"Alright," said Gerd. "Show me what you know of frjosleikr."
Loki didn't ask what frjosleikr was. He could guess based on its similarities to words for magic and freezing that it was the Jotnar's name for their cryokinetic abilities. He fidgeted with his hands, distracted by the texture of the lines etched into his skin. "I've never actually used frjosleikr before," he said.
"Never?" said Fjolnir, shocked.
The three of them were standing in the middle of the largest bath chamber in the palace. Round pools of varying temperatures were sunk into the floor in a circle and one smaller raised basin of cool water stood at the center. Heavy curtains had been drawn over the windows so that the only light came from braziers. To an Aesir or Vanr, the room was dimly lit and comfortably warm, if extremely humid. To the two and a half Jotnar, it was bright and almost suffocatingly hot. Thor and Freyr stood near the door, backs to the wall, chatting and laughing together, Freyr idly twirling Gerd's and Fjolnir's pendants around a finger. Frigga had promised they would not be disturbed until she personally came to fetch them for a meal.
"Unlike you, I only just found out I'm Jotun, so I haven't had much opportunity to practice."
"All the same, I'd like to see what you can work out on your own before we show you anything," said Gerd. "Instinct plays a large role in frjosleikr."
Perhaps it wasn't so different from seidr, then. Loki looked down at the water basin between them and imagined the contents freezing solid, then laid a hand flat over the surface and willed it to become ice.
Nothing happened. Loki frowned. He'd heard countless stories from the older Einherjar that a Frost Giant could freeze anything with a single touch, and he'd seen plenty of the frostbite scars that proved it. He'd been relieved beyond words to find that such an effect wasn't automatic enough to make physical contact dangerous to the people he loved, but now he was getting annoyed.
"No, like this," said Fjolnir after about a minute of nothing. He touched one finger to the surface of the water, and ice crystals spiked and swirled across it almost instantly.
"Fjolnir, let Prince Loki try," said Gerd, laying her hands on his shoulders.
"Sorry, Prince Loki," said Fjolnir. He withdrew his hand but bounced slightly where he stood, clearly bursting to get to the fun part.
Some of the water at the top of the basin was still liquid, so Loki tried again with that. He didn't know what Fjolnir had done that was different, but he thought he'd seen him inhale as he touched the water. Loki did the same, breathing in slowly while trying to imagine the molecules slowing and locking into crystalline form as the heat left them. His eyes flew open. The water around his fingers had not frozen, but he was sure he'd felt it drop in temperature by at least a few degrees.
"A start," said Gerd. "Describe your thought process."
"I willed the heat to leave the water," said Loki.
"And go where?" said Gerd.
Loki blinked.
"What do you know of our biology?"
Loki was surprised to feel his cheeks warm. "Very little," he admitted. "There are some books on the subject," which he knew because said books were currently stacked on the desk in his chambers, awaiting his perusal, "but I focused my studies elsewhere." What he was less willing to admit was that he had never thought the Jotnar worth his time. All he'd believed he needed to know was how to defeat them if he ever met them in battle.
If Gerd was offended by his unnecessary ignorance, she hid it well. "You know Aesir biology, though?"
"Of course," said Loki.
"Your knowledge is not entirely lacking, then," she said with a faint smirk. "Fjolnir could not exist if we were not more similar to the other races of Yggdrasil than we are different, after all. There are, however, a number of ways in which Jotnar are unique. The most important is the source of our frjosleikr. Fjolnir could have been born without it, but he was lucky."
She ruffled her son's hair, a twinkle in her scarlet eyes, and he looked rather pleased with himself as he grinned up at Loki. What a marvel was the House of Freyr. Partly to spite the other timeline, Loki was striving to believe that being Jotun did not make him inherently lesser, but he doubted he would ever be able to consider himself lucky to have been born what he was.
"Heat is far too scarce to waste on Jotunheim, and life forms native to the realm have a number of adaptations in order to function at extremely low temperatures. For us, these include glands that secrete a substance to lower the freezing point of our blood, which is where we get our coloring. Other races leak their heat like sieves, but our skin traps nearly all of it inside, which is why we are so cold to the touch."
"Then how are we not already dead of heat stroke just by standing in this room?" said Loki. If they retained all of their own body heat, it shouldn't be possible to introduce additional heat without significant problems.
"Because of the bruni-magi," said Gerd. Loki nearly jumped when she reached across the basin and jabbed his midriff at a point about halfway between his navel and his ribcage. "It is an organ that collects excess heat and converts it into usable energy, located between the stomach and the liver."
"Ah," said Loki, "then I should have been trying to draw the heat from the water inward."
Gerd smiled. "You are clever. Yes." She reached for the water, and did a slower, more exaggerated movement than Fjolnir had as she touched it, and Loki could see that she while she was inhaling, she was also contracting all of her abdominal muscles. More of the water froze.
Loki reached down and imitated her movements, and this time he closed his eyes and imagined drawing the heat to him with the motion. "There it is," said Gerd. "Pull the heat in. You will be able to feel it the more you do it. Like a fire inside you." There was a sensation not unlike drinking hot cider, except that it trickled up his arm rather than down his throat, before pooling at a spot near where Gerd had poked him.
"You did it!" cried Fjolnir excitedly. Loki opened his eyes and saw that there was indeed a thin patch of ice beneath each of his fingertips. Fjolnir leaned to the side so he could see Freyr around Loki. "Papa, Prince Loki made ice!"
"Well done," said Freyr. "What excellent teachers my wife and son are!"
"Loki was always the better student of the two of us," said Thor.
"You say that as though you were ever much competition," said Loki, torn between embarrassment at being praised for so small an accomplishment and satisfaction that he had at least worked out how to do it.
"Now," said Gerd, "we can only draw heat in up until a certain point. After that, you must release it or risk a frjosleikr fever, which can be deadly. You will know when you are close to danger."
"How do I release it?" said Loki.
She smiled again and drew her hand up above the partially frozen water. The ice followed her motion and reshaped itself into the figure of a horse. Fjolnir had started bouncing again. Gerd splayed out her fingers and the figure disintegrated into glittering frost powder.
"So...we can digest heat and turn it into energy for magic?" That was...remarkably efficient.
Gerd nodded. "What does it feel like now?"
Loki frowned. He hadn't realized it until she drew his attention to it, but the hot cider sensation wasn't quite the same now. "It's like...a coiled spring," he said slowly. Completely different from the way seidr felt. He also noticed that he was more aware of the ice they had made, even what was left of the frost. He could see the patterns in it, and he had the sense that there was something more just out of his reach. With seidr, he could have moved the ice anywhere he wanted it to go, but he wasn't sure what to do with the new source of energy.
"That's frjosleikr. Most Jotnar's bodies are able to use the energy from heat for normal biological functions, and only the excess is available for frjosleikr, but there are mutations that block the production of the enzymes that facilitate the energy conversions. The result is—"
"Skamrbarn," Loki realized. "We only have the enzymes for frjosleikr, which accounts for our height."
"Precisely."
"Does the reverse ever happen?"
"It does," said Gerd. "They are called mikillbarn." The term connoted power and strength, not just great height, so Loki could already guess how such Jotnar were perceived. However, Gerd's brow creased with sympathy as she spoke of them. "They are even more rare than we are, at least as adults." She touched the water again, and as it hardened, three little ice figures rose up out of it. One was barely an inch tall, the next was about two inches, and the third was at least three inches. "Their size considerably shortens their lifespan, and they cannot leave Jotunheim at all or they would fatally overheat within hours." The largest ice figure crumbled. "Normal Jotnar can tolerate higher temperatures for perhaps a few days before succumbing to deadly fevers." The second figure followed the first, leaving the smallest standing alone on a thin plane of ice. "We skamrbarn can survive away from Jotunheim indefinitely as long as we don't overexert ourselves."
Perhaps that was why the refugee skamrbarn were safe on Alfheim—not just because they could survive in its climate, but because larger Jotnar could not safely pursue them. It also explained why Laufey had never been able to make another assault on Midgard. Without the Casket, his armies would wither and die there.
"What happens when we do?" he asked. "Is it like seidr exhaustion?"
Gerd shook her head, her eyes wide. "If only it were. I would rather have seidr exhaustion for a month than a frjosleikr fever. It is absolutely miserable. Be very careful how hard you push yourself."
Loki nodded. He wondered what Stark would make of this. In ten minutes, he'd gained more technical knowledge about how Jotun magic worked than he'd learned about seidr in his entire life. He was going to have to rectify that. The work of a scholar was never done.
"Well," said Gerd, suddenly very businesslike. "You understand the basics now. I think another test is in order."
Loki concealed his alarm. "What sort of test?"
"As I said, frjosleikr is largely instinctive. What better way to test one's instincts than to be thrown into a situation where they are needed? There will be time to teach you the eighteen crystalline structures of ice, how to control lattice size and texture, and how to discover the ideal shape of your fetils svell. For now, your task is to land one snowball strike against Fjolnir."
"I beg your pardon?" said Loki, but his words were drowned by a jubilant war-cry from Fjolnir. The boy plunged his hand into the basin, then pulled it out a second later clutching a perfect sphere of snow, which he pelted straight at Loki's face.
Loki didn't even have time for an indignant reaction. Fjolnir was giving no quarter, and Loki took another two snowballs to the ear and shoulder before he could so much as duck behind the basin. It was so ridiculous that he couldn't be angry, even though Thor and Freyr were now laughing so hard they had to hold onto each other to stay on their feet. "You treacherous little fiend," said Loki, his tone more complimentary than accusatory, "you knew this was going to happen, didn't you?"
"Yep!" said Fjolnir without the faintest hint of remorse, popping up around the side of the basin and letting fly snowballs four and five. Loki threw up a cloaking spell without thinking and sent two simulacra in different directions to cover his retreat.
"Hey!" shouted the boy. "No seidr! We're practicing frjosleikr only!"
Gritting his teeth, Loki uncloaked, but he didn't need to dispell the simulacra, as Fjolnir had already done so with more snowballs. He succeeded in dodging the next one to come his way, but his failure to retaliate was giving his foe time to stockpile ammunition and take careful aim.
Loki threw himself to the ground in a roll past the next snowball and stuck his hand into the nearest bath. It was far hotter than the water in the basin, and the heat shot through him with such intensity that it left him gasping until it settled in his stomach—or his bruni-magi, he supposed. It definitely felt like a fire now, which quickly became a buzzing tension, less reminiscent of a coiled spring than of a hive of swarming bees. It all happened in mere seconds (during which he was struck with at least three more snowballs). He tried to send the writhing energy back into the ice to make one of his own. The ice did change shape, but only into an irregular lump, still made of solid ice. He scowled. How in the Nine was he supposed to do this while under constant assault? It wasn't that the snowballs hurt—they didn't even feel colder than his skin—but he couldn't concentrate at all with them constantly raining down.
X
When Frigga opened the door of the bath chamber to invite her sons and cousins to the midday meal, the sudden chill stole her breath away.
"Ahahaha, I am the Snow King!" a young voice roared. "All princes of Asgard and lords of Vanaheim shall tremble before me!"
It took a few seconds for Frigga's eyes to adjust, and when they did, it was difficult not to burst out laughing. There was very little liquid water left in any of the baths, and it looked like the room had been hit by a blizzard. Fjolnir stood atop a battlement of snow on the far side of the chamber, tall pyramids of snowballs stacked on either side of him. Thor and Freyr crouched behind a much less impressive wall of snow not far from the door. They were both completely soaked, and when they turned to look at her, their grinning faces were bright pink from the cold. Gerd sat primly on a chair made of ice, completely untouched by the fearsome battle.
Frigga took a few more steps forward, and Loki came into view where he was lying sprawled out at the bottom of the nearest bath, breathing hard, caked in snow and partially buried in pieces of ice in various lumpy shapes. He looked sullenly up at her. He had been struck by so many snowballs that they had freed his hair from its usual slick confines, leaving it sticking out in the kind of untamed curls he had not allowed since he was old enough to dress himself. Now was probably not the time for another attempt to persuade him that they were very handsome curls.
"How go the lessons?" she asked.
"Poorly."
So...can you tell I was a biochemistry major before I switched to English? :D
Okay, I didn't really expect ALL of the extensive headcanons I painstakingly came up with about Jotun biology to come out in the dialogue this chapter, but I clearly underestimated how nerdy Loki and Gerd are. Whoops. Hope you found it interesting. I took some inspiration for the idea of the bruni-magi (which translates to heat-stomach from Old Norse) from AtLA, when Uncle Iroh explains that the stomach is the sea of chi. I decided to give the Jotnar a more literal version of that. A stomach that digests heat. That would be a pretty remarkable thing, because usually heat is the byproduct of chemical reactions and ends up as wasted energy.
Fjolnir is a fearsome snow warrior and I love him. If it wasn't clear from what Frigga found when she arrived, Thor and Freyr couldn't resist joining in the fight once there was enough snow for them to use. They are wonderful childish dorks sometimes. Or all the time. (Freyr and Gerd are meant to be in their species' equivalent to their mid-thirties, while Thor and Loki are in their early twenties.)
Once again, my estimations of my own fic's pacing were off, but this time I'm almost positive we've only got one more chapter with prominent roles for the House of Freyr until the next arc kicks off properly. This stuff about Loki's Jotun lessons is all sort of a transition between two arcs, so it isn't always as fun to write, but this chapter gave me a lot of cool ideas to use in what's coming next, so I'm psyched.
Oh, I almost forgot! I totally did finish that 7-page comic about little Thor and Loki. It's on my tumblr, where I have the same username as here. Second post after a dumb Thor/Mean Girls crossover meme I made.