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When Frigga hears of Hela’s banishment, she bows her head and says nothing. What can she say? Odin’s firstborn is none of her blood, and it is not her place to question his treatment of children who were legends among the stars before she had ever set foot in court.
Moreover, she is no longer a mere advisor to the king: she is the mother of his heir (his new heir), and there are certain proprieties that must be adhered to. However much Odin may rely upon her counsel in private, she gave up the right to criticize him in public when she accepted her place at his side.
And the truth is, he was never eager to follow her counsel.
But he is king and Allfather, and his wisdom is without parallel, and she will follow where her king leads.
When he brings home Laufey’s son, Frigga takes him to her breast and to her heart, and bargains with Odin to keep him in their hall. He does not want to, at first. He plans to secret the boy away, to one day seat him on the throne as an obedient puppet king, as he had seated Njord in Vanaheim.
In the end, Frigga wins the right to keep the little baby, this small flame of Jotunheim. But the price is her silence, and his birthright.
“If he is to be a prince of Asgard,” says Odin, “then he must be of Asgard. I will give up my plans for Jotunheim, to please you, but that is the price.”
Frigga holds the baby close, and in that moment, he becomes Loki Odinson. And she promises Odin that he will never know the truth.
But she can never forget it.
She brings him to Jotunheim once in his boyhood, secretly, without Odin’s knowledge, without Heimdall’s sight to follow them. She has not forgotten all the ways of her old order, after all, and shares a very few of them with Loki. Part of it is pure spite against her husband, but part of it is fear for her child. He is fierce but he is little, and she wants him to have ways to escape as well as to defend and attack.
Hiding him inside her cloak, she shows him the terrible beauties of the craggy landscape, the fierce nobility of Jotunheim’s people, and the ruined temple in the city of Utgard. She does not tell him that this was where Odin first set eyes on him, but Loki’s eyes linger on the tumbled down pillars as though he is recalling some faint wisp of a memory.
When they return to Asgard, he asks if they can do it again, and she smiles and promises that they will. But that is when the nightmares begin, and the little prince wakes screaming in the dark of Frost Giants lurking in the corners of his room.
She never takes him back.
So long as she administers the princes’ lessons, she allows no tutor to speak ill of the Frost Giants in Loki’s hearing. She excises vile passages, condemning Jotunheim, from his and Thor’s schoolbooks. She reprimands Odin's nephew Fandral, and the chamberlain's daughter Sif, for spreading tales of Jotnar barbarity.
Frigga knows she cannot shield Loki from every evil spoken against the realm and people of his birth. But she can guard her own tongue, guide his reading, help him leave the monster of his childhood behind, and hope to make his adult views more open and balanced.
Soon, too soon, Odin demands that his sons leave off their book learning and concentrate on the pursuits of warriors: sparring and tilting, hawking and riding to hounds. Thor abandons the schoolroom gladly, but Loki lingers, eyes clinging to the spines of books and the well-worn handles of scrolls as tenderly as his fingers stroke the daggers his mother gifted him when he was ten. And Frigga is glad to have instilled that love in him, at least.
She hopes that his love of books will keep the door of his heart open. But his pursuits become esoteric and uncertain, and she realizes that what influence she had over his education has long since gone.
When they talk of books now, they keep to fiction and poetry and plays, and never touch on history or philosophy anymore. He shudders at the rare mention of Frost Giants, and always changes the subject.
Frigga is no fool. She knows the touch of the magic that she gave to her second son. She knows he allowed Laufey’s men into Asgard, to ruin Thor’s coronation. But she sees the horror in his eyes at Thor’s banishment, and the betrayal writ large on his face, gone lean and hungry, as they sit on opposite sides of Odin’s bed, while the king lies asleep.
But he is of Asgard, and a prince, and Asgard cannot be without a leader while the king lies in the Odinsleep and Thor struggles powerless on Earth.
She gives the order to the chamberlain before Loki arrives at Odin’s bedside, and she struggles to maintain her composure and to balance her fearsome mother’s pride with a queen’s serenity when Loki takes possession of Gungnir. The look on his face as he turns to her, all cunning and dark delight, should frighten her.
Odin will be proud of him.
But he has no chance to be.
“We should have told him the truth,” she rages at her husband, after Loki falls. “His death is on our hands.”
“He chose his own path.”
There is grief in Odin’s voice, the grief of a weary old man nearing the end of his life, and for a terrible moment, Frigga wonders how Asgard will survive when Odin is gone, with the Bifrost destroyed and their elder son left to stand alone.
But there is denial, too. He will not accept one fragment of responsibility for Loki’s death, even though it had been his choice to take the baby prince from Jotunheim in the first place, over her objections.
Frigga would never wish for the death of her king. She loves him, as her ruler and as her husband. But her faith in his wisdom, that she had so lauded to Loki all his life, is shattered.
He will die soon, she sees for the first time. And soon after, surely Asgard will fall in his wake.
For the first time, Frigga wonders if it would not be for the best.
When Loki is seen on Midgard, Frigga is too overjoyed to care, at first, about the deaths he is causing. She has her child back. What are the lives of a few thousand mortals, compared with that?
Then she has to rebuke herself. One life or a thousand, mortal or otherwise, all have value, and all are worthy. It is the one thing she has ever been able to change the Allfather’s mind about. Otherwise, the Nine Realms might well now be Ninety.
She expects to have to plead with Odin, to spare Loki’s life, especially since her defeated son seems to no longer care whether he lives or dies. But her husband surprises her. “He is not mine to kill,” Odin reminds his wife. “I gave him to you. If you wish him executed, it will be done.”
“And if I wish him freed?”
“Then it will be done.” Odin’s eye pierces her with a steeliness she has not seen since the Valkyries fell. “But he will be banished to Niflheim, as I did to the last child who attempted to overthrow me.”
“You would send a being of such power straight into Hela’s hands?”
“At this point, what does it matter?” The Allfather slumps in his golden throne. “It would all be over that much quicker.”
Frigga hates her husband, in that moment, for giving her a choice that is no choice at all. And yet she still loves him, for making the decision hers, and allowing her to take it from his hands. “Let Loki be imprisoned in the dungeons, then,” she says. “Until such time as he can mend his ways.”
Odin agrees, and then warns her she will not be permitted to visit. Frigga bows her head, and plans to obey her king’s words to the letter. A simulacra, after all, need not be seen by any except its intended target, save out of the corners of the eye.
He will do no more than glance at the books she sends him, even though the old histories were once his favorites. But they are all about Jotunheim, and the great deeds of the Frost Giant kings of old, and Loki will have none of them. When she tries to encourage him to accept who and what he is, he rails at her for her hypocrisy.
Frigga cannot chastise him for that.
“Why should I bow my head and accept that I am a monster? What will it do except ease your conscience? Even if I cared, Jotunheim will never accept me now, not after I murdered their king. My true father,” he spits.
They have this argument many, many times over the course of the year but never once does he ask about his Jotunn mother. Frigga knows about her; she could tell him all, if only he would ask.
But he shies away from the very thought like a horse from a snake, and she wonders what he believes, if he thinks that she dallied with Laufey to produce him, or if he simply rejects the notion of any mother save her.
She never finds out, in this life.