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1.
When Odin, bloody and stinking of war, had come to her with a baby tucked under his arm and a sheepish look on his face, Frigga took both away from him with a smile.
"You are not mad?" her husband said.
In her arms, the baby stared up with the brightest eyes she'd ever seen on an infant, brighter even than the eyes of her natural born child. "Never," she said. The baby curled his tiny fist around her finger. "This is the greatest spoil of war you've brought home."
Odin smiled like he'd been pardoned. "He will bring us a more lasting peace than war ever could," he said. "We'll raise him as a son of Asgard and Jotunheim. A Jotun king at last worthy of that frozen throne."
Her son was so small in her arms. She would remember that. All her days, her long, long years, she would remember how once she could hold him with one arm. "Are you certain?" Frigga asked.
Odin great brow furrowed. "Certain that we may raise a king?"
Frigga's finger traced the edge of her child's pink, warm cheek. "Certain that we should tell him that he is Jotun? He does not look it now. Surely life will be kinder if he does not know. How cruel our people will be to the son of Laufey. That cruelty could warp him worse than the winds of Jotunheim ever could. I have remained cloistered in the citadel for so long. The kingdom will believe that I could have been with child all this time."
"How can we keep such a thing from him?"
Easily, Frigga thought. It was a simple enough thing to lie. "We tell him when it is time." When he loved Asgard too much for his own good. Frigga tapped her finger on the end of her son's nose and was rewarded with a smile as bright as the sun glinting off the ice.
Odin was silent, thinking about her proposition. He did not know that the matter was already settled. "Do you think that is best?" he asked.
"If you agree," she said demurely, hoisting her son higher in her arms. Odin was still thinking as she pressed her lips to Loki's forehead.
2.
Loki could be a great warrior. Frigga knew that. It was in his people's blood—both of his people's. And the world was certainly shaping him to be so. From the time he first began to walk, he had a sword in his hand. Odin and Loki were never more father and son than when they were hacking at each other, banging metal into metal. He was a small, pale child with slender arms and legs like sticks, but she could see the muscles that waited like seeds buried in the winter earth. He would be strong one day. He could be a great warrior.
But he could be the greatest mage. And if that was true, there was no question which path he should take.
"Again," Frigga said gently when Loki scowled in frustration. "You do not mind when your father makes you strike with the blade more than once."
Loki's tiny hands shook as he slid the threads through his fingers. Thread magic was the simplest of magic. She'd learned her first spells through it herself, millennia ago. "You have to practice if you want to be a warrior," Loki said.
"You have to practice if you want to be a mage."
"But—" He stopped, glanced up at his mother's face. She smiled kindly at him, giving him permission. "Princes are supposed to be warriors."
"Princes do as princes please," she said. She reached over and guided his fingers to the third knot in the yellow thread. "Not what their father's would prefer."
"I want to be a warrior," he said. And Frigga knew that it was true. But children were young, malleable, and growing. So she smiled like she knew something he did not, and that was also true, and doubt crossed over Loki's face like a storm cloud.
"Try again," she said. And Loki did.
3.
Some nights when she could not sleep, Frigga slipped from her marriage bed, cloaked herself in shadows, and walked through the silent halls of the palace to her children's rooms. Thor she always visited first. He was her golden child, a sun of sons. He slept with his fist pressed against his mouth, a vestigial habit from the days when he would suck his thumb as he dreamed. She swept back his hair as he slept without stirring. She spelled sweet dreams into his quiet head.
Loki's slumber was not so gentle. As a baby, he'd cried all through the long nights, and he'd stayed restless long into his childhood, until more than once Odin had told her that he'd wished he'd left the child out in the snow. He said it with a bitter smile on his face as if he were joking, but Frigga knew that Odin had never forgotten this child's blue skin. Now his younger son had no time for the sword and spent his afternoons chasing illusions and tricks. Odin was a better parent than Frigga; he loved and raised a foreign stranger while she loved and raised her very own creation.
"Can you not sleep?" she asked as she found Loki sitting up in bed, reading by candlelight. He jumped in surprise at the sound of her voice and scowled at himself for doing so.
"I'm sorry," he said, closing the book.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him. "You have no reason to be. It is better to fill your empty hours than to suffer as they creep by."
In the quiet hours, when he and his brother finally stilled from their endless sport, she could appreciate how much her children had grown. Loki was nowhere near a man, but his limbs were stretching like one. These days, he was nearly as tall as she was. But his wrists were still thin, and when she reached down and wrapped her hand around them, her fingers touched easily. His skin, as always, felt just a little cooler than it should.
"Was it the dreams again?" she asked quietly. Under her fingers, she felt his pulse jump.
"No," he lied. "I'm not tired."
He dreamed of snow some nights. Snow and ice and the bitter cold. He dreamed of hunger and thirst that no son of Odin could have ever know. He dreamed of strange stars. Strange how scars could last longer than memories.
She took the book from his hands, an old collection of Vanaheim myths that she'd read herself as a young girl. "Would you like to hear a story?" she asked.
He scowled again. "I can read."
Frigga smiled. "Then would you like to indulge your mother?"
Gratified that he would not have to ask for it for himself, Loki settled back into his pillows. "If you insist, Mother, but it's hardly necessary."
"If mothers only did what was strictly necessary," she said opening to the tale of the Bard and the Dragon, "what a bleak world we'd live in."
Loki rewarded her with a smile as thin and wan as a knife. How grown up he looked, she thought as she found her place in the text, opened her mouth, and began to read. How very old already.
4.
"He's not fit to be king," Loki spat.
Frigga sipped her wine and said nothing. Her youngest hunched over in his seat across from her and wrung his hands like he was choking something.
"Why should he lord about like he already wears a crown?" Loki said it almost to himself. "Why should he act like he is the one true son of Asgard?"
"Your brother loves you," Frigga said before Loki could pursue that thought. "Just as you love him. He'd be hurt if he could hear how poisonous your words sound."
Loki looked away. "Let him be hurt."
Frigga put down her glass and reached for Loki's hands. He didn't grasp hers back, but he didn't move away. His fingers were tight and cold underneath hers. If they were Thor's, she would have rubbed some warmth into them. Instead, she let them go and cupped her youngest's cheek. "You are brothers," she said, and thought it an absolute truth. "But you are not identical. Do not judge him by what you are. Do not judge yourself by what he is."
He looked away from her and Frigga let her hand fall. "If we're brothers, then we must share something," Loki said quietly. "What am I that he is so foreign to me?"
"Thor is his father's son. This has always been true, and if you are not careful, you will always resent this." Loki glanced back and then away again, his mouth twisted in a grimace. "But you are my son. This has always been true as well."
Loki’s bright, sharp eyes cut upon the floor. "That is not the cloth a king should be cut from."
Perhaps he said it to hurt her. He succeeded then, though she could endure the prick to her pride. But it sharpened her voice as she said, "There is more than kind of one throne in Asgard. There is more than one ruler in the realm."
He didn't listen. She could see it now how the words flowed over him. His hands still clenched and wrung. She longed to reach out, to touch her child and smooth the fear and hate out of those fingers. When her children had been young, before the world had taught them what it meant to be a man, they’d walked hand-in-hand with her everywhere they went. Now they thought themselves adults, these children who had never seen war, never courted death with anything more than a passing lust, and her touch did nothing but embarrass them.
"Have you learned nothing from me all these years you've studied at my skirts?" she said, her voice gentle and truly curious. "Have you spent your life thinking me powerless? Did you think that because I wear no crown, I make no speeches, I sign no laws, that I have passed these centuries in placid idleness? Do you do me such dishonor? I have ruled Asgard since before you were born and I have bartered peace in wars the All-Father never knew he was fighting."
Loki stared at her, his pale brow furrowed. She reached over and smiled as she pushed his hair back out of his eyes. "You want to be one true king?" she asked. "There is no such thing. There is the man in the crown and there is the work to be done. The two often have little to do with each other."
"Does Father know you speak like this?" Loki asked.
Clasping her hands back together, Frigga tilted her head. "There is a great deal that your father does not know and does not wish to. This arrangement suits us quite well. You yourself might have such an arrangement someday."
Loki said nothing to this, but his eyes skimmed over her face. He did not believe her. She saw it in his face, his too honest eyes, and it twisted her heart bloody. You pity me, she thought. After all this time, you still understand nothing.
"Aw well," Frigga said softly, smiling gracefully as she always did. "Perhaps you are your father's son after all."
5.
Loki smiled for Thor when Odin gave them the news in the royal hall. Loki clasped Thor’s hand and wished him the best of luck. Loki stepped aside as Thor pushed past, rushing to the arms of his greatest friends, rushing to tell them the news. Behold, Asgard, your next king. Long may he reign.
Because as queen Frigga could not leave the party, she made the party leave her. “To the alehouse with you if you cannot bring yourself to contain your celebration,” she said, laughing, smiling, sparkling, as Thor beamed sheepishly. “The palace demands some decorum from its heir.”
“Then I shall leave the palace,” Thor said. He took her hand and kissed it. He held her hand a moment longer than he had too. How very young he looked right now. He wasn’t stupid, no matter what his brother thought; he knew enough to fear the future.
“Brother!” Thor said, looking at Loki. “Join us! This day is yours as much as mine.”
“Oh, I would say the day is yours alone.” Loki had a funny little smile on his face. Frigga had never seen it there before. “Or does the throne sit two now?”
Thor clapped his arm on Loki’s shoulder. “The lonely throne sits only one, but a great many men may stand beside it. And none closer than my brother. Every king must have his councilor.”
“Thor—” Frigga said.
“And every councilor must have his king,” Loki replied, his voice chipper and brittle. “Someone must do the taxes, eh?”
Thor’s smile was warm as the sun. “Together, brother,” he said as though the room was empty of everyone but them. “We were both born to be kings.”
Loki’s mouth stretched and thinned. “How right you are.”
But Loki did not join them that evening. He begged out of the festivities. A spell of his needed completing tonight while the moon still hung as it did. Perhaps he could join them in the morning if the party still raged. “It will,” Lady Sif said in a tone that suggested that if the party did not, she would stir it to life again herself.
“Then I’ll see you in the morrow,” Loki said, and that was that. Frigga and Loki were alone then. Odin had left for his chambers long ago. More and more these days, he needed his rest. The Odinsleep was coming fast, and she dreaded it every hour.
Her son still had that odd smile on his face. When Frigga rested her hand on his arm, his expression did not alter. “Long live the king,” he said to no one.
“Long live his Hand,” Frigga replied. “A realm’s seat of power is rarely the throne alone.”
“So you’ve said.” Loki did not look at her. His eyes were fixed on the chair she was assuring him he did not want. “You must support Thor’s ascendance as well, then. If Father does indeed do nothing without your approval.”
Frigga squeezed his arm. “Without my counsel,” she corrected. “But he has learned the value of my counsel.”
“And you counseled him to this choice.”
She did not raise her chin. It was always raised. “Yes.”
Loki closed his eyes. Underneath her fingers, she felt his arm tense as he clenched his fists. “I was never meant to be king. Despite everything Father said, I would never have sat on the throne of Asgard.”
Frigga could not deny it.
“And you knew that,” he said, stepping out of her grip. “All these years, you knew that Father never intended to pass the throne to me. That you never intended to pass the throne to me. That’s why you molded me as you did.” He shimmered and Thor stood beside her now, resplendent in red and gold. A crown sat upon his forehead. “How different you treated me than him,” Loki said through his brother’s mouth. “You taught me tricks while he learned to be a king.”
“I taught you my craft until you surpassed me,” Frigga said. She waved her hand and Thor shimmered into Loki once more. “There was no better gift I could have given you.”
He looked at her at last with poison eyes. “You could have given me the crown.”
The bitterness in his voice shocked her. It scared her. For a moment, she could not keep both emotions off her face, and Loki’s eyes flashed in what looked like triumph. And then they dulled in what looked like shame. He looked away from her once more, and she studied the profile of his face which looked, as it always did, nothing like the face of everyone else she loved. “The crown is a circle of metal,” she said quietly. “It chafes the temples and bows the neck. It is nothing but jewelry. And like all ornamentation, what suits one will not do for another.”
When Loki smiled the faintest little smile that made no claims to happiness, Frigga sagged with relief. This smile, at least, she knew. “Are you saying I don’t have the complexion for it?”
She’d take what jest she could. “It’d clash terribly with your armor.” Frigga stepped forward and slipped her arm through Loki’s. “Could I submit my son to such a tragic fate?”
He looked down at her hand before he rested his on top. “You’ve always looked after me.”
Frigga smiled. Loki would be fine, in time. He was too clever not to be. Loki would be fine. “From the moment I met and held and loved you.” If he heard too much truth in that, let him. It was almost time. She couldn’t tell him now, not the spite still festering in his chest, but Loki was too much her son to let it consume him. He’d see the value of her words soon enough. And when he did and Thor was king and Loki was something more, she’d wrap her arms around him and tell the simple truth that changed nothing.
He was so much taller than her now. Once she had had to scoop him up so he could kiss her cheek goodnight. Now he stooped. “Ah, Mother,” he said, drawing back from her. The funny little smile was back on his face. “Perhaps in future you could look after me a little less.”
His lips chilled her cheek, and the cold spread until it felt like all the winds of winter bore down and cut her to the bone. Her hands fell to her side as he walked away without a sound. That too he had learned from her. How to be invisible, how to disappear, how to deceive. What gifts she'd given him, Frigga thought. He walked away as Frigga stayed, stood like a statue until he was gone, until she was alone, at last and finally, at the foot of the empty throne.