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In later life, there were many secrets that Frigga, Queen of Asgard, bitterly regretted keeping from her beloved second son, about his heritage and his true birthright. But there was one so awful that she had vowed on the spot to take to her grave.
“No one must know the cause of her death,” she told Eir quietly, as they stood over the shrouded body that lay in the seldom-used mortuary of the healing hall.
“If I might make bold, my queen, that is a profound understatement.” The chief healer considered the poor serving woman’s remains beneath the fine linen. The cold was palpable. “Any of the warriors who survived the fighting on Midgard would know what caused this.”
“Which is why it must never be known.” Frigga touched the dead woman’s forehead lightly in blessing, and then turned away. “You must prepare the body so that her cause of death is not apparent.”
Eir’s lips tightened minutely, but she bowed. “Of course. Your commands will be obeyed.”
Her tone was just the smallest bit disapproving, but Frigga could not fault her for that. “I will see that her children are well-cared for, Eir. Now, what of the boy?”
“After the... incident, the Allfather took him and returned to the royal chambers.”
Frigga nodded and took her leave, hurrying to the family wing and to her son’s nursery. She found Odin there, alone, save for the babies. Thor was in his cradle, beginning to grumble for his afternoon feeding. The king was in a chair before the hearth, his good eye looking down forlornly at the small blue baby boy held within the shell of his large, broad hands. He did not raise his head as she approached and laid her hand on his shoulder. “The woman, is she...?”
“She is gone, my love,” said Frigga softly. Odin let out a harsh, pained sound. “Eir will see that the manner of her death is kept secret,” she assured him.
“Good.” Odin shifted the baby into the crook of his arm and passed a hand over his body, rippling his form from Jotunn blue to Asgardian ivory. “And we must see to it that his heritage is also kept secret from all. From himself, especially.”
“From himself? But... why?”
“To protect him,” Odin said, “from the knowledge that he accidentally killed his wet-nurse before he was old enough to know what he was doing.”
Frigga knew her husband too well to think that was Odin’s only reason, but there was so much horror in his voice and his manner, that she accepted it as a sincere and grave reason. “You will have to tell him someday,” she reminded him, dropping a kiss to his graying-brown hair. “If he is to fulfill the purpose for which you took him.”
“Yes... someday.” Odin took a deep breath, and Frigga felt him shudder slightly as he inhaled. “But until that day, we must decide how best to keep him.” He stroked the baby’s lapis-colored cheek, and then smiled wanly as the boy turned his head and tried to suckle on his fingertips. “He is still hungry.”
“So he is.”
The boy looked up at them with enormous red eyes, and then his lightly-lined face screwed up into a wail.
“Very hungry,” Frigga diagnosed, holding out her arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Thor is a hungry boy but even he cannot drink all that I have. Give your war-prize to me.”
Odin recoiled in horror. “Are you mad? After what happened to the servant woman? I forbid it!”
Frigga’s eyes narrowed. “My king and husband, you will not forbid me to do with my body as I please.”
For a moment, the queen and king stared at one another, each silently willing the other to yield, and all the while the Jotunn baby cried out to be fed.
At last, Thor added his own lusty bawling to the din, and Frigga looked away.
Odin found minders for the Jotunn boy, loyal servants of the crown who could be trusted to hold their tongues, and to be doubly-sure, Frigga put them under geas to make certain the story did not grow legs and run about the city. The declaration of Odin’s son had gone out within a month of Thor’s birth, but it had been whispered about the taverns within a day of Frigga’s labor, and the last thing she wanted now for there to be rumors of a second baby in the royal nursery, let alone that the baby was a Frost Giant.
The problem that plagued them all was that Loki, as she had decided to call him, could not maintain the appearance of an Asgardian. When the Allfather held him, it remained in place, but as soon as Odin set him down, he reverted to his Jotunn form. If he could have held the glamour reflexively, then the security measures would not have been as necessary, but he could not, and without the protection of a glamour, there was the danger of his Frost Giant skin, which would kill whatever living thing he came in contact with. His caretakers wore thick leather gloves and aprons while bottle-feeding him and bathing and changing him, but that was all they could do.
Only Odin could handle Loki without fear, and to Frigga he seemed almost surly in his reluctance to do so.
“He is still starving,” she told him, after the minders had cared for him for some days, and Odin had spent as little of that time in the nursery as possible. “Not for food, but for attention. What he wants, my husband, is you. His eyes follow you whenever you’re in the room. He cries when you leave. Could you not spend a little time with him? Play with him, perhaps feed him once a day—”
“The boy is not our child, Frigga, and I will not argue this point with you again. We are not keeping him, either as a child or as a pet to be coddled. He is a hostage. When he is well and able to control his powers, he will be given to caretakers to foster, who will school him in his eventual destiny. I know you have become fond of him and it does your heart credit, but you would do well to remember that he is not our son.”
“And you would do well to remember that if he is a hostage, he will not serve your purposes if he dies,” she retorted sharply. “Away from his own people, he is sickening. He may yet die, and it will be our fault for not being able to meet his needs. And that, husband, does your heart no credit. The least you can do is give him some kind of affection!”
Odin stopped in his tracks. “I... cannot do what you ask.”
“You can.”
“No. I have already lost one child to my own cruel ambition. Yes, I have another of my own blood, but now there is this foundling who craves nothing but my attention, and I cannot give it, Frigga. I dare not. My weakness, my sentiment, has already caused me to harm my people and those I should be protecting. I cannot afford to become attached to another weapon.”
“‘Weapon’? He is a baby. My king, your children are children.”
“He is not my child!”
“Then why are you so terrified to treat him as a child at all? I know you, my king. I know that in your determination to keep me from loving Loki, you have left your own heart unguarded!”
Odin rounded on her, clearly shaken. “Do you think I do not know that? Did you truly believe that it was only for my own gain that I took him from Jotunheim? When I held him in my hands and quieted his crying, and saw him smile at me, Frigga – in my heart, at that moment, he became my son. And that... I cannot do this again. Not again. To look at him and think of what he may become, what Thor may become... and to think of what Hela became. Better for Loki and for us that he should remain a political prisoner.”
Frigga pressed her lips together. “My love, you cannot mold your offspring, natural-born or otherwise, to your own whims, but neither can you spend your life fearing them. They must be people first, and second, what their natures make of them. If you persist on thinking of them only as pawns in a political game, you will bring them all to ruin.”
And then Frigga held her breath, biting back even harsher words, until at last, Odin bowed his head and took her hands, and conceded that she counseled him wisely, as always.
For days, in every spare moment, the king tended Loki with his own hands. He fed him, played with him, sang and rocked him to sleep in the evenings, and tried repeatedly to stabilize the Asgardian glamour which his touch seemed to trigger in the child, but though after a week the boy was noticeably happier, he was still weakening.
Eir discovered that his Jotunn physiology could not gain enough nutrients from cow or goat milk, so Frigga expressed her own breast milk and Odin fed Loki from a bottle, but as his weekly sessions in the soul forge showed, something was still lacking.
“I thought he was doing better on the breast milk,” Frigga murmured, wisping her fingers through the glowing red energy field around Loki’s small form, “but he is almost as weak as before. Something is lacking.”
“He needs contact, my lieges,” said Eir quietly. “He needs touch. The Allfather,” she nodded respectfully to Odin, “is the only one who can hold and play with him, but he has many duties and cannot be with the boy every moment of every day. If there were some way to maintain the shift from Jotunn to Asgardian, then he could be cared for as Prince Thor is, but without that, at best, he will fail to thrive. At worst...” She let her words fade, spreading her hands in a gesture of mute helplessness.
Odin’s face was too-carefully blank, and an ominous feeling of despair curled around the queen’s heart.
As they prepared for bed that evening, Frigga found that her hands were shaking as she brushed her thick hair. Quietly, her husband took the brush from her, and finished smoothing and braiding her hair for the night.
Frigga turned on her dressing table stool and leaned her cheek against Odin’s chest. “We are going to lose him,” she murmured, fighting back tears.
Odin stroked her hair gently, and said nothing.
Deep in the night, she woke as she often did, from some subtle instinct, and went to Thor in the next-door nursery. During the day when her duties took her all over the palace and all over the kingdom, her son was cared for by attendants, but at night she insisted upon claiming his care for herself, even if it meant giving up her rest. She offered him her breast but for once, he was not hungry, only in need of some quiet time with his mother. She cuddled and rocked him before the hearth, kissing his pale, pale hair, until he dropped off to sleep.
As she was returning him to his cradle, she heard the familiar heartbreaking sound of Loki’s pitiful soft crying, and went to him.
“Poor hungry creature,” she murmured sadly, lightly rubbing his stomach, which was wrapped entirely in a soft green blanket, more for the protection of others than for his own warmth. Indeed, to Frigga, he felt over-warm, which was a strange thing to feel from a Frost Giant child. “Poor sickly little boy.” She found the thick gloves the child-minders used while feeding him and was in the act of readying to fill a bottle with breast milk... when her eyes fell upon some sewing that one of the servants had left on a chest.
Frigga stood there for a moment, robe half-open, lost in thought, while in the cradle, Loki’s stick-light blue arms waved weakly. Then she put down the bottle and instead, picked up the sewing. It was a small shirt of fine linen, fit for a prince, and there was a still-threaded needle tucked into the weave of the cloth.
It was a foolish idea, she knew. An idea born of sleep deprivation and stress. The image of the poor serving woman’s frozen corpse flashed through her mind and she faced the fact that if she was wrong, that could well be her own fate.
Loki wailed again, but the shrill complaining cry was thready and feeble, and he quickly stopped again, unable to muster the breath for more.
Frigga’s resolve hardened. She pulled the needle free, pricked her finger, and dabbed a drop or two of her own blood on her nipple. Then, for the first time, she picked Loki up.
His squalling stopped abruptly and his red eyes regarded her with suspicion. “I know,” she murmured softly to him, smiling. “I know I am not your favorite person. But he has done all he can for you.” She sat down in the rocker before the hearth, with Loki resting in the crook of her arm. “Now, little one, let us see if we cannot calm your hunger.”
She warded herself carefully with every protection spell she could draw upon, and then let her night robe fall open to the waist. She unswaddled the boy, and put his tiny blue body against her bare skin.
The shock of the cold was like a sudden fire, stealing her breath away so quickly that for a second, her lungs seemed to cease their labors. But she fought the pain. She pushed seidr and mother’s love against the instinctive defense of the frost, and slowly it receded, allowing her to gasp and draw warm air again.
Loki butted his forehead against her flesh like a colt searching for its mother’s teat, and when Frigga had guided his mouth to her nipple and helped him to latch on, he suckled hungrily and well. She stroked his fine dark hair and wept freely. “That’s it, my little boy. Now we shall save you.”
As she rocked and Loki nursed, Frigga was startled to see him begin to change in her arms. His form shifted into the shape of a perfect baby Asgardian boy, still with his cap of gossamer-fine hair, but now with eyes wavering between a new baby’s blue and a fine clear green, looking up at her in wonder.
“Oh,” Frigga smiled through her tears, “hello, child.”
When he was completely glutted with milk, Frigga did not put him back in his crib. She took him and the fine emerald blanket and returned to the rooms she shared with the Allfather.
“Frigga?” her husband asked from the darkness. “What has happened? You were gone for so long... Is aught wrong with Thor?”
“Thor is well.” She passed a hand over a light globe beside the bed, bathing her pillow in a low, soft glow. She settled into her place with Loki against her bare chest.
Odin blinked in the brightness and stared in amazement. “How?”
“Love, my husband. Trust and love. He is not a monster.” She kissed the contented, sleepy baby’s cheek. “He is our son now,” said Frigga firmly.
Odin looked down at him for a moment, and then delicately stroked the dark head with the back of one forefinger. “So he is,” he murmured, feeling the fragile beginnings of a bond between mother and child. “So he is.”