things over the last two days. I learned that we did violate your rights, and every Asgardian youth's rights, because there are rules that are unwritten that we nevertheless expect you to understand and obey. And then I learned that there are even written rules; they just became lost over time. You should be proud of yourself for that discovery. Were it not for this particular trial, perhaps those rules would have been lost to us forever."

"Thor helped," Loki said, a bit bashfully, still chastened by Tyr's reprimands.

"Then he should be proud of himself, too. And for standing by you when I know he disagreed with your actions."

Loki nodded. "He's a good brother. Most of the time."

Tyr chuckled, something Loki couldn't remember seeing before, but Tyr had probably seen enough of Loki's and Thor's arguments and fights to understand the qualification Loki had placed on his statement. "You really should think of this as a win, Loki. Sorkvir was right, it's a win for all of us. I'm happy with the incomplete. I hadn't thought of that as an option at the time, probably I was too angry at you. If I had thought of it, I would have called incomplete instead of fail, and for that, I apologize."

"Apology accepted," Loki quickly interjected. He would have been upset by an incomplete, too, but it would have been far less humiliating than a failure. But Tyr had admitted to a mistake he could hardly be blamed for, really – as Finnulfur had pointed out, defeat was unprecedented and not accounted for in the rules and procedures – so while it still left him with a bitter feeling, accepting Tyr's apology, at this point, wasn't hard.

"Thank you. Incompletion is a better reflection of what happened, anyway. Failure was never an accurate term. Loki…I admire your creativity, and I understand your desire to distinguish yourself from your brother and bring something unique to the Trials. The rope was clever. And…now that I'm not spitting mad about it anymore, and taking into account that you believed you were within the rules…the light was clever, too. In a real battle, risky, because your opponent's behavior would become unpredictable. But in the right circumstances, perhaps worth the risk. Of course, now that we have those old rules, Sorkvir and I are going to review them and make any changes necessary, and we'll make sure that from here on out, every youth knows them by heart. What happened to you will never happen to anyone else."

Loki nodded, but couldn't muster up much enthusiasm. It was great, in an abstract way, that no one else would have to go through what he did. But it didn't change the fact that he did go through it.

"And I would be proud to have you continue your training with me, if you wish."

At that a genuine smile began to grow, lighting up Loki's face. He'd hoped for that very thing, but after the battle trial he'd been certain that all hope of that was lost. "Yes, I'd like that. Thank you, Tyr."

"We can explore how to work your own strengths into your fighting style."

"You mean magic?" Loki asked, eyes going wide with surprise and a bit of excitement.

Tyr laughed…but it wasn't a laugh of ridicule. "No, not magic. I wouldn't have any idea how to train you in that. You already know more magic than I do. But every warrior, if he wishes to become a great warrior, must learn to take every advantage of his strengths, and to compensate for his weaknesses. You're quick and light on your feet; that's something we can build on."

"All right," Loki said. "I'm looking forward to it." And he was. He didn't really want to be known as the warrior who used magic for everything, anyway. If he hadn't fully realized it before he certainly did now – fighting with magic was not the path to respect.

"Perhaps Mordi, or even your parents, could teach you a bit more about using magic."

"Perhaps," Loki echoed. Studying with Mordi was also something he'd aspired to, and his mother of course had already taught him a few things, but he wasn't so sure at the moment. His life would slow down now though, and there would be plenty of time to decide what, if anything, he wanted to do with magic. For now, he had that coveted invitation from Tyr, and he was going to focus on being the best warrior he could be.

"Shall we go finish up with Sorkvir?"

Loki nodded. "Tyr…thank you. For everything."

"You're welcome. We'll see if you remember saying that after I've worked you so hard you've tossed your breakfast into the dirt yet again."

"Just give me a minute to rinse my mouth out and I will," Loki said with a smile as they started back out to the main hall.

"Will your enemy give you a minute to rinse your mouth out?"

Loki looked up at Tyr in confusion and a bit of nervousness. When they threw up, they always got a minute to rinse their mouth out.

Tyr leaned down to whisper in Loki's ear. "Your teeth are becoming far less susceptible to rotting now."

Loki's head jerked up. Tyr's voice had sounded positively menacing, but his face now betrayed nothing but his typical stoic resolve. Though there was a slight curve to his lips. He took a slightly shaky breath; he'd known that training with Tyr as an adult would be different from training with him as a youth, but he'd never really thought about it that much. Thor loved his training sessions with Tyr, usually returning invigorated, exuberant, high-spirited. There was no time for concern, though, because they had reached Sorkvir, and Thor who was still there as well, the two of them talking about some battle Sorkvir had fought in.

Their conversation died off, and they turned to Loki and Tyr.

This wouldn't be easy, but Loki had been through worse. "Sorkvir, I want to apologize that I haven't…always handled things in the best manner throughout all this." He had to press his lips together to stop there, to give no reasons that Sorkvir may see as excuses.

"Well, Loki, that is…admirable of you to say so. I should apologize as well. I have a competitive nature, you see, and, well, I may have been a bit overzealous at times myself. Let us both put it behind us, shall we?"

Loki nodded and gave a tentative smile. It wasn't actually as hard as he'd thought it would be. "I know it's short notice, but my birthday is just two days away now. Would it be possible for me to redo the battle trial tomorrow morning?"

Sorkvir glanced to Tyr, who nodded. "I think we can make that happen."

/

/

"Let's get out of here," Thor said as soon as they were alone, to Loki's eager nod. It was a sunny day, blue skies and a comfortable temperature. "No more magistrates. Ever. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Loki said, not particularly thinking about it other than the fact that he was glad it was over.

"Remember what we studied, about how before we had all the magistrates and laws and trials, people would just have sword fights? They should still do it that way."

"That is ridiculous, Thor. Just because you're better with a sword than someone else, that doesn't make you right and the other person wrong. That's no way to settle anything."

"It gets it over faster. And if you know you're not as good with a sword as the other person, then you just know you have to work things out with him before it goes that far. See? Everything gets resolved, but faster."

Loki shook his head. Sometimes there really wasn't much point in arguing with Thor. Even though it was obvious that if they'd followed Thor's idea of settling disputes, Loki would still have "fail" on his official record because it was only through the process of the trial that the failure had been overturned. Then there was also the little detail that he would be dead.

"So…what do you think?" Thor asked, a little more tentatively than was normal for him, as they continued ambling more or less randomly through the city. "Incomplete is better than fail. Incompletions happen sometimes, there's nothing wrong with that."

Loki nodded. Not particularly enthusiastically, but he nodded.

"So…you're okay?"

Loki nodded again. This time with slightly more conviction. "It's not what I wanted. But it's better than what I had. Now it's still true that no one in the history of Asgard has ever failed the Trials."

"Right," Thor said, bumping his shoulder into Loki's. "What did Tyr want?"

That one took time. Thor, surprisingly, gave it to him. Sometimes Thor was not just a good brother, but a really good brother. "He reminded me that the reason he didn't strike at me after I blinded him was for my safety, because he couldn't be sure exactly where I was then."

"That makes sense. He wouldn't give up and surrender just because he couldn't see."

It was a bitter tonic, really. So much of his anger and indignation over the judgement of failure was driven by his conviction that he had literally won, and not merely passed. But the truth of the matter was that he'd been wrong. He hadn't won in any meaningful sense of the word. As painful as that encounter with Tyr had been, though, it definitely hadn't been all bad. "He also invited me to continue training with him," he said quietly, sneaking a surreptitious look Thor's way.

"He did?" Thor asked, slowly, stopping and turning fully toward Loki with a growing grin. He gave a triumphant shout and threw his arms around Loki – chest and arms, too – and squeezed hard, lifting him up and quickly setting him back down again when Loki kicked him in the shin.

They wound up continuing a few more paces in laughter, arms around each other's shoulders, before Thor stopped again. "While you were talking to Tyr, a clerk came in."

"And?" Loki asked. Clerks coming into the Magistrates' Hall was nothing special, but Thor wouldn't be mentioning it for no reason. Probably.

"Father sent her. We're expected at dinner tonight, upstairs."

"All right," Loki said. He hadn't given any thought to it before, but now that he was, he knew he would have gone to dinner in their parents' chambers anyway; it was almost always where he went to dinner, unless dinner was held in the Feasting Hall instead. The message, he thought, had perhaps been meant more for Thor – who was more likely to miss dinner – than for him.

"What now? We still have a couple of hours."

"Well…as it turns out, I have another battle trial tomorrow morning, and Tyr already knows all my surprises. If you still feel like fighting, maybe you can help me put together a couple of new ones?"

"With the rope?" Thor asked with raised eyebrows.

"No, with magic. Of course with the rope!"

"In that case… I'll race you!" Thor said, taking off before the words were entirely out, as startled passers-by parted and made way for him.

Loki shook his head, purely out of fondness. Thor's cheating head start was the only thing that gave him even the slightest chance of winning. He burst into a run, confident he would still reach the training field before his brother.

He did.

/

Guess what? This story is complete! Woo-hoo! No, not with this chapter, but with the writing. There are 2-3 more chapters to go, depending on how I break them. Yes, that's 1-2 more chapters than I was estimating recently! I'll get the rest up within the next week or two.

In the next chapter...family dinner time!