Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bards inquire into unsung history like cooks sniff new spices, like artists squint at new pigments, like woodcarvers touch the cut-open planes of unfamiliar tree species. History is your supply, your working material—and unknown history means you can craft a song nobody has ever heard before.

You were immensely glad to see that black wolf before the evening came on which you had been hired to sing at the Allfather’s palace. Something your friend Lif’s grandmother had embroidered: a giant wolf with green eyes. It hung on the wall of her rented room, two doors down the corridor from yours. “Grandmother says it was Odin’s,” Lif had told you, looking up from her sketch of a smiling Jotun mother. She is a controversial artist; far more controversial than you. You never sing treason; but there are some victories that should not have been fought, and you never sing about those, either. 

But bringing peace to the nine realms was admirable, on the whole...was it not?...and surely Odin would enjoy your mentioning that he had owed such a stupendous mount. 

However, now—in the sunset light of one of the palace gardens, sitting beside the Allmother—the Allfather is glowering at you.

    “With war-weapons wafting woe to the wicked,

    Woden the Wolf-Rider rang the rare era in:

    Light for all limbs of lives-leafed Yggdrasil

    Rest for all realms rendered up to his rule.”

It is the last verse of your ode. You replay the melody on your harp, your eyes flickering from the strings to your three hearers and back again. 

You suspect you will never be invited to sing at the palace again. Indeed, you apprehend being unpaid. The Allfather is staring at you with his single blue eye as if you had just sung the details of a plot to overthrow him. The Allmother is looking at you with a kindly, polite smile, but her hands are folded far too tightly in her lap. And Prince Loki, who is standing behind the Allmother, under a maple tree, is too shadowed for you to see whether he likes or dislikes your song. 

You strike your last note and bow. 

“Well-sung, bard,” the queen says, charm, courtesy, and unhideable anxiety all in her pleasant voice. 

“Thank you, my Lady Frigga,” you murmur as you stand upright again.

Deep lines are between the Allfather’s brows. He stands up, shaking white hair out of his face, and his mouth opens. 

Before any words come out of it, Prince Loki takes a step forward. “Clever, to borrow the scholar Thorvald Siegfridsson’s comparison of the state to a wolf, and make a kenning of it.” Certain you have never read anything by Thorvald Seigfridsson and suspecting that that scholar is nonexistent, you look up at him. His pale, sharp-angled face is perfectly serious, his eyes untwinkling. Either Thorvald is real, or the second prince is a superlatively good actor and inexplicably helpful to bards who have made a false step. 

You bow again. “Thank you, my lord. I believe bards should not be ignorant of our realm’s chroniclers, however obscure.” As you lift your head, Odin sits down again, and pulls a handsome sum from a pouch. The slightest touch of a smile crosses Prince Loki’s face as he steps back from whence he came.

“But neither should you sing overmuch of eras you do not understand,” the Allfather says, sententiously. His cold, wrinkled fingers bump against your palm as he places the coins on it. “Compose a song of the Lord Thor’s victories; his coronation is in a month, and I would have many bards at his feast.”

For a third time, you bow. “As the Allfather wishes, so I will sing.” No need to mention that you already have written three songs about Thor, in hopes of being hired to sing at one of his feasts with the Warriors Three.

“We anticipate it with pleasure,” the Allmother says, giving you a warm smile. 

As you walk away through the gardens, the palace behind you, gravel pointy under the soles of your boots, the forefront of your mind is pondering which of your songs to sing at Prince Thor’s coronation. Which is the best? Does it have any allusions to uncommon historical knowledge? And under these thoughts, you are thinking of Prince Loki’s excuse for your faux pas . Why did he invent a scholar (if he did invent Thorvald) to save a stranger from his father’s annoyance? 

The sunset shines through the red-veined leaves of the rosebushes and through their petals, as pink as the inside of a white kitten’s ears. Two Einherjar in golden armor shine at a crossroads in the garden paths. You look questioningly at one of them as you approach them, silently asking if you are allowed to pass. He nods, and you carry on, beginning to wonder why leaving is taking longer than coming did. Is this not the way to the palace garden gates? 

The light dims and goldens, emboldening the hints of peach and orange in the pink rose petals. Every chunk of gravel has a shadow, and every one of your footsteps is loud.. You look behind you and see the palace, like a giant’s organ. Is Lif right in her belief that frost giants are capable of making art? She tells you that you should sing of other realms, but—well, you sing for coins to rent your room and to buy your bread and cheese and apples. 

Two guards stand on either side of the nearest garden-path crossroads, and again you look at them questioningly—oh. They are the same Einherjar, and one of them is pressing his lips together so tightly that you can tell he is trying not to laugh at your wallking in a circle. “Could you please tell me the way to the gate?” you ask, absentmindedly pulling on a raveling thread of your skirt’s embroidery. 

“First turn left, bard, and then the second turn right,” the more serious Einherji answers. You thank him and follow his directions, or believe you do. The gardens on each side of you become herb beds, lavender and thyme and mint all looking heathery in the twilight.

Quiet footsteps behind you. “Unless you intend to avail yourself of the palace sauna, bard, you’re astray.”

You start, and turn to see Prince Loki standing a few feet away from you, his arms folded and a few too many laugh lines by his eyes—enough to make you suspect that he has been diverted by watching you peregrinate through the gardens. 

“Lord Loki. Could you please direct me to the gate?” you ask quietly. “I do wish to be home before dark.”

“I’ll guide you to it.” He gives you a sudden, lopsided smile. “In exchange for answering one question.” As he adds that, he turns and strides back toward the roses, his green cape billowing with a lightness that shows it is neither to keep him warm nor to keep him dry. 

You follow him, but then take a few quicker steps and walk beside him since he wishes to ask you something. “What is your question, my lord?”

A rosethorn snags your skirt and you halt, to pull your skirt off of the thorn without ripping it. Prince Loki stops walking and waits silently until your skirt and the rosebush are separated. “Where did you read that the Allfather rode a wolf?” he asks softly as you poke at the small hole the thorn made, hoping to pull a couple threads over to hide it.

You look up at the prince and hear yourself say, “In one of the chronicles of the scholar Thorvald Siegfridsson, as you said, my lord.”

The corner of the prince’s mouth quirks up. “Ah, well, I can’t expect a subject to give me the lie. Where else have you heard of this wolf?” You hesitate, and he begins walking again. You keep up. Why does he want to know this? Does he wish to find the reference to the Allfather’s wolf and destroy it? Does he wish to punish its owner? The garden gates appear, many yards away but visible. Loki quietly clears his throat. “I have no wish to know who made or who possesses this record. There are few chronicles of my father’s reign before my brother’s birth, and he is...reserved. Will you tell me the contents of your source?”

Why not? You believe him that, whatever his motive is, it is not hunting down those who know what they should not know. “It was not a chronicle,” you say. “It is an embroidery, made by my friend’s grandmother, of a giant black wolf with green eyes. Her grandmother said it belonged to the Allfather. I know not if that is true, of course.”

“Of course,” Loki echoes. You look sideways at him. He is scratching his palm, looking at the gravel on which you are walking as if it had runes carved on it that he was trying to read. Another rose thorn stabs your sleeve, but this one slips out as soon as you move your arm forward. “Thank you.” His expression is inscrutable; you have no inkling whether he believes his father had a wolf or not, nor whether his having ridden one would be a momentous fact.

“Thank you for guiding me, Lord Loki,” you say. “I can find my own way from here, unless you wish to speak with me further.” The gate is only ten or so yards away now.

A faint shadow crosses his face; if he were not a prince, you would think he had wanted to walk further with you. “I will not detain you. But—do not refer to unorthodox history when singing here. Your voice is too sweet to be confined in a dungeon.” He bows his head slightly, as if you were a noblewoman, turns on his heel, and walks away into the twilit garden, shoulders back, cape streaming behind him and coming perilously close to rose thorns. 

You realize you are staring after him and quickly walk toward the gate, wanting to reach home before dark. Was he exaggerating for emphasis when he implied that you could be imprisoned for singing about history? Would you have been, had he not invented Thorvald? You uneasily walk faster. Is a king who would punish bards for singing the truth about him a king worthy of your kennings and your melodies? 

People are drinking tonight in the city, stargazing, flirting. You see the Lord Fandral walking into a tavern with each of his arms around a maiden’s waist, and frown because three days ago Inge, the tapestry weaver who rents the room below yours, told you that he had kissed her and she was in love with him, and had a fit of shaking because it frets her that he is a friend of  Prince Thor. Inge believes that Asgard’s monarchy should not be hereditary. 

You step over something someone’s horse left and push open the unlocked oaken door of the stone building in which you live. 

There is a bloody footprint on the ashwood floor, pointing toward the door. You blink, frowning down at it. Did someone become injured and go to find a healer? Down the corridor you follow the footsteps. They are all large left shoe prints, so separated that you guess whoever made them would be a tall man. But only two men live on this building’s ground level: Magnus, a short jeweller, and Halfdan, a tailor who lost his left leg in Jotunheim a millennium ago. 

One of the bloody footprints is an arm's length in front of Inge’s closed door. No marks are further down the hallway than that. You stop short, bewildered. She has no male relatives or male friends, as far as you know; and her only lover is Lord Fandral, who you know is uninjured and wooing two ladies at a tavern a quarter hour away from here. Why would a man have been injured in her room?

You tuck your harp under your arm and knock on her door, three times. “Inge?” No answer. You knock again, three times and then two times. “Inge? Is all well?”

No answer. You try to lift the latch. It rises, and the door swings smoothly into Inge’s lantern-lit room. 

Beyond her bed, which is perpendicular to the door, the tapestry on her far wall—a cool-toned, complex one she made for herself, depicting Asgard with a terraced garden instead of a palace and with blue and purple morning glories growing over all other golden buildings—is ripped into shreds, as if a cat the size of the room had stretched out a vast paw, transfixed the tapestry with every claw of it, and then slammed the paw to the floor. 

Your breath catches. Inge never destroys her own art. Where—what—?

Your gaze descends from the tapestry to the floor. From the other side of her bed, Inge’s arm and hand extend, her fingers clasping a shuttle full of blue silk and inches away from a bloody footprint.

Chapter Text

“There has been a murder. Whom should I tell?” The words sound as if you were reading them aloud without feeling, but at least you are not sobbing at the tall Einherji who looks down at you with shock on his umber face. Justified shock. Murder is an unwonted crime in Asgard. His fellow Einherji, who remained standing directly outside the gate when he walked to meet you, stare at you through the planet-lit darkness.

He clears his throat. “You should tell a captain of the Einherjar, maiden. As you have. Come with me; I am under orders to report such crimes to Prince Loki.”

Prince Loki again today? You nod mutely as the golden gates swing open, and then follow the Einherji through them. He tells you his name is Hermod. 

Even the stone floor you are walking over is beautiful, and golden statues and golden walls shine through the darkness to your right and your left. But you do not even try to think of words for singing about them.

“Does the Lord Loki investigate crimes?” you ask quietly.

Hermod nods, and takes  off his helmet and tucks it under his arm. “He’s found out two murderers, and a robber. One man who desired to poison the Allfather. And three who were casting curses on the pumpkin harvest.”

Your tired mind begins to leap back and forth between the image of Inge’s bloodless face and imaginations of rotting, slimy, cursed pumpkins punctured in a foggy field. 

Down corridors. Up stairs. Past golden statues, past golden curtains, past golden murals, past brown-arrayed servants. The golden, windowless walls are like the inside of a locked treasure casket. Where did so much gold come from? Asgard has one small goldmine; your cousin works in it. 

Hermod triple knocks on a closed golden door. Inside, a chair slides back and someone steps lightly toward the door. Its latch rises and it opens.

Prince Loki stands in the doorway, his erect posture and grave expression at odds with his disarranged hair and noticeably inkstained hands. “Hermod. Is something amiss?” You take a step forward, to where the prince can see you, and his brows rise in surprise. 

“There has been a murder, my lord. This maiden bears tidings of it.”

Prince Loki draws in his breath and nods. “Thank you; you may return to your post.” 

Hermod bows and strides away down the golden corridor and around a corner. As his footsteps become inaudible, you clasp your hands together, trying to be calm enough to talk clearly and informatively about what you have seen. 

“I am sorry that our second meeting is under such circumstances,” Prince Loki says with calm courtesy. You look up from his inkstained hands to his pensive face. He is not much older than you are, you realize. “When and where was the murder?”

“A few hours ago, my lord. In a room in the house where I live, in the center of the city. The victim is Inge, a tapestry weaver.” Who would have been a friend if she had lived below you for another fortnight. And who meandered on the edge of becoming a revolutionary, but that is not what you will tell a prince about her, not immediately. 

Loki listens attentively and unblinkingly, and when you finish speaking raises a bony hand, palm toward himself, and splays his ink-stained fingers. Green light curves over his head and drops down his back and dissipates, a dark, hooded cloak appearing on him as its aftermath. “I shall accompany you to your home. Tell me everything you know of this murder and of Inge as we go.” 

You have told him everything you know of the murder by the time you exit the palace in his wake, and everything you know of Inge by the time you leave the gardens, except for her antimonarchial convictions. He listens quietly; because of the hood, you cannot see his face.

“You have said she was unmarried; did she have any suitors?” he asks. A smith jostles him in passing and he ignores it, which is surely an indication that he is purposefully incognito. 

“She told me that the Lord Fandral had kissed her, and that she was in love with him,” you reply, unable to keep your anger at that philanderer out of your voice. “But I saw him shortly before I reached home, entering a tavern with two other women.”

“Ah.” Prince Loki’s tone is dry. “I shall trouble you to direct me to that tavern, later.”

You nod, presuming that he wants to analyze whether or not the Lord Fandral could have gone there after murdering Inge, and fall silent. The air feels like it is going to rain, and the street torches are almost as bright as the lights in houses. Through one window you see a young man kissing a girl’s hand; through another, three toddlers running in a circle; through another, an orange cat biting a blue curtain. The parts of Asgard where the commoners live are very serene. 

“I tried to see in what directions the footprints went, after I left the boarding house,” you say as it becomes visible. “But the street is too dirty.”

Loki nods. “It matters not; he would not have continued making prints for long enough to point out his direction.”

He follows you through the door and to Inge’s room, both of you steppping where the russet footprints are not. People are talking in Inge’s room; you told Hrist, the elderly woman who own this house, about Inge’s murder before you walked to the palace, but it sounds like at least two other people are talking to her. 

You push open the door. Magnus and Halfdan have both returned from their work.

“—you cannot prove that anyone meant to kill anyone!” Halfdan says. “I was a soldier. Most wounds are not fatal!” He points down at his silvery metal foot. “Unless it’s a decapitation, or total disembowell—”

“A wound that could be lethal is as cruel as one that is!” Magnus shouts up at him, waving hands with five rings apiece.

Behind them,crying with her face buried in green-paint-stained hands, Lif is standing beside the bed Inge’s body is lying on, and Hrist is kneeling beside it with her hands above her head, chanting: “O Allfather, Lord of Hliðskjalf, resurrect your child, if she merit resurrection! Mover of Constellations, Awakener, Teacher of Gods—”

Prince Loki clears his throat and pulls back his hood. “Excuse me.” 

Lif looks up, and Halfdan and Magnus, at that instant interrupting each other, stop with their mouth open and bow. Hrist keeps chanting: “The One who Rides Forth, Lord of the Aesir…”

Loki sighes. “Madam. Might I suggest you address me, since I am present and my father is not?”

Hrist closes her mouth and pushes herself up to her feet, hands on Inge’s tapestry bedcovering on which a man and a woman are dancing. “Lord Loki. Can you raise the dead?”

“I can prevent the man who slew this maiden from putting more people of Asgard in need of resurrection.” The prince walks to the other side of Inge’s bed and looks down at her, down at the red cut across her throat. Pity crosses his face, and he whispers something: “...take your place...halls of Valhalla…”

He turns and walks to the dried pool of blood, follows the footprints back to the doorway, and then suddenly speaks to Halfdan, who has his back to him. “Show me the sole of your left foot.” Halfdan raises it, showing that the bottom is covered in hobnails. It would not have left footprints like the ones on the floor. Prince Loki nods. “You seem unimpeachable. What have you done today? Have you seen anything unsavory?”

Halfdan turns to face him. “No, my lord. I rose at dawn; I left this house, I ate at the Horned Guard Tavern, I worked in my shop, sewing a wedding gown, I ate at the Horned Guard tavern again, and I came home a quarter hour ago and heard Lif crying and Hrist praying in poor Inge’s room. And my apprentice, Rollo, and the barkeep at the Horned Guard tavern can prove I was at my shop and at the tavern. I haven’t seen anything but fabric and food.”

“Thank you. You may leave.” 

Halfdown bows and walks out of the room.

Prince Loki looks at Magnus, or rather at Magnus’s shoes. They are minuscule. “What have you done and seen?”

Magnus’s hands are shaking. “I saw Fandral at the Sign of the Double Ravens with two wenches!”

One of the prince’s brows rises. “Is that noteworthy?”

“He made Inge think he wanted to wed her! And he was less than half a hour away from here!” Magnus makes one of his rings whirl around. 

“I shall interrogate him.” To your surprise, Prince Loki smiles, very faintly, as he says it. Either he he thinks Fandral would never commit murder...or he delights in the task of questioning him. “What else did you do today?”

“I slept at my mother’s house last night and ate there, and then I crafted jewelry at my shop, with my journeyman and my apprentice, until an hour ago. I saw nothing unusual on my way home, except that knave—” Magnus drops one of his thumb rings and squats to pick it up. 

“Thank you. You are dismissed,” Prince Loki says tersely, and turns to Lif, who is wiping tears of her cheeks. “And you, maiden?”

“I was painting all day. Loki.”

You wince at her choice to address him by his first name without a title. 

Prince Loki tilts his head. “Did you leave your room?”

“No. I was painting a Jotun mother. I ate an apple. I came down half an hour ago, when I heard Hrist scream.”

He walks around the foot of the bed, and his gaze falls to her small feet, clad in high-heeled boots. “Can anyone testify that you were upstairs?”

“Yes,” Hrist answers. “I have the room closest to the stairs. Nobody went down them after she left this noontide”—she gestures at you—”until she came up to tell me that Inge was dead and she was going to the palace. Lif was in her room.” She caresses a brooch she is wearing, a brook carved with runes that probably say something about the Allfather.

“Very well,” he answers. “Lif, did you hear any noises in Inge’s room, two to four hours ago?”

Lif shakes her head. “No, Loki Odinson.”

His lips press together. “You may depart—and paint as many monsters as you please, but learn respect for those who protect you from them.”  

Lif looks at Inge and swallows hard, and then walks out of the room, heels tapping. You back against a wall and lean against it. Tears refill your eyes as you notice that Hrist or Lif drew the shuttle of blue silk out of Inge’s hand. 

Prince Loki turns to Hrist. “You own this house, madam?”

Hrist folds her hands. “I do, Lord Loki. I was in my room all day, reading of the glories of the Allfather.”

“How pious.” The prince brushes a lock of hair away from his eyes. “Do you possess an alibi?”

“No, but why would I kill my room-hirer, when I only have five?” She lifts her red woolen skirt to show her small, slippered feet. “I plight, by the holy emptiness of your father’s eyesocket—” Prince Loki’s mouth twitches “—that I have never killed an innocent maiden.” She deeply courtesies and then drops on her knees and chants again.

Prince Loki tweaks an unraveling thread on one of his cuffs, and then walks up to you and speaks under his breath, too quietly for Hrist to hear. “Could you direct me to the Sign of the Double Ravens? I’ll pay it a visit after searching Hrist’s room.”

With the side of your wrist, you wipe your eyes. The way to the Sign of the Double Ravens is complicated: there are a gate that looks like someone’s front door, two forks in the road, and a sinkhole. “Shall I show you the way to it?” 

Chapter Text

The rain begins to drizzle from the dark sky as you lead Prince Loki around the corner of a baker’s shop. It is cold, windy rain, that throws itself in your face now and then as if it were salt and your face were a bland meal. 

“Wait,” the prince says. You halt and look back at him. To your puzzlement, he walks past you and then turns to face you, and extends his hands to lightly touch your shoulders. It does not alarm you, but it is puzzling. Before you can query, green light shines on your shoulders and then surrounds your face and flares behind you, casting your shadow on Prince Loki. He is smiling a little. 

Two breaths later, a warm cloak hoods your head and drapes from your shoulders. Prince Loki folds his arms. 

You feel the edge of the cloak in front of you. It is a soft, waterproof black woolen felt, and it has unclosed ties at the neck, which you tie. “Thank you, my lord. This was most kind of you.”

Prince Loki smiles at you, without wryness. “You would not be walking in a midnight rainstorm had you not offered your services to guide me.” He turns and walks onward, and you take a few quick steps so that, walking in front of him, you can demonstrate how to not fall into the sinkhole, which he says he will see is mended--a statement that nearly makes you lose your balance and trip into it. 

Either you (and still more, Lif and Inge) have been maligning the royal family, or Prince Loki and the Allfather and Prince Thor are not ravens of a feather. 

“If I may ask, how do you make cloaks out of nothing?” you ask, ten minutes away from the Sign of the Double Ravens. Rainwater is making your hands feel as cold as if you were ungloved in winter. You fold your arms so both hands are under your cloak. 

“I do not,” the prince answers from behind you, scarcely loud enough for you to hear him through the rain and the wind. “The eddies around us shift into a cloak like cut flowers shift into earth; seidr causes composition even as other powers cause decomposition.”

The quiet man walking behind you is the most masterful magic-user in the realm. You already knew that (though you did not know that he could conjure cloaks), but now you absorb it. “Is all magic shifting?” you dare to ask. You are curious about magic; the bookshop has many war chronicles and epics but scarcely any grimoires. 

You and Loki turn left onto the road on which the tavern is, and then he replies, “No. Reading memories is not, and for illusions light shifts, but no matter.”

“Reading memories?” you echo. An idea flies into your mind. “Could you--could you read Inge’s memories? And Hrist’s, and….” You do not know if it is disrespectful for a peasant to urge a prince to read a noble’s mind.  

“Hrist’s and Fandral's memories, I can read; it is against the Allfather’s laws to do so without probable guilt.” His voice softens. “As for Inge’s, I cannot. Her spirit is in Hel or in Valhalla, not here where I can peruse its past.”

A man runs past you, coming from The Sign of the Double Ravens, shouting, “You can’t catch me, coal-biter!” Another man, holding an upside-down tankard above his head and babblingly bellowing, is chasing him, bare feet splashing into puddles. You hope they are the entirely of the tavern fight, rather than two sparks from an enormous fire.

When you and Prince Loki walk into it, the tavern is scrimmageless; a man who cannot sing is singing, and two women are aggressively playing chess with each other, but nobody is scuffling.

You sit on a bench at the cleanest table you can see and watch as Loki strides across the room to speak to the barkeep. Both of the women who are playing chess watch him too; since he is cloaked, you doubt they know he is Prince Loki, but his long strides and his wearing a hooded black cloak that is billowing behind him both make him noteworthy.

You cannot hear what Loki and the barkeep, whose beard is braided, are saying to each other. You put your elbows on the oaken table and put your chin on your hands, your mind buzzing like a beetle that has fallen on its back. In one day, you have sung before the Allfather and been hired to sing at the next Allfather’s coronation; Inge has been murdered; and now you are in a tavern in which a man is singing about women’s ankles, trying to help Prince Loki discover her murderer. You press your fingers against your eyes, trying to remain calm and quiet and ready to talk when Prince Loki ceases talking to the barkeep. But now that you are not seeking the palace, or narrating, or guiding, you keep picturing bloody footprints and the blue shuttle in Inge’s hand. 

“The stew appears fit for consumption, unlike the roast goat.” You start and look up. Loki is standing beside the table, talking to you. “Will stew suit you?”

There is no purse in your pocket; you ate before you went to the palace, and planned to eat supper when you returned to your room. “I’ll eat at home, my lord.” 

Loki tilts his hooded head. “You have fasted since before you sang for us.” He pauses, and you wonder how he knows that. Surely he has not read your mind--no, he must have deduced that you would not have eaten after finding Inge’s body, and he knows you found her body before ascending to your room and your food. 

“I have not brought money,” you admit. “But I have food at home, my lord.” Loki pivots, his cloak billowing enough that its wet hem brushes against your hand, and returns to the counter. You wince, folding your hands tightly on your lap. He has prevented the Allfather from thinking you are treasonous; he has given you a cloak; and he is buying you stew. A prince giving boons to a peasant maiden is dubious. 

He orders stew and mead, and then returns to your table and sits on the opposite bench. “He says it will be brought to us within a quarter hour.” You study what the hood reveals of his face: clear green eyes with dark circles under them, an angular nose, a tired smile. His expression is not like the expressions of men who have tried to seduce you, let alone the ones who have tried to assault you. He must simply be appreciative of your guidance. You smile at him. “Thank you, my lord.”

He nods, his fingertip running around the edge of a knot on the tabletop. “Your guidance has been worthy of more than a bowl of turnip stew and a horn of mead. Are you willing to help me further?”

You look at him inquiringly. 

“Since you were in the palace garden when the murder took place, you are indubitably innocent,” he says softly, leaning forward. “I will pay you whatever you earn from singing at a noble’s feast per day in which you abide in your hoarding house, study Hrist, study everyone who dwells there or who enters it, and then report to me in the evening what you spied. I will question the women who were with Fandral, whose names the barkeep told me, and I will speak to the Lord Heimdall, but this month--” He sighs. “This month I am in charge of organizing my brother’s coronation.” Bitterness hardens his voice. “And while I deem solving this maiden’s death a matter of greater importance than ordering pumpkins to trick out feast tables….”

He stops talking as a maid in a mauve gown arrives, holding two horns of mead in her left hand and making her right hand a stand of a tray with two bowls of turnip stew. Loki thanks her and gives her coins, and then as she hastens to the counter and you take a hot spoonful of stew, says, “In short, I cannot spend many days or nights in this part of Asgard until after Thor’s coronation. Will you surveil for me?”

You swallow your stew. “Yes, my lord.” You cannot think of any reason why you should not; you want Inge’s murderer to be punished, you would be living in your boardinghouse whether Prince Loki asked you to or not, and you have not agreed to sing at anything anterior to Prince Thor’s coronation. 

He thanks you, with a slight, pleasant smile, and you eat your stew and drink your mead in silence.

Chapter Text

It would not be so difficult to write an ode to sing at Inge’s funeral tomorrow if Hrist were not chanting, lilting but unmelodious. It is Wodensday, and so she has been chanting to the Allfather from five hours after midnight until now, an hour after noon. Her chanting awakened you after you had only slept for four hours, and since then you have been abiding in the house, trying to write when not looking out your window to see if anyone suspicious is near the house or pacing through the upstairs and downstairs hallways, seeking informative happenings; you also bootlessly searched the kitchen rubbish bin and the compost heap for a knife or a dagger. 

 Halfdan and Magnus are both at work, and Lif is painting a portrait of Inge. Hrist is chanting. 

You mark out an arrhythmic line, and then you feel someone staring at you. But nobody is in your small room, and nobody is looking in through your open door.

You write another line, for show,--your name and then two cousin’s names, all written in small font and cumulatively of equal length to the marked out line--and then rise and tensely walk out of your room into the hallway. Once you leave your doorway behind, you stop feeling as if someone is watching you. 

You hesitate and then walk past the empty room between yours and Lif’s and knock on Lif’s door, quietly saying her name. Something clinks onto her floor, and she sighs as she picks it up; then she walks across the creaky floor and opens the door.

A painted ash board lies on the table beside the door, Inge’s pretty face and an aqua background, separated from each other by the unpainted form of her hair. A paintbrush dipped in brown paint is in Inge’s hand, and a splat of brown paint is on the floor near the table. “I’ll be able to finish painting her by tonight,” Lif says. Her eyes are red and puffy. 

“It’s beautiful,” you say softly, and clear your throat. “Ah, do you--”

Lif looks over her shoulder at her window, her fingers clenching around her paintbrush. “I keep feeling like someone is staring at my back while I’m painting,” she says, and tries to laugh.

Your heart drops. “I came to your room because I felt like someone was staring at me,” you say under your breath.

Lif pales and sets her brush on the table beside her. “My door was closed, so they’re not in the hallway,” she whispers. “And they can’t be in either of our rooms if we were both feeling it….”

She turns around and walks toward her window and you follow her, though it is nonsensical that somebody would be looking into it. There are no giants in this realm! 

But there are roofs, and from this angle you see what you did not see when you looked out of your window: a man is lying on top of the neighboring house’s shallowly-sloping room, his taupe tunic blending with its slates, and he is staring at Lif’s window through a spyglass. Lif smothers a shriek and drops on her knees, bending her head so she cannot be seen through the window. You stare at the man for an instant long--all you can tell about him from this distance is that he has orange hair and is not the elderly man who lives in that house, and then sit down on the floor beside Lif, breathing hard.

“Do you think he’s the murderer?” Lif whispers, grabbing your arm. 

“Would not the murderer hide and watch us? Instead of lying on a roof where you can see him?” you whisper. But he may not know that you can see him through Lif’s window, or he may not have anticipated that you would feel his inspection…. “Perhaps he is curious about the murder. Or maybe he is a voyeur.” 

Lif wrinkles her nose. “I’m going to close my drapes. And lock my door. Would you mind sleeping in my room tonight?”

That would be safer for both of you. “I will. But I have to report to Prince Loki about what I’ve seen today; I’ll make sure I leave early enough that it will only be sunset when I return.”

Lif nods and very suddenly stands up and pulls her green drapes closed. She has painted yarrow and hares on them. “Will you tell him about this?”

“Of course.”

She walks to her door and locks it, and then dips her brush into brown paint again and begins painting Inge’s hair. You rise and find a scrap of cloth, and begin cleaning up the paint on the floor; Lif has forgotten she dropped the paintbrush earlier. “I’m glad you’re also trying to learn who killed Inge,” she says, her voice quavering. “I suspect the prince will simply pretend to solve it--why would he truly solve it, when he can seem brilliant and caring by beheading anyone, probably someone who blasphemes against Odin?”

You look up at her, frowning. “You should be more fair. He stayed up for hours last night, just to discover the names of two women who were with Lord Fandral--his brother’s friend! And he gave me a cloak because rain was falling.” You roll the rag up with the painted part inside, and stand up and set it on her table. 

Lif bites the end of her paintbrush. “I shouldn’t presume that he’s like the Allfather,” she grants. “But don’t fall in love with him, dear.” She mixes brown paint with yellow and white. 

Your brows rise. “ What ?” 

Lif stirs paint. “You are unbetrothed and unwed, you have told me you admire intelligent men, and he is very beautiful. And he gave you a cloak, and a task that makes you visit him in the evenings.”

Redness floods your face. “I am visiting him to tell him if a murderer has been here, not to--not-- I only met him yesterday!” 

Lif brushes golden-brown paint next to the brown paint. “Inge--Inge died! And Fandral is a nobleman--” Lif’s voice cracks and she dissolves into tears. 

You pull her into a hug and pat her shoulder-blades, and the back of your gown becomes a painting: Lif’s brush is dripping. 

For the rest of the afternoon, you wash paint out of your gown (you only own three), and then try to finish writing your song about Inge. The man is no longer on the neighbour’s roof, nobody enters the building, and Hrist stops chanting and starts cooking herself soup with many onions in it. 

You leave Lif’s room, put on the cloak Loki gave you (the one you owned already has five patches and grass stains), leave the house, and make your way, heedfully, to the palace.

Chapter Text

Prince Loki told the Einherjar who guard his door to let you in whether he is in his chambers or not; you are in them, standing with your hands folded and surveying the spines of the hundreds of books on his bookshelves, and he is not. You would like to sit down, but it seems inadvisable to sit on a prince’s chair without permission.

“Py-tha-gor-as,” you sound out in a whisper. “Snorri Sturluson, Wil-li-am Shakes-speare—”

There are voices outside Prince Loki’s door: two men talking at the same time.

“...troll under the steps…”

“...daughter eloped…

“...out of the back window…”

“...fisherman…

“...need to stop importing them from Nornheim!”

“...LUTEFISK!”

Abruptly, they cease speaking.

“Who was here first?” Prince Loki asks. After a moment of silence, in which somebody apparently answered via body language, he says, “Tell me your grievance.” 

“My daughter eloped with a fisherman! He smells like lutefisk! I beg you, Prince Loki, declare their marriage unlawful!”

“Is your daughter of age?”

“She is two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-nine.”

“Take walks in the fishmarket to season yourself. You may go.”

Footsteps, almost stomping, depart.

 “There is a troll under your steps,” Prince Loki says. “How large is it?”

“Only the size of a bear, my lord. But I had to climb out of my back window, and my wife is pregnant, and shouldn’t climb out of windows. The import of trolls should be banned, my lord!”

“I shall send Einherjar to remove it. Eadmund, you have fought in Nornheim; gather as many Einherjar as are necessary to capture a troll the size of a bear, follow this man to his home, and remove the troll.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Thank you, my lord!”

Boots and leather slippers walk away down the hallway, and then Loki opens his door and enters his room, closing the door behind him.

Before he sees you, someone knocks on his door. He sighs and turns and opens it. “Yes, Bjorg?”

“The new tablecloths for the Lord Thor’s feast have been lost in transit, my lord. The airship captain surmises that they are caught on a twig of Yggdrasil between Vanaheim and Asgard,” a woman says.

Prince Loki pauses for a moment. “You should have told the seneschal that they are lost.”

“He is drunk, my lord.”

“When he is not drunk, tell him that I desire him to find fine tablecloths in the linen presses and to have the launderers bleach and iron them.”

“Yes, my lord.” Bjorg walks away.

Prince Loki closes the door, and brushes a lock of hair out of his face. “By Odin’s beard….” You clear your throat, feeling stupendously awkward, and his eyes go to you. He manages to smile. 

“Greetings, my lord. A man was on our neighbor’s roof today, looking through my window and Lif’s window.”

One of Prince Loki’s brows rises. “Do you know him?” He gestures at the dark wooden bench next to his fireplace, and you sit on one end of it. It has a green velvet cushion. 

“No, my lord. He has bright orange hair, and a spyglass. He was wearing brown.”

The prince sits in the middle of the bench. Cold air is encompassing him and his eyes are glassy, both as if he had been walking in the winter. He must have been in an ice-house. “When did you perceive him?” 

“About an hour after noon, my lord. He left an hour and a half ago. I know not if he is the murderer, or a busybody, or a pervert.”

Prince Loki scratches his palm, lines between his brows.“I shall direct the Einherjar whom I am sending to surveil your house—now that I have persuaded the Allfather that solving this murder is of greater importance than having a row of fourteen guards rather than ten—to watch your neighbor’s roof,” he says. “They will escort you back. Has anything else come to pass?” 

You shake your head. “Lif painted, Hrist chanted, and Halfdan and Magnus were working.” Since the fire is making you overheated, you untie your cloak. 

He nods. “The Lord Heimdall did not see Inge’s murder, but he has pledged to watch your house and its vicinity. And the two women who were with Fandral last night both told me that they were with him from noon until midnight.” His lips narrow scornfully; you wonder whether he is disdaining the two women, or the Lord Fandral.

“Do you think Hrist might be the murderer?” You do not ask your other question: Or did you search her room because her worshipping your father irks you? 

“Perhaps. She has no alibi, and she believes Inge was blasphemous.” He stands up, towering over you, pale against the dark stones around the fireplace. “I anticipated your coming later; the Einherjar who will escort you will arrive an hour from now, more or less.”

You stand too. “I don’t mind waiting, Lord Loki.”

“Sit, please. And excuse me; I have two hundred invitations to write.” He gives you a wry smile, and then walks to his desk and takes a bottle of ink out of one of its drawers.

“Two hundred!” you blurt. “Do you not—” You realize that you are being too familiar.

“Have a scribe?” Prince Loki pours the ink into an inkwell. “One is attending an Alfish wake, and the other inadvertently drank ink and is in the rooms of healing with symptoms that are unfit for a lady’s ears. This fortnight hasn’t exactly been felicitous.” He begins to write neat runes on a sheet of parchment.

You’ll be waiting here for an hour, and you can write neatly, and Prince Loki is overloaded. “Might I fill their place, until the Einherjar come? I can write legibly.”

He puts his pen in its holder and half turns, looking at you questioningly. “You are strangely eager to serve.”

Your face flushes. How can you explain to a prince that you want to help him because he has dark circles under his eyes and seems to be carrying out enough work for two or three people? “I would rather write invitations than sit idly, Lord Loki,” you say. Your voice sounds too high. 

He contemplates you for a few moments. “Thank you.” He pulls a second chair to his large desk. Wishing that your blush would fade, you seat yourself in the second chair and watch him finish writing the invitation. You agree with Lif that he is beautiful; he looks like a marble statue, but with a more lop-sided smile and with more wistful eyes. There are two layers of ink stains on his long hands now. 

With a faint smile, he slides the invitation towards you. “All of the invitations will say this. I’ll give you a pen...” He looks in two different drawers, finds another quill pen, and hands it to you, his fingers brushing unintentionally against your hand, and then he picks up the inkwell and places it nearer to you. 

You dip your pen in it and begin copying the invitation, trying to make your runes the same size as his. Lif says that the royal family is useless, but Prince Loki is not. Is he anomalous? Knocks sound on the door when you are halfway through writing your eighth invitation. “Come in,” Loki says, continuing to write.

Lord Fandral flings the door open and saunters in, grinning. “Oh, I see you have a maiden with you! I’ll give you your privacy.” He winks and turns on his heel.

Prince Loki’s eyes narrow, and he puts his pen in its holder. “Stop. Where were you last afternoon?”

“In Valhalla!” Fandral cries. He seems intoxicated.“I’m in love with both of them. But Lofn—she has eyes like shadows on snow!—says she fancies you, Loki!” He sits on the edge of Loki’s desk, almost on top of Loki’s inkwell, his golden curls messy.“You—”

Prince Loki holds up his hand. “I have spoken with both of them.”

Fandral blinks. “Loki, it’s unfair! You may win away one of my lasses, but not both ! You’re going to make her jealous!”  He gestures at you. 

“The tapestry-weaver Inge was murdered yesterday.”

Fandral’s eyes become wide. “Loki! You were always one for pranks, but—”

You stand up, tears filling your eyes. “She was murdered, Lord Fandral. And she was in love with you. She didn’t know you were wooing two other maidens! She wanted to marry—to—” You choke on tears, and grasp that you are shouting at one prince’s friend in the other prince’s chamber. Anxiety twists inside you. 

Fandral sobs and leaps to his feet. “I’ll put my sword through the heart of whoever slew her! Who slew her, Loki?”

Loki tugs on a thread that is unraveling from his cuff. “I know not.”

Chapter Text

Fandral is hooded and cloaked at Inge’s funeral; if he were not wearing the same boots that he wore in Loki’s chamber when he cried that he would kill Inge’s murderer, you would not have realized that the man watching Inge’s burning boat float away was the philanderer she had loved. You look away from him and focus on singing the lament you wrote for her. Lif is sobbing. Hrist is praying to the Allfather. Inge did not have a family.

Inge’s withdrawing boat reminds you of the time one of her shuttles fell out of her bag when she was leaning over a bridge. She couldn’t swim, and she had started crying because she had already had an irksome day, and now her shuttle, as costly as a bag of flour, was floating toward the sea. You had jumped in, since you could dog paddle, and caught it for her, and she had hugged you….

But you cannot catch her boat. Your throat tightens, and you sing the last line of the lament a few notes higher than you wrote the tune of its last verse, and Inge’s ship plummets into Ginnungagap, the abyss. 

Hrist pats Lif’s shoulder as she sobs into her hands. “Shh, it was the Allfather’s will…” Hrist looks at you. “Are you coming home?”

Your eyes flicker toward where Fandral mourned, wondering if you should ask him if he has learned anything before he leaves, but he has already departed—and another man stands there, also hooded, with a spyglass in his hand. “Wait, Hrist,” you ask (Lif is crying too much to be addressed), and stride towards the stranger, tucking your harp under your arm. He raises his hand sharply as he notices you walking toward him and then wheels and races down the nearest alley, running bouncily and awkwardly. 

“Stop!” you shout, but he leaps more quickly and throws himself around a corner. You could chase him, but if you caught him he could slay you—and you cannot run as fast as he ran. With a frown, you trot back toward the water, looking behind you frequently.

Hrist and Lif have already left. Anxiously, looking down alleys, looking behind you, looking intently at tall people in hoods, you make your way home—and scream. 

Hrist lies in the street, blood pooling from her side, and a man is collapsed next to her with a knife handle sticking out of his calf, crying out: “Ah-ah—ahh! Ahhh!!” 

Your heart and hands begin shaking. Forgetting to look both ways, you run across the street, already trying to think of what you could use as bandages and how you could get a doctor. The man with the knife in his leg isn’t bleeding heavily; Hrist is. You throw yourself on your knees beside them, set your harp on the verge of the street, and rip fabric off the bottom of your overgown. Where are the Einherjar whom Prince Loki said he would send to surveil the house?

 “Call for help, sir,” you urge, glancing up at the stranger. Brown eyes round, he stares at you for a heartbeat and then throws his head back and begins yelling,”Help! Help! Murder! Help!” 

Hrist’s eyes are closed and her hands are limp. Her right hand’s bloody fingertips are near her wound. She must have touched it. You bunch up cloth and push it against the wound, and hesitate. Should you wrap a bandage around her and that bunch? Or will half-lifting her harm her? 

“What—what hap—?” You glance up and see Lif, face as pale as paper, standing in the doorway.

Before you can answer, a bright but horrified voice behind you cries out, louder than the stabbed man’s calls, “Idunn’s pips!” Fandral’s olive-green cape billows as he drops to his knees beside you. “Let me bandage her. And him. And go fetch a healer.”

Fandral is a warrior as well as a rake; doubtless he is as good at bandaging stab wounds as he is at injuring reputations. You nod. Once he is pressing the bunch of fabric against Hrist’s side, you stand up, glance at Lif and urge her, “Help him,” and run down the road, hands wet with blood, toward the healer who lives around the corner.

You find the healer, who is making carrot stew, tell her that a woman’s side has been cut and a man’s calf has been stabbed, and then walk back slowly enough that a woman four-and-a-half millennia old can keep up with you, hearing the man with the knife in his leg shouting for help even though Fandral is still there and you are bringing a healer. The healer tells Fandral to carry them inside; he does, and you seize your harp, run up the stairs, leave your harp and find a sheet in your room, and speed down the stairs with the sheet.

You pump water into Hrist’s largest cauldron and put it over her fire, and every so often Fandral or Lif comes into the steamy kitchen for a pitcher or bowl of it. Lif looks as if she might faint; you volunteered to boil water because you reasoned that she might faint from seeing blood but almost definitely would faint from being overheated.  

Half an hour before sunset, a woman with a cart drives up to take her husband home. The knife is no longer in his calf. You hurry out of the kitchen, face flushed from steam, as you hear the Lord Fandral tell the woman that he’ll carry her husband to her cart. “Wait! Mistress, please let me ask your husband one question before he goes.”

She looks at you wordlessly, and her husband, lying on blankets on the foyer floor, opens his eyes.

“Did you see who stabbed you?” you ask. 

He shakes his head. “No; but they did not stab me. They threw the knife. I heard a gasp, and then a knife flew into my leg.” He looks away from you at his wife. “And yes, sweetheart, I know you always tell me to beware of my surroundings.” 

Fandral carries him to the cart, and his wife drives away with him.

“How does Hrist fare?” you ask Lif, who is looking down from the top of the stairs. She has been tending Hrist, who is in her own room. 

Lif rubs her temple. “She has almost stopped bleeding, and she’s awake...she says she didn’t see who wounded her.” She looks almost green.

“Go lie down, Lif—you look like you’re going to swoon. I’ll care for Hrist.” 

“You must go to the palace, though. I won’t swoon. I haven’t swooned since…last month?”

You shake your head. “I’ll ask Lord Fandral to bear a message; I believe Prince Loki won’t blame me for staying with Hrist.”

“He will not,” Fandral confirms as he returns into the foyer. “What is your message, fair maiden?”

You clear your throat. “My message is that Hrist was cut on her side and that Leif, a stranger, was stabbed in the calf; that neither of them will die; and that neither of them saw the dagger-wielder. And that I saw the man with the spyglass, at Inge’s funeral.”  You pause to take a breath. “I thank you for bearing it, my lord. And for aiding us.”

Fandral smiles. “I am more than glad!” He turns on his heel and strides out the door. 

Hrist murmurs prayers to Odin as she lies on top of her covers, her hand pressed against her bandaged wound. “I’m glad you’re awake, Hrist,” you say as you enter her room. Portraits of Odin hang on her walls, and also a portrait of Hrist’s late father, the Allfather’s own bard: art Lif painted, biting her lips, in weeks when she did not have funds to pay for her room. “Do you want water? Or something else to drink?” 

Hrist shakes her head, her hair wavy from being in a braided bun. “No; Lif gave me a horn of water.” Her eyes roll to see your face. “Is the man whose leg was wounded well?”

“Leif, yes; his wife took him home. He will only limp temporarily.” You sit down on the oaken chair beside Hrist’s bed. 

“Leif was walking in front of me...I knew not that somebody else was walking after me until I felt the cut, and then, as I fell, I heard the sound of a flying knife.” Hrist gestures as if she were throwing a knife at her wall, her wrinkled hand trembling. “And Leif fell in front of me. I heard him—the aggressor—running away, but I was too faint and hurt to turn and see him...or her….” Her shoulder twitches. “The Allfather’s worshippers are immortal.” She stares up at the nearest portrait of the Allfather, a painting in which he is riding Sleipnir and shouting, his eye and his mouth both round and incensed, begins murmuring again, and then falls asleep.

An hour later, horse hooves clop outside. You get to your feet and tiptoe to Hrist’s window, from which you can see the road. 

Nine Einherjar, of whom two are grasping the elbows of the orange-haired man with the spyglass, who looks like he is declaiming, troop down the blood-puddled road, following Prince Loki, who is riding a glossy brown horse and whose face and posture both express reined-in ire. The prince’s eyes rise to Hrist’s widow as you open its red curtains, and he raises his hand and beckons you to come outside. 

Chapter Text

Prince Loki greets you by name as you step over the dried blood that stains the street. “The Lord Heimdall believes this is the man who was spying on you. Is it he?” 

You look intently at the orange-haired man, who looks back at you as if he wants to interview you. He has the same figure as the man you saw at Inge’s funeral and on the roof, and is wearing the same cloak as the man at Inge’s funeral. One of the Einherji holds his spyglass. “Yes, my lord. It’s he.”  

The orange-haired man confirms that he wants to interview you by starting to do so, there on the bloody road beside the Einherjar and the prince. His blue eyes are wide-open, and he is shaking a little, more as if he possessed an excessive amount of energy than as if he were terrified. “You found the body? And you’re a professional bard? Are you--”

“You seem to have confounded your role with ours,” the prince interrupts, his voice deeper and much more caustic than it is when he converses with you. He looks at the Einherjar who have a hold of the prisoner. “You two, take him to the dungeons.” 

The two bow, and march away, the orange-haired man asking one of them, “Are there many murderers in the dungeons? Do you frequently….”

Prince Loki continues directing the Einherjar. “Two of you guard the front door. Two of you guard the back. One of you station yourself in the foyer; the last two, stay in the upstairs hallway. The guard will change every three hours.” His horse whinnies. 

“Yes, my lord,” they say in unison. Two stand on each side of the front door; the rest enter it. Their boots thump on the ash floor. 

Prince Loki looks down at you, the sunset afire behind him. “I desire your help in interrogating the prisoner.”

Obviously, he does need to be interrogated. He is at least a peeper and at most a serial murderer. But your shoulders tense. There are rumors that torture collars and muzzles are in the palace dungeons; that the walls of the cells are knotted of death-dealing magic; that Prince Thor gains confessions by gripping prisoners necks with his right hand, toward which Mjolnir is hurtling; that those Prince Loki interrogates are afraid of snakes for the rest of their lives. “I--” Your voice breaks off. “I wish to help, but--”

Prince Loki tilts his head. “You dare not leave Hrist alone?”

“No, my lord.” You fold your hands. “Lif will be with her, and--I think the same miscreant murdered Inge and cut her; I don’t think she murdered Inge.”

“Then why are you ambivalent?” He studies your face, stroking his horse’s mane. He is a dangerous magician, and a prince over whom nobody but the Allfather is in authority; it is reckless to reveal that you detest his (possibly) planned deeds. 

But he has never acted as if he considers you a thrall. You moisten your lips and tell the truth, tipping your head back to look up at him: “I don’t have the heart or the stomach to watch him be tortured.” 

“Ah.” The corner of Prince Loki’s mouth curves up, but his eyes do not smile. “I assure you, bard, I would not ask you to assist me in torturing a prisoner. ” He twists one of his reins around his fingers, absently but tensely. 

You feel yourself reddening. You shouldn’t have assumed or feared that; but the Asgardian dungeons are ill-reputed. And his answer is not a denial of torture, only of torture while you are present….  

You still are flushed by the time you have told Lif to watch over Hrist, thrown on the cloak Prince Loki gave you... conjured you...and returned to him. It is frightening to displease royalty; it is painful to fear that someone one likes might be cruel; it is wrenching to fear that one has offended someone kind. Not until you met Prince Loki had you ever had all three of these woes while interacting with one individual. 

Loki gives you a slight smile, his eyes going from your face to your cloak, and dismounts from his horse. “You’ll ride behind me.” Before you have an opinion about that, he effortlessly lifts you onto the pillion of his saddle and springs into the saddle again. He towers over you even though you both are sitting down. The tips of his black hair are trying to curl though it is plain from how combed and pomaded it is that that is the last thing he wants it to do. Not looking back at you, he asks wryly, “Perhaps you are unaware that it is not a crime to touch my royal person?” Understanding his implication, you wrap your arms around his ribs. Under his cold leather armor and coat he is very thin, so bony that you wonder if he eats enough. 

Loki clicks his tongue and his horse walks and then canters through the streets, past homes and workshops and vendors toward the golden undulations of the noble section of Asgard. “I learned to see memories after witnessing one interrogation too many,” he says, just loudly enough that you can hear him. He silently sighs. “Tell me what took place today.”

Glad that you did not offend him, even gladder that he is humane, you narrate from Inge’s funeral to his entrance. “I think the man with the spyglass, the prisoner, may be trying to kill all of the women in Hrist’s house,” you tentatively hypothesize. 

A muscle twitches in Loki’s back. “You must wonder why I did not send the Einherjar yesterday.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“I did,” he states. His voice hardens. “And their captain elected to lead his men to your house a day after I bade him. Possibly after spending a day seeing spiders on every floor he treads and every bench he sits upon and every table he eats from, he will deem those unoccupied twenty-four hours too dearly bought.” 

“That...seems probable,” you murmur, and decide not to ask why in the Nine Realms he decided to punish the captain with illusory spiders instead of with a reprimand, or a demotion.

When you reach the palace and descend to the dungeons, the orange-haired man is sitting on a chair in the middle of a cell as white a bright as a snowheap on a sunny day. He is staring up at the ceiling, but when Prince Loki (you following him) walks into the cell, he lowers his chin.

“At the very least, you have spied on two women in their bedchambers,” the prince tells him coldly, walking close enough to him to tower above him. “Your choice lies between my learning the answers to my questions and my learning not only those but also every deed of yours for the past fortnight. Will you comply? Or must I read your mind?” Green light glints inside Loki’s fist. 

“Read my mind,” the orange-haired man says without hesitation.

One of Loki’s brows rises. “You’ll have a headache.”

“I want to know what it is like to have my mind read.” The orange-haired man stares up at Loki expectantly. 

“In your own head be it,” Loki says dryly, flattens his right hand, and plants it on the prisoner’s orange hair and freckled forehead. The prisoner’s eyes roll upward and he goes limp. Loki stands like a statue, staring at nothing, eyes moving as if he were looking at a fair and trying to concurrently watch everyone at it. 

You shift your weight from one foot to another. Two Einherjar march past, talking about a coronation. Far away, somebody bellows in a language you do not know. 

Prince Loki raises his hand and folds his arms, and the orange-haired man blinks and then—grins. “Can I have paper, my lord?”

“After you serve a month for your voyeurism, you may patronize all the stationery merchants you please. You’ll be sentenced on Tyrsday.” Loki turns toward you. “Let’s depart.”

You follow him up the dungeon stairs again, into a golden corridor. “He is innocent?” you say.

“Aside from watching you, yes. He’s a chronicler with an immense amount of curiosity and a minuscule amount of wisdom—a journalist, to borrow a Midgardian term. He watched you because you found her body.” He clasps his hands behind his back. “Pardon my bringing you to the dungeon for nothing.” 

You almost laugh. “You couldn’t expect him to want his mind read, my lord. Is he going to chronicle that--is that why he wanted it read?”

“Obviously.” 

You follow the prince onto a golden veranda, the floor almost too smooth, the pillars glossy, the roof three stories above you. A raven glides through one of the tall spaces between pillars, caws, and flaps out of a space five or six pillars away. 

“He is not the murderer,” you say, just loud enough for the prince to hear. “And Fandral is not the murderer. And Hrist is not the murderer. Is there anyone else suspicious, my lord?”

Prince Loki walks to the edge of the veranda and tips his head up, contemplating the planets. “Why do you deem Hrist innocent?”

“She was nearly stabbed in the heart,” you say. However...many murderers are almost killed, or are killed, by avengers…. She killed Inge and then someone else tried to stab her, to avenge Inge!?

Loki turns toward you, unclasping his hands. In his right hand a dagger appears; he flicks its tip past the left side of his leather armor, almost scratching it; he hurls it toward a pillar; it smites the pillar at the height of a man’s calf and ricochets off.

Your hands rise to cover your mouth.

Chapter Text

You would not have been surprised if you had come back to the boarding house and Lif had been sitting with Hrist; you would not have been surprised if you had come back and Lif had been dead because of Hrist. But you are surprised when you climb the stairs, ask the Einherji in the hallway to excuse you, look into Hrist’s room and see that she is by herself, asleep, and then hear a man talking in Lif’s room. 

On tiptoe, you run down the hallway and shove Lif’s door open, heart thudding. Loki said he was only hypothesizing that Hrist is the murderer; the murderer could be the man in Lif’s room—

Lif and a young man you have never seen stare at you as her door bangs into her bed. They are kneeling on the floor, holding charcoal sticks, an enormous, sketched-on piece of paper under their knees. 

“Lif! Who is this?” And why did you leave Hrist alone? Though it may be good for your safety that you did. 

Lif smiles, with her eyes as well as her mouth. “He’s The Brush. A mural painter from Vanaheim. We met years ago. He’s come to collaborate with me--we’re sketching plans. Don’t fret; Hrist is feeling well and told me I need not bide with her. ”

The Brush nods. He is more or less Lif’s age; his black hair is waist-length, his lips look like he bites them, his eyes are fervent, and his tunic is covered in a hand-painted pattern. “I’ve rented the room between yours and Lif’s,” he says. “I’m pleased to meet you; Lif has been telling me that you’re friends. And that you’re a bard.”

“Did she tell you that Inge, a weaver, was murdered few days ago? And that a woman was cut and a man was stabbed in the leg today?” You step closer. The pattern painted on his tunic is lozenges surrounded by leaves and holding broken Gungnirs. You lean closer and whisper, “Inge lambasted the Allfather, and Prince Loki thinks she was murdered because of that. You shouldn’t stay here.” You look at Lif. “And neither should we. Can we speak?” 

The Brush listened politely while you talked. Now he commences sketching a raven. 

Lif sets her charcoal down, you take a leap over the paper, since it is so long it touches both the left wall and the right wall, and the two of you walk towards the back of the room, near the window. Whispering, you tell her that the orange-haired man did not commit murder and that Prince Loki hypothesizes that Hrist slew Inge. “He says that he cannot read her mind because he has no evidence, but he will be coming at dawn to question her. He would have come tonight, but the Allfather ordered him to audit the palace book-keeper. He says not to be alone with her, and to lock our doors, and put chairs against them.” Lif’s eyes are round, her eyebrows raised. “The Brush wouldn’t be safe here either.”

Lif shakes her head. “But we won’t be here tonight; we’re going to be painting our mural on the Bifrost, in front of the palace,” she whispers. “The Brush has invented a paint that will adhere to it.” She looks at you with concern. “But you should go somewhere else...my sister would let you stay in her home. Or my cousin Ger--”

“I’ll be careful.” Your song with the wolf is your most treasonous song; you doubt Hrist wants to kill you. And if she is innocent, she should not be left alone. 

Lif and The Brush leave, she hugging the scrolled sketch and asking you to please go stay with her sister, he carrying five buckets of paint at once. As well as making sure Hrist does not kill you, you must make sure Hrist does not follow and kill them. And you must make sure she is well, in case she is innocent. You rub your temples. 

Warily, you open Hrist’s door. She is mumbling a request  to the Allfather to strengthen her. You cough, quietly. “Hrist? Do you need anything?” 

“No.” 

You close her door, and walk down the hallway to the Einherji who are playing chess in front of Lif’s door. “Pardon me.” They look at you. You bend and whisper, “Prince Loki suspects the woman in that room—” you point at Hrist’s door, “of being the murderer. Please make sure she does not leave the house tonight.” 

One of them, a man in his three thousands with bleached hair, nods. “The Lord Loki told us all to listen to you,” he whispers. “We’ll tell the next shift.” 

Prince Loki deems you that reliable?! “Thank you,” you whisper. “And if she needs anything—she may be innocent—please do knock on my door.”

They nod, and as you walk to your room, they stride toward Hrist’s door. 

After locking your door, you go to bed. 

Hrist can’t follow Lif and The Brush, but what if the Lord Heimdall sees them? What if Prince Loki asks you where Lif is? What if The Brush is the murderer?

One or two hours after midnight, you fall asleep.

Loki’s hands are frigid as he takes yours. A green cloak with a fur collar so wide it almost hangs to his elbows is around his shoulders. “Where have you been that’s so cold, love?” you ask. “It’s only autumn.” 

Though this is a cold autumn day. Red leaves dot green grass and are caught on rose thorns; the rosebushes of the palace garden have flowers but are no longer budding. A frosty gust of wind inflates your skirt, and you shiver. 

Loki’s face is grave. “Don’t you recall? Lif painted me.” He releases your hands and unpins and pulls off his cloak; he wraps it around your shoulders, the fur stroking your neck and cheeks. “But you, you’ve never been bold enough to sing about me.” 

“I have—I’ve written dozens of ballads and a saga—”

Loki shakes his head, indignation and impatience and desolation flickering in his eyes. “You have never sung about me.” 

There is a breaking-glass sound, and then a pounding sound, pounding, and pounding, and pounding, and you wish you understood how you have never sung about your beloved, and there is a pounding sound—

Your neck is kinked.

 Someone is knocking on someone else’s door. 

The sun has almost risen. You spring out of bed, wrap a shawl around your nightdress-clad self, and look out into the hallway. One of the Einherjar, the one with bleached hair, is knocking on Hrist’s door. As you look out, he takes a deep breath and shouts through the door, “Madam? I know you are awake--what was just broken?” 

“Open her door,” the other Einherji says. “If the murderer….”

“Hush.” The first Einherji tries to open Hrist’s door, but it is locked. He steps back and then runs toward it and slams his armored self against it. It swings open and he vanishes into Hrist’s dark room.

“I know how to pick locks,” the other Einherji mutters.

“Madam, are you hurt? Your window is broken,” you hear the first Einjerji saying inside Hrist’s room.

And then her stiff voice: “I slammed it.”

She has certainly not been murdered. You wrap your shawl more tightly around yourself, blinking. You have accidentally slammed your window more than once, and it has not cracked. 

Oh . If she climbed out of the window, down the apple tree that is fruitful under it...and then if the window had blown closed while she was gone, and it had latched when it blew closed...windows in this house do latch when they blow closed….

You slam your door closed and dress faster than you have ever dressed, not combing your hair, and then dart past the Einherjar, down the stairs, out of the front door, around the corner of the house, and to the apple tree. Fog condenses on your face. 

More apples are in the grass under the tree than usually drop in one night, and two small branches are among them. You look up through the leaves and apples at the house wall, and your heart thumps. Two or three footlengths under the window, lit by the dawn, there is a red-brown print. 

You dart around the apple tree, squeeze between it and the wall, and look upward. The print is five prints: the prints of five bare toes, all blood-immersed.

You freeze, staring at them, imagining Hrist pulling bloody feet out of blood-soaked shoes. 

Towards the Bifrost you run.

Chapter Text

Fog stuffs the streets as if it were batting protecting the houses from bumping against each other and chipping. You run through it, the pavement hard under the archless soles of your slippers—you would have put on boots, if you had planned to run across half of Asgard—dodging walkers and riders. 

You diverge out of the way of a dark brown horse, without looking at the rider, but then you hear a familiar voice say your name and the dark horse's hooves slow to a stop behind you. You stop running and turn to see Prince Loki looking back over his shoulder at you, puzzled. “What has happened?”

You walk toward him, trying to speak clearly despite panting from running. “Hrist seems to have snuck out of her window and back in...and put a bloody footprint on the wall...I’m afraid she attacked Lif and her friend. They’re...they’re at the Bifrost.”

Prince Loki swings you up behind him on the horse. “Go!” he tells it, and it flies into a gallop through the fog, as fast as a racehorse's. “Why are they there?”

You cling to him. “They are….” You hesitate. Will he think they deserve to die? Will he blame you for letting them set off? “They are painting a picture on it.”

“On it? Of a view from it, or—” You almost fall off as the horse turns a corner. “Hold on!” You are holding on, but your arms are trembling with anxiety. Perhaps Prince Loki can feel them shuddering; he puts both his reins in his right hand and puts his left hand over yours. “There were two of them,” he says, “and merely a single, aged woman assaulting them. The blood on the wall could be Hrist’s.”

You manage to say, “Yes, my lord,” and he presses your hand.

The houses past which you gallop have golden accents; two minutes later, they are gold coated, reflective of the dawning sun. And then the Bifrost is visible. You lean sideways, trying to see around Loki, see if there are bodies on it, see if there is blood on it, and smother a cry. 

 Somebody is lying on the Bifrost, beside a large patch of colors that disrupt its parallel lines. 

Prince Loki’s back tenses, and his fingers tighten around your hand. “She may not be dead,” he murmurs, and knees his horse to gallop faster. 

On the Bifrost, the Brush lies beside his and Lif’s enormous painting, as if he were posing for the Allfather whom they painted in the Odinsleep on a pile of blue Jotuns, orange Fire Giants, black and white Dark Elves, and people who might be Vanir or Asgardians or Midgardians. In his hand is a brush with a broken handle and a tip clotted with drying blood. Runes of blood are brushed onto the Bifrost next to him: “NOT OUR FATHER.”

“The Brush,” Prince Loki recognizes as he walks towards him. He continues speaking as he looks up and down the Bifrost, presumably for Lif. “A death for which Hrist will not be punished.”

“What?” you ask. You cannot make your mind think of places where Lif could be. She is not on the Bifrost, and the Bifrost feels like it is undulating. 

You sit down hard, inches away from the paint, inches away from the runes. Prince Loki, who was scrutinizing a bloody footprint a yard or two away, looks back over his shoulder at the quiet thud. His eyes widen. “You are unwell.” He hurries toward you. 

“No, no, I’m fine—we must find Lif. Do you—do you think she fell in the water…..” You try to stand up, and see sparkling blackness and sit down again, closer to the middle of the Bifrost, facing the terminal. The painting and the blood and the body are behind you. 

Prince Loki touches your shoulder, bending over you. “I’ll consult Heimdall; he’ll see her. Stay here—don’t stand.” 

You nod, and put your head on your knees. Loki’s running, fading footsteps.The fumes of paint. The fetor of blood. The scent of saltwater. The fragrance of the thyme-scented soap you used last night, soap Lif gave you for your birthday. Your teeth chattering. 

The golden monument of a support that holds up the Bifrost, directly below you, shining under the diaphanous-looking bridge—and something that does not shine, something dark, the size of a person, adhering to it. Lif. 

Automatically you leap to your feet, but then you fall to your knees, feeling like everything is moving. But Loki is truly moving; he is almost to the terminal…. “My lord!” you call. He does not look back. “Prince Loki!” You cup your mouth with your hands. “LOKI!!” He stops short and turns. You point emphatically down at the bridge, take a deep breath, and shout as if you were bawling the penultimate verse of a battle ballad: “UNDERNEATH!!” 

The prince pivots and runs back, and then swerves toward the edge of the Bifrost, arms swinging upwards, palms meeting, and dives into the water. Under the bridge he swims, and then you hear him speaking: “Lif, can you hear me? Lif, release the support. I will help you climb up.”

A splash. You draw in your breath sharply. Lif is alive. And she is in the water...and she cannot swim. You kneel, pressing your palms against the Bifrost, and look over its clean-cut edge into the sea.

Prince Loki swims from under the Bifrost to where the support slopes farthest from it, Lif’s arm over his shoulders. He steers her to the support and boosts her onto the slope of it. “Climb; I shall follow you.”

Lif climbs, her eyes blank and overwhelmed, her hair plastered to her head. Her wet hands, paint-stained, slowly pull her up towards you.You reach out to her when she is almost within armsreach, and she clutches your hand; you help her up onto the bridge, tug her towards the center of it, and throw your arms around her. She buries her face on your shoulder and begins to sob.

Dripping, Prince Loki reaches the Bifrost and you look up at him, whispering, “Thank you!” as you pat Lif’s back and feel her seawater and her tears saturate your gown. 

Loki nods and then shakes water off his hair and off his arms, his movements impulsive enough that he reminds you of a cat that has been bathed against its will. He kneels beside The Brush’s body and scrutinizes it, and the puddle of blood beside him, and the runes. 

Lif is forcing herself to stop crying. She raises her head and moves so she is sitting beside you, clutching your wrist. “Prince Loki?” she says, her voice shaking. “Hrist killed him.” 

Loki looks up from the blood, his jaw clenched. “I repent of waiting for proof.”

Lif grips your wrist tighter. “He—The Brush—he pushed me off the bridge, after she stabbed him. So she couldn’t hurt me. I managed to climb onto the support. He was….” She buries her face in her free hand’s palm. “He was an outlaw. You must think she should have killed him,” she forces out.

“I must?” Prince Loki asks blandly, closing The Brush’s eyes. 

Lif’s hand slaps onto the Bifrost, and then she springs to her feet. “The Allfather thinks so! And when does any prince or noble of Asgard contravene him?!”

“Lif!” you exclaim, anxiety sparking in you. 

Loki looks up at her and the corner of his mouth mirthlessly quirks up. “Only last night at dinner, my brother informed him that letting the ravens molt feathers into the mutton broth—” 

“He is dead and you are jesting !” Lif shouts, grabs a bowl of red paint, and hurls it at Loki’s face—a pottery comet.

You forget to breathe. 

Prince Loki raises his hand and knocks the bowl away; it lands in front of Lif. One splatter of red paint spots the prince’s forehead. He rises and looks at you.“Take her anywhere save the boardinghouse. I shall cover up her involvement in this defacement, lest she be imprisoned for aiding and abetting an outlaw, and I will arrest Hrist and charge her with Inge’s murder.”

“She’s not herself, my lord,” you apologize.

“That’s the first lie you’ve ever told,” Lif tells you, and chokes on a sob. 

“I really can’t think of anything more characteristic of her than throwing paint at a prince,” Loki says dryly. “Judging by the half-dozen of her works I have viewed—” He stands up suddenly. “Their horses are on the Bifrost.” Looking at Lif, he adds, “My brother reacts better to tears than flying objects; I suggest you continue weeping and eschew hurling paint.” 

The horses come into view, a man in silver armor with a red cape riding foremost. “Why are they coming, my lord?” you ask, standing up and putting your arm around Lif’s shoulders. You have stopped feeling like you will swoon.

Loki sighs, turning to face the horses, his back to you. “I presume Lord Heimdall informed the Allfather of the Bifrost’s defacement.”

Prince Thor shouts “Halt!” and his white horse stops short, on the other side of The Brush’s body and of Loki. Mjolnir is in his hand “Loki! You’re already here!” He nods at The Brush’s body. “You’ve already slain the outlaw! Which of the women is his accomplice?”

Lif clenches her wet fists and half-runs to stand beside Loki, shouting up at Thor. “I am! I painted half the mural!” 

“Lif, no….” you whisper. 

Prince Loki clasps his hands behind his back. “Also arrest the boardinghouse keeper Hrist, brother. She killed the outlaw—”

“As our father commands, brother!” Prince Thor interrupts. Two Einherjar shackle Lif’s wrists and steer her toward a riderless horse.

“—intended to kill the artist Lif,” Loki continues, “stabbed an innocent citizen in the calf, lied to me, and, most germanely, murdered the tapestry weaver Inge.” 

Lif looks back at you and smiles, and you try to smile at her. Perhaps she can be pardoned? Should you have helped her escape? But you cannot swim, and there are two dozen Einherjar, and the God of Thunder….

Prince Thor frowns. “Fandral’s maiden Inge? I’ll capture her. Will you help?” 

Two Einherjar lay The Brush’s body on the other unridden horse. Loki shakes his head. “I have other business, brother. The Einherjar at the boardinghouse will verify her identity.”

Lif is petting her horse’s mane, and...oh no . You realize that what she is quietly saying to the Einherjar around her, who are looking at Thor instead of at her, is that they should be ashamed of themselves for serving a tyrant who deems painting worse than murder. Is she aiming to meet the axe?! You try to catch her eye, but she is looking up at a tall Einherjar and telling him that the Allfather is a “miscreant.” And then Thor and all of the Einherjar are turning around and galloping away towards the boarding house. 

You and Prince Loki and a treasonous painting of the Allfather and blood remain on the Bifrost. Loki turns to you. “Come. I’ll ask my mother to intercede for Lif—to argue that she was led astray, and in shock.” His tone is wry; he seems well aware that Lif would be rebellious whether she were led or in shock or not. 

“Thank you, Lord Loki,” you say dully, and follow him towards his horse, his wet footprints soaking through your slippers’ soles. It is magnanimous and unorthodox of him to intercede for Lif, and to have tried to help her escape before Prince Thor came, and to have dived into the water to help her. Lif is a rebel, technically a traitor.   

You wait until the horse is trotting towards the palace, its dark brown tail shooing teal flies, before asking tentatively, “I am grateful that you are helping Lif, my lord, but...why are you?”

“She has been punished enough,” he says. You feel him draw in his breath. ”And...she is dear to you.” 

You recall how he put his hand over yours, while riding to find Lif; and you crave that you could be as kind to him as he is to you—that you could be his friend, not solely his assistant, his bard, or his follower. “Thank you, my lord,” you whisper. 

He begins quietly reprimanding the horse for trying to stop trotting and put its chestnut head inside a noble’s scullery window. 

Hrist will be captured, and she will not hurt Lif or you. Lif will be pardoned. You will finish writing songs for Prince Thor’s coronation....

...Thor the thunderer, captor of artists….

You grimace and resist your impulse to lay your head on Prince Loki’s shoulder and cry. Mentally, you begin roughing out descriptions and explanations to persuade the Allmother.

Chapter Text

All of the marble pillars have knot-carved insertions. A pool with roses floating on it is in the center of one of the chambers--oh. It has a washbasin on the rim; it is a bathtub ? Green velvet benches echo the pitted trees on the balcony, which is almost as large as your room. You would belong in Frigga’s chambers if you were holding your harp and singing; but you left your harp at home and are standing in a queen’s bath chamber with wet, dirty slippers and uncombed hair, about to try to persuade her to pardon someone who was painting a pejorative picture of her husband. 

“Mother has been asking me to bring you to the palace,” Prince Loki says with a slight smile. A rose petal is lying on the stone rim of the pool instead of floating on the clear water; he flicks it in, making it become a tiny pink ship. 

“To sing, my lord?” you ask, half-knowing that that is not why.

“To make your acquaintance,” he says evenly, and then, watching the pink petal shipwreck against a red one, “You were less careful to use my title, on the Bifrost.”

You take a step back, awkwardly flushing. You were urgently shouting to get his attention; is he so formal that he objects to that? “I ask your pardon, Lord Loki.”

“I grant it, conditionally.” He looks at you with a lopsided smile and serious eyes. “Save in the Allfather’s presence, do not use it.”

“What should I call you, my l--” You bite your tongue. 

His eyes twinkle. “My name isn't exactly hard to say. Two syllables, quite phonetic--”

You smother an unexpected laugh, and somebody else does not smother hers—a soft, affectionate chuckle. You and Loki turn to see the Allmother walking into the chamber, warmly serene. “Loki, you’re saturated. Go change your raiment!”

“I shall return,” Loki says, and leaves through the door through which the Allmother came. 

She walks toward you and touches your arm. “You both look as if you’ve dealt with a cataclysm. Have you had anything to eat this morning?”

“No, my lady, but I am—” 

“Come.” You follow her as she walks toward the massive balcony, lifting her ankle-length skirt, the color of robin eggs, as she climbs its steps. There is a small oaken table with three chairs and with plums and bread and skyr on it; she sits on one of the chairs and motions for you to sit across from her. You sit down, wishing Prince—wishing Loki would come back. It is much less awkward to eat with royalty if one is well acquainted with them, and, more importantly, he would bring up the matter of Lif. 

“Eat, please.” She picks up a bloomy purple plum.

You pick one up too. “Thank you, my lady.” It is cool and smooth. You take a deep breath. “Allmother, we—I—my friend is in trouble. Please intercede for her.” 

The queen tilts her head. “Tell me the story from the beginning.”

You narrate the defacement of the Bifrost, Hrist’s killing of The Brush, Lif’s clutching the the support, Loki’s saving of her, Prince Thor’s arrival. “Lif is under great strain, and she has never defaced monarchial property before,” you conclude softly. “I do not think she would have tried to paint the Bifrost, if The Brush had not misled her. Please, would you ask the Allfather to pardon her? Or to reduce her sentence?” 

“I second the request, Mother.” You turn your head and see Loki climbing the steps to the balcony, a long vest of dark brown leather over his green velvet tunic. His hair is as well-combed  if he had never dived into the sea. “The artist Lif is young, scarcely of age, and ere last night had committed no graver wrongs than painting appealing images of Frost Giants--a bizarre occupation, but not truly perilous to Asgard.” 

The queen gestures for him to sit down on the third and last chair, between her and you; he does. You wonder which member of the royal family usually sits where you are sitting, Thor or Odin; and why does the fourth member not sit here? “I will certainly intercede for her,” the Allmother says with a determined smile. “And you should add your voice to mine, Loki: your father will be proud that you have delivered Asgard from our only serial murderer.”    

“Will he?” Loki asks, tilting his head. He picks up a plum, tosses it startlingly high, and catches it. “She seems to be rather a devotee of his.” 

“Loki,” the Allmother admonishes, touching his arm. “Your father is a just king.”

He puts his hand over hers, giving her a concerningly sad smile. “I would never doubt your word.”

You hope that the Allfather will deem the Allmother’s arguments for clemency toward Lif more credible than Loki deems her declaration of the Allfather’s justness.

Chapter Text

The nine days after Hrist’s capture and before her and Lif’s trials, which will be held back to back, feel like nine months. Your greatest hope this week is that Lif will not be imprisoned, and that Hrist will be, for long enough that she cannot murder more artists. You hope this constantly, but not singly. Another hope accompanies it like soft harp chords accompany a steady, well-known saga: the hope that the trial and Thor’s coronation will not be the last two times you see Loki. 

If he asked for your aid in writing invitations again, let alone anything interesting, you would be overjoyed. You laugh at yourself and enlighten yourself that princes do not befriend bards and try to forget that you dreamed you called him your love. But why did he ask you to say his name, rather than his title, if he does not wish to pass time with you again? 

It is arduous to glorify Mjolnir and thunder while missing inky hands and quiet sarcasm, to lionize the pride and circumstance of a prince whom you have only met once and who you saw leap to a conclusion and rejoice that his brother had seemingly killed a man who was outlawed due to paint while wishing that a prince hidden in a hooded cloak would reappear at your door to rectify wrongs. 

But you finish your songs for Prince Thor’s coronation feast, and you clean your room, and you dust Lif’s for her. You write out what you will say if you testify against Hrist, and what you will say if you testify for Lif. You clean the staircase and the hallways.

You write a song in memory of The Brush, and one night, after midnight, wrapped in the cloak Loki conjured, you whisper-sing it beside his grave in Asgard’s dumping ground. At least four other mounds here look like mounds; what outlaws moulder in them? 

The night before Lif’s and Hrist’s trials, you cannot sleep. You read your speeches thirty times, dress before dawn, and get hiccups when you eat breakfast. But you find your way to the throneroom without becoming lost--though you almost wish you had become lost, when you realize that (other than Einherjar) the only other person in the room is the Allfather, sitting on his throne. Sitting on his golden throne, in golden armor, wearing a golden eyepatch, holding a golden spear, in a golden room, in a golden palace, half an hour after dawn. It is as if he wants to reassure Hrist that her idol is a god. 

“You are early. Witnesses need not arrive until six,” he states. 

“Yes, my lord.” You curtsy. “I was avoiding being late.”

“Diligent.” He nods approvingly. “You may remain where you are.” You fold your hands and try to decide whether you should look attentively at the Allfather, or submissively down at the golden floor. Before you have chosen, he asks, “Have you been rehearsing for my son’s coronation?”

“Yes, my lord. I have written new songs, and rehearsed them; I hope you will not be disappointed in your choice of bard.” You wish you had not come early.

“You sing tunefully, and have ensured the capture of the blasphemous artist Lif,” he says, sickeningly graciously.

Internally screaming, you curtsy. “Thank you, my lord.” Telling him that you did not want to capture Lif would anger him, which would make him less merciful towards her. 

Queen Frigga swishes through a door to the Allfather’s left, a blue velvet cloak over her blue silk gown. You clasp your hands more loosely as she smiles at you and you curtsy to her. “Remember your promise, my king,” she tells Odin, barely loud enough for you to hear. 

He looks at her with a sigh. “If your heart were to bleed more, my queen, it would exsanguinate.” He kisses her hand. “You have my word.”

You hear familiar footsteps behind you as Loki enters the throneroom, and turn to see him. He looks as if he is ready to lead an army or to sit on a throne; his green cape billows behind him, his golden armor curves over his chest and collars his neck, his golden helmet’s horns arch like the scaffolding of a dome. Nowhere and no time could be worse for absorbing that you have fallen in love with a prince , but his attire and his grave, regal expression force that fact upon your notice. You curtsy, your home-dyed skirt brushing against the golden floor.

Loki gives you a slight but genuine smile, stands beside you, and bows in the direction of the Allfather and Allmother.

“Why are you standing there?” the Allfather asks blandly.

Loki gestures explanatorily. “As one of the chief witnesses….” 

The doors at the oppose end of the throneroom slam open and seven Einherjar, encompassing Hrist, walk in. Hrist’s hands are manacled, but she looks excited, far too excited, gazing at Odin like astrologers gaze at the stars. 

“Hail Odin!” she vociferates. “I, Hrist, the least of your Valkyries--” 

Odin shoots to his feet and gongs Gungnir down. “It is not your time to speak.” 

Hrist’s mouth closes. She walks silently until the Einherjar cease moving, a couple yards in front of the throne’s staircase; then, she flings herself facedown. “Hail to the Allfather!” 

“Raise her,” Odin orders. He sits down. “Hrist Mimirsdottir, you are accused of the murder of the weaver Inge, of assaulting the peasant Leif, of perjury, and of the attempted murder of the artist Lif. Loki. Give your testimony.” 

“As you will, Father,” Loki says formally. He opens a sheet of parchment. “Yesterday, Hrist wrote this confession:

‘I, Hrist Mimirsdottir, confess to Odin Allfather that I killed Inge, the tapestry weaver, because her tapestries denigrated you. I injured myself so that I would not be captured. I threw my knife at Leif to prevent him from observing me injuring myself. I killed The Brush because he was an outlaw and was defacing the Bifrost by painting a blasphemous image of you upon it. I attempted to kill Lif, the artist, because she was aiding and abetting The Brush. 

In the name of the Allfather,

Hrist Mimirsdottir, Valkyrie of Odin.’”

Loki folds the parchment. “Hrist Mimirsdottir has made a true confession. She was the only person without an alibi when Inge was slain, and I found blood-stained men’s shoes and women’s hosen in the latrine of a tavern around the corner from her boarding house--which vouchsafe how she left large, bloody footprints. And Lif substantiates that Hrist slew The Brush and intended to slay her.”

“Did you write that confession?” the Allfather asks Hrist.

“I did, Allfather.”

“Is it veracious?”

“Yes, Mover of Constellations.”

Loki clears his throat; the Allfather looks at you. “You are a witness.”

You pull your shoulders back. “Yes, my lord. The morning after The Brush was slain, I saw a bloody footprint on the wall of the boardinghouse beneath Hrist’s window; that indicated that somebody with blood on their feet hand climbed through her window, and there is no evidence that anybody except Hrist climbed through it.” You remember to breathe. “Prince Loki and Hrist’s confession have already said everything else I could say.” 

The Allfather nods, and stands up. “Hrist Mimirsdottir, I judge you guilty of murdering the apostate Inge and of assaulting the Asgardian Leif. But I judge you innocent of murdering The Brush and of attempting to murder the artist Lif.” Your eyes widen. “The Brush was an outlaw; Lif was conniving with him. You will be incarcerated for nine years. Einherjar, take her to the dungeons.”

Hrist falls prostrate. “Thanks be to the Teacher of Gods!”

Chapter Text

Lif walks in—glaring daggers at the Allfather, looking as if she is about to open her bitten lips and expel an inculpating rant about monarchy or conquering or justice. She glances at you and awkwardly waves with a manacled hand; she looks at Loki and gives him—a wry smile. Has he been conversing with her?! Has he persuaded her not to declaim rebelliously at Odin? You keep your expression calm. 

“Heimdall cannot leave the realms unsupervised to attend your hearing,” the Allfather says. His tone is frigid. “He claims he saw you engaged in painting a indecorous image of me on the surface of the Bifrost.” He looks at Loki and you. “Did you see anything of relevance?” 

“We arrived after Hrist assaulted them; I know not whether it was The Brush, Lif, or both who had painted the image,” Loki states.

“Nor do I,” you agree, looking at Lif and hoping that she will not proudly confess. 

Odin stares at Lif. “Did you paint the image?”

“Yes,” Lif says, and closes her mouth and looks at the floor. You restrain a sigh of relief that she did not rant. 

“The sentence for defacing the Bifrost is five centuries in prison.The sentence for creating an obscene image of me is six centuries in prison.” The Allmother, lines between her arched brows, touches the back of the Allfather’s hand. He nods. “My queen has asked me to be clement towards you, because you are young, and were misled by a hardened outlaw.” Lif’s hands clench into fists. “Rather than eleven centuries in prison, I sentence you to one hundred and ten years—” You cover your mouth with your hand “—without access to paper or to paint.” Lif winces. The Allfather rises and thuds down Gungnir. “Take her to the dungeons.” 

You have no coherent thoughts as she walks out of the throneroom. She waves at you again; you wave—waving feels like a preposterously merry movement—you think of running to her, hugging her—the throneroom doors thud closed. 

Without paint. Can Lif be Lif for a hundred and ten years without paint? 

The Allfather treads deliberately down the steps, down the room, and out of the doors.

The Allmother touches your arm. “We are grateful for your aid in capturing Hrist,” she says, her voice soft.

You swallow hard and look into her eyes. “Thank you, my lady. With all my heart.” 

She nods, comprehending that you are thanking her for pleading for Lif, not for her gratitude. “No one could have done more,” she says, of you or of herself or of both. She smiles unhappily at Loki and exits the throneroom, her hands clasped in front of her. 

“I will accompany you home. If I may,” Loki says after a few seconds of silence.

You’ll keep Lif’s room clean. She was planning to paint nine paintings of Jotuns; you aren’t sure if she has finished five or six of them. They’ll need to be put somewhere where they won’t fade. “Thank you,” you say dully. Should you get rid of her oil paints, or will they stay fresh for a century? 

Perhaps you can send her clothes. The Allfather didn’t say she couldn’t have clothes. You mutely follow Loki out of the palace. “If I put some of her clothes in a bag, would you give them to her?” you ask in the gardens. The sky is covered in rainclouds. “Have someone give them to her,” you reword.

“I’ll convey them to her. Package her paint and parchment, too,” he adds quietly. 

You stop short and look up at him, nonplussed. “The Allfather ordered—” A lump fills your throat. 

Loki gives you a wry smile. “I assure you, he will not descend into the dungeons and peer into her cell.”

A drop of rain hits your face. “I do not know how to express my gratitude.”  It is a stilted sentence, but it is honest. “For this, for asking the Allmother—for trying—” Trying to let Lif be free, instead of immured. But she is immured as you speak; she is incarcerated, solitarily. Your throat tightens too much to talk. 

“For winding a scrap of dulling mercy around justice’s axe?” Loki looks up at the rainclouds and raises his brows. “It’s about to deluge. Come.” 

You nod and follow him out of the gardens, into the streets. Raindrops tap the shoulders of your gown and become heavier. They are landing on Loki’s shoulders, running down his impermeable armor as fast as they would run down a windowpane, dripping from the tips of his helmet’s horns. People stare at him from their windows. 

Loki’s helmet vanishes, its place usurped by green light that shines all around him as he halts. He half turns around and holds out his hand, palm up; you put your hand in it without spoken questions, though with unspoken ones. 

Loki’s fingers close around your hand. A hooded cloak appears on him, and the green light drifts to you, like a flame goes from one piece of paper to another. The cloak that wraps you is hooded, like Loki’s, and like the one he conjured for you earlier; but unlike the one he conjured for you earlier, it is green. You swallow the lump in your throat. “Thank you.”

Loki’s hood hides his expression. He opens his hand but does not move it, and you realize that he is silently asking you whether you wish to leave your hand in his as you walk, or withdraw it. After an unjust trial, judged by his father; in the rain; on a house-edged street--an odd time and place to decide whether you will remain nothing more to each other than a prince and a bard who aided him in ending a fanatic’s murders…. You curve your fingers around Loki’s and his hand, protective and bony, envelops yours.

Part of your mind, as you walk together through the windy rain, wonders if he would hold your hand if he knew you will never write a favorable song about his father again; more of your mind is guilt-stricken that you are free and befriended while Lif is imprisoned alone; even more of your mind is trying to think of how to rightly pack Lif’s paints and brushes. Did she tell you that brushes need to be wrapped in cloth, or that they must never be wrapped in cloth?

You wrap them in cloth, after you and Loki reach the boarding house, and pack them and Lif’s canvas, paper, and paints in the bottom of her trunk, putting her painting smock on top of them to protect her raiment from the nearly-dry paint on the exteriors of many of the paint vessels. 

As you begin to roll Lif’s clothes and set them in the trunk, you look up at Loki, who is standing in the hallway outside of the chipped, fingerprinted wooden frame of her door. He is looking at something over your shoulder; you turn around and see that he is pondering a sketch of a smiling Jotun stonemason that Lif pasted onto her wall, his head tilted. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of packing these earlier,” you say, looking at the clothes again. All of them have paint stains. “Will you need a cart to move this?” The trunk isn’t too heavy for him to carry, but it would be unwieldy to bear through Asgard in a rainstorm. 

Loki blinks and then shakes his head, his eyes leaving the sketch and fixing on you. “No, I’ll place it in a pocket dimension.” His tone implies that it is as easy for him to place the trunk in a pocket dimension as it is for you to place a blue gown with red paint stains in the trunk. 

You add everything else that fits after Lif’s clothes are in--her comb, her tapestry blanket she bought from Inge, her small wooden dog named Emperor of Yggdrasil. Her book on Vanir art. Her book on pigments. 

After you have shut and latched the trunk, Loki bends and raises it as if he were about to set it on an invisible table. He upends it, and upends it, and upends it again. Viridescent light encompasses it. It disappears. “I’ll give it to her myself,” he tells you, pulling his hood up over his head again. Rain is pouring down the window. “Have you any messages?”

“Please tell her that I hope when she is released, she’ll bide with me as long as she wishes--whether I’m still in this boarding house, or have moved.” You blink back tears. “And that I’m sorry I couldn’t...no, just tell her I miss her. And that I hope she’ll lodge with me.” 

“I will give her your words.” He presses his lips together for a moment, sympathy in his eyes. “Do you still intend to sing at my brother’s coronation feast?” 

You restrain a frown at the thought of singing about Thor Odinson, and sit down tiredly on the edge of Lif’s blanketed mattress. “Yes.” You rub your temple. “And I’ll be singing on the Moonday evening before it at The Sign of the Double Ravens, and on the Laugarday after at Lord Tyr’s anniversary feast. I sing for a living.” But I will not sing about the Allfather again...not appreciatively . 

Loki nods. “Then I shall hear and see you at The Sign of the Double Ravens.” He hesitates. “Farewell. I have duties to which I must attend.” 

He strides away down the hallway and down the stairs, leaving you alone in the boarding house.

Chapter Text

Fifteen or thirty tipsy people with thick boots are stomping out the rhythm of your ballads and disagreeing about which syllables the beats are on. The Sign of the Double Ravens is one of the loudest in the realm. But since coins for food and fuel and warmer boots are pinging into your bowl, you won’t complain that rhythmless feet are stamping on the floor. 

“Sing it again!” a massive man shouts when you finish a ballad about the Norns. He reminds you of a rock troll, if a rock troll was handsome and had hair. 

“Sing it again!” a woman reiterates. She looks like you thought Valkyries looked. That is another mystery: why did Hrist say she was a Valkyrie? The Valkyries are dead. “But make another verse with a fourth Norn. There’s more than the past, the present, and the future.”

But there isn’t a fourth Norn, and you can’t invent one and mentally write poetry about her in three minutes. “I’ll sing it again!” you exclaim ebulliently. “And all of you sing with me, in the chorus!” 

A man in a dark, hooded cloak paces through the tavern doors during the second verse, the verse about the Norn of the present. He stands by a window, his arms folded, watching you. You suppress a smile and keep singing about the Norns, and then sing an ode about an Alfish warrior princess and a song about wooing in pumpkin patches versus wooing in apple orchards versus wooing in ash groves. 

The woman who asked for a fourth Norn departs. The man who looks like a handsome rock troll exits. All other people vacate the tavern but the man in the hooded cloak and the barkeep. The barkeep is sweeping but is not sweeping under tables and chairs. 

You put your coins and your bowl in your pouch, put on your green cape, and cross the tavern to the hooded man, whose boots and hands attest that he is Loki. “Let’s eat somewhere cleaner,” you say in a low voice. “I’ll pay.” 

Loki nods. “As you wish.”

You thank the barkeep for letting you sing, he tells you it would be better if you sang at the Sign of the Double Ravens next Tyrsday instead of next Moonday, and you lead the way outside into a chilly, windy twilight. Loki pushes his hood back and his dark hair wisps in the wind. “Lif wished me to tell you that she is well, that she thanks you for her possessions, and that she will be more than glad to lodge with you again, though she hopes you will be more rebellious a hundred and ten years from now.” He keeps a perfectly straight face.

Why in the nine realms, Lif, would you give a prince that message?!   You blush from the awkwardness of it, and say mutedly, “Thank you.” At least she is uncrushed. 

Loki raises an eyebrow. “Will you be more rebellious a century from now?”

You ponder the question. Against Odin, who will not be king then? Against Thor, who will be king? Against Asgard? “Against what?” you counter-query. 

“A question neither of us can answer.” Loki gives you a wry half-smile.“Where are we bound?”

“To Sighilda and Harald’s eating-house.” You gesture at the street leading right. “She’s a fisherwoman and he’s a baker.” 

“Ah. What familiar names. Serial tax evaders,” Loki says dryly. “Please, lead onward.” 

You take the right-hand street, your boots tapping the stones, the wind blowing your cape behind you. You don’t know what to say, other than apologizing for taking him to an eating-house that belongs to serial tax evaders, which would be superfluous since you didn’t know Sighilda and Harald were serial tax evaders. 

“Do you often sing in taverns?” Loki asks, catching up with you and walking beside you. “And were those who listened to you tonight a common number for your audience?”  

“Yes,” you say, “to both questions.” You duck under a pink linen gown that is clipped onto a clothesline. 

“Would you sing there if you had a patron?” He looks at you questioningly, and then ducks under a towel on another clothesline. 

You accidentally step on a fallen clothespin. “Yes. Unless they forbade me from singing at them as a condition of being their protegee. I earn many coins at taverns.” Loki holds a tablecloth out of your way. “Thank you. And I only sing at the ones that are safe for women.”

Loki pauses, brows drawing together. “Are there taverns in this realm that are not?” he inquires. 

You turn and face him, holding your cloak closed. “All the women of my rank know that women are presumed to be harlots at The Sign of the Watcher’s Eye, and at the Alehouse of Erik the Bull…you don’t want to know.” 

Head tilted, Loki interrogates, “Have these dens been reported to the Allfather?” 

You blink. “Would the Allfather close them?” 

“If they are as you say, I will extirpate them on his behalf.” One of his hands clenches, over-tightly. 

Loki is like the love ballads that implicitly are songs about conquered realms and still more implicitly songs about the folk of those realms revolting: charming, kindly--melancholy, enraged. Also like those ballads: bemusing.

“It is well known that they are unwholesome,” you say quietly. You begin walking again, because you are hungry and Sighilda and Harald close their eating-house in three quarters of an hour. Loki matches your pace. “But it is not known that the Allfather or his sons are willing to eliminate such places,” you add carefully. 

“I knew not that there are such places.” I. Does he surmise that the Allfather or Thor or both are aware of these ill-reputed alehouses? 

You look up as a flock of crows yell across the lavender sky. So Loki ends houses of ill repute; solves crimes; organizes public events; copes with commoners’ family crises; protects people from escaped wildlife….

“How much of the government of Asgard do you do ?” you ask spontaneously as you reach the street on which Sighilda and Harald’s house is. 

“If my brother and father leave an obligation undone....” Loki’s tone is dry. “Father presides over trials and diplomatic occasions; Thor defends Asgard and captures criminals, if they have been identified.” 

“We are not at war,” you think aloud, “and we have few criminals.”

Mirthlessly, Loki laughs. “‘Aye, there’s the rub,’” he says. It sounds like a quote. As an apple-roaster’s brazier brightens his face, you look sideways at him; the dark circles under his eyes imply that he made time to watch you and walk with you by waking up too early. Barely above his breath, he says “My brother--” and then terminates his sentence, lines between his brows. “Let’s speak of something merrier than the throne.”  

“Salmon,” you say. You point at Sighilda and Harald’s house, leaning sideways, bordered by purple asters. “And Sighilda, who claims to have twenty-seven grandchildren. She adopts everyone. She’s adopted me. You’ll have a new grandmother as well as a full stomach.”

Loki smiles but does not laugh. 

Harald opens the door as you and Loki approach it, you pushing back your hood. “A pretty lady!” He is bald and lean and has twinkly blue eyes; he cannot stop teasing people. “And a…?” He looks up at hooded Loki with a questioning smile. Loki pushes back his hood. Harald unhesitatingly gives a dramatic bow and then rubs his head. “Are you lost, my lord?”

“I doubt it, since I have a loyal guide,” Loki says with a smile.

Before Harald can say anything giddier, Sighilda treads out of the kitchen. Her red hair, turning white, is cut like an overturned bowl, and she looks overheated. She happily says your name--and then she looks up at Loki. She looks back and forth from him to you, and then points at the door to the kitchen. “Come pick out your bread.” Her voice is loud and beneficent. “Not you, my lord.”

You give a bemused blink, and then look apologetically at Loki. He nods. 

Sighilda’s kitchen is clean. It has approximately as many object in it as Yggdrasil has leaves; all of them are also clean. But she does not have counter space. 

She slams the note-, art-, and list-covered door closed. “I know you’re a grown-up lass--”

Oh no. “Sighilda, Prince Loki and--”

“Prince Thor broke Jarnsaxa’s heart!” She rips a tray of broiled salmon out of a stone oven and thuds it down onto stacked recipes. “Lord Fandral has a lass in every realm!” Her voice is very loud.

You wince at the memory of Inge. “Probably not Muspelheim,” you say wryly. 

Severing salmon, Sighilda ignores your statement. “And my aunt, after she met Lord Tyr, she thought he would marry her, but…. Do you want plain or herbed bread?”

“Herbed, please.” She mightily slices the bread. “Sighilda, Prince Loki has never treated--”

Harold opens the door. “All right in there, Wife?” 

“But WHAT” ---Sighilda pays no attention to Harold and slams salmon onto bread and bread onto salmon--“are his INTENTIONS?”  

“Not dishonorable,” Loki says quietly. You and Sighilda both turn towards the door and see him standing behind Harold, hands clasped behind him, expression inscrutable. 

Sighilda puts her hands on her hips and pulls her shoulders back. “What ARE they? My lord.” 

Loki’s expression does not change. “They will be whatever she wishes.” His eyes go from her righteously suspicious face to her right hand, on her hip and grasping the bread knife. His brows rise. “Was that whetted one century ago, or two?”

He takes a long step towards her, picks the knife from her hand, and scrutinizes it. “If you’ll permit me….” A small whetstone appears in his hand, and he begins expertly rubbing the edge of the blade. Sighilda looks at him like she looks at runes that are too small to read. He lightly touches the sharp edge of the knife with his forefinger, and gives it back to her, handle first. 

Sighilda pokes it into a basket of turnips and then hands you the wooden trencher of salmon and bread. She grips your hand when you pay her the coins it costs. “If you’re going to play with fire, put it in a hearth first,” she says. “I can say that. I’m your grandmother.”

She is not your grandmother, and you wish she would have warned you discreetly and not warned Loki at all, but you appreciate that she means well. You lightly kiss her cheek. “I’ll remember that.”

As you and Loki leave (the tables are outside), you hear Harald tell Sighilda, “Wife, they ordered fish, not treason….”

“Treason?”

“Well, he’s a prince, and you were holding a knife.”

“For the BREAD!”  

Loki closes the door behind you, and follows you toward the table and benches that are under an oak tree a few yards away. An owl hoots in the tree. “I’m sorry about that,” you say, looking back over your shoulder at him.

The corner of Loki’s mouth quirks up. “Who am I to object to a grandmother defending her granddaughter’s honor?” He takes the trencher from you and carries it to the table. “I should recommend Sighilda’s eating-house to Fandral.”

You sit down on one of the benches and cross your ankles. “He might be stabbed with a bread knife, if you do,” you say mildly.  

He smirks, setting the trencher down. “Whatever gave you that suspicion?” Across from you he sits, one hand on the table, and draws in his breath, looking down for a moment. The owl hoots again.

Loki looks you in the face. “What do you wish my intentions to be?”  

Chapter Text

You draw in your breath. It’s not a hard question to answer—well, not a very hard one—but your answers are idealistic, impractical.

You wish his intentions were what they would be if he were a commoner: to woo you, wed you, live in a small but pleasant house with you, aid you in your projects and accept your aid in his, parent children with you, grow old with you. 

He is a prince.

You wish that his intentions were what they would be if you were a noble: to woo you, wed you, take you to the palace where you could help him with his over-copious duties and gather stories for your songs. 

You are a rankless bard.

You do not want to be a passing fancy, an unwed mother, a kept woman, or any combination thereof.

You sigh, and Loki presses his lips together and closes his eyes for a moment. “Forget I asked.” 

Shaking your head, you reach across the table and take his hand. His pulse throbs in his palm and in his fingers, both calloused despite the popular wisdom that nobles are free of rough skin. “I am willing to be your friend, and I am willing to be wooed for a wife. More than willing. For either.” Your voice quavers. “But I do not take lovers.” 

A planet comes out from behind clouds. Loki tilts his head, closing his fingers around yours. “Neither do I.” His gaze is direct but anxious. 

You steady your voice. “What can your intentions be, Loki?” 

“Father believes the heir to the throne should choose any worthy bride he pleases. Younger sons are more suitable for political marriages.... I’ve been betrothed six times.” His tone is wry. “But—” His grip tightens, though it is still gentle. “Father will be abdicating. And the next king will not betroth me against my will.”

Loki does not exactly sound like he is talking about something that will happen in three days, or like he is talking about his brother, but you are too overwhelmed and hopeful and nervous to ponder that. “My father was a farrier,” you disclose. “My mother was a gardener. Don’t you wish to wed someone who knows courtly manners, knows diplomacy?”

He nods, but not emphatically. “Far more ardently I desire to wed a woman who is clever enough to solve murders, compassionate enough to pity a prince drowning in invitations.” He lifts your hand and presses his lips to your knuckles. “A companion whose love I will prize, not a tool for diplomatic maneuvers or a link to some arrogant magnate, bristling with agendas, who fathered her.” His voice could not be more serious; his gaze could not be more affectionate. 

“I won’t sing about the Allfather again,” you whisper, because a son of Odin might object to that.

His brows rise slightly. “He’s not exactly inspiring of lyricism.” 

You look him in the eyes. “He is not an upright king.” 

“Has there ever been one?” The question hangs in the air. Loki almost lets go of your hand. “If your newfound disapproval of him extends to me, then—”

“No!” you interpose. “No, but I do not want you to be surprised that I do not...worship your father.”

“I think Hrist has done enough worshiping of him for all of Asgard,” Loki says dryly. 

You nod and take in a breath. “Then—will you come with me to the market, after we eat? I must purchase fabric for a shirt. Green fabric.” 

Loki blinks and then a smile curves across his face. He leans forward. “Must I wait to kiss you until after I’ve put you on my lap?”

Surprised both by his knowing that peasant tradition and by the flirtatiousness of his question, you smother a giggle with your free hand. “I won’t say ‘must,’” you demurely reply.

Loki laughs quietly and brushes his thumb across your harp-string callused fingertips. “From harping?” he guesses.

You touch the calluses on his fingers and palm. “Yes. Yours are from…” 

“Dagger handles, and spear shafts. And pens.”

“But this is your left hand.” You look at him inquiringly. “Are you left-handed?”

“No.” He smiles, enclosing your hand in his again. “Ambidextrous.” 

You’ve never heard before that he is ambidextrous or that he is a spear-warrior. “There is much we do not know about each other.” 

Loki pushes the trencher of cooling food toward you. “Tell me of your parents.” 

DIVIDER

It isn’t fair that you are walking past tables covered in apples and pears and booths presenting blue-glazed pottery in the planet-light and starlight, Loki (cloaked and hooded) holding your hand and telling you about a Midgardian art, “theatre,”—he is dramatically more talkative than you had thought, but that is the opposite of a problem, since you are interested in foreign art and interested in Loki’s avocations—looking for green linen, but that Inge is dead and Lif is in the Allfather’s dungeons. 

“—is worthy of praise, Edmund of Gloucester’s fall has the pathos Iago’s lacks.” Loki pauses and takes a step ahead of you, turning to see your expression. “Is something troubling you--too much discussion of tragedies?”  

You shake your head. “Too much remembering tragedies. It isn’t fair that Inge was murdered and that Lif is in prison.” 

“No.” He is silent as you walk past a table covered in dented, warmly orange pumpkins. The man and woman behind it debate whether canvas or leather shoes are superior.  “Do not lose hope for Lif,” Loki says quietly. “Father eschews commutation, but his heir may not.” 

You brighten. “Is Thor more merciful?” 

Loki gently hushes you. “More malleable,” he says too quietly for anyone but you to hear. “Look.” He gestures ahead of you. 

On top of a table under a canopy, rolls of fabric are stacked in a peak. More rolls are in an open trunk beside it, on the edge of which a curly-haired girl in a pink gown, eighteen or nineteen years of age, is sitting and knitting. She smiles at you as you walk under the canopy. “My father stepped out, but I can sell you cloth. What are you making?” She sets the knitting on top of the rolls of fabric and stands up. “A new gown?”  

You return her smile. “A shirt. Do you have green linen?” You bend to see the fabrics at the bottom of the peak.

She giggles and points at Loki, who is standing beside the canopy. “Is it for him? He’s very mysterious-looking.” You blush, and she grins. “And he’s very tall!”  

“It might be,” you murmur. 

She heaves a bolt of fir-green linen out of the trunk. “Green like this? Or do you want lighter green?” 

The fabric is almost the same shade as the cloak Loki conjured for you. You lightly touch it; it is tightly woven and lightweight. “Green like this. I’ll buy two and a half ells of it.”

She smiles and unrolls the fabric on a second, empty table that is behind the other, and cuts it with large steel sheers. “That will be five coins. I’ll give you three ells for the same price. Father doesn’t believe in halves.”

“Thank you!” You set the coins on the table as she folds the linen three times lengthwise and then tightly rolls it up and ties a piece of yarn around it.

Leaving the canopy with the roll of linen tucked under your arm, you see an Einherji talking to Loki. “—Allfather is indisposed, the Allmother is at his side, and the Lord Thor is at a feast.”

“I will come; you may return.” Loki’s tone is emotionless. The Einherji bows and strides away, his golden armor shining in the planet-light. Loki turns toward you. “If you’ll excuse me,” he says, very quietly, “it seems the Elvish ambassadors have come ahead of schedule.” 

You are disappointed that he cannot walk you home, but you smile. “I’ll see you on Thorsday.” Perhaps at the banquet you can talk; royals sometimes do talk to bards at banquets. “But—how did the Einjerji know you are here?” 

“Heimdall, I presume.” Loki catches hold of your hand and draws you a yard or so into an alley; you hear the fabric-seller giggle. “Until Thorsday, my dear.” He bends and kisses your hand.

You would like to hug him, but you are too diffident. “I’ll be sewing,” you say, smiling at him. He returns your smile and walks away, disappearing around a potato vender’s booth. You tuck the green linen more safely under your arm and hurry towards the boarding house, wanting to cut out the shirt before you sleep. 

Chapter Text

Evidently the curses on the pumpkin harvest were soundly prevented or undone: an army of pumpkins besieges every greenery arrangement on the white-clothed tables in the palace’s banquet hall. They and the plates are in a competition for being round and golden. Servants put bread on the tables, cheese, apples, boar, butter, grapes, and more.

You stay out of their way, your back against one of the golden walls, your bagged harp in your hands. There is a roundness at the bottom of its back: Loki’s shirt, finished and neatly rolled up so it won’t wrinkle. Just in case you’re able to talk to him today. But he’ll probably be too busy. 

At the moment you think it, he walks through the door at the other end of the hall in golden armor, his helmet in his hand. He glances from table to table to table, and then gives the nearby servants a slight smile. “Well and promptly done. But remove the filberts from the Elvish table; they do not agree with the Lord Ambassador.”

They bow, and a woman about your age picks up the filberts and sets them on another table as Loki walks towards the end of the room in which you are standing, his smile softening as he sees you. He nods toward the steps and columns that lead to a terrace outside; he climbs them and walks out of your view, moss-green cape billowing behind him.

You follow him onto a part of the terrace that is out of sight from the banquet hall, yellow apple leaves falling on it. Loki is scratching his palm as you catch up with him. “Aren’t you going to watch the ceremony?” He takes a step closer to you. 

You shake your head. “No. I’d like to, but it would be hard to be out of the throneroom in time to be in the banquet hall before a crowd of people were in it, blocking the part with the best resonance.”

“It’s not often the throne is passed in Asgard.” His eyes are feverishly bright, mirroring your face like his helmet mirrors the yellowing apple leaves; he is as full of nervous animation as an Elvish lament is of grace notes, his pulse pounding in his throat. But his expression is calm and cheerful. “Surely you wish to see the crown prince’s big day.”

Why in the nine realms would you want to see it? The only time you met Thor, he was arresting Lif. “It’s not often I get the chance to sing in the palace. I don’t want to start after the feast has already started. And I’m presently seeing the only person at the coronation I truly want to see.” You smile up at him as you say it, trying not to look concerned at his unspoken overexcitement. One’s brother isn’t coronated every day. Maybe Loki is simply energized by the extraordinariness of the juncture. 

Loki returns your smile. “In ten minutes I must accompany Mother to the steps of Hlidskjalf. Shall I visit you tomorrow evening? ”

“I’ll be home.” And that will be a good time to give him his shirt. “If—if you have time to come. I know you have many duties.”

He tilts his head, perusing your expression. “I will find time. Unless you would rather I be a rarer visitor?” He sounds serious--not disgruntled, but serious.

You blink. “Loki—I was concerned that you would weary yourself to make time to visit me. Not...hinting that I didn’t want to see you often….” Your voice trails off. What sort of peculiar mood is he in? A falling yellow leaf flitters off his shoulder. 

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. It’s…” He lightly caresses your cheek, his hand gentle and cool, dissociative from the jittery expectancy in his eyes. “A singular day.” 

Impulsively, you slip your hand into your bag, past your harp, and pull out the neat roll of shirt. You hold it out to him with both hands, saying with an unsteady smile, “I’ll make it more singular.” 

Loki looks down at the shirt almost as if he hadn’t actually expected you to sew one and touches it with one fingertip, like one might touch the soft-feathered back of a fledgeling. “I accept,” he affirms, and then it is between his hands, touching neither of them, whirling in green light, and lost to view. “Another dimension in the cosmos--just to preserve it.” The corner of his mouth quirks up, and then he looks in the direction of the throne room. So many people are in it now that you can hear them all talking at the same time. Loki sighs. “I must go. Until tomorrow, my dear!”

Before you can answer, he vanishes back into the banquet hall, cloak flowing behind him. You look after him with a smile, almost changing your mind about missing the coronation. You’d like to watch him there. But...well, somebody might notice you gazing at him. 

He made a new dimension for his shirt.

You pick up the yellowest apple leaf from the terrace and slide it into your pocket for a memento, and try to look undelighted as you walk back into the banquet hall. Cross-legged, golden wall behind you, golden floor under, you sit down. This room would be much more beautiful if it were decorated with tapestries or paintings.

Inge wouldn’t have wanted and Lif wouldn’t want to bedeck these halls. Lif is probably painting at this moment….

It isn’t fair that you’ve fallen in requited love and are singing at a coronation feast but she’s interned. She must be lonely...she spent most of her time paining, but she talked to you every day. 

But perhaps Loki can persuade his brother to parole her. 

Would Loki be irked by Lif’s imprisonment if he were not fond of her friend?

You sigh and decide to focus on remembering your songs. Silently, you recite the words of them, one song after another.

A maid, possibly sixteen years old, stealthily enters the banquet hall, grabs a cluster of grapes, and slips it into her pocket. Then she notices you. “Oh!” She presses her hand over her mouth and hurries toward you. “I didn’t know you were here. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

You shake your head. “I won’t.” 

She beams and then squats beside you, hugging her knees. “Were you silently singing? Are you a bard? I always wanted to be a bard.” 

“Yes, I’m a bard.” You smile at her. “You should become one, if you want to be one; you can start singing in the evening without leaving your position as a maid.” 

She shakes her head emphatically. “I have a sense of rhythm, but I can’t carry a tune--and I can’t tell when I’m not carrying a tune! And I do like working here...and there’s a new Einherji who’s my age, and he’s very handsome….” She bends toward you, keeping her balance, and whispers in your ear, “I steal cheese for him.”

“That seems unwise,” you gently whisper.

She shakes her head again. “The cooks care not.” Without asking if she may, she touches the frame of your harp.

You let her, though you will stop her if she seems to be going to touch the strings, since that could put them out of tune. “What is the royal family like to servants?” you ask curiously.

She shrugs. “About which one are you asking? The Allfather is cross but generous. The Allmother’s maids say she is kind, and she never shouts. Prince Thor is handsome and smashes cups. And then there’s Prince Loki; he’s the best one to ask if you need help with something legal, or if you saw a crime, but if you laugh at him--” She shudders. “Snakes and spiders. Well, illusions of snakes and spiders.” She sits down beside you. “It’s chancy, because when the Lord Volstagg or Prince Thor jest about him, they’re cross if you don’t laugh, and he’s cross if you do . But he’s never cast illusions at me. The older maids say he doesn’t at children. I’m not a child, though!” 

“It would be kinder not to laugh at him,” you state, trying to keep your expression pleasant.

She looks at you as if you were trying to play your harp with your elbows, but before she speaks, the voices in the throneroom abruptly become far more elevated than they were. The girl springs to her feet. “The coronation must be over. Must go!” She runs through the hall and out the door at the opposite end.

You stand up, smooth your skirt, and hold your harp. You wouldn’t have expected a coronation to be that brief….

A boy who is about six races into the banquet hall, screaming as if a bilgesnipe were chasing him. You hurry toward him. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” 

“The Jotuns are going to freeze us!!!” he screams, grabbing your skirt. “They’ve invaded and they’re going to freeze us and kill us! Like Grandfather!” 

You are at a loss for words. “Shh--I don’t think--” You awkwardly pat his blond head, wondering what in the nine realms made him think there are Jotuns are going to attack

A blonde woman runs into the hall and scoops the boy up. “I’m sorry,” she pants. Before you can ask her why her son is scared witless, she runs out onto the terrace and into the distance, carrying him. 

“Kill the blue varlets!” a man bellows from the direction of the throneroom.

Your heart jumps into your throat. Jotuns must really have invaded, or at least people think they have. You step back, standing beside the doorways to the terrace in case you need to flee. You ought to go home, but possibly the feast will be held--and you want to know what is occurring. 

More screams, of fear, not pain. 

More ferocious shouts. 

After you have been standing beside the terrace for half an hour, the Einherji who gave you directions in the garden glowers into the hall. He recognizes you. “You should go home, bard. Nobody will feast today.” 

“Did Jotuns invade?” you ask, bagging your harp.

“Yes.”

You draw in your breath. “Did anybody die?” 

“Two of my fellow Einherjar.” He visibly swallows. 

“I’m sorry. May they live forever in Valhalla.” 

He rubs his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Make a song about them.”

The autumn air smells like winter as you carry your harp home.

Chapter Text

The day after the Jotuns invaded, Asgard is generating rumors as if everyone had silently agreed to plot a tragedy together. The Allfather is dead and the princes are locked in the palace mourning. Prince Thor, Prince Loki, the Warriors Three, and Lady Sif fell in battle in Jotunheim. Prince Loki poisoned the Allfather and Prince Thor and became king. The Allfather exiled Prince Thor and made Prince Loki his heir. The Allfather fell into the Odinsleep and Prince Thor exiled Prince Loki. 

If Loki does not visit you this evening, then you will go to the palace early tomorrow morning and talk to maids and Einherjar until you are certain what has taken place.

Five hours to midnight. You rend first drafts of finished songs.

Four hours to midnight. You make yourself a hot cup of mint-infused water. 

Three hours to midnight. You accidentally walk into the wall while pacing. 

Two hours to midnight. Pebbles dash against your window. You peer through it and see someone standing under it, pale face tipped up toward you. Relief rushes through you as copiously as the cold air flows into your room when you proceed to open your window. Loki is not dead, or exiled, or locked in the palace mourning; he is safe, and here, and wanting to pass time with you. “May I come in?” Loki asks just loudly enough for you to hear him. 

“Of course, I’ll go open the door.”

He tilts his head and examines your window as if he were philosophizing about the significance of casements. “Step aside.” With a puzzled blink, you do. One quiet thud outside, that sounds as if it were on the side of the building, and then Loki’s hands appear on your window sill. Your eyes go wide as his face and body elevate past them, almost as if he were ascending towards the sky. He swings his legs over the sill, and without even a moment of stillness for catching his balance, turns and closes your window.

“That has splinters!” you exclaim, because it does—you seem to get a splinter from the window sill at least once a week in warm weather, and you would never try to put your weight on it. “Here, let me check.” 

He lets you take his hands, but he shakes his head. “You seem unaware, my dear, that I’ve fought in a hundred and forty battles.” 

You run your fingertips over his palms and the undersides of his fingers. His hands are cold from the autumn night. “I know. I’m a bard, after all. But I don’t think part of being a valiant warrior is ‘getting splinters in your hands and not removing them.’” There are no splinters, but both of his palms have fingernail marks; he must have walked from the palace to your boardinghouse with his hands clenched. You release his hands and slip your arms around him. “I was worried about you, Loki. There were rumors you were dead—rumors you were exiled—rumors you’d become the king! I knew not all of them were true….” You laugh unsteadily.

Loki pulls you close, bending his head to brush his cheek against your hair. He is tense and bony, clad in chilled leather, but you nestle close to him, letting your head rest against his shoulder. He draws in his breath. “But one of them—is.”

Which—Oh. Oh . You look up at him, startled though not dismayed. “You’re king of Asgard,” you say softly. You almost pull away—it seems so inappropriate to be hugging the king (the Allfather ?)—but before you do you realize that would be nonsensical and might hurt Loki’s feelings. His face is serene like an actor’s face is serene who has not slept enough and who ate too fast but who is deftly playing a composed character. “How did this come to pass?” 

“ That is the question.” Loki’s eyes scan your room, pausing on your one wooden chair and on your bed; he releases you and sits on the rug far more gracefully than most people could do that, crossing his legs. You settle beside him, slightly embarrassed that you do not have a bench or two chairs and more than slightly appreciative that he understood you would be embarrassed to sit on your bed with him. “Thor invaded Jotunheim,” he begins tightly, twisting a red tassel of your rug’s fringe. He’s wearing the shirt you made him; it is almost invisible under his multiple pieces of leather armor, but when he turns his arm, you see its greeness between the straps of his bracer.  “Hence, we’re at war with them.” He sighs. “Father has fallen into the Odinsleep. And I am king.”

You take in his words. “What will you do?” you ask softly.

Loki turns his head to look you in the eyes, as fervent and solemn as the fire in a funeral ship. “I will save Asgard and show Father that he has one son who understands every facet of rule .” He visibly swallows, faint lines between his brows.

Does he want to become the Allfather’s heir? But you decide not to ask. He is king and there is a war—and his father is unnaturally asleep and his brother is exiled. He doesn’t need to be asked questions about the farther future. “Can I help you at all?” you ask tentatively, doubting that there is any help he needs that you’re able to give. You’re just a bard. 

He lets go of the tassel, which he has twisted so many times that it looks like a tiny rope. “Lif—who is well (albeit contumacious), and to whom I’ll bear a letter if you wish to write one—told me her paintings of Jotuns are based on descriptions The Brush gave her, after he visited their realm. I would see all of them.” 

Lif has asked you, many months ago, to show her art to anyone who asks to see it when she is out of the house, but you hesitate. She doesn’t like wars. Would she want Loki to use her paintings to prepare for one? But then, how could domestic scenes of Jotuns help him battle them? Lif said once that she wished the Allfather could see her paintings…. “I’ll bring them,” you say, standing up. “But why do you want to see them? They’re just domestic scenes—they don’t show their fortifications or armor, or anything like that.”

Loki’s gaze flickers away from yours. “I consider all knowledge worth gaining.” He scratches his nail-dented palm, his posture unnaturally straight. 

When you return with the five Jotun paintings the whereabouts of which you know, he has not moved a muscle except those in his scratching, accelerating fingers. Something is wrong that he did not tell you about….

You sit beside him again, closer, and hand him the stack of canvases. He thanks you and studies them, looking inscrutably at each of them for three or four minutes. A man carving a stone chair; two children playing tug of war with a long strip of leather; a young woman and a young man riding a Jotun Beast, her arms around his waist; a man showing a boy how to stand on his hands; a mother holding a baby and tickling its chubby blue feet. Loki’s fingertip hovers above her hand, and then he decisively sets the canvases down on the floor beside him. “Romanticization bordering on the farcical,” he spits out.

You shake your head. “Maybe the Brush didn’t tell Lif the truth, but she doesn’t intentionally soften things. She says it's wrong.”

“I’ve been to Jotunheim. The monsters I saw there are nothing like the beings in these images.” He gestures scathingly at the stack. “Tell me, do you think these pictures can be true?”  

You pause and think. “They could be,” you say hesitantly. “Why couldn’t they be?”

He scoffs, almost rolling his eyes. “You wouldn’t be frightened if you met a Jotun? If a Jotun warrior was in your room?” 

You look at him quizzically. “Of course I’d be frightened if a stranger was in my room! And frightened if I met an enemy warrior from any realm. But I don’t….” You reach across him and pick up the canvas of the mother and child. You haven’t thought about it very much, but if Lif painted this based on a first-person account…. “It’s not like they’re ferocious animals.” You set the canvas on the others and turn toward Loki, looking up at him. “Is something wrong? Other than the war and the Allfather and Prince Thor being exiled?” 

Loki almost laughs. “Do those not explain my ill-ease?” He looks at you for a moment and his expression softens. “I’m sorry, my dear. You did nothing to deserve derision.” You move closer to him and lean against his shoulder. He hesitates and then puts his arms around you again, one hand lightly stroking your back.

The wind gusts again and again outside, sounding like the wind before a thunderstorm. Loki sighs. “I must return to the palace—I’ll be rising early.” He helps you to your feet and kisses your hand. “Sleep well, my bard.” 

You gently touch his cheek. “You too.” And eat, and I don’t know how you plan to fend off the Jotuns but please, please don’t be hurt…. “When will we see each other again?” 

The corner of Loki’s mouth curves up. “When I have won.”

Chapter Text

The twilight after, the windows of Lord Tyr’s banquet hall shatter inward with a sound like every breakable in Asgard had been thrown down. Shards hail onto the floor, fly across the hall, embed in bread, scratch skin, glittering in brazier-light. And then they lie quietly where they fell or flew, and two strings of your harp are still vibrating.

Two or three people shouted when the windows imploded, but now nobody is making a louder sound than hard breathing. Everyone stares at the window frames as if somebody will walk up outside them and apologize.

Tyr stands up, a burly, long-bearded man with golden-gray hair brushed back from his forehead. “All of you who are warriors, follow me to the palace. Our aid may be needed. All others, remain or go home, as you will. Pardon my departure.” He turns to his wife. “I will return, my heart.”

He, almost all the men in the hall, and three of four of the women in it, stride out into the explosion-harboring night.

You slip your harp into your bag, put it under your arm, and leave in their wake. You’ve already been paid for the night, the feast is over, and whatever the blast was—you want to know. At worst, people might need someone who can bind wounds and fetch healers. At best, there may be some remarkable but nonlethal explosion about which you can write a song.

People are shouting and looking out of windows, coming out of houses, frightened, excited, curious, grumpy about being woken up, grumpy about needing to replace windows. A small stone gets into one of your boots. A raven caws above you; another somewhere towards the Bifrost, caws again. You aren’t sure from what direction the explosion came, but you think it came from the direction of the Bifrost or the Palace. Lif is in the dungeons so unless the palace exploded both above and below ground, she wouldn’t have ben hurt. But Loki—Loki could have been….

Tyr and his warriors stop short. You squint through the twilight and see the two golden, perpendicular-ended horns of the Lord Heimdall’s helmet. He is talking to the Lord Tyr, half-audibly.

“Prince Loki...the Bifrost...no need for warriors...the Lord Thor will not want to see anyone..home...tell the Allfather of your readiness….”

“As you say. Lord Heimdall.” Lord Tyr sounds flabbergasted. He turns around. “We are unneeded. All who wish, return to the feast!” 

Everyone turns, most of them walking back, passing you, some of them turning and goes down side streets. Half of them look as if they had just seen a ghost. 

You stand where you are, beside a hawking gear shop, holding onto your harp. Immobile.  What has happened what has happened what has happened—

“Bard.” You look up and realize that Lord Heimdall has walked within speaking distance. Handsome and golden-eyed, he looks far more exhausted than one would expect such a mighty lord to be. Or, maybe, exactly as drained as one would expect a lord who can see the cosmos to be. 

“Yes, my lord Heimdall?” Your stomach twists anxiously. 

“I know of your bond with Loki,” he says, quite gently. “Since I see all.” He sighs. “Prepare yourself for ill tidings, maiden.”

You swallow hard. “Has he been hurt?” you ask, your voice higher than usual.

“Thor cleft the Bifrost; Loki fell.”

You stumble against the wall of the hawking shop, heart in your throat. “He—is he dead?” Heimdall bows his head. Your harp falls from your arms, the first time you have ever dropped it. Fell. Dead. When I have won . “Why?” you breathe. 

Heimdall hesitates. “It is better not to know too much, maiden. None can verify that more than I.” 

“I want to know.” You push your palm against the shop’s stone wall, a rough granite stone against the heel of your hand, a smooth quartz one against your fingers. “Please, Lord Heimdall.”

“Be it so. Loki was destroying Jotunheim with the Bifrost.” 

Your thoughts are chaos. “ Why ?” you say again.   

Heimdall shakes his head. “How would I know, maiden? All I can give you is this fact, and these words. He learned that he was begotten by King Laufey of Jotunheim; and his last words were these: ‘I could have done it, Father. For you, for all of us.’” Pity in his golden eyes, he turns and walks away, vanishing into the twilight. 

You thud on your knees on the cobblestones and clasp your harp against your chest, staring at a leaf that is falling into the road. 

I will save Asgard and show Father that he has one son who understands every facet of rule .

I could have done it, Father. For you, for all of us.

When I have won….

An image fills your mind: the Allfather’s pile of corpses, that Lif painted, that The Brush died painting. Einherjar raked together the bodies for it; Hrist piled The Brush onto it, and Inge. And Loki—Loki, who saved Lif from the aftermath of Hrist’s attack, who protected you from Odin—Loki has mounded multitudes of Jotuns on it. 

Loki has become part of it. 

He learned that he was begotten by King Laufey of Jotunheim.

...Loki, staring at Lif’s paintings of Jotuns, asking you if you thought they could be true, asking you if you would be frightened if a Jotun were in your room...

I’ve been to Jotunheim. The monsters I saw there….

Back against the hawking shop, arms around your harp, you plummet into wrenching sobs.

Chapter Text

A Week After the Sacking of Asgard

You open your door after hearing light, fast knocks and see—Lif! Bright-eyed and grinning, though pale, she flings her arms around you. “I’m back!” 

“What—how— how are you here ?!” You hug her so tightly you almost pick her up. 

Lif squeezes you and lets go. “Odin has released fifteen or twenty prisoners. He says it's in honor of Frigga and Loki, but I think it’s because the dungeons are being mended. Can you help me carry my paintings up, please? They’re in a cart; there are fifty-six of them.”

You laugh, eyes widening. “Of course! But would you object—”

“Oh!” Lif interrupts. “Before I forget. I was in the cell across from Loki’s, three months ago (we don’t always stay in the same cell through our captivity)—and let me tell you, his being in sight and in hearing was an ordeal! Pacing and staring at nothing and conjuring up illusions, and after nightfall, more pacing or he’d scream in his sleep—but yes, I was in the cell across from his, and he gave me a message for you.” She stops to breathe, and you try not to think. “He said, ‘Tell her to forget we met.’” 

You look away from her, blinking away tears, not so much because of Loki’s message as because of his nightmares and because he is dead again... take your place in the halls of Valhalla … “Let’s carry in your paintings.”

Lif pats your arm and walks toward the stairs. Oh, right—”Lif, do you mind staying in Hrist’s empty room for a few days?”

Lif turns back toward you, forehead inquisitively lined. “No; why?”

You lean toward her. “Because somebody is staying in yours,” you say under your breath. “An outlawed saga-writer, disguised as a man since Heimdall might look into this house. Sighilda—did you know Sighilda is a smuggler?—Sighilda is going to take her to Alfheim the day after tomorrow.”