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Chapter Text

Loki has never been happier in his whole entire life.

It’s scary sometimes thinking about happiness, about waking up and being happy, and going to sleep and being happy. An alien concept, to be sure. He hadn’t precisely been unhappy in the Before Time, when Thor was a boy like him, but Loki’s happiness had come in small, controlled bursts – playing with Thor in the apple orchard, helping Lady Hilda with her chores, seeing Mamma at the beginning of each day. They had been bright, lovely moments in a landscape of ever-encroaching darkness, of the pain his magic brought him, of the way people looked at him, of the way his otherness bled into everything he was.

But that was then. That was when Thor was small and Pabbi had thick, blond hair and Mamma’s face was like porcelain. That was when Braggi and Baldr were still alive, and Skildir was his teacher, and Thor’s idiot friends delighted in tormenting him.

In Loki’s quiet moments, in his most personal thoughts he can’t reveal to anyone, he’s glad he isn’t there anymore. It makes him feel terribly guilty, but overpowering that guilt is a relief sweet as milk and cool on his tongue. No one is mean to him here. Mamma hugs him all the time, and Pabbi dotes on him and lets him play with the tiny toy warriors he uses when planning campaigns, and Thor lets him ride his shoulders anytime he wants to. Even the servants are nice to him, and sometimes give him sweets he isn’t supposed to have because it makes him overexcited and restless.

Perhaps most lovely in this brand new world are Loki’s new suite of rooms, away from the nursery for the very first time. They are his rooms, that he doesn’t have to share with anyone, and though the thought had made him feel a bit wobbly for a while, in no time at all he had come to adore his new space. As Pabbi had promised, his rooms remained in Thor’s Hall, across the way and down from Thor’s own suite. That he should be so close to his brother had filled him with glee so fierce he had wiggled when he’d realized it, in part just to make Thor laugh. But honestly, Loki’s suite is incredible – he has an enormous four-poster bed that he needs a stepstool to get onto, plush and thick and soft and decorated in lovely shades of blue and green. He has his own portico with a breathtaking view of Asgard’s southern province, mountains and hills and the valley proper where he knows the little village of Harstad sits nestled away from the unforgiving mountain winds. He has his own washroom he doesn’t have to share with his stinky beast of a brother, and all the privacy he needs to care for himself as he ought. No more would he have to bathe in the middle of the night while his brother snored from his bed.

But perhaps most lovely and most wonderful is the magician’s study. Pabbi had said he would need such a study once he began his schooling, and the study has everything he could possibly need and want. It is full of vials and cauldrons and books, so many books that he couldn’t hope to read them all. There is a massive, enchanted worktable that raises and lowers itself depending on if he’d like to sit or stand. When Pabbi shows it all to him Loki can only hug himself and smile, so hard his face hurts, because he has never been so happy in all of his entire life. Soon, he’d have two of the best teachers in all the Nine Realms teaching him, and Loki would become a great seidmadr, powerful and controlled. He would be strong enough to protect his brother, his parents, and his people.

The only thing standing in the way of this wonderful new life is Loki himself.

He knows it isn’t rational, this part of him whispering that the affection his family is showing him is conditional. He knows that his parents and brother love him and nothing could change that, but he is terrified of even chancing it, of doing something that would make them hate him. He’s trying to be a good boy, to be worthy of his family’s love, to be the person they think he is. The problem is that he’s not that boy, and never has been.

Loki is keeping his true self, the self no one liked, the self who loved mischief and trickery, the self who threw temper tantrums and hollered on top of his lungs, all wrapped up and tucked under his skin close to his heart. If he doesn’t, all Pabbi would have to do is press the runes inside his skin and send him back, and Loki doesn’t want to go back. He wakes up sometimes gasping and sweat-soaked, horror a vice around his throat with his nightmares wispy and dark and snarled in his mind, at the very notion that Pabbi would send him back to that place where he was tolerated, underfoot, and an annoyance to all.

He doesn’t want to be the second and forgotten son ever again.

Loki likes tricks but this is the most painful one he’s ever played, because he knows that eventually the part of himself he’s hiding is going to come free and his family is going to realize what an awful boy he actually is. Skildir always did say he was a snake in the grass, but for being such a mean old man, he really was the wisest of them all. He recognized Loki’s deceitfulness long before anyone else did.

Loki knows the happiness he feels is fleeting. Soon enough he’d ruin it all.

.

Brun arrives in Asgard at the first touch of frost on morning dew.

They’ve been trading letters back and forth, as they waited for the season to change so that Brun could withstand Asgard’s heat. Brun was always curiously serious in his correspondence, so much so that at first Loki had thought perhaps he’d misread their friendship completely. When he’d mentioned his concern to Pabbi, whispered there against his shoulder one night in the king’s study, Pabbi had told him in his quiet and thoughtful way, “My son, I doubt young Brun knows how to write in the Allspeak. He’s likely drawing on assistance from one of his servants.”

He’d been right, of course – Pabbi was always right. It had just made Loki love Brun all the more, for trying so hard to be his friend.

It’s all a lot of pomp and circumstance, when Brun finally arrives in Asgard. Loki knows that this is the next new chapter of the healing between their peoples, that Brun being invited to study with Loki was a high honor for the Jotnar people, and that there are political complications that he doesn’t understand, but Loki doesn’t care about any of that, not really, not like he should. All he cares about, as the Bifrost finally fades and Brun and Lord Byleistr stand there in their jewels and finery, with their retinue of servants and luggage, is that Loki’s friend is finally here.

Brun is just as Loki remembers, if not a bit taller than last time he visited. It’s all very official and royal and there’s a lot of bowing and gifts and other nonsense, and Pabbi drones on for a bit, and there are ten royal scribes documenting this auspicious moment. Loki only has eyes for his friend. He waits, with barely contained glee, for Pabbi to invite him forward, and then all sense leaves him.

He was supposed to bow and offer Brun the gift of a pelt – a snow rabbit for his shoulders, woven with delicate silver thread and covered with protection runes – but that is not what happens. What happens is that Loki throws his arms around Brun, and Lord Byleistr must catch Loki’s offering, and it’s all incredibly embarrassing, or would be if Brun wasn’t squeezing him just as hard. They’re both yelling at each other with excitement, and Brun is lifting him off the ground because he really doesn’t know his own strength, and Loki is shouting, “The blue mirror turned white!” and Brun is giggling, “I told you it would work!” and then they’re talking over each other so fast Loki can barely understand his friend. It’s only when he realizes that the entire Bifrost has gone silent that he understands what he’s done.

Their parents are staring at them, mouths all but hanging open, and Loki cringes under their disbelief. Loki prides himself on being the smartest person in the room at any given moment, but that he miscalculated here, let his emotions take him over, speaks to how much he adores Brun. That doesn’t mean Pabbi isn’t going to be absolutely furious with him, or yell at him again for acting like a child and not a prince of the Realm Eternal.

He shrinks from his father’s gaze, but before he can apologize to their guests and make amends for his horrific breach in etiquette, the Jotnar all burst into laughter.

It’s so loud, echoing in the Bifrost chamber like a gong. Lord Byleistr’s face is transformed with mirth, and Loki understands why Brun told him his modir was one of the great beauties of Jotunheim. Pabbi has a hand to his face, and Mamma is laughing outright, and Loki is mortified but can’t quite seem to let his friend go. Lord Byleistr gazes down at him with a warmth he had not shown the last time he was here, before laying the snow rabbit pelt over Brun’s thin shoulders. “This is a kind gift, young prince,” he says with his rumbly voice.

“It’s a welcome present,” Loki says, beaming up at him. The white of the pelt against the dark blue of Brun’s skin is so beautiful, and Loki loves that he got to give it to him, especially when Brun wiggles into its warmth. He hugs his friend again, so tightly, and Brun squeezes him right back. “I’m so happy you’re here.”

“Me too,” Brun says, full of joy, and takes his hand.

.

Brun is everything Loki could ever want in a friend. He’s funny, so smart, inquisitive and thoughtful; he has the most infectious laugh Loki has ever heard, and loves telling jokes at the most inopportune times. He makes it very hard to control the mischievous part of Loki’s nature, but Loki finds that he thrills in resisting, in strengthening his resolve, in using his fun-loving and cheerful friend’s antics to moderate his own.

They go everywhere, the two of them, until Thor jokes one night that their names are becoming interchangeable. Only, Loki has never felt such a deep and instant companionship with anyone, not even his beloved cousins. Brun is second to him only after Thor himself, and Thor is a grown man and busy with the running of his household and the protection of Asgard – he no longer has time to run and play and be the boy Loki longs for. Though Loki still saw him often, Loki has realized that Thor had been shielding him from the stretch of time that existed between them. He was the crown prince, and his life was consumed with work – work he had set aside during Loki’s first tremulous months in this new world, but which could not be put down forever. Not only was he assisting the Jotnar in the rebuilding of their world, but he had been tasked with putting down rebellions and shoring up the defenses of their allies across the Nine, as the time of the Convergence drew near.

Whenever Thor leaves Asgard Loki can tell it is with a heavy heart. He does his best to reassure Thor that he’s fine here in Asgard, until one day he realizes that he is.

It is clear, from the first, that Brun has charmed the King and Queen of Asgard utterly. Perhaps what draws them, as it draws Loki, is his new friend’s loving heart. Brun is kind, from the top of his small horns to the bottom of his fat toes, in a way Loki doesn’t immediately recognize. Kind in that when Loki is self-deprecating, he is quick to tell him all the ways Loki is wonderful; kind in that praise falls from his lips like snowflakes, building on the ground under Loki’s feet until he feels buoyed by it, lifted by it, wrapped in his friend’s love. He shares everything he has with Loki and Loki, who is by his very nature a selfish creature, begins to learn to share back.

Very quickly, almost without his realizing it, Brun becomes Loki’s closest companion and dearest friend, and his love for him grows until it is near to bursting. When he tells Brun this one day when they’re hiding from Volstagg, one of the red braids from his beard clutched between them, Brun says, “You are my only friend, Loki, but even if you weren’t you would still be my best,” and starts to cry. It is happiness, Loki knows, because he feels it too, and he hugs Brun so tightly they almost fall backwards out of the barn loft.

That the love of Brun should not be universal is difficult to understand, but there are old prejudices at work that not even a new alliance could stop. For all that Loki has only seen nine passes of the stars he is very, very smart, and equally as observant. He would have to be blind not to notice the way that others react to Brun. Loki doesn’t know what his father has ruled, but he has known since Lord Byleistr’s first visit that the people of Asgard have been directed to treat all Jotnar with respect. The warriors, surprisingly, had been the most tolerant. Good soldiers understood the need for peace, better than the common people. The nobility had been more outwardly suspicious, and though they had treated Lord Byleistr and his party with respect – as Pabbi’s guests – respect did not mean acceptance. They have warned their children away from them, because though the children of the palace already avoided Loki, that does not hold a candle to what they do now when he and Brun race through the Great Hall, or go adventuring in the orchard. For all that his friend is cheerful to a fault, he can see his dark red eyes skipping longingly over the other children, with a hope that isn’t answered.

“People are ignorant, and stupid,” Loki tells him one day when they’re exploring the palace’s dusty towers. He and Brun had overheard the maids whispering of one warded by evil magic, and how none dared enter for fear of some latent spell entrapping them. Loki had no idea who could have warded it so, or what monster Pabbi had trapped there once upon a time. It was the most delicious of mysteries, and one Loki could not resist.

Unfortunately, the story of a tower warded by evil magic seems as if it was just that – a story. Still, he and Brun enjoyed a splendid morning getting filthy in the palace’s little used staircases and rooms, and Brun’s heavy mood had greatly improved. They had found an old volva’s study of particular interest, which despite being emptied still had a few small treasures tucked into small corners. The magic in Loki’s breast had been tickling since they entered.

Brun wriggles out from under the enormous wooden bed and sits back on his haunches, sighing. He is completely covered in dust and grime. One of his braids is coming uncoiled from around his horns. “It would not be different if you had come to Jotunheim instead, Loki. Worse, I think. The children there would distrust you as much as the children here distrust me. The lives of our peoples are long, and their memories longer.”

“That doesn’t make people less stupid. That makes people more stupid,” Loki says, dropping down from one of the rafter’s where he’d scurried up, convinced he’d find something on one of the long wooden beams. All he’d found were dust motes, but he remains undeterred. “I don’t want to forget the past, not at all – it’s important that mistakes not be made again. But to linger in it, to be forever counting wrongs, is not the path forward. How are our people to ever become friends and heal our wounds if all we do is distrust one another?”

“What is obvious to you and me is not so to our families,” Brun says softly. “And even less so to the common people.”

“What does it matter what they think? We are princes, Brun, and younger brothers to kings. We will hold immeasurable power and be great magicians in service to our kingdoms.”

Brun grins at him. “Yes, this is true. We will be in service to our kingdoms. Filled with people.”

“Stupid people!”

“Ignorant people,” Brun corrects, though gently. “Mine more than yours. The war – it is in everything we are.”

Loki comes to kneel behind his friend and undo the braids that have come loose. Brun’s hair falls long and glossy and beautiful, so black it is almost blue, to his waist. It feels like silk in Loki’s hands. “Will you tell me of it?”

Brun is silent for a time, but Loki has come to understand that his friend was as thoughtful as he was cheerful, and sometimes needed time to collect his thoughts. Loki lets him, working Brun’s hair into elegant plaits, in patterns that please him. Brun sighs and lifts his face up to where the weak fall sun is streaming in through the high window, a triangle of light falling over them. “Do you remember when we met, and I told you of the sakna ?”

“Yes.”

His friend hums, low, the sound shaking in his chest so loudly that a barn mouse squeaks and scurries across the wooden floor, disappearing into a tiny hole in the stone. “I’ve never known it to be, but Modir says that Utgard once glittered like a jewel, glowing with a light that lived deep underground. Padir Laufey ruled over a million subjects from a throne as magnificent as Allfather’s, and there was music and laughter and a great library, and a market so large that people from all the Nine came to buy and sell their wares. I can’t imagine it, truly. When Jotunheim went to war with Asgard, the Aesir took the Skrin, what you call the Casket of Winters, and Jotunheim grew still. The water became brine, and food no longer grew. The fish became nothing but bones, and the Ironwoods crumbled to dust. And the people, Loki. The Jotnar stopped growing, too, and became as cold and empty as the world under their feet. That is the sakna. Loss, and death, and suffering. Many have lived and died and never knew peace and growth and sunshine. Do you understand?”

It is an awful thing to hear his friend speak so, and for the first time he understands why Thor’s shoulders are so bowed all the time. How could he ever be unburdened of their father’s choices, when it had hurt so many?

“Prince Thor gave us back the Skrin,” Brun says, taking Loki’s trembling hands in his, his plaits falling around his shoulders half-done. “And the sakna is not as heavy as it once was. But I don’t know if it will ever go away completely, not while there are still beating hearts on Jotunheim. You know and I know that the path forward is one of healing, yes? But our people don’t. They are frightened, Loki, and ignorant in their fear because they think Thor’s return of the Skrin is another yoke, another thing Allfather will take from us if we displease him.”

The tears well up in Loki’s throat like water rushing through a broken dam. “You – you don’t think that.”

“I did, at first,” Brun says, so softly Loki can almost pretend he didn’t. “When Modir told me we were coming here, I thought – I thought that the Allfather would throw us in the dungeons, at the very least, or kill us where we stood, as he did Padir Laufey.”

Loki’s world narrows to a prick.

“Pabbi… Pabbi killed the King of Jotunheim?”

“Padir Laufey snuck into Asgard to fight the Allfather for the Skrin, only a few years ago. ” Brun’s eyes go glossy with tears, and he sighs. “There was a mighty battle fought that day. Padir Laufey’s guilt was a thing so deep and desperate, the elna. The guilt of a king who rules over dying lands. The elna made him so angry that it turned to madness, made him take chances he should never have taken.” Brun sighs again, shaky. “It is difficult for me, sometimes, to think of him like that. He was hardened by circumstance, but he loved us in his way.”

Shame chokes him, freezes his tongue and cuts off any words he could possibly say. Brun smiles his sad smile and pulls him into his arms, his cool, soft touch a comfort against Loki’s burning skin. The roaring in his ears is so loud. “Did you not know, my friend?”

Loki shakes his head, numb. “My father knew that Jotunheim was dying. Why did he not give King Laufey the Casket?”

“The same thing that guides the hearts of all people, Loki. Fear.” Brun tilts his chin up, gently, and brushes his thumbs over the tears frozen on Loki’s numb cheeks. “Your brother looked past his fear and saved us. He opened the door to a future we did not think we would have. Uncle King looked past his fear, too, and saved us. He accepted Thor’s word and in doing so, was able to bring the Skrin back to our world, when Padir Laufey could not – through peace and words, not fighting and bloodshed. You and I are the symbols of our new friendship, and we are here to learn too. It will be up to us to guide the hearts and hands of our kings, when we come of age. Guide our people to a long-lasting peace.”

Loki buries his face there at Brun’s throat, hugging him tightly. “You are so wise. How will I ever be as wise as you?”

“I had a good teacher,” Brun says, patting Loki’s head gently. “My modir is the wisest of all Jotnar. It is often said that he had the best of his parents – strength and cunning and fearlessness, tempered by the heart of a poet. Modir told me to keep my heart open when I first visited Asgard, and in letting his wisdom guide me I have met my very best friend, the one who I would tell everything to and share everything with.”

Loki rubs the backs of his fingers under his nose and the heel of his hand over his eyes. “You do your family proud, Brun.”

Now it is Brun’s turn to blush, though with pleasure. They beam at one another until they start to giggle, and then Loki pokes him until he turns around again, to let him finish braiding his hair.

.

He waits until that night, after the evening meal is through and nightly ablutions completed, after the servants have turned down beds and Brun has gone back to his rooms on the other side of Loki’s hallway, and after Mamma has come to kiss him and wish him a good night. He waits until night has cloaked Asgard, that precious hour before the moons rose and bathed the land in dim light, and then Loki creeps out from the blankets Mamma had carefully arranged and loosens the floorboard in the corner of his bedroom.

This space is shallower than the hole he’d made in the nursery, small, enough only for the few bits and bobs he’d already accumulated, one of the pearls from Mamma’s favorite shawl, a book stolen from his father’s library, and his journal. His treasures stare up at him, and he runs his fingers over the bits and bobs he’s collected – he had added one of Thor’s cloak pins only this morning, diamonds glittering around the crest of the House of Odin. He presses a kiss to his fingertips and touches each of his treasures once, before moving them aside.

It is his journal he takes out, with careful hands, eyes darting to the window to make sure his father’s ravens are not perched and watching. He crawls under his new four-poster bed, pillow and blanket in tow – a false sense of privacy, he knows. He dares much writing down his inner-most thoughts, and it is with a near frenzied anxiety that he flips to the place he’s marked, and licks the tip of the fountain pen.

Refrencing all green-marked entries.

Brun does not know that I search for answers surownding my arrival here, how I came to be in a future that is not a future, but reality as my family sees it and I have come to acept. I myself do not know why I am desprate to learn the truth, only that it is a truth all have been sworn to keep from me. It fills me with dred to think why this is so, why they keep the events surownding my coming here secret.

Loki knows it’s wrong, that Pabbi would be furious if he knew Loki was trying to understand what happened to the older him. He can’t stop trying, compelled to learn why he woke up chained and gagged in Pabbi’s Hall, why Thor spoke of Titans and Mamma nursed two Midgardian’s in the soul forge, when no Midgardians had ever visited Asgard before. For being such a consummate liar, he hates being lied to – and this is one falsehood that can’t be borne.

My dea friend did not realise it, but this afternoon Brun gave me a peace of the mystery I’ve been un-covering since I woke up here. None in my family told me of the death of the King of Jotunhime, which happened in this very palace only a few short years ago. To conseal something of such magnitud from me – a king of one of the Nine Realms slayn in the palace keep!! – is evidense enough that the secrets Pabbi will not voice involve King Laufy. Was Laufy one of the reasons why I was captured on Midgaurd, and turned against my family and friends? Did he work with the Titan Thor spoke of? I know not, but this revalation brings me closer to the truth.

Loki doesn’t know what to think, with this new knowledge that Pabbi fought and killed King Laufey of Jotunheim, after he snuck into Asgard using a path other than the Bifrost. Something about the telling of it doesn’t sit right with him, as if he’s cocked an ear to listen to a tune being sung far away. He wants to hear the lyrics so badly, but he can’t. Trying to make the runes in his fingers tingle, even after he rubs them on the knees of his sleep pants.

He doesn’t think Brun is mistaken, but neither does he think his friend has all the facts. Pabbi was no king slayer. Laufey came to fight him for the Casket, and lost. He knows he only need ask his father and Pabbi will tell him what happened, explain the events in his soft, gentle voice, but Loki fears the truth.

I do not doubt my family’s words when they say that the illness that consumed Loki the Elder could not be healed. What happened to him, and therfore to me? I wish to know the person he was, the sorcerer he became. Did the pain of being Other ever sofen into something that could be accepted? Did he ever love another?

He dashes his wrist over his eyes. When he sighs, it’s shaky and rough.

I am a bad, spiteful, cruel boy. There is no goodness in me that I have ever been able to find, and that I have tricked my family until now only speaks to my capasaty as a liar and a cheat. I fear every day that they will learn of my treachery, and yet still seak the truth I know will destroy me. But what choice do I have? How can I ever grow, when the fowndation on which I stand is swaying beneath me?

With careful hands, he marks his page and closes his journal, whispering the only spell he knows over the leather, the only one his magic responds to – one of concealment and deception. Fitting, truly.

The journal fits neatly in the crevice he’d painstakingly dug out of the stone, slotting into place where it could not be seen, even should his hiding place be discovered.

With one more fretful look to the window, Loki pulls his father’s book free. One of the Titans of old stares at him with its one-eyed grimace from the cover.

.

The arrival of the teachers who would instruct Loki and Brun in seidr is one of incredible fanfare, trumpets and grand feast and all. Loki doesn’t precisely know why there is so much celebrating and carrying on, only he thinks it has more to do with the new alliance and friendship between Jotunheim and Asgard than it does with Loki and Brun beginning their studies.

The morning their teachers arrive is terribly exciting. Lit chases them down three hallways before he can catch Brun up to haul him to the bath, and his friend’s wails are token protest at best, if the exaggerated wink he gives Loki as he’s being carted off like a sack of flour indicates. Loki laughs for five minutes before Mamma appears with one of her ladies in waiting and two big fluffy towels, but Loki is a creature of poise and grace. He only runs down two hallways before letting Mamma catch him.

Pabbi’s court has assembled to witness this supposedly momentous occasion, though he thinks it’s more likely they’re here to enjoy the show before partaking in the Allfather’s generosity. Cook had fifteen boars on a spit when last he and Brun had investigated during their weekly filching expedition for sweetbreads.

Mamma stands near where Pabbi sits on Hlidskjalf, but Thor is with them on the dais in full armor and helm, Mjolnir at his hip. “Cleaned to a sparkle, despite the twin looks of disdain,” he says, laughing.

Loki glares at him and tries to smooth his hair, which Mamma refuses to fix for him, as if she likes the way that his curls spring out all around his head. She had at least used pomade to tame them a bit, but he can’t help thinking he bears a striking resemblance to a yappy little dog. Running about with Brun with a bird’s nest for hair didn’t matter, but he wanted to make a good impression for his teachers. “I look stupid.”

His brother kneels in front them to fix a collar here, smooth a wrinkle there, and unkink one of the chains of Brun’s pectoral for him. “You look fine. You clean up well, gentlemen.”

Brun doesn’t know whether to glower or to smile, and the mix on his face is hilarious. It’s enough to pull Loki out of his sour mood, and he grins. “Oh yes, we’re perfect princes prancing like proper peacocking prats.”

Thor’s ridiculous honk of laughter earns him a sharp look from Pabbi, but Thor doesn’t much seem to mind. He winks at the two of them as the trumpets call from the entrance to the hall, signaling the arrival of Lady Groa and Sir Ragnvaldr.

Looking back on this moment later, Loki will realize that though he hadn’t really known what to expect, he thought at the very least that they would be tall, imposing figures of stunning power, magic crackling right under their skin. That outwardly, they would appear to be what they were – the most powerful magical users in the Nine Realms.

To put it diplomatically, they are not.

Lady Groa was a volva, witches of the most impossible and glorious power, so much so that they were heralded across the Nine for their sorcery and spellwork. She was also short, standing of an eye with Loki, and so bent and frail that it was clear only Sir Ragnvaldr’s arm was keeping her walking. She had wild, thin white hair that stood straight up all over her head, and the deeply set purple eyes that marked her as volva, though one had gone milky.

Sir Ragnvaldr, on the other hand, struck Loki quite speechless. He was a slight man, dark of hair and eye, and so wildly, unabashedly ergi that Loki doesn’t know what to think or how to feel. His utterly flamboyant lavender silk robes, lined with white rabbit fur, swish around his ankles as he walks, and the dark amethyst gemstones woven into his long, coifed brown hair catch the firelight. At least a dozen rings twinkle on each hand, and tiny bells on his golden slippers chime with each step. Everything about him is merry, from his lilting, laughing voice, to the impish delight he clearly takes in the show he is putting on, bowing with a flourish to Mamma and Pabbi.

To be ergi in Asgard was the deepest and ultimate shame, but Pabbi comes down from his throne and embraces Sir Ragnvaldr, squeezing his forearms as they greet one another like old friends, which they certainly were if he had taught Loki for most of his life. Loki doesn’t know what to do, where to look, his cheeks flaming because he had no idea his father would ever – that Otherness such as this would be accepted.

Loki makes the mistake of catching Thor’s eye, and the tenderness in his brother’s gaze freezes the air in his lungs. Thor knew who and what he was, though they had not spoken of it – Loki too embarrassed, too shy to point out something they both knew. Thor arches a brow with a smile, darting his gaze to Pabbi once, as if daring Loki to recognize the acceptance in his father’s warm reception.

Before he has a chance to think on it, Sir Ragnvaldr turns his Sight on Loki, and Loki realizes that for all the humor in the man’s twinkling eyes and absurdity in his costume, he is standing before one of the most powerful seidmadrs in all the known universe. Brun shivers at his side, grabbing Loki’s hand tightly in terror. Loki knows they have nothing to fear, not really, but it is humbling to stand before one so powerful as Sir Ragnvaldr, to recognize that this man will teach them to one day surpass him in their power.

Sir Ragnvaldr crouches before them not unlike Thor had done, and plucks at their magic without a single word, like a musician at a harp. Loki feels tendrils of power he had no idea he possessed light up in his throat, his chest, his groin and the soles of his feet, and Brun’s grip is crushing now, trembling as he is trembling. Loki wants to tell him that they have nothing to fear, that for the first time since waking up in this future-not-future he feels safe, but he thinks the words would be lost on his friend.

Sir Ragnvaldr looks first to Brun, and they speak without saying a word. Brun’s fear lessens, though his grip on Loki’s hand stays true. Loki can feel the vines of magic they’re trading, Sir Ragnvaldr’s light touch met by Brun’s, clumsy and unlearned, for all that this was something they were born to do. Sir Ragnvaldr says, “Golden ash?” and a tremulous smile ticks at Brun’s mouth. “Yes, tryllekunstner.”

The word startles a laugh from him. “That is not a title I’ve had for many years, young one, but it is fitting.”

Sir Ragnvaldr’s gaze turns to him and Loki meets his eyes, unflinching, though it is he who is now terrified. Sir Ragnvaldr must already know what a wicked boy Loki is, but such knowledge is small comfort when the full force of a seidmadr’s gaze is on him. It is only when Sir Ragnvaldr’s magic brushes the runes laid like a map over Loki’s body that Loki feels Sir Ragnvaldr’s curiosity turn to terrible surprise, then rage, and then to helpless, tearing grief. He feels it, and sees it, as tears fill the man’s eyes red. “Ymir save us,” he says softly, with such profound anguish Loki can’t flinch away from it, as much as he might want to. “Loki.”

Loki has the strangest, most curious sense of Sir Ragnvaldr gathering all of Loki’s magic up in his hands and studying it, though their eyes never leave one another’s, though neither of them move. Pabbi’s Hall falls away – Lady Groa’s angry voice, Mamma and Pabbi. Even the feeling of Brun’s fingers laced through his fades, until the only thing in the world is Sir Ragnvaldr and Loki.

I did not know it would be you, echoes in his ears. He recognizes Sir Ragnvaldr’s shock for what it is. Dear one. There is no need to fear me.

I’m not afraid, Loki thinks, desperately.

You’re trembling.

You can see inside me. You can see the person I am.

Yes, I can. Why does that frighten you?

There can be no secrecy here. No hiding. To do so will only prolong this pain. You will learn that I’m not a good boy. And when you tell them, they will send me back.

Send you back? Where?

To the place I come from. When Thor was a boy like me.

He can feel Sir Ragnvaldr’s anger, though it is clear he is trying to hide it. You think your father will send you to the past because of your naughtiness?

I am not naughty, sir. I am bad and cruel and full of mischief. I have tried to be good, tried to pretend, but they’ll find out. And when they do, they will not want me anymore.

Loki doesn’t want to go back. Not to that place, where he was constantly underfoot, where Thor yelled mind your place, where Pabbi told him to stop acting like a child, where Lady Hilda said you must learn to listen. Where his tormentors were rewarded for hurting him. Where he was forgotten, and nothing he ever said or did was worthy of praise or love.

Will you tell them? Please sir, I beg this of you, don’t. I will do anything to keep them from knowing. I – I would offer myself to you in any way you wish, if only you would keep this secret. Skildir taught me many ways to please, and I can do the same for you.

The world lurches back with the flavor of Sir Ragnvaldr’s magic coating the back of his tongue, and Loki doesn’t burst into tears through iron will alone. Brun is at his side, restlessly stroking his arm and crooning to him, something strange and Jotun and lovely, and he doesn’t know why until he realizes he can smell himself, the stink of his own fear, can hear the shattering force of his teeth clacking together.

All it had taken was one look from this sorcerer to peel him open and leave him bleeding to death at his feet.

Sir Ragnvaldr stares at him for long, long moments, and when Loki whispers, “Please, sir,” the expression on his face shatters like glass. To see so much anger, and to know that it is directed at him, makes Loki want to hide from the world.

Sir Ragnvaldr stands, one hand at Loki’s shoulder. “Allfather, I ask that you clear this Hall.”

Pabbi studies Sir Ragnvaldr for long moments, before Gungnir makes it so.

All leave the Hall, even – after Sir Ragnvaldr’s sharp look – the Warrior’s Three. Even Pabbi’s Einherjar. Even, with tears streaked down his cheeks, dear Brun, carted away by Lit with such devastation on his small face that Loki wishes he hadn’t seen it. Loki’s world is narrowed to a prick, but he can see Mamma’s desperate concern, Pabbi’s grip on Gungnir. Thor has Mjolnir in hand, and looks as if he is a minute away from murdering Sir Ragnvaldr where he stands.

Sir Ragnvaldr voice echoes in Loki’s head. You robbed him of Valhalla.

Pabbi lifts his chin. Yes.

It was his time. Was it done for selfish means?

Yes.

Sir Ragnvaldr studies Pabbi, Odin Allfather, with such frankness that Loki wants to hide from it, from them – wants to clamp his hands over his ears. “You knew he had been plucked from the stars.”

“Frigga saw it.”

“This is why you came to me.”

“I knew of none other who could help conjure the dark magic needed. With the Bifrost destroyed, I could not retrieve him – only send Thor to where we knew he had been commanded.”

The Bifrost had been destroyed? Loki’s world lurches under his feet, and it is only Sir Ragnvaldr’s grip on him that keeps him standing. He thought it strange that the Bifrost looked so different, but he thought perhaps his father’s seidmadr’s had built on its magics, not that it had been rebuilt. But even that thought, so awful and strange, is second to –

What – what did Sir Ragnvaldr mean, that he had been plucked from the stars?

Sir Ragnvaldr’s sharp gaze moves to Thor, whose confusion is falling away to horror. It is matched only by Mamma’s eyes.

“This will not be, Odin,” Sir Ragnvaldr says, with such force that Loki recoils underneath it. “I blindly followed you, once, allowed you to convince me that the secrets of his life were better kept. This is not a mistake I will make again.”

Loki has never seen his father so angry before, so full of rage that he looks like the gods from Loki’s books, terrible in his power. Just as quickly as the rage comes on him does it fall away, leaving his father hurt, and so old.

“Can you not see what you have done?” Sir Ragnvaldr asks. “When does this end, Allfather, King of Kings? That you have used the magic I gave you – magic of my own spirit, carved from me as easily as flesh and bone, never to return to me – to do this makes me accomplice.”

“Enough, Ragnvaldr,” Lady Groa says, and Loki startles when she cups his face with gnarled fingers. He’d forgotten she was here at all. They’re of a height, and he stares into her violet eyes for long seconds, helpless in the face of her kindness. “Ah, Loki,” she sighs, her fingertips papery thin and soft against his face, like the feathers that sometimes escape his pillows. “You have no reason to be frightened.”

“Yes, my lady,” Loki hears himself say, the jerking of swallowed tears strangling his voice.

“Dear child,” she says, so softly. “This conversation is not meant for small ears. The Allfather and Ragnvaldr have much to discuss, and I am an old lady in need of a rest. I would be shown my rooms, and ask for your escort.”

His eyes dart to Sir Ragnvaldr and Pabbi, Thor and Mamma. Loki recognizes their silence for what it is – they’re waiting for him to leave before saying anything more. It used to drive Thor crazy when Pabbi ordered them out of the Hall, as it was usually when something exciting was happening – a townsman stumbling into the Hall, blood-splattered and shrieking about a dragon, or the Einherjar throwing a caught murderer at Pabbi’s feet. Loki never really knew why Thor got so mad, as oftentimes the reason Pabbi ordered them out was because it was too scary for them to be there, but Thor didn’t see it like that. He would holler and carry on and swing their wooden play swords with such force that sometimes they’d shatter, little splinters caught in the carpet of the nursery for weeks afterward and digging into bare toes.

He understands, now. As soon as he leaves Pabbi’s Hall, Sir Ragnvaldr is going to tell his family what an awful boy he is, and what they must do to guard themselves against him, and there isn’t a single thing he can do about it.

Lady Groa squeezes his hand and he offers her his elbow, ever the gallant prince he has been taught to be, even with the rock lodged in his throat choking him. “Of course, my lady. I would be happy to show you your rooms.”

.

Lady Groa’s quarters are in the wing of the palace reserved for dignitaries and heads of state. Loki would have puzzled out that particular honor in another time and place, but right now it’s taking all of his considerable restraint not to burst into tears and run away.

He had learned the skill of polite small talk at his mother’s knee, and he follows Lady Groa’s mindless chatter with half an ear as he helps her unpack her trunks. She has occupied one of the larger suites in this wing, where Loki remembers Pabbi always putting the dignitaries from Alfheim because they needed space for their workings. The suite has an enormous workshop, a study, and an enchanted doorway that led to a private pocket universe. When Loki chances a peek he sees a lush meadow under picturesque, snow-capped mountains, and deer grazing on blossoms under tree boughs swaying in the summer breeze.

She would use the ingredients she found in the pocket universe for her magic, Loki knows, but it would also be home to the dozen birds she’d brought with her, all rustling and fluttering in their golden cages in the sitting room. She had finches and cardinals and small fluffy owls, one of whom hooted at him when he got too close, and an enormous, dark brown hawk with a breast of white feathers and sharp golden eyes. Loki is drawn to the creature, to the intensity of it’s gaze, to the shiver of magic he feels when it tips its head to study him.

Lady Groa steps across the room to him, her robes rustling where they brush the floor.

“His name is Red.”

“Red? But there’s nothing red on him.”

“He is of Midgard. I heard his cry through the cosmos, and when I came to him he had been attacked by an eagle and was dying under a raging summer sun, his wings broken. I brought him home and mended him, because in him I felt a fierce warrior’s heart. A will to live as strong as fire.”

He stares at the majestic creature. “He is beautiful.”

Lady Groa suddenly laughs, wispy and soft. “He tells me to say thank you.”

“You hear his thoughts?”

“His intentions only. He is one of my familiars.”

“What is a familiar?”

Lady Groa smiles down at him. “When you look into an animal’s heart and feel a kinship.”

He can’t help but think of the shiver of magic he always felt when he looked into Sleipnir’s eyes. The way he could almost hear Sleipnir’s thoughts, feel his amusement. He feels that now with Red, in a way. “Did he heal? Can he fly, now?”

“He can,” Lady Groa says, and opens the cage door. Red walks along the branches in his cage until he can hop, lightly, onto the arm Lady Groa extends him. The massive talons should have cut into her thin, papery skin, but they don’t – and he doesn’t know if its care on Red’s part, or magic on Lady Groa’s. She gently runs the backs of her fingers through the white plumage at his breast, and encourages Loki forward with a smile. “He likes you, and invites you to stroke him, though asks you be mindful not to put his feathers into disarray.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, staring at Red’s massive beak. “He won’t bite me?”

“He likes to nip,” and at this Lady Groa gives Red a look, “but he won’t this one time, if you feed him one of the mice from his box.”

The dead mice smell awful, which thrills Loki to the core and makes him forget, for a moment, about what is happening in Pabbi’s Hall. When he offers one of the mice to the bird, held by one skinny tail, the hawk darts forward and snatches it from his fingers, gulping it in two swallows.

Lady Groa has him wait until Red settles back comfortably before allowing Loki to touch him, just a little bit, there along his breast. His feathers are downy-soft and scratchy all at once, and Red ruffles them a bit, like Loki’s touch tickles him. He strokes more firmly, then, and Lady Groa smiles, scritching Red along the top of his head.

“Did – did you teach the elder Loki for very long?”

“What an odd turn of phrase,” Lady Groa murmurs, and Red cocks his head at her as if in agreement, his sharp eyes blinking. “In all the long years I have practiced these arts, I’ve never quite come across a situation like this. Neither has Ragnvaldr.” She must see something in his gaze, something pleading and painful, because she sighs. “You may ask.”

“Why was Sir Ragnvaldr so mad?”

“You may ask anything but that.”

“Why?”

“Because Odin Borson must take some responsibility for the choices he has made.”

He chews on his lower lip. “He – he is my father.”

“Yes he is, in all the ways that matter,” Lady Groa says, and runs the backs of her fingers gently along his cheek. “I love you, Loki. I have always loved you, when you were a little boy running around my workshop and knocking over my vials, when you were a young man struggling with a spell that was just outside your reach, and when you were grown and brought me my favorite sweets from Alfheim. I loved you when you made the wrong choices, and when you suffered for them. And I love you now, even as I grieve for you.”

It’s not unlike what his mother had told him, or what was in Pabbi’s eyes every time they spoke. The grief of his older self, this phantom who haunted Loki’s every waking moment.

“That’s what everyone says,” he whispers, shuddering, and Red darts forward to pluck at his hair. Even that small touch isn’t enough to hold back the tears, and Loki stares down at his lap, chin trembling. “That’s what everyone says, that they grieve for me.”

“A blank slate, a life unlived.” Lady Groa tips his chin up, brushing his curls back from his face. “He was a good man. Lost, sometimes, as we all are. Prone to making the wrong decisions. But a good man, with a good heart.”

“No one will tell me what happened to him.”

“While it’s true that tragedy often inspires pretty words, this heartbreak is too fresh. In time, the story of Loki the Elder will pass into fable and epic poems will be written of his exploits. We are still bleeding on the battlefield, child. It is not yet time for song.”

Loki rubs his face on his shoulder, sniffling. He thinks of his journal hiding under the floor of his rooms, the furtive midnight scribblings. He doesn’t know if he can trust Lady Groa, but he thinks he must try, for his own sake. To make sense of the mess of his life. “I – I know, a little bit. Of what happened to him. But not the whole story.”

“You always were so clever. Too clever. I’m sure your new friend could learn from you. Isn’t that right, son of Byleistr?”

Loki hears a muffled thump from the door, and a yelp. One of Lady Groa’s handmaidens opens it to reveal Brun, crouched before the door and rubbing his eye.

“Brun! What are you doing here?”

His friend’s face flushes a shade of violet so intense that whatever anger Loki holds in his heart for the snooping melts. Brun shuffles into the room, wringing his hands in the tails of his kilt-belt and sending the stones woven into the fabric chiming against each other. He ducks his head and his small horns cast shadows over his face. “I’m sorry, Loki, Lady Groa.”

“As well you should be,” she says, though not unkindly. “It isn’t polite to eavesdrop at the cracks of doors.”

“Yes, Lady Groa. I just – I didn’t –”

“Stop stuttering and come in.”

Brun looks so miserable to have been caught that Loki takes pity on him, slipping his hand into Brun’s and pulling him into Lady Groa’s sitting room. The birds all flutter and ruffle their feathers, as if in response to the cold his friend emanates. Only Red seems unaffected, tipping his head curiously at this new creature with a look in his eye Loki can almost read.

Brun looks fabulously out of place among Lady Groa’s doilies and trunks and birdcages, and Loki thrills in it and in him, scooting close to him on the settee to lend him his strength. “I’m alright, Brun, honest.”

“You’re not,” Brun insists, wringing his hands together. “You had the fearstink, when tryllekunstner talked to you. You’ve never had the fearstink, not even the other day when we were almost caught in –” he darts a look at Lady Groa “—in the, you know.”

“Ymir save us from mischievous children,” Lady Groa sighs. She waves her handmaiden away and picks up the teapot herself, pouring a generous cup for each of them. As soon as the hot water touches the tea bags they release a citrus scent, something lovely and floral and unlike anything Loki has ever smelled before. “Neither of you have anything to fear from Ragnvaldr.”

Brun’s distrust is evident on his face, and Loki loves it, and him, so much. He’s never had a friend quite like Brun, someone who filled something in him that had been lost and alone for so long. Loki never could have dreamed that such a person would be waiting for him on the other side of the Bifrost, with his long black hair and small horns and big wide smile. He adores Brun utterly, and is adored in return, enough that his friend would risk Lady Groa’s anger in coming to spy at the door to her rooms like a common servant trying to hear gossip. He grins at Brun and Brun rolls his eyes, which somehow just makes it better. “I’m fine, Brun,” he says again, and squeezes him in a tight hug.

Brun gives him his patented unimpressed look, which should not be so funny on his lovely face. “You are sitting in a room of birds.”

“So?”

“They are auguries.”

“The only augury in this room, young one, is the poison you learned at Laufey’s knee,” Lady Groa says smartly.

“Jotunheim does not have birds for good reason. Birds are not to be trusted.”

“Jotunheim does not have sweetcakes – does that mean that sweetcakes are not to be trusted?”

The fact that Brun loves sweetcakes is not lost on Loki. “No!”

“But certainly they must be. Jotunheim does not grow wheat for flour, or yeast for bread. There are no trees for molasses or flowers for honey. If nothing about the sweetcake is natural to Jotunheim, then that makes them bad – and any Jotun who eats them will carry that augury with them forevermore.”

“But that’s not true!”

“Does it stand to reason then, princeling, that birds are no more an augury than sweetcakes?”

Loki can see his friend struggling with the idea – struggling against all he has been taught. Lady Groa takes Brun’s hand and laces their fingers together, guiding them both to Red’s plumage. Brun is as taut as a wire, terror in his dark red eyes, but as they stroke Red’s feathers together, and the bird preens with a low trill, the terror eases into confusion, and a strange longing Loki doesn’t understand. “What we perceive to be true is what we see and hear. You have lived your entire life thinking birds were harbingers of death, because that is what your people have told you – and why should you doubt them? They are older and wiser than you. And yet here you are, stroking the feathers of a Midgardian hawk. Here you are, understanding that birds are not bad omens but creatures like you and me, with a will to live, like you and me. Your hand has not erupted into boils, you have not plagued your family to death. You are petting a very spoiled bird who is, just now, telling me how lovely your touch is, cool as winter morning.”

Brun stares at Red. “Modir always tells me to think for myself. To stop listening to other people and make up my own mind.”

“Your modir is very wise.”

Brun turns his stare from Red to Lady Groa. “But how do I know what is truth and what are falsehoods?”

He feels the tickle of her magic skating along the surface of his own, and like Sir Ragnvaldr’s it is full of caring and warmth, certainty and belief in him. “By setting aside what you think you know, especially if that knowledge is fueled by emotion, and opening your mind and heart to other possibilities,” she replies, but her gaze is for Loki and Loki alone.

.

For all of Loki’s faults – and of those there are many – none could say that he did not comport himself a prince of Asgard.

The grand feast should have been a torture. Sitting at Pabbi’s high table with all of Asgard’s Court gathered together, the music, the boisterous laughter, the Hall should have been too much for Loki to tolerate, but he is numb to the center of himself. He watches, as if standing outside his body, as he smiles in all the right places, and laughs when Brun makes silly faces at him, and even as he stands and speaks his prepared speech for his professors, thanking them for returning to Asgard to teach him anew. He eats heartily, and speaks at all the right times, and doesn’t make the mistake of asking his why. He’s learned his lesson.

Pabbi watches him in that steady way he has and Loki thinks he wishes to speak, but something holds him back time and again. The secrets of who Loki was and is and would be are like cards on a table, waiting to be overturned, but neither his parents nor Thor seem willing to. Seem able to. So Loki asks Mamma to pour him more juice, and laughs when Thor tells an outrageous story of their exploits as young men, and doesn’t remark once on how the Loki in Thor’s story is a stranger. Or maybe the stranger is him.

Mamma walks him back to his suite, and helps him undress and bathe, and brushes his hair until all his curls come unspooled and turn to fluff around his head. She works a pomade into them, the smell of jasmine sweet on the nose, and then tucks him into bed, kissing him once, twice, three times.

“I love you Loki,” she murmurs, and for all that the House of Odin is built on a tower of lies, his mother’s love is one of his steadfast truths.

He waits until the rustling of her skirt fades, until the footsteps of servants slows. He waits until the moons have come up over Asgard and bathed it in white light, until Pabbi’s crows have come and gone as they do every night, checking in on him – or perhaps just checking to make sure he’s where he’s supposed to be. He waits, until all is silent and the cool night wind is on his cheek, and then Loki creeps out of his bed and across his room as silently as possible, to his secret cubby hole.

When he lifts the floorboard, a scroll with the Allfather’s seal is sitting almost gently atop Loki’s treasures.

Loki stares down, uncomprehending. His hands are shaking so badly he wants to slam the floorboard down and go racing back to his bed.

The seal breaks with a small flare of gray magic. Pabbi’s magic.

My son,

Come to me when you read this note. I will be in my study tonight.

Father

Loki knows well enough that it is not a request.

His father often worked well into the night, as it was the quietest time in the palace and he would remain undisturbed, so Loki is unsurprised to see the sconces lit down the hall leading to Pabbi’s study. His father’s space was as familiar to him as the nursery, from the heavy leather journals lined up like soldiers on the recessed shelves behind his writing desk, to the comfortable chairs in front of the crackling fire in the hearth. The smell of his father, woodsmoke and umber and something uniquely him, permeates this sanctum. A smell Loki could never mistake, even if the man seated at the desk had white hair instead of gold.

“Sire, the prince,” says the Einherjar who opens the door for him, and when Pabbi looks up Loki feels about two feet tall. That feeling doesn’t go away when Pabbi beckons him enter, when he says, “One moment, my son,” and the scratch of his pen seems to echo against the tapestries lining the walls.

Pabbi makes him wait and it’s awful, the worst. He knows why Pabbi asked him to come here specifically, and the book Loki is holding seems to weigh a million pounds. He’s almost shaking when Pabbi finally sets his pen down.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts.

His father smiles. “For what?”

“Taking your – I took your book. I put it in my tunic when you weren’t looking and I took it from your study, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to and I didn’t understand most of it anyway, and I’m – I’m sorry, Pabbi, and I promise I won’t do it ever again.”

Loki hates it when Pabbi studies him just like he’s doing now, because it usually meant he knew there was much more to Loki’s mischief and he was deflecting. Loki had been trying to hoodwink his father since he learned to speak, which was ridiculous, he should have learned by now that nothing got past his father.

“I must ask for your forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness?” Loki squeaks. “That’s not the way this works, Pabbi.”

“Oh? And how does it work?”

“I stole your book! I’m supposed to be sorry, and I am.”

“You’re sorry that you were caught,” and well, that’s true, and Loki has been taken over his father’s knee for far less, so he can’t really help the flinch when Pabbi stands from his desk. A curious expression crosses his father’s face, but when he sits in his favorite chair before the fireplace he doesn’t seem angry, nor does he beckon Loki forward for his punishment. Instead he takes Loki’s hand, gently, and the book as well, though he sets it on his side table without looking at it. “I have not called you here to punish you for taking a book from my office. You are my son, a sovereign prince of Asgard, and second in line to the highest throne in the Nine Realms. I would no more deny you a book of mine than I would deny you bread from my hand.”

He has never heard his father talk like this. When Pabbi called him to his study it was because Loki was in trouble – and he was so often in trouble. The last time he’d been here in the Before Time, his backside smarting and tears clogging his throat, his father had looked at him with such a severe countenance that Loki knew for the first time that though his father loved him, he didn’t like him very much.

That Pabbi and this Pabbi don’t even seem like the same person.

He doesn’t know what to say, and Pabbi tugs Loki gently to him. “Come, my son. There is room enough for both of us.”

Loki has never gotten to do this before, not ever, and certainly not in the Before Time. Loki wasn’t even allowed in Pabbi’s study then but for scolding, but now – now it’s as if Pabbi wants him to be there. Loki has spent more time in this room since he woke up in this world than in all the years before it combined, and – and – “I love your study,” he says in a rush, as he wiggles into the chair beside his father. It’s a tight fit, but then Pabbi puts his arm around him and suddenly it’s just right. They fit so well here together, and his father sighs, propping his feet up on the ottoman so that the fire can warm his slippered feet. “I love being here with you, even when I’m in trouble.”

He feels Pabbi’s laughter before he hears it, the low burr of his chest vibrating through him. “You have always been the most mischievous of my children. Just as you have always been the most prone to melancholy.”

Loki bites his lip. It’s easy, tucked under Pabbi’s arm, tucked against his side, to confide in his father. “Are you mad at me?”

“Why would I be angry?”

“I – I stole those things. In my hiding place.”

“A boy’s treasures are his to do with as he chooses,” Pabbi says, running his fingers gently through Loki’s hair. “I do not mind that you have your keepsakes, ill begotten or not, when I know that it was done out of love. I care about the boy in that journal, and the anguish he hides behind his sweet smile.”

He clenches his eyes closed. “You read my journal?”

“I went looking for my book, as it is one of the only ones left that name the Titans of old,” Pabbi says, and Loki ducks his head so Pabbi won’t see his shame. “I have marked all the books in my library with a magic sigil, to never misplace them. The sigil led me to my youngest son’s rooms, and to my surprise, the hiding place for his treasures. I didn’t know what it was, until I’d read the first page.”

Loki worries the hem of Pabbi’s tunic between his fingers. “Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

Loki looks up at his father but Pabbi’s eye is far away, and so filled with grief Loki can’t bear to see it. Knows he’s seeing his son, the Loki who was grown, who died when Pabbi reached into the past and plucked Loki like an apple from a tree, pulling him here and now. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Pabbi says again, low. “Do you remember, when I told you that all kings make mistakes?”

“You said you could fill a library with them.”

“There is a part of that library that is filled with the mistakes I’ve made with you. I realize now that the truth should have been given to you, freely, when you were a boy as you are now. I was overprotective, trying to shield you against further pain. A father always wants to protect his children against that which will hurt them, even when the blooding is necessary.”

“Is the – is the truth really that awful, Pabbi?”

“No. No, my son, it is not awful at all, for all that it is a tragedy,” his father murmurs, studying him for long moments. “Have I ever told you the story of how Sleipnir came to me?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Would you like to hear it?”

“You are the best at telling stories, Pabbi.”

“Well, then.”

Pabbi goes quiet for long moments, gathering his thoughts, and his fingers feel so nice running through Loki’s mop of hair, and it’s so warm and cozy here, especially when Pabbi pulls the blanket over the back of the chair over him.

Tucked away from the world, with only the fire to light their way, Loki feels enveloped by his father’s love.

“Many years ago, eons it seems to those who lived it, the Aesir went to war with the Vanir. I was a young lad no older than Thor is now, and ready for conquest. Also not unlike Thor, I had a band of comrades dear to me. My brothers, Ve and Villi, a decade younger than me and skinny as rails; Heimdall, not yet of the Watch and wild as a tiger; and my dearest friend in all the realms, and your namesake, the warrior Loki.”

He sucks in a startled breath. “I didn’t know I was named for one of your shield brothers.”

“He was a trickster through-and-through, and oftentimes I think that the power of his name gave you some of your own impish ways,” Pabbi says, smiling down at him, and Loki grins. “My father, your grandfather Bor, had gone to war with the Vanir after centuries of unrest turned the peaceful realm of Vanaheim into a place of butchery and massacre, such that my father could no longer condone. My friends and I were restless with energy in the days leading up to our call to the Front, making a nuisance of ourselves to all the Vanir villages between us and what we thought would be our first glorious battle.”

Loki can’t help but think of the story Thor had told him, of his own impatient battle thirst and the innocents he and the Warriors Three had slaughtered. “Were you getting in trouble?”

“Terrible trouble, especially the twins, who when spurred on by Loki got into the most ridiculous mischief. It became such a problem that my father demanded that we make ourselves useful and build additional battlements between the cluster of river valley villages and the Front, to protect the women and children who had fled the areas where the Vanir were making their stand. Loki had what, in hindsight, was a terrible idea – rather than do the work ourselves, we could hold a contest of might. We put out word that whichever builder could put up the battlements first would win the hand of Lady Freyja, my cousin and the Lady of the Lake, who had a birthright larger than the Vanir city of Hollander and enough gold to build a palace to rival Asgard.”

“That is awful Pabbi.” And not least because it was well known that Lady Freyja had unmanned many a potential suitor in a most permanent fashion, rather than wed against her will.

“Thor comes by his stupidity honestly,” Pabbi says with a snort.

Loki grins. “So what happened?”

“Well, it was quite the boon, wasn’t it? The hand of the Lady of the Lake, gold besides, and a title? Soon enough there were builders of all kinds streaming into the river valley ready to test their mettle, but only one impressed us. Going by the name of Svadilfari, the Builder of the North, the man boasted that he would build a wall in half the time than any other. None believed him, until he built a firepit in under an hour that could both warm half the camp and cook twelve boars. After so impressive a feat, and full of boar, Loki said that we ought to let Svadilfari enter the contest, despite our feeling that the man was using seidr that would crumble to dust as soon as he left. We gave all the contestants the rules, foremost of which was that none could have help from any man, woman or child. We should have been clearer in our direction.”

“Did he cheat?”

“Not precisely. Svadilfari operated within the parameters of the contest, if not the spirit – we woke up the first morning of the build, and saw he’d tacked an enormous black stallion with balls the size of bricks and a temper to match to pull his stoneware.”

Loki bursts into peals of laughter. “Pabbi!”

But his father is grinning. “He was a mean one, by the name of Gylfaginning. Svadilfari insisted he had not broken any rules, and it was true enough. Loki, who despite having nary a drop of seidr in him, said from the start that he thought Gylfaginning might have been enchanted, but none of us were smart enough to work out how. Svadilfari made such quick progress that it soon became apparent to all who had entered the contest that Svadilfari would soon build his wall and theirs too, just as it became apparent who was to blame for the loss of the lady’s hand and more importantly her gold – Loki. The contestants thought for certain that our trickster friend had rigged the contest so that we would be housed and watered in the villages, and had dangled a prize such as Lady Freyja before the men-folk to let the fields go fallow.

“We soon realized that, Asgardian or not, we were in real trouble. We couldn’t hack away at the villages, because though we were formidable warriors, they outnumbered us fifteen to one. Mostly, the brothers Bor couldn’t face their father if they were chased out of the river valley by peasants with pitchforks. To soothe tempers, Loki said he would uncover the deceit, for surely Svadilfari was an old god of some kind, and his horse a demon. So Loki did what Loki always did – created mischief.”

Loki finds he rather likes his namesake. “What did he do?”

“Ah, well. He reckoned that an ungelded horse such as Gylfaginning, ornery though he was, could not resist a mare in her time. Of course there were many peasants willing to have their mares foaled by the likes of a stallion as magnificent as Gylfaginning. The problem was that ornery horse that he was, Gylfaginning didn’t so much as twitch an ear when the mares whinnied. Desperate, Loki brought three mares before Gylfaginning, and three times did Gylfaginning turn his nose up at them. That was irrefutable proof that magic was afoot.”

“You thought Svadilfari was a seidrmadr, and had cast a spell on Gylfaginning?”

“Exactly right. Our honor, tattered rag that it was, had been tarnished beyond bearing. In his fury Loki disappeared, and for twenty days and twenty nights he roved the Vanir countryside looking for a mare of special type and breed, with a touch of seidr about her and who we knew would get through whatever enchantment Svadilfari had put over the stallion. The story of the volva Loki came across in this adventure is another story entirely. Needless to say, the volva was not much willing to be parted from her mare, a lovely roan palfrey of brown mane and coat. It took him and Heimdall another week to steal the horse from under the volva’s nose – I did tell you we were louts in those days, child – and bring her to the river valley. We knew Loki had been successful before we even saw him, because Gylfaginning became so agitated that even liberal application of the lash could not control him. When he broke free to give chase, Svadilfari went right after him, and that set the pattern for the night – the mare running and screaming, Gylfaginning right after her, Svadilfari chasing the lot, and the five of us oafs following. By the time Svadilfari caught up to the beast, it was too late. And that was when we uncovered the cruel deception that Svadilfari had made us party to.

“Svadilfari, on his knees and wailing, furious and frothing at the mouth, told us the entire sorry tale. Gylfaginning was not a normal stallion – he was the enchanted King Gylfi, the king who had been kidnapped by bandits on the road to Hollander almost two centuries before. All of his warriors had been murdered and no trace of him had ever been unearthed, but the loss of such a strong and fair king had sent the realm of Vanaheim into a spiral, causing the civil war that my father was there to stop.”

Loki stares up at his father, wide-eyed. Lady Hilda had told him and Thor the story of King Gylfi many times, and they had spent days one long summer thinking up ways to save the poor old king. “What did you do?”

“We were horror-struck. There we were, like idiots, watching him mount a mare as if he were a common horse and not the Lost King of Vanaheim. By the time Svadilfari ran out of words the mare had been foaled with, for all intents and purposes, a child of Vanir royalty.”

“Oh no, Pabbi.”

“I didn’t know what to do. Villi wanted to recall Father at once – Ve said he’d rather throw himself off the edge of Asgard. Heimdall, with an unusual eloquence in those days, managed to break through our panic and laid out what, in hindsight, was a brilliant plan – find someone who could break an enchantment such as had been laid on King Gylfi, and protect the mare and her foal at all costs.”

Loki, rapt, wiggles up enough so he can stare at his father. “Did you find someone who could?”

“After some liberal application of my fists, Svadilfari told us how he had come to be in possession of the king. He was not King Gylfi’s first owner, nor his second, fifth, or tenth, because the stallion was mean as a snake – as any king would be, to be left an enchanted horse for so long. Svadilfari had come by the horse in a game of dice. At that point King Gylfi had been missing for over a century, his name passing on into myth and legend, but Svadilfari had a bit of seidr himself and he knew right away that the horse had a curse laid over him. After consulting with several warlocks, he came to piece together the story of the ornery horse, and discovered who he was.”

Loki gasps. “The lowly toad!”

“Just-so. Svadilfari agreed to give us the horse. But not before my father arrived in the river valley to find out why there was talk all over Vanaheim of the Borsons and a magical horse.”

Not even quickly slapping a head over his mouth can stop his giggles, and Pabbi’s eye crinkles at the corner. “Oh no Pabbi.”

“Oh yes. To say my father was furious is perhaps an understatement, and he sent us back to Asgard to deal with the situation, the mare and the king in tow. Despite our very best efforts, no magic user was ever able to turn the king back into, well, a king. My brothers thought it was because he had gone too wild and forgotten he was a person, but I think the old king just didn’t want to be bothered – the responsibility of a civil war, the exhaustion of almost a century of back-breaking labor. He was content to spend the rest of his days as a horse, in the royal stables with the mare and his young son, who had been born with a bit of magic about him.”

Suddenly it all makes perfect sense.

“Sleipnir,” Loki breathes.

Pabbi smiles his gentle smile, and tweaks Loki’s earlobe. “Prince Sleipnir, after a fashion. A creature born of magic, and sharply intelligent, but a horse born of a stallion and a mare nevertheless, extra legs notwithstanding.”

“Is that why he’s yours?”

“It is. Sleipnir has proven to have the best of his parents – he is stubborn and quick to anger, like his father, but there is a temperance of spirit in him that is his mother’s disposition. He is a warrior prince, born of a long line of warriors kings, and I trust him with my life.”

The crackle of the fire is loud, merry where it is warming their toes. Loki turns the story over and over in his mind, like a river-rock grown smooth in the palms of his hands. His father has never told him such a story, and all he has learned this night tumbles about in his mind. He almost can’t decide which question to ask first. Almost. “Pabbi, I knew that Heimdall was your friend in your youth, but why did you never tell me of Loki?”

“Because it is painful, even now, to think of him.”

Pabbi’s arm is warm and heavy over Loki’s shoulders, and when he pulls Loki closer, cuddles him, it feels so different and so good. The Pabbi in the Before Time never cuddled him, never tweaked his ears or tugged on his curls, or touched him or held him, not like this Pabbi does. It wasn’t that Pabbi didn’t love him, didn’t show him affection, didn’t hug him so tightly sometimes his whole body felt squished up in his arms, but this Pabbi is older and maybe – and maybe feels easier in showing his love in these moments, when they weren’t king and prince, but father and son. Loki feels overcome with joy thinking about it, and burrows closer to his father so that Pabbi knows how much he likes it because, Loki knows, sometimes even grown-ups were uncertain.

“I lost Loki during the War of Jotunheim,” Pabbi says, softly. “My father had died in battle a decade before, during the war with the dark elves. My modir never recovered from the loss, and took ill. When the Jotnar started to skirmish on Midgard, and war became imminent, the horror of what was to come became too much to bear. He passed away in his sleep the eve before I was to take my armies to Jotunheim.”

Loki opens his eyes. There is quiet for a time, but for the crackling from the fire. “Your modir?”

“Mmm.”

His heart kicks in his chest. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

He stares into the fire, unable to – “Pabbi, your modir was a Jotun?”

“He was.”

Loki doesn’t know what to think, what to say. His thoughts are scrambling around each other, because if – if Pabbi is half Jotun, then Loki is Jotun too, but if Pabbi was half Jotun he had kept the light of their world locked in his vault – but if he hadn’t the Jotnar would have attacked Midgard and destroyed them, and Loki liked the Midgardians, but – but Brun had told him about the sakna, the loss and grief and the dying of their world, and – and did that mean that Thor was a Jotun too? He has so many questions he doesn’t know where to start, doesn’t know what Pabbi will answer, and suddenly understands how awful it is to be King.

“You know the story, from your studies. The Jotnar had made war on Midgard, and the Aesir rose up to answer to cries of the humans, infants in their history and unable to protect themselves. What you perhaps don’t know is that King Laufey was a fanatical purist, one who believed that Jotun blood should not mix with the blood of the other peoples of the Nine, if the Jotnar were to remain an unblemished race. He attacked Midgard to provoke me, as he had grown to hate Asgard, hate my father, hate his sibling who had married into the House of Bor, and above all else, hate his nephews, who he saw as blasphemous reminders of Bestla’s choice.”

Loki stares into the fire, overwhelmed and unable to speak.

Pabbi had been King Laufey’s nephew. Pabbi was half Jotun. Pabbi’s mother had been King Laufey’s sibling.

Brun was Loki’s best friend, but also his blood.

“For those of us who lived during that time, we called it the First Purge. King Laufey began to quietly gather all those who were mixed peoples – parents who were not both of Jotun descent – in Utgard, for a festival to honor the expansion of the Jotun race. And so the Jotun came, their children in tow, and at the height of the festival he turned his warriors against his own people. Fifteen thousand souls were slaughtered without mercy, and it is said that the snow ran red with blood for twenty days and twenty nights. And when he was done, he turned his eyes to Midgard, and using the Paths of the Tree walked his army into the center of that small and innocent realm to slaughter any Jotun who had settled there as well. These were acts of war, my son. I had sworn, at my father’s knee, to uphold and protect the Nine Realms when I became King of Asgard. Such an oath could not be broken.”

It is awful to hear, awful, and Loki thinks of what Brun had told him, the guilt of the old king which had turned to madness, and wasn’t this madness? Slaughtering thousands, for something that was no fault of their own?

“And so we went to war, my brothers at my side, Loki and Heimdall at each shoulder. We fought valiantly, as the men we had become and not as those ridiculous boys on Vanaheim. Loki was killed in one of the first campaigns, protecting my flank. Ve was cut down at the height of the war. I lost my eye in the last forward push, and it was only Sleipnir’s light hooves that kept me from losing my head.

“In one of our final attempts at diplomacy, before the start of the war, Laufey accused me of being a warmonger like my father, and he was right. But oh, my son, how I hated it. I hated warring on my modir’s people, and I hated what I knew I had to do to control King Laufey and keep his madness from spilling out to the other Realms. I hated that I could be so cold, so unfeeling, when I knew the suffering the Jotnar people – my people – would endure.”

Loki almost can’t breathe. There is a weight in the air, a terrible feeling of foreboding. Suddenly, Loki doesn’t want to hear the rest of this story. “Pabbi.”

His father squeezes his shoulder and Loki wraps his arms around his father’s waist, hugging him as tightly as he can. “I would never wish the kingship on either of my children,” his father whispers into his hair, and Loki nods against his father’s shoulder. He understands. “I must tell you the rest, Loki, as I should have done many years ago. Will you hear it?”

“Is it awful, Pabbi?”

Pabbi nods. He takes Loki’s hand gently in his own, resting there on his middle, which had grown large over the years and which Loki loved to see, evidence of Pabbi’s good health. “I had battled long and hard, pushing at King Laufey’s flank as Villi pushed at the other. Laufey’s lines had started to crumble, but the turn came when a blizzard bombarded Utgard. It was not natural, this storm, and seemed to rise and fall like a scream. We had no idea what could be causing it, and not even the warrior seidrmadrs could explain it. It ceased after only a few hours, and with it the bravery of the Jotun warriors. I could do nothing but press the advantage. We fought like demons for three days, pushing through the line which had held in Utgard for over a year, slaughtering all the Jotnar in our path. We fought to the last man, until Villi came to me and said that King Laufey had been taken prisoner in the Keep, and I knew the war was finally over.

“I was overcome. I had never known such battle, had never felt one weigh so heavily. My decisions had cost so many their lives, and I am ashamed to say that I broke under their weight. The horror of what I had caused, the pain I would have to inflict on an entire people, was more than I could bear. I knew then of a loathing so deep and so interminable that I didn’t think I would ever break free of it.”

Pabbi stops suddenly, as if unable to speak, and Loki knows sometimes that older people, grown people, were overwhelmed by sadness not for themselves or their families, but for the tragedy of impossible choices. It’s hard to see his father, so proud and powerful and strong, and to know that beneath the hardness of the crown is a man who hurts for millions of beings across the Nine Realms, who shoulders an impossible responsibility too great for any one man. “What did you do, Pabbi?”

“I wished – I wished to beg forgiveness at the altar of the old gods. The Jotnar were a people of faith, but the war had been fierce, and unkind. The Temple on the Mount had been ransacked weeks before, half-destroyed, but I felt a tremendous pull to go there, to ask the old gods their forgiveness in these atrocities I had committed, to try to find some peace in what I had done. And when I entered that most hallowed hall, I found a baby, newly born and squalling, lying atop the crumbling worship pedestal.”

“A baby?”

“A tiny thing, so very small for a Jotun, with a crown of leylines at its brow. A princeling, of Laufey’s house, of Laufey’s line, but tiny, naked and shivering, left abandoned in the temple to die of exposure. On that pedestal I saw proof of Laufey’s madness – to leave his first-born prince, to leave his child, to die in the hands of the old gods for daring to be born different and by Laufey’s own impossible standards, impure, was confirmation to my heart what my head already knew. I had done the just thing, to war on Jotunheim. And do you know, the most curious thing happened when I took the baby into my arms.”

Pabbi’s fingers tingle in his, the way Loki’s do when he’s cold. Except the tingles don’t stop, and as Loki watches Pabbi’s skin washes into the blue of his ancestry, traveling up his wrist into his tunic, across his face when Loki stares up at him in wonder. Pabbi’s skin is a lighter blue than Brun’s, though no less a brilliant cobalt, and his eye is the same ruby-red. At his brow is a raised semi-circle, the same that Brun and Lord Byleistr had, and Loki stares at it with wonder. Something in Loki’s heart that has cried out with a fierce and painful longing, something he hadn’t understood or been able to name for all the years he has been alive, goes peaceful and still. He hears himself croon, the same – the same sound as Brun, when he tried to comfort Loki, and he doesn’t understand until he does.

The world goes white and blank and Loki stares down at their entwined hands resting on Pabbi’s middle. Slowly, as if a dream, the blue bleeds into Loki’s skin, traveling gently up his wrist. A darker shade, and yet the exact same hue. The ice comes up in his blood, his lungs and the back of his throat, and all of a sudden the shadows in Pabbi’s study come alive. He can see the names of the books in the darkest corners of the room, can see the curving spine of the cat who lives in Pabbi’s study and feasts on the mice that plague the palace proper, asleep behind Pabbi’s sofa. But more – more than that – Loki can sense the rain coming by week’s end, can taste the salt in the air, can feel the currents against the raised lines on his forearms and behind his ears. He knows which direction is north.

“Our people are seafarers,” Pabbi says, and his voice rumbles like Lord Byleistr’s does. “Did you know that?”

Loki finds he can’t catch his breath. His chin is wobbling fiercely, but Pabbi is smiling his soft smile, and he still looks like Pabbi, and feels like Pabbi, and smells like Pabbi, and his touch is so gentle when he cuddles Loki close to him. Loki buries his face at his father’s shoulder, squeezing him so tightly, and Pabbi runs his hand over Loki’s back gently, a wave up and down. “Most of Jotunheim is a saltwater ocean, and so the Jotnar learned, over time immortal, to tame the wild waters of their world. They are explorers above all else, restless in their way. That is why you and young Brun get on so well. You have always been a curious boy, always looking for the next adventure.”

“Pabbi,” Loki whispers, and tears escape though he doesn’t mean them to, trembling down his face. “Pabbi.”

“I went to that temple to beg forgiveness from the old gods, and I found you. A beautiful baby born too small, whose mad-king of a father had abandoned him and left him to die. A child of my blood, and the son of my heart. You turned pink in my arms,” and a pale flush crawls over the blue of their entwined hands, and now Loki recognizes the old sword calluses on his father’s palm, the rough, swollen joints of a life hard-lived, “and I knew then that you had been born to another of my family, but you had come into this world to be my son. I named you Loki, in honor of the fierce Jotun warrior who had been at my side since we were children.”

Loki is shaking so hard it’s only Pabbi’s touch that is keeping him in one piece. He doesn’t know what to think, or what to say, or how to feel. He is his father’s blood, but not his son – and yet he is, by word and deed. He is Jotun, and he is Aesir, a child of two worlds. Brun is his blood. Pabbi is his blood. Thor is his blood, too. All of them are family, and now – now Loki knows why Pabbi let Thor give the Jotnar back the heart of their world. King Laufey died, and Helblindi took the throne, and with him started a new chapter of the Nine Realms.

It is overwhelming to think about, that – that he is adopted, that Pabbi is his cousin by blood, that he took Loki from the frozen plain when his own father did not want him. It answers so many of his questions, too, and he feels for the first time a peace in himself, a centering of himself, as all that had always been so different about him begins to slowly fall into place. He tries to untangle it in his mind, and Pabbi never stops stroking his back, slow up-and-downs.

“Pabbi, what did – you took me home? Did everyone know?”

“Your uncle did. He was the second to look upon you and love you. So too did Heimdall know, and he helped me get you to Asgard safely. I had asked Heimdall for some time to serve as my Watcher, but always he refused. Even after Thor’s birth, he was not ready. I often think that he was waiting for you, because it was after I brought you to Asgard that he agreed.”

“And – and Mamma? What did – I was another baby, a baby that – that wasn’t hers,” and here Loki feels the tears come back up his throat, because Mamma is one of the pillars of his world, and his love for her is so strong that to think maybe – maybe she doesn’t love him the same, makes him want to curl up into a little ball.

“My son, she is your mother in all but blood,” Pabbi tells him, softly. “The first time your mother looked at you she became caught in the web of her Seeing, as she sometimes does. Two days and two nights she was caught, and when finally she came free of it, she turned to me and said that the missing piece of her had finally been found.”

He knows all of that, but to hear it spoken, to know there is unshakable proof that he is loved and wanted, makes something old and painful in him finally ease. Loki chews on his lower lip to stop the trembling in his chin. “There is a – I have a modir, too.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes,” Pabbi says. “Yes, he still lives. He is modir to Helblindi and Byleistr, your natural siblings. He is called Farbauti.”

Loki’s world goes swimmy and awful, like sometimes after he’s been sick.

He is brother to Helblindi, the king of Jotunheim. He is brother to Byleistr. Brun is his nephew.

He is a prince of the house of Laufey. He is Laufeyson.

“Did…did he want me?”

“Do you remember when I told you that there was an unnatural storm, the days of our final push into Utgard?”

“Yes.”

“All Jotun are born with the ability to call across wind and storm, but few are born with the power to focus it, to manipulate nature, to use the elements to their own ends. I think – I think that when you were born, Farbauti fought for you in the only way he knew how.”

Loki feels like he’s broken in two. This world and that world, and he, caught in the middle. A modir who had loved him so much that he had destroyed Jotunheim’s chances of winning the war to end all wars, and a mother who had taken in the son of her enemy and loved him with her entire heart.

Pabbi hugs him tightly and he – he realizes he isn’t alone, that Pabbi is in the middle too, a prince of two worlds, for all that he is King of Asgard. Pabbi is Jotun too, and Loki doesn’t know how he will ever survive knowing this, when it is rewriting all he thought he knew about himself.

He is Loki, he has always been Loki, only now so many things make sense. Things he hadn’t understood about himself, about the way he was, about the call of the wind and the way he could hear the music in it, about how he wanted to explore the branches between the worlds, and even the way he could sense so much about Asgard that no one else seemed to be able to. He is just different, he is Jotun, and – and – and there is so much joy in him, so much relief, to know that there is an explanation for why he did things the way he did, and thought the way he did.

Pabbi is studying him, watching as if Loki is going to begin screaming and carrying on any minute. And Loki is crying, a little, but it’s joy and relief and understanding. His skin goes cold again, blue flushing up his arms, and Pabbi’s does too, and Loki is maybe crying more than just a little bit because he touches his own forehead and it matches the crown of leylines at Pabbi’s brow. “I am so different, Pabbi. I had no explanation, and everyone always said so many bad things about my differentness, but I’m not different at all. I’m Jotun, and that’s why I am the way I am. That’s why I’m Other. Only I’m not Other at all, it’s just normal because I’m Jotun and there aren’t men and women, there are just Jotun and they are both men and women together.”

The smile his father gives him is like the rising sun. “Yes, Loki.”

“And sometimes when I think differently than Thor, it’s not because I’m strange or – or peculiar or anything like that, I’m just Jotun. And so I think differently, but that’s a good thing too because Thor is Thor and needs help usually when he’s planning things.”

Pabbi is crying a little now too, but Loki knows it isn’t for sadness, not really. “Yes,” he says, and cups Loki’s face in both of his hands. “Yes, Loki, that’s exactly the way of it.”

“And I’m your son, because you took me when the mad king did not want me.”

“You are my son,” Pabbi says, and hugs him so hard his bones creak and his ribs complain, only Loki finds he’s hugging his father just as tightly, burying his face there at his cheek. “You are my son, and will always be my son, and nothing I could ever say would be enough to convey the depth of my love for you.”

Loki feels lighter than he has in so long – free in a way he never thought he could be. Joyful.

“I’m so glad the old gods called you to the temple, to be my father,” Loki says, and Pabbi is crying more than a little bit now too, and he says, “My dear child,” in that way he does sometimes when Loki has done something amazing, and he feels it too in his heart and in his soul.

.

Loki dreams of the man with the sewn mouth for the last time that night, tucked close to his father in front of the crackling hearth.

There is a hush all around him but for the forest, rustling in the cool breeze. Crisp leaves turned orange and red and nearly ready to fall glint like gems from their boughs. Under his hands the soft, prickling detritus of a forest floor, dirt under his nails and leaves a mush between his fingers, is soft as satin. He breathes in the scent of green things, of water, of dirt and growth. The mother star can’t hope to prick its way through the canopy above, and the light reflects the greenyellowred of a forest in fall. It is cold here, for the tunic and leggings he wears, but it is not the wind finding its way under his collar that makes him shiver.

The man sits cross-legged on the forest floor before him. His hair is a riot of curls around his face, long past his shoulders, as black as the macabre stitches that have sewn his ravaged mouth shut. His hands are face-up on his lap, empty. Loki marvels at them, at the length of his fingers, at the discoloration at the tips that speak to his craft. The man is a seidmadr. His eyes are a bright, bright green where he watches Loki.

In his pocket Loki knows he will find a dagger. It is familiar and unfamiliar, and it calls to him, whispering his name.

He stands and those eyes follow him, though the man isn’t afraid, not even when Loki kneels next to him. He cups the man’s chin and gently turns his head, and finds the skin under his fingers cold as ice.

I will free you, he saysthinksfeels. There will be pain.

That ravaged mouth curves, just a tiny bit, and blood threads down the man’s chin.

Loki understands. No pain could be worse than what has already been inflicted.

It is careful, precise work, and Loki’s small hands were made for the task. Each thread is gently cut and pulled free. The blood sheets down, down, down, over the man’s throat down to the hollow, until red spreads across the front of his dark tunic. Loki cuts, and cuts, and cuts, as gently as he can, and when his hands are slippery with blood he wipes them onto the forest floor. The trees grow restless, agitated around him, and Loki thinks of blood sacrifices and old spells and wonders at the magic of this place.

In the seidmadr’s eyes is fear, a terror born of knowing what creeps in the dark. The leaves rustle and branches sway in the gentle wind, and Loki doesn’t know why he’s so afraid, only that there is not much left of sanity in the man’s eyes. Loki pulls and pulls and pulls at the black thread, and he can feel magic and so much love it hurts in his breast.

He says I’m sorry and flicks his knife through the last three threads, tearing the corner of the man’s mouth as the trees wail.

The man says, thick with blood, No, child. It is I who am sorry, and presses his palm to Loki’s head.

Loki wakes with a start. Pabbi is there, holding him, and says, “Loki?” in his gentle way, but Loki can’t stop the shudders that race through him.

“I dreamt of him again.”

“Dreamt of who?”

“The skinny man with the dark hair. His mouth is always sewn shut, but this time I helped him cut through the threads.”

Pabbi’s fingers still in his hair. “You have not told me of this man before.”

“He looked so wild and so sad and so scared,” Loki whispers, and buries his face in Pabbi’s side. “But Pabbi, he is so scared because Thanos is coming. He told me that the Titan won’t stop until he has collected the six gems, and that the time of the Infinity War is upon us.”

The blood runs out of his father’s face like sand through an hourglass. Loki has never seen his father look like this, and he sits up, scared now too. “Pabbi? What is it?”

“Tell me everything the man said.”

Loki does.