Trials
Chapter Nineteen: Bridge
Odin did not return early; he returned late. But he was king, and kings were never really late. Their schedules were simply adjusted.
Loki did not get worked up; he got antsy. He'd been determined that his father would find him sitting calm and perfectly poised when he arrived, and that meant no distracting himself by paging through his father's books or examining the items on display. By the time Odin did arrive, he'd settled on exactly how he was going to apologize, the apology he would offer to extend to Vituri to make amends, and several suggestions for how he could have better handled the situation, in case he was asked. One of those suggestions, unfortunately, could not be "couch the lie in grayer, more defensible and deniable terms," which he also put some time into considering.
"Everything is set for tomorrow," Odin said as he bustled in and sat behind his desk. "Tyr tells me you do battle at ten. I called Hulun in for a meeting tonight, which leaves ten open."
"You're coming?" Loki asked, feeling stupid as he did so, since that was obviously what Father had just said.
"Of course I am. I wouldn't miss it for anything, unless I truly had no choice. I'm afraid I won't be able to linger after, though, which is unfortunate."
"It's all right. I'm just glad you'll be able to come at all. I didn't expect it. I'm sorry for complicating your schedule."
"Children are inherent complications. Frustrating ones. But worthwhile ones as well."
Loki nodded, uncertain how he felt about being described as an "inherent complication."
"The hour is getting late, my son, and you'll want to get plenty of sleep tonight. On to the matter at hand. You won your petition."
Loki didn't immediately answer; that wasn't the matter at hand, as far as he had understood, and he'd expected Odin to continue. "Yes," he finally said.
"Do you feel like you won?"
That required a bit more thought. Not because he wasn't sure of the answer – he was – but because he wasn't sure what his father was looking for. "Not exactly."
"It is rare in life to get exactly what you want out of difficult circumstances, even any circumstances. Much of life is a compromise. Leadership? Impossible without compromise. There are limits, of course. Fundamental principles that must never be compromised. The greatest among these: honor."
Loki nodded, wearing his sagest, most thoughtful look. It was also rare in life for his father to sit down and speak with him privately about anything, and he wasn't going to ruin it by saying the wrong thing. Even if he was fairly certain that at the end, Father was saying in a roundabout way that he'd acted dishonorably by telling Vituri what he did.
"I didn't contradict you to Vituri, Loki. I saw no reason to bring that shame upon either of us. The matter is closed now, and will not arise again, correct?"
"Correct, Father," Loki said softly. Now he was a dishonorable, shameful complication. He felt humiliated, and it was all his own fault. It definitely wouldn't be arising again.
"One other thing. It was obvious from Thor's reaction that you didn't knock over the bookshelves. Which means that you lied. Standing with your brother is admirable, but I don't appreciate being lied to by my son at my own dinner table."
"I wasn't lying," he said, then quickly continued when Father's expression started turning angry. "Thor knocked over the books, yes. But it was my fault, too. Thor wouldn't have been there in the first place if not for me."
"Your logic is flawed. You are not responsible for Thor's decisions, just as he is not responsible for yours. But in this case, I will accept this explanation. Loki…I'm well aware the last several days have been difficult for you, and Victory Day, your Proclaiming, and your birthday are all upon us." Odin paused, folded his hands atop the desk, and looked down at them for a brief moment. "You had to deal with what happened at your Trials on your own, and with a great deal more pressure upon you than any boy who was not my son would have faced. This may be the first time that has seemed a burden to you, but it will not be the last. For that, I'm sorry. You have brought your mother and me much joy since you came into our lives, Loki. And I don't want to heap further punishment on you at this time."
Joy? Loki thought, blinking as tears pricked at his eyes, all thoughts of shame vanished in a heartbeat.
"Except for one more thing, which you may elect to see as punishment, or as an opportunity. Either way, you have no choice in it."
"I'll do it, Father," Loki quickly responded. But that was stupid. His father had just told him that he had no choice. "Gladly," he added.
"I want you to attend all meetings Sorkvir has with Tyr or anyone else about how to incorporate into the Trials the rules you and Thor discovered. You are not to participate, merely to observe. It will be a good experience for you, I think, to listen without voicing your own opinion on this matter. If they ask for it, you may provide it. Otherwise, listen and take notes. Once Sorkvir has come to his conclusions, you will arrange for a similar series of meetings regarding the Women's Trials, with whomever their chief arbiter wishes to include. At these meetings you may participate, but only to speak to what was decided for the Men's Trials. You are not to voice your opinion on the Women's Trials themselves, unless asked, but in this case I doubt anyone will. Do you have any questions?"
"No," Loki answered. It was a punishment – he was being tasked to act as a low-level clerk, essentially – and all those meetings were going to make it hard to fit in six hours a day in the library and training with Tyr. But he could also see it as an opportunity, especially if he thought of it less as being a clerk and more as being Odin All-Father's personal representative in the handling of Asgard's chief rite of passage for every single citizen of the realm. Either way, his father was trusting him with this task, which was a new and welcome experience. "I won't let you down, Father."
"Good. I spoke with Finnulfur, too, and he confirmed that you conducted yourself with the appropriate decorum and respect during the proceedings of your petition. Have you given any thought yet to whether you'd like to undertake further study?"
"I…ahhh…n-not really?" Loki said, grimacing after. He had given it thought. Lots of thought. He'd wanted to ask permission to seek training from Mordi, Asgard's First Master of Magic. He'd wanted that badly. But things had changed now. He had the offer from Tyr, he had two separate punishments that were going to eat into all that free time for adventuring with Thor he'd thought he was going to have...and those ancient rules called magic "unseemly." He'd tried not to linger on it before, when his focus had been on the trial, but the word was unsettling. And no matter what he thought about it, studying magic was clearly not what Father had in mind.
"Truly? I'm surprised. You've excelled at your studies."
Loki swallowed hard. He was going to need to go see Eir after all of this; he was starting to feel ill from all of the ups and downs, and it was getting harder to keep up. No sooner had he heard "surprised" and substituted "disappointed," kicking off a mad scramble to come up with something suitably respectable to say he had been thinking about, before Father said he'd "excelled." He'd never heard that before. "Well done," Father had said after he'd passed each of his examinations. The exact same thing he'd told Thor, even when for two of the advanced levels it came only after Thor took them a second time.
"No matter," Odin said before Loki could readjust and respond. "You have plenty of time to consider it."
"You want me to study law?" Loki asked. He wasn't sure what he thought about that. It had come more easily to him than to Thor, but it certainly hadn't been his favorite subject, and if he added that into everything else already on his schedule, he figured he would hardly see the sun again until he was a hundred.
Odin laughed, though. "No, not law. Though you may pursue it if you wish. As a prince you could never become a magistrate, though. I was thinking more along the lines of public speaking. Diction."
Diction? Loki thought, incredulous. How to pronounce things? He hadn't thought he'd been that bad, that he needed to study diction and speaking in public. He'd been nervous yes, but-
"I can see you're less than enthused at the idea. It isn't an order; the decision is yours. Finnulfur said he thought you might have talent for such matters. And although you were a late bloomer, as they say, once you started talking…you didn't always say much, but you tended to say it well." Odin broke into unanticipated laughter. "For a little while there, we could hardly shut you up, or stop you from shouting."
Loki's eyebrows shot up. This was getting positively weird.
"Irrelevant, I know. It's just nostalgia, Loki. Surely you've noticed how easily your mother cries lately? Our child is embarking on adulthood. It's a new chapter for each of us."
Loki nodded, thinking that if his father started crying, he would be convinced that this entire conversation had been a dream.
"Something to consider, among other options, should you elect to study anything at all."
"I'll consider it, Father. Thank you for the suggestion."
/
/
Thor, of course, was waiting for him when he got back from his chambers. Not just waiting, of course; Thor didn't do that very well. He was tossing one of Loki's axes into the air and catching it.
"Don't put a hole in my ceiling," Loki cautioned, pulling off his bracers.
"I won't. Though if I did…that might be fun. We'd have a secret passageway between our chambers."
"Secret for a few hours at most, until the next servant came in. Come on, put it down."
Thor gave the axe one more toss, twisting a bit to catch it in his left hand instead of his right, then placed it back on the stand Loki kept the matching pair on. "I did put a scuff on your floor."
Loki looked around until he found the black mark, with a gouge in the wood, too. He glowered but said nothing. Someone would fix it.
"How did it go?"
He thought back over his discussion – if one could call it that – with Father. A simple question without a simple answer. "I really have no idea."
"Well, what happened? What did he say? What's your other punishment?"
"He said it's not a punishment. He said I have to take notes in the meetings about the Trials and the rules we found. And then I have to organize the same kind of meetings for the Women's Trials."
"Take notes at a bunch of meetings about rules? That sounds like a punishment to me."
"Maybe," Loki said with a shrug. He didn't feel like getting into it all right now. And somehow he didn't really think Thor would understand, anyway. "He wants me to study public speaking and diction." Thor's eyes went so wide in horror Loki had to laugh. "It could be worse! At first I thought he wanted me to study law."
Thor made a retching sound. "If you had to study law, I would have to go live on Vanaheim or something until you were done."
"Why? What would it have to do with you?"
"You'd want to talk about it. You'd want to come find me after your lessons and tell me all about the fascinating details of the eighty-ninth codex of the forty-third iteration of the seventy-fourth treaty on…on the tariff agreements on grain imports from Alfheim. And I would have to find the nearest sword and run you through with it to make you stop. Don't you think it would be better if I left for Vanaheim instead?"
"I don't have to study law, so it doesn't matter," Loki said with an eyeroll.
"Why do you have to study anything? You're a warrior. You'll be a leader of warriors. You need to train with Tyr. You aren't going to be a magistrate or a public speaker or a…a…what do you do with diction? You aren't going to be a dictionary!" Thor said, bursting into laughter.
Loki laughed, too, though it wasn't exactly the cleverest jest he'd ever heard. "You're a warrior, and you're going to have to do plenty of public speaking. When you're king."
"That's just standing up in front of people and talking," Thor said with a shrug. "It doesn't take years of lessons to do that."
"I don't know," Loki said, really considering it for the first time. "When it's telling stories at the tavern, that's one thing. When it's serious business, like in front of a magistrate…it can be hard to get your thoughts out the way you mean to. It's easy to get flustered."
"Speak for yourself. Start telling more stories at the tavern and you'll get better at it."
Loki sighed and started toward his study. He sometimes liked to picture himself joining Thor and commanding the same kind of attention his brother did, everyone as eager for his stories as they were for his brother's. Maybe it would happen, once he was officially a warrior. "Diction," he said to his dictionary slate, resting atop his desk. The selection and use of words and phrases in written or oral speech, Loki read. Style of enunciation and locution. His eyebrows went up. It was much more than pronunciation, his initial understanding. That wouldn't be a bad skill.
"Getting to work early? Memorizing the dictionary, Lord Dictioner?" Thor asked, having followed him in and seen him looking at the slate.
"Right, Brother, that's what I was planning to do the night before my battle trial," Loki responded, shooting Thor a look that said he was being ridiculous.
"So what are you going to do? After your battle trial, I mean. After your birthday."
"I don't know yet…he kind of made it sound like I had to," Loki said. It might be best for Thor to think that, if he decided he wanted to do it. Besides, even though Father had said it was his decision, he wouldn't have brought it up if he didn't have an opinion on the correct choice.
Thor looked disheartened. "Maybe you can at least put it off for a while. Maybe if you put it off long enough he'll forget about it."
"Maybe," Loki agreed, though the more he thought about it, the more he thought he might actually be interested in this kind of study. It might help if he could figure out for certain whether Father had suggested it because he thought Loki had been deficient at it, or whether, as Finnulfur had apparently told him, he thought Loki had a talent. "Thor…do you think you know what Father really thinks about you?" It was an uncomfortable question to ask, something he'd never raised before.
"I've never really thought about it before," Thor said, flicking the projection of Nidavellir's solar system, next to the desk, into jumbled motion with a finger.
"Do you know that he's proud of you?"
Thor gave him a funny look before giving a tiny moon a flick. "Of course he's proud of me, why wouldn't he be?" He laughed as he squashed Nidavellir between his palms, only to have it spring out again when he let go. "Don't worry about what you said to Vituri, if that's what's bothering you. I don't think Father's too angry about it. Sorkvir's not going to want to sit around in meetings for years on end, so it won't take long. He would've given you a much worse punishment if he was really angry. It's not half as bad as what we both already got for the library books. Thank you, by the way. You didn't have to take any blame for that."
"He knows the truth about that. I didn't tell him, he figured it out himself."
"He knows everything. Sometimes I think he can see everything, like Heimdall, but with Gungnir."
Loki didn't think he could see everything. But he was clever, and it was much harder to get anything false past him than past their mother. "You better go. I have to go to bed. Will you run through the rope parts with me again tomorrow morning? Around eight?"
Thor readily agreed, and Loki got ready for bed, though sleep was slow in coming. The day had been long and stressful, and the next would bring more of the same.
/
/
"This is not a dinner table."
Loki and Thor exchanged a glance. "We'll clean it up when we're done," Loki offered.
"It's a special occasion, Heimdall. Please?" Thor asked.
"Clean it well," the gatekeeper said after only a brief hesitation. "Leave nothing behind. And congratulations, Loki."
"Thank you, Heimdall," Loki said with a smile.
The gatekeeper walked back to his post, and Thor and Loki finished unpacking their picnic basket.
It was over. He'd stood against Tyr for sixty minutes and fought with all he had. Tyr hadn't fallen for Loki's attempt at using a repositioned rope; with less time to practice, Loki thought he might have unintentionally telegraphed its location at one point anyway. He didn't get any hits on Tyr this time, but Tyr still got several on him. He told himself he should be proud of that; the harder Tyr pushed you in the Trials, the better his opinion of your skill, and Tyr hadn't at all taken it easy on him despite everything that had come before. He'd taken his final oaths and been declared a warrior. It should have been one of the most exciting moments of his life, but Loki had mostly just felt relief. Everyone cheered – around fifty or sixty this time, many of them his trainers. Loki concentrated on greeting his aunts and uncles, who he hadn't even seen the last time, and on indulging Baldur, whose enthusiasm wasn't dampened in the slightest. Mother apologized for Father, who had to slip away as soon as the ceremony was over.
Getting stupendously drunk was the normal way of celebrating the completion of the Trials. After a family lunch, Loki had convinced Thor to go rock-climbing with him instead, and on the way there and back they laughed and talked about nothing important, returning well past dark. Thor insisted they stay up past midnight, so they'd taken some snacks and drinks out to the bifrost and plunked themselves down in the middle of the bridge.
After they'd worked their way through most of what they'd brought, Thor checked his timepiece yet again and from the grin that lit up his face Loki knew what it had finally told him. "Happy birthday, Brother."
Loki grinned back. Birthdays were better than Trials, whether he held a sword or notecards. Short of dying – in which case it wouldn't exactly matter – there was literally no way he could get this wrong.
"Do you feel different?"
"I do," he answered, nodding, tone of voice serious. "I think I felt the exact moment when I hit peak durability. I think a whole library of bookcases could fall on me now and I wouldn't feel a thing."
"We should test that. I don't think anyone would notice if a few more got knocked over in the Library of War."
"I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I know you'd really do it if I asked you to."
"You'd be the one doing it, but of course I would. And I know you won't really do it, because I know you're a giant liar anyway."
Loki shrugged, smile still firmly in place. "You're the best brother ever. But don't let that go to your head."
"Too late. But you're the best brother ever. And don't let Baldur hear any of this. He's the cutest brother ever, but you're the best. You're the ugliest brother ever."
"You're the dumbest brother ever."
"You're the…I can't think of anything else. I think right about now is usually when I would just kick you or something. But it's your birthday, so I have a better idea."
"What's that?" Loki asked as Thor started opening up one of the pouches affixed to his belt.
"Mead!" Thor declared, holding out a large silver-and-leather flask.
Loki rolled his eyes. "I told you I didn't want to go out drinking."
"Oh, no, worst-memory-ever brother, you told me you didn't want to go out to a tavern. I don't see a tavern anywhere. Just you and me and the open sky. All right, and Heimdall down that way. But I only brought enough for two," he said, withdrawing a second flask. "In honor of your birthday, adulthood, freedom."
"Oh, all right," Loki said, taking the flask and working the stopper out. "But don't think I don't know this is really you wanting to have mead."
"You're wrong there, Brother. This is really me wanting to have mead with you."
"Wait. That sounds familiar. This isn't some grand scheme to kill me, is it?"
"Not at the moment. But it's still early I suppose. Come on. We'll do it together. Drink it all at once. No stopping. That's how it's done. Got it?"
"Got it," Loki said, face contorting at the thought.
"Ready? Now."
Loki tipped his head back and started drinking. It burned and he squeezed his eyes shut but kept gulping it down and he felt tears coming but he kept going until the flask was empty. He coughed, licked his lips, wiped the moisture from his eyes. He could feel the warmth spreading from his belly, pushing out the night chill.
"Well?" Thor asked.
Loki shrugged. The burn was fading, and the taste left behind wasn't bad. "I'm not dead yet. That's something."
"Do you know what I think?"
"I can't imagine."
"I think you should invite Marthol. Put her on the special guest list so she's guaranteed to get in and have a good view."
"Marthol? She's…I wouldn't even know where to find her. The Library of the Law won't be open tomorrow."
"I bet Finnulfur would know how to find her."
"I am not going to Finnulfur to help me find a girlfriend, Thor."
"Who said anything about a girlfriend? She helped you out, didn't she? You should do something for her in return."
"I don't know. I still don't know why we're doing this tomorrow…well, today now, instead of the next day." His father had sent him a message noting the change, just as lunch was finishing up. Everyone was already talking about him, because of what happened with his Trials, and now his Proclaiming would be part of the Victory Day celebrations, forcing him far more into the public eye than he wanted to be at this particular time.
"It should be today. Today's your birthday. It shouldn't have to wait until tomorrow just because you happened to be born the same day Father defeated the Frost Giants."
Loki nodded, but it had always been that way, marking his birthday the day after; that didn't bother him.
"If you don't ask, I will."
"What?! Thor, you can't!"
"Why not? It's just an invitation. There'll be at least a hundred people on the special guest list. I'll ask Finnulfur, and then I'll send her an invitation. For service to the throne," Thor said with a grin.
"No! Not like that. I can't afford to make Father angry again. Nothing about Father or about the throne."
"Then write her the invitation yourself."
"Fine, all right," Loki relented with a great show of exasperation. "You ask Finnulfur. If he's able to find her address, I'll write her an invitation."
They talked for a few more minutes, then packed up the picnic basket; Loki was tired from the long busy day. As they made their way over the pulsating bridge, they sang one of the sagas about the final defeat of the Frost Giants, skipping and occasionally stomping as the text dictated.
They were still singing when Loki missed a step, and came to a sudden halt, staring down at his feet. "Am I drunk?" he asked Thor with alarm, arm slung over his older brother's shoulders.
"Only drunk people ask that question," Thor answered, laughing. "Well, drunk people and you. No, you aren't drunk. It would take more than that one flask. You aren't fourteen anymore, Brother. Welcome to adulthood."
An hour later, Loki fell into bed exhausted but happy.
/
Forgive me for being pedantic, but just to be clear...we mere mortals don't gain magically high alcohol tolerances at age 20, or any other age. (Not that Loki and Thor drank so much here.) But you know, just in case anyone really young stumbles across here, I feel I should say it. At times I write these guys drinking way more than what we could safely drink. PSA over.
Nineteen down...one to go! Just like Loki! :-) The next and final chapter is a little icing on the birthday cake. I might stick a couple of "deleted/alternate scenes" at the end of it...I was going to put them in a separate chapter but then that destroys the kismet of twenty chapters for a story about Loki turning twenty (yes, 100% planned that way, uh-huh).