A Tale of Two Lokis, Chapter 10
Title: A Tale of Two Lokis
Authors: Khilari and Persephone_Kore
Summary: Thor and Loki were not the first of Odin's loved ones to bear those names. After the events of the movie, Loki is planning his next moves when he discovers a frost giant imprisoned in a volcano, who proves to be both the uncle he was named for and Laufey's first child. Soon Loki has a new mentor, Asgard is shaking off isolationist tendencies, Jotunheim is receiving foreign aid, and Earth is suddenly and vividly reacquainted with the existence of aliens....
Chapter 10
'You want to leave for another planet again?' Coulson asked skeptically, eyeing Jane and the two Asgardians with her. 'I suppose I should be glad you mentioned it in advance this time.'
'Safety training,' Jane said, 'for the extradimensional work. Tony and I managed to create a miniature Einstein-Rosen bridge, but it turns out I ca--mmf!'
Thor had swept her into his arms and kissed her. Most people did not think this was an appropriate form of congratulations to someone who was in mid-sentence with a government official, but Jane was having a hard time complaining about it. 'That is a great accomplishment,' he said, putting her down with a warm smile.
Sigyn cleared her throat, sounding amused. 'So it is.'
'Anyway,' Jane said, trying to recover her train of thought, 'in the process, I slipped into extradimensional space myself. And before you get any ideas about applications, research or travel or anything else, this is a really good way to get completely lost if I don't learn to control it. And I wouldn't necessarily have a chance to warn you first.'
'Which I can teach her,' Sigyn said. The beginnings of worry on Thor's face cleared at once. 'It will probably also be interesting for her to be present while we repair the Bifrost itself, which I originally helped to design and build.'
SHIELD agreed. Actually, once convinced, there was some discussion of whether Stark should be sent with them too, but as he had a multitude of other projects and was not actually in any notable danger of drifting into other dimensions by mistake at this point, they decided against it.
Freya sent a message home that she was leaving Midgard for Jotunheim and they should send a new ambassador, which prompted Darcy to ask just what Freya's relationship was with Vanaheim's government. (Part of the answer, apparently, was "Trusted." Jane missed most of the rest of it in the process of preparing to leave her experiments and explaining her latest discoveries to Erik.)
In Asgard, and after Sigyn had spoken with Odin, she took Jane aside into an airy, warm-toned room lit by the afternoon sun. 'I have to tell you,' Sigyn said, 'Midgard would actually be a safer place for you to have this problem, but on balance, I think supervision is more important.'
Jane swallowed. 'I'd prefer to stop having the problem, really. I felt much safer once I ran into you.'
'That's understandable.' Sigyn paced the sides of the room, touching the walls. 'I can't be with you constantly, but I may be able to teach you enough magic this evening to avoid accidents. After we retrieve the pieces of the Bifrost, the scavengers won't be so much of a problem. And if necessary, I can create a temporary binding to prevent you from leaving the dimensions you're in.'
'I'm still having trouble believing I'm going to learn magic,' Jane said with a nervous laugh.
Sigyn turned back to her, looking baffled. 'I'm not sure what else you think we'd do. The binding would be something of a nuisance for both of us. Such things are easier to establish on locations than on people, and either one would interfere considerably with both your travel and your research. I don't think you want that to be permanent.'
'That's not--' Jane shook her head. 'It's not that I wanted you to do everything. I'd much rather learn to control where I go, or don't go, myself. It's just a really strange thought. An adjustment. I'm not used to thinking of magic as real.'
'I would call that the really strange thought.' Sigyn gave her a long, appraising look, then gestured to a chair.
The chair looked uncompromisingly rigid and blocky. Jane sat in it anyway and found it wasn't actually rock-hard, but did poke oddly at her back and left her feet dangling several inches in the air. This did not make it that unusual, as furniture went. What did was that after about three seconds, it adjusted -- her feet hit the floor, and the subtle curve of the backrest suddenly offered excellent lumbar support. She resisted the urge to twist around and eye it.
Sigyn took the facing chair herself, which didn’t require nearly as much adjustment. She pulled it close enough that Jane had to move her knees aside a little, and wrapped strong fingers around Jane's wrists. 'I will not lose you. Are you comfortable?'
'Surprisingly so,' Jane said, looking up at her and trying to swallow another inappropriate giggle. 'I wasn't expecting your furniture to accommodate short people this way. Did you do that or is it built in?'
Sigyn grinned. 'Built in, but it's part of why I picked the room. I got rather tired of Jotun-sized furniture over the past weeks and thought you might appreciate it. Now, what I want you to do is think about extradimensional space. Try to become aware of it, but don't go there.'
'All right.' Jane wasn't sure how well this was going to go. She did know that sitting absolutely still was harder than it sounded. Still, she trusted Sigyn, she needed to learn, and she had to start somewhere, so she shut her eyes and thought about extradimensional space. The star-shot darkness of being in it, and the equations and abstractions and geometry and--
She could feel the shift, a sudden sense of unfolding, of awareness of more directions all around her. She jumped a bit, involuntarily, and Sigyn's hands tightened. 'Will is action,' Sigyn said in a low voice. 'Choose to be still. You can breathe--' There was a hint of amusement in her voice as Jane realised she'd been holding her breath and gasped. 'You can open your eyes, look around, blink, even talk to me. Moving in other dimensions is largely a matter of the mind; it's not something the ordinary movements of your body are going to cause.'
Jane opened her eyes. There was a hint of darkness shot through with something that might not be quite starlight, at the edges of her vision, and despite what Sigyn had just said she found herself half afraid to turn her head. 'I can't decide if that's reassuring or not.'
'It just is.' Sigyn smiled faintly. 'You really didn't believe magic existed? I know Midgard at least used to have it -- one of Heimdall's teachers was from there.'
'What did she teach?'
'Far-seeing. Scrying. He had one from each of the nine realms -- the more accessible ones first, of course. Now he can observe nearly anywhere he wants.'
Jane paused, a memory itching at her mind from the reading she'd done after Thor disappeared. Or maybe it was something Erik had said, and that was why she couldn't pin down a reference. 'Do those nine teachers by any chance explain why we've got a story about him having nine mothers?'
'That’s the origin, yes. Although if you're wondering why your poets described him as pale with gold teeth, I never figured that one out.' Sigyn looked thoughtful. 'You have a concept of magic. What is it, exactly, that you didn't believe in?'
'Well, it's--' Jane paused. Thought about that for a minute. 'Harder to define than I thought. I guess... something that doesn't operate within the laws of nature. Except sometimes it just winds up being used to mean people exerting control over the universe in ways we don't understand yet. That's the attitude behind one of our authors who said sufficiently advanced science would be indistinguishable from magic. And Thor said--' She hesitated, partly because the thought distracted her from extradimensional space and brought back an entirely different star-filled darkness, with the cool of the desert night and a near-stranger telling her unbelievable things. 'Thor said magic and science were one and the same, for you.'
Sigyn chuckled. 'I'm afraid Thor isn't exactly an expert on either subject. Or rather, he's very good at weather magic, but in a different way from what you're going to learn. I wouldn't have said what he did--' She looked thoughtful. 'But given what you've just told me, I suppose it did make the basic point that we don't consider them contradictory. What do you say science is?'
That was easier. 'It's a way of thinking, of learning about the world by systematic observation and measurement and testing hypotheses, and the body of knowledge we've gotten that way. It's about believing nature is comprehensible and worth trying to comprehend, and going at it with an open mind, and revising our assumptions when they don't match the evidence.' She paused. 'Sometimes we're not as good at that last part as we'd hope.'
'It can be difficult,' said Sigyn, 'but very valuable.' She looked pensive, and Jane wondered if that had to do with revising assumptions very quickly after spending a mind-boggling length of time trapped in a misunderstanding. 'We have a similar concept of science, anyhow, which is a start. But you're going to have to let go of defining magic as something you don't understand, let alone that doesn't exist.'
'I'm working on that,' Jane said with a wry grin. 'I'm convinced what you call magic does exist, but maybe it'll help with the other part once I actually do understand some of it. So what is it?'
Sigyn smiled and, somewhat to Jane's consternation, let go of her to lean back. 'It's not a very technical term,' she mused. 'It can refer to a kind of energy, or to ways of manipulating reality that rely more on thought than direct physical interaction. In addition to deliberately enchanted objects, there are objects that naturally have magic in them, and animals that use it, though I am not sure if there are any on Earth. And there are nine main categories of magic.' A sudden grin. 'You'll run into disagreements on exactly what they are, but nearly everybody will tell you there are nine of them.'
'Oh, boy.' Why nine? Why were there different lists, and what were they? Okay, one thing at a time. Or possibly nine. 'Well, what's your list?'
'Fire,' said Sigyn, an apparently unfueled flame blossoming in her open hand and then snuffing when she closed it. 'Ice, and weather; fertility, shapeshifting, and enchantment; world-walking, far-seeing, and illusion.'
'Well, that sounds... pretty far-ranging.' Jane was surprised that world-walking was one of the top nine categories, but now that she thought about it... there was getting there, there was navigating, there were the things that lived there, and the space itself seemed to have some very strange properties that she was desperate to find out about. (If she could get there and find her way around safely, at least within Jormungand's coils, maybe she could figure out how to study them.) Extradimensional space was surely going to require a new category of science; why shouldn't it have its own category of magic?
Jane shut her eyes again for a moment to concentrate on here-and-now. She didn't usually make quite so much of an effort to ground herself -- either she was working, in which case her thoughts were off in mathematics and outer space or fixed on her instruments, or she wasn't and it didn't matter that much. What Sigyn had said so far was probably enough to fuel several hours of questions, minimum. Jane resisted shaking her head at herself. Of course it was. It was enough to fuel literally centuries of study, by a lot of different people, for whom a war that happened a thousand years ago was recent and still stinging. She wanted to ask everything, but right now she was supposed to be learning how not to get herself lost or eaten completely by accident. Focus. 'Are you going to teach me just about world-walking,' she asked, 'or do I get to ask about all nine?'
'Just world-walking today. Or how to avoid world-walking, to be more exact. As for the rest...' Sigyn tilted her head. 'I've been teaching some of my better fire magic secrets to frost giants who aren't even allies. I don't think there will be a problem teaching you.'
Jane shifted and pulled her feet up to sit cross-legged, partly to see if the chair would adjust to that. Dividing her attention was starting to get easier, and she was starting to feel less like she might turn and drift off. 'I didn't mean to ask about, uh, anything proprietary,' she said uncertainly. She was inexperienced with industry and new to governmental paranoia. Academia was largely about publishing, and while it was sometimes a good idea to keep things quiet, it was mainly so you wouldn't lose credit when you did publish. And that was a nod to practicality, not part of the collegial attitude intended to encourage the spread of knowledge.
That, and her main problem until recently had been getting anyone to listen in the first place. People did not normally jump aboard the work of crackpots.
'There's nothing wrong with asking,' said Sigyn. 'For that matter, it's entirely traditional to go nosing about trying to find out other magicians' secrets that they aren't willing to tell you, although it's not especially safe. But I like you. You should be fun to teach. And it would probably be useful for both our worlds.' A thoughtful look. 'You're having misgivings. Is it about the spying? That's really not something you're likely to have to worry about.'
Jane felt her cheeks warm. Was she that transparent? 'It's not that,' she said, trying to put words to the sudden unease. 'It's more... I do want to learn. But you're right about Thor's key point being that magic and science weren't contradictory, because I think he'd picked up that I had always assumed they were. That if magic was real and wasn't sufficiently advanced science, but was about... spirits, and objects not playing by the laws of nature, and doing things just by willing them, we'd never have been able to figure out the patterns.' Sigyn was looking baffled, and Jane wasn't sure whether this was encouraging (not a problem!) or disheartening (failure to communicate). 'How am I going to be sure I'm not subconsciously messing with the results of my own experiments?'
Sigyn shook her head. 'How do you know you haven't put your thumb on the scales when you determine a mass? You should learn enough control not to do magic at all without intending it, especially as it isn't strong enough in you naturally to be used by instinct. You should certainly be able to recognise whether you're doing it, despite not growing up with the idea. It shouldn't be a problem.'
Jane thought about that. Sigyn was treating what you did with magic, and with your mind, as something that was as observable and controllable as what you did with your body. Which made sense on one level, but she also thought about clinical trials and placebo effects -- things that weren't normally an issue in her kind of work -- and decided she might have to think about whether she could work out some blind tests as extra experimental controls. Just to be safe. 'Okay,' she said. 'And we work around the behavior of conscious agents all the time. Of course.'
A nod. 'You're doing well at that part so far. You seem comfortable with not accidentally moving into extradimensional space, and that's actually one of the trickier examples of magic to contemplate without carrying out.' Sigyn grinned suddenly, and she flicked her fingers toward a candelabra, which suddenly flared alight and then went immediately back out. 'So, want to learn to set something on fire?'
There was a frost giant on the television. Loki had been watching it in case Midgard’s rapidly expanding web of extraterrestrial relations affected his plans. And to keep an eye on his brother. Somehow he’d missed that the diplomats had changed, there was someone he didn’t recognise from Asgard and then, when he’d expected Freya, instead the producer had announced Frey, the new diplomat from Vanaheim, and his wife, Gerd, the diplomat from Jotunheim.
Loki missed whatever he said next because there was a frost giant on television. In a dress. She was wearing a sheer white silk gown, tied with a white sash, and little white silk slippers that should have looked ridiculous on a frost giant instead of somehow elegant. Deep bronze hair was coiled on her head, held there with carved wooden pins. Somehow he was surprised she had hair, which was stupid. He had hair, Lopt had hair, there was no reason for them to be the only frost giants to have hair. Her jewellery was wood too, rosewood polished to a high shine.
It was rather disturbing to realise she looked gorgeous.
Not that she looked greatly feminine, without the dress he might not have been able to tell she was a woman. Less muscular than the warriors, but that was true of him and Lopt as well. Even then she would have been a beautiful man, though, with her even cobalt skin and amazing cheekbones. Disconcertingly the mortals seemed to agree, acting around her as they would any beautiful woman, even as she towered over them.
‘What are you watching?’ asked Lopt, folding his arms over the back of the couch as he paused to see. ‘Oh, Gerd’s here. Too bad Freya left.’
‘You don’t like her?’ said Loki, feeling unreasonably embarrassed and keeping it out of his voice. It wasn’t as if Lopt could read his mind and tell he’d just been admiring a frost giant’s beauty.
‘What? Oh, she’s here because Frey’s replaced Freya, is she? No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just funnier when you have the two contenders for most beautiful person in the universe in the same room.’
‘She’s here as Jotunheim’s ambassador, although it does seem like she’s come with Frey,’ said Loki. ‘Why would Jotunheim send an ambassador?’
‘Maybe they’re in need of friends,’ said Lopt. ‘And there’s trade. The interesting thing here is that so far Alfheim haven’t.’
‘Hmm,’ said Loki. Alfheim was known for maintaining relationships with everyone. They’d even managed to have both an Asgardian and Jotun ambassador throughout the war. ‘Nothing they want, no military or magical strength?’
‘That wouldn’t stop them normally. Things like that can change,’ said Lopt.
Loki nodded. ‘What would Jotunheim want from Midgard? In a trade situation, rather than trying to take it over.’
‘Chocolate,’ said Lopt promptly.
Loki twisted his head around so he could give him a look, and Lopt ducked his head to hide a giggle. Both of them liked chocolate, and had a fondness for Midgardian sweets in general, but the question had been serious.
‘Really,’ said Lopt. ‘Fruit, sugar, sweets. There’s very little on Jotunheim that’s sweet and, as a race, we have something of a sweet tooth.’
Loki looked away sharply, disturbed that something he had thought was him turned out to be a Jotun thing. ‘And Asgard?’ he asked.
Lopt snorted. ‘Nothing, or they’d have maintained contact.’ A pause. ‘Maybe science. I don’t think they’ve done anything we haven’t, but they have done it in other ways.’
‘Did you realise you use “we” to refer to both Jotuns and Asgardians?’ asked Loki.
‘Why not?’ said Lopt, cheerfully.
On the screen Gerd was smiling at Frey with open affection, red eyes full of love.
The largest piece of bridge came into view, a huge jagged thing. Glimmers of rainbow light shimmered through a lumpy coating of what appeared at first to be dried grass and then proved to be wriggling. Occasionally a fatter, tentacle-like piece would drop off and wander out of sight. As they changed angles, Thor saw that there was a large protrusion on one end shaped like a broken eggshell, streaked in black and green, with no squirming grass on it. It took him a moment to put together the shape and size. 'Is that the control room?' he asked in surprise, coming to a halt. 'It exploded. I didn't think there would be that much left.'
'We did build it to be sturdy.' Sigyn sounded rather satisfied. 'That will help a bit.' She looked over at him. 'Well, it will make the retrieval a bit more difficult, but it will make everything else easier.'
Thor grinned at the hint of apology in her tone. 'So I should try not to break any more of it, then?'
Sigyn laughed at him. 'If you don't mind!'
'I'll see what I can do.' He squinted at it. 'Is it moving toward us?' He didn't feel any pull along that direction, so he wasn't sure why it would be.
'Yes,' Sigyn said. 'Mind -- intelligent thought -- is among the attractive forces here, so we're disturbing its course.'
'So if we had them both, we could just bring Jane and Loki out here and get it to follow them home?'
His aunt, at this point, broke down in giggles. 'It doesn't work quite like that. But it would probably have drifted farther if not for the minds of the population of Asgard, for instance. And it may stick to you until you get back into our home dimension.'
'That may be good.' Thor studied the shape they were approaching. 'I was trying to figure out where I could get a grip on it.'
When they reached the end of the Bifrost, Thor took his hammer and began systematically knocking away the creatures clinging to it. Sigyn watched his back and fended off strays, with spell and sword.
'I didn't know you trained with weapons as well,' he remarked. Sif would be interested. Sigyn didn't move like someone who used a sword regularly or exactly expertly, but on the other hand, she didn't seem to be uncertain about it. She was really quite deft for someone who had to be a thousand years out of practice.
'They're not my best area, and I'm better with a knife than a sword, but sometimes I need the reach.' She lashed out with magic, then skewered a tentacle coming up hopefully toward the underside of the chunk of bridge. 'It's also useful to have a quick alternative to spells here -- some creatures will simply eat the magic you hit them with if you don't tune it properly.'
'Is that like striking a chord?' Thor punned without quite thinking about it, then hoped he hadn't offended her. Loki usually responded to music-related jokes about 'tuning' magic with a sour look or a swat, when he didn't join in, and while there had usually been what Thor thought was a hint of amusement lurking about the corners of his mouth when he wasn't already in a foul mood, he was starting to second guess himself there. And even if his brother had enjoyed them, that was no guarantee about his aunt.
Sigyn laughed, though, and then answered the question seriously. 'Not quite. You want dissonance; harmony makes things easier for them.'
Freed of the tentacle-creatures feeding on it, the material looked strange. Instead of smooth and flat on the original surfaces and sharply jagged at the broken place, it was worn down all over to rounded bumps and pits. 'It looks like they've been licking it.'
Sigyn looked it over. 'Close enough.'
Thor hung Mjolnir back at his belt and turned off the falconskin, which was necessary in order to get his arms around one of the remaining protrusions. From this point he would mostly be relying on Sigyn for defence as well as guidance, although dropping the bridge to fight would be somewhat less hazardous here than in a place where gravity worked normally.
She moved ahead of him, taking a few steps back toward Asgard, and Thor leaned toward her. The piece of bridge... budged. Reluctantly. The problem wasn't precisely that it was heavy, but that he didn't really have anything to dig his feet into.
Sigyn looked back at him after a moment, analysing the struggle. 'We do need your physical strength for this, but you're thinking of it too physically. You don't need the ground here any more than you do when you fly.'
'I don't fly without Mjolnir.' Though that still might be the way he needed to think of moving. After a few more laborious steps, however -- and realising they were still steps -- Thor shook his head and let go. 'And maybe that's what I need to do after all.' He went around to the other end of the chunk and braced his shoulder underneath where the remnants of the control chamber curved upward, then hefted Mjolnir and pointed it forward. 'To Asgard!' he cried, and set off.
Only to promptly veer off in a weirdly shaped swerve, because of course he was propelling it from a strange angle. He slowed and brought it under control again. 'Oops.'
'It's not a bad idea for propulsion,' Sigyn said, slapping away a few interested scavengers and sounding as if she was trying very hard not to laugh, 'if you can get the angles right.'
Thor reoriented himself based on his extremely amused aunt, shot her a grin, and set off again. It took a few tries and a great deal of effort to find a way to hold the bridge and keep it pointed forward, but he mastered it. As they began drawing closer to Asgard, more scavengers began to find the exposed Bifrost energies and swarm around; Sigyn drove most of them off, and they mostly bypassed Thor anyway, but the weaker ones that touched him felt like midges, and the stronger ones like wasps. He gritted his teeth and pressed on faster, until Sigyn shouted at him to stop and, with a slight sideways tug on his arm, brought him back to normal space, next to Heimdall.
Several women -- sorcerers all -- who'd been called upon to work on the repairs, standing with Odin a little way down the bridge, jumped back. The chunk of bridge thudded down, making the intact part of the Bifrost vibrate with a hum that was still going on when they finished mopping up the scavengers that had followed them through.
After a few minutes of scurrying around and double-checking that the area was clean, there was a pause, and then everyone broke into a cheer.
Loki paced back and forth along the bench as if looking at the last two pieces from several different angles might be the way to solve the problem. The boy was standing a little way away, red eyes following Loki’s pacing.
‘I think we can do it,’ he said. ‘We’ve done the analysis three times now.’
‘And the analysis says that using magic on either will trigger both,’ said Loki. ‘They’re going to have to be deactivated at the same time. And they’ll both trigger as soon as we start, so it won’t be a case of doing the deactivation first and then separating them.’
‘So we’ll take one each,’ said the boy. ‘I know I haven’t done the…quick deactivations before, on the active ones. But I’ve deactivated dormant ones. And it’s not the same as the ones that activate when we get it wrong, I already know the deactivation spell.’
‘You’ll have to do the slowing down at the same time though,’ said Loki. ‘Are you sure you can do this?’
’Yes,’ said the boy impatiently. ‘Please have some faith in my assessment of my own abilities. What about you? Should I let you access the casket?’
Loki looked at him in surprise. It would make his chances of pulling this off much higher, but he hadn’t even considered asking. ‘It would help,’ he said.
‘You have permission to access the casket. For this one task, and this task alone,’ said the boy. ‘Now, will you stop dithering?’
Loki nodded, smiling slightly. ‘You’d better start by summoning the casket. We’ll need it nearby if we’re both going to use it.’
The boy nodded and spread his hands, bringing the casket out to appear between them with the normal drop in temperature. This time he placed it on the bench, ice crackling along its sides as it formed. Loki felt there was something satisfying about using the casket that went beyond the practical; Laufey’s most precious treasure in the hands of his unwanted sons.
Loki picked up a pair of pliers and held them out to the boy, realising, with slight amusement at himself, that he was offering them with the same ceremony a warrior might use in handing over a sword. The boy took them solemnly and the two of them took their stations on opposite sides of the bench. Taking the pieces apart would trigger them as surely as using magic, but starting with the separation meant there was less chance of the deactivation spells interfering with one another. They each carefully closed the pliers around their pieces and Loki started to count. ‘Three…two…one…now.’
They each pulled and started the deactivation spell at the exact same time, the murmuring of a completely different spell a distraction Loki tried to ignore to focus on his. Something made harder by his desire to keep track of how the boy was doing. Maybe the need to concentrate on something else was making them sloppy, but the casket responded to both of them drawing on it by coating most of the workshop with ice. Loki could feel the ice crystals in his eyelashes.
As soon as the magic faded from his piece Loki turned to help the boy. But the boy had his piece dormant before the motion was even finished. They both reached for bags at once, motion almost mechanical, and wrote out the tags before putting them gently into the box with all the others. Then both of them just stood for a moment, filled with the emptiness that sometimes follows the completion of a task that has, for a while, been all consuming.
Then the magnitude of what they’d just done hit him and Loki started grinning. ‘Freya’s going to be furious,’ he said. ‘And Odin…he’ll be furious too. And delighted. And definitely jealous.’ He started laughing. ‘You have to give me permission to tell him this. It’s too perfect.’
‘Not yet,’ said the boy pensively. ‘We don’t know if we can build one of our own yet.’
‘You sound just like him,’ said Loki, delight making him thoughtless. ‘When you complete an impossible task you should celebrate. Not complain that there’s another you haven’t done yet.’
The boy looked away and said, ‘This is a stepping stone. If this as as far as we get then all we’ve done is turn a useful item into a useless one.’
Loki put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Humour me,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve tried to do this for centuries and I couldn’t. Not even with Odin. Let me enjoy success for a while.’
A sigh. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Celebrate properly. A meal out, good food and wine. And tomorrow we can get back to work.’
‘Very well. I doubt we could continue today,’ said the boy.
Loki squeezed his shoulder. ‘Thank you.’
The restaurant they picked was a nice one. The food was good, the portions were large and the waitress was pretty. They started off with salad and breadsticks and then the main course arrived, in Loki’s case a steak in bearnaise sauce while the boy had lambshanks. To his surprise the boy took a mouthful immediately. He seemed equally surprised when Loki ignored his and just sipped his wine.
‘You’re not eating?’ he said.
‘Too hot for me,’ said Loki. ‘You can eat it at that temperature?’ For the first time he wondered what Odin had meant by “deeper than glamour”. Just what had he changed to make the boy seem Asgardian?
‘I’d prefer it cooler,’ the boy admitted. ‘But at feasts they normally stop serving if I take too long.’
‘We’ve got time,’ said Loki. It was progress that the boy was willing to admit it, he thought, rather than claiming that being able to eat hot food made him less of a Jotun.
By the time the food cooled to the point he preferred Loki had managed to talk the waitress into giving him her phone number. She really was very pretty, he thought, watching as she went into the kitchen with a blush still reddening her cheeks.
‘And a few months ago you couldn’t use a telephone,’ said the boy dryly. ‘Aren’t you married?’
‘Sigyn doesn’t mind,’ said Loki, putting the number in his pocket. ‘I’ve never been faithful but I’ve always been honest.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘It was her choice,’ said Loki. ‘She was eager enough to marry me.’
The boy looked down, eyes on his plate. His reaction to surprise always seemed to be to still himself rather than fidget. ‘It wasn’t political, then?’
Loki briefly considered taking offense before realising where the assumption had come from. ‘Because I’m a frost giant?’ he asked.
The boy shrugged. ‘I suppose you can glamour yourself,’ he said.
Loki shook his head. ‘Sigyn is a very adventurous woman. And quite fond of me in all my forms. But, unless you want to grant me permission for conjugal visits, she’s also not available.’ He stopped to take a bite of his steak. Excellent. ‘It would have been a stunningly useless political marriage, actually. Laufey was perpetually embarrassed that Asgard kept remembering I existed.’
‘I thought you were a prince,’ said the boy.
‘I was disowned. It made the politics of the situation interesting when I became Odin’s family after having been cast out of Laufey’s.’ The boy was tense and nearly managing to hide it. They probably needed to discuss Laufey, if only to clear the air about his death. But not while celebrating their triumph. Loki picked up his glass. ‘To us,’ he said. ‘And our next project. May it go as well as this one.’
The boy picked up his own half-full glass and gazed at it as if it might hold answers. ‘To us,’ he murmured, and drained his glass.
Authors: Khilari and Persephone_Kore
Summary: Thor and Loki were not the first of Odin's loved ones to bear those names. After the events of the movie, Loki is planning his next moves when he discovers a frost giant imprisoned in a volcano, who proves to be both the uncle he was named for and Laufey's first child. Soon Loki has a new mentor, Asgard is shaking off isolationist tendencies, Jotunheim is receiving foreign aid, and Earth is suddenly and vividly reacquainted with the existence of aliens....
Chapter 10
'You want to leave for another planet again?' Coulson asked skeptically, eyeing Jane and the two Asgardians with her. 'I suppose I should be glad you mentioned it in advance this time.'
'Safety training,' Jane said, 'for the extradimensional work. Tony and I managed to create a miniature Einstein-Rosen bridge, but it turns out I ca--mmf!'
Thor had swept her into his arms and kissed her. Most people did not think this was an appropriate form of congratulations to someone who was in mid-sentence with a government official, but Jane was having a hard time complaining about it. 'That is a great accomplishment,' he said, putting her down with a warm smile.
Sigyn cleared her throat, sounding amused. 'So it is.'
'Anyway,' Jane said, trying to recover her train of thought, 'in the process, I slipped into extradimensional space myself. And before you get any ideas about applications, research or travel or anything else, this is a really good way to get completely lost if I don't learn to control it. And I wouldn't necessarily have a chance to warn you first.'
'Which I can teach her,' Sigyn said. The beginnings of worry on Thor's face cleared at once. 'It will probably also be interesting for her to be present while we repair the Bifrost itself, which I originally helped to design and build.'
SHIELD agreed. Actually, once convinced, there was some discussion of whether Stark should be sent with them too, but as he had a multitude of other projects and was not actually in any notable danger of drifting into other dimensions by mistake at this point, they decided against it.
Freya sent a message home that she was leaving Midgard for Jotunheim and they should send a new ambassador, which prompted Darcy to ask just what Freya's relationship was with Vanaheim's government. (Part of the answer, apparently, was "Trusted." Jane missed most of the rest of it in the process of preparing to leave her experiments and explaining her latest discoveries to Erik.)
In Asgard, and after Sigyn had spoken with Odin, she took Jane aside into an airy, warm-toned room lit by the afternoon sun. 'I have to tell you,' Sigyn said, 'Midgard would actually be a safer place for you to have this problem, but on balance, I think supervision is more important.'
Jane swallowed. 'I'd prefer to stop having the problem, really. I felt much safer once I ran into you.'
'That's understandable.' Sigyn paced the sides of the room, touching the walls. 'I can't be with you constantly, but I may be able to teach you enough magic this evening to avoid accidents. After we retrieve the pieces of the Bifrost, the scavengers won't be so much of a problem. And if necessary, I can create a temporary binding to prevent you from leaving the dimensions you're in.'
'I'm still having trouble believing I'm going to learn magic,' Jane said with a nervous laugh.
Sigyn turned back to her, looking baffled. 'I'm not sure what else you think we'd do. The binding would be something of a nuisance for both of us. Such things are easier to establish on locations than on people, and either one would interfere considerably with both your travel and your research. I don't think you want that to be permanent.'
'That's not--' Jane shook her head. 'It's not that I wanted you to do everything. I'd much rather learn to control where I go, or don't go, myself. It's just a really strange thought. An adjustment. I'm not used to thinking of magic as real.'
'I would call that the really strange thought.' Sigyn gave her a long, appraising look, then gestured to a chair.
The chair looked uncompromisingly rigid and blocky. Jane sat in it anyway and found it wasn't actually rock-hard, but did poke oddly at her back and left her feet dangling several inches in the air. This did not make it that unusual, as furniture went. What did was that after about three seconds, it adjusted -- her feet hit the floor, and the subtle curve of the backrest suddenly offered excellent lumbar support. She resisted the urge to twist around and eye it.
Sigyn took the facing chair herself, which didn’t require nearly as much adjustment. She pulled it close enough that Jane had to move her knees aside a little, and wrapped strong fingers around Jane's wrists. 'I will not lose you. Are you comfortable?'
'Surprisingly so,' Jane said, looking up at her and trying to swallow another inappropriate giggle. 'I wasn't expecting your furniture to accommodate short people this way. Did you do that or is it built in?'
Sigyn grinned. 'Built in, but it's part of why I picked the room. I got rather tired of Jotun-sized furniture over the past weeks and thought you might appreciate it. Now, what I want you to do is think about extradimensional space. Try to become aware of it, but don't go there.'
'All right.' Jane wasn't sure how well this was going to go. She did know that sitting absolutely still was harder than it sounded. Still, she trusted Sigyn, she needed to learn, and she had to start somewhere, so she shut her eyes and thought about extradimensional space. The star-shot darkness of being in it, and the equations and abstractions and geometry and--
She could feel the shift, a sudden sense of unfolding, of awareness of more directions all around her. She jumped a bit, involuntarily, and Sigyn's hands tightened. 'Will is action,' Sigyn said in a low voice. 'Choose to be still. You can breathe--' There was a hint of amusement in her voice as Jane realised she'd been holding her breath and gasped. 'You can open your eyes, look around, blink, even talk to me. Moving in other dimensions is largely a matter of the mind; it's not something the ordinary movements of your body are going to cause.'
Jane opened her eyes. There was a hint of darkness shot through with something that might not be quite starlight, at the edges of her vision, and despite what Sigyn had just said she found herself half afraid to turn her head. 'I can't decide if that's reassuring or not.'
'It just is.' Sigyn smiled faintly. 'You really didn't believe magic existed? I know Midgard at least used to have it -- one of Heimdall's teachers was from there.'
'What did she teach?'
'Far-seeing. Scrying. He had one from each of the nine realms -- the more accessible ones first, of course. Now he can observe nearly anywhere he wants.'
Jane paused, a memory itching at her mind from the reading she'd done after Thor disappeared. Or maybe it was something Erik had said, and that was why she couldn't pin down a reference. 'Do those nine teachers by any chance explain why we've got a story about him having nine mothers?'
'That’s the origin, yes. Although if you're wondering why your poets described him as pale with gold teeth, I never figured that one out.' Sigyn looked thoughtful. 'You have a concept of magic. What is it, exactly, that you didn't believe in?'
'Well, it's--' Jane paused. Thought about that for a minute. 'Harder to define than I thought. I guess... something that doesn't operate within the laws of nature. Except sometimes it just winds up being used to mean people exerting control over the universe in ways we don't understand yet. That's the attitude behind one of our authors who said sufficiently advanced science would be indistinguishable from magic. And Thor said--' She hesitated, partly because the thought distracted her from extradimensional space and brought back an entirely different star-filled darkness, with the cool of the desert night and a near-stranger telling her unbelievable things. 'Thor said magic and science were one and the same, for you.'
Sigyn chuckled. 'I'm afraid Thor isn't exactly an expert on either subject. Or rather, he's very good at weather magic, but in a different way from what you're going to learn. I wouldn't have said what he did--' She looked thoughtful. 'But given what you've just told me, I suppose it did make the basic point that we don't consider them contradictory. What do you say science is?'
That was easier. 'It's a way of thinking, of learning about the world by systematic observation and measurement and testing hypotheses, and the body of knowledge we've gotten that way. It's about believing nature is comprehensible and worth trying to comprehend, and going at it with an open mind, and revising our assumptions when they don't match the evidence.' She paused. 'Sometimes we're not as good at that last part as we'd hope.'
'It can be difficult,' said Sigyn, 'but very valuable.' She looked pensive, and Jane wondered if that had to do with revising assumptions very quickly after spending a mind-boggling length of time trapped in a misunderstanding. 'We have a similar concept of science, anyhow, which is a start. But you're going to have to let go of defining magic as something you don't understand, let alone that doesn't exist.'
'I'm working on that,' Jane said with a wry grin. 'I'm convinced what you call magic does exist, but maybe it'll help with the other part once I actually do understand some of it. So what is it?'
Sigyn smiled and, somewhat to Jane's consternation, let go of her to lean back. 'It's not a very technical term,' she mused. 'It can refer to a kind of energy, or to ways of manipulating reality that rely more on thought than direct physical interaction. In addition to deliberately enchanted objects, there are objects that naturally have magic in them, and animals that use it, though I am not sure if there are any on Earth. And there are nine main categories of magic.' A sudden grin. 'You'll run into disagreements on exactly what they are, but nearly everybody will tell you there are nine of them.'
'Oh, boy.' Why nine? Why were there different lists, and what were they? Okay, one thing at a time. Or possibly nine. 'Well, what's your list?'
'Fire,' said Sigyn, an apparently unfueled flame blossoming in her open hand and then snuffing when she closed it. 'Ice, and weather; fertility, shapeshifting, and enchantment; world-walking, far-seeing, and illusion.'
'Well, that sounds... pretty far-ranging.' Jane was surprised that world-walking was one of the top nine categories, but now that she thought about it... there was getting there, there was navigating, there were the things that lived there, and the space itself seemed to have some very strange properties that she was desperate to find out about. (If she could get there and find her way around safely, at least within Jormungand's coils, maybe she could figure out how to study them.) Extradimensional space was surely going to require a new category of science; why shouldn't it have its own category of magic?
Jane shut her eyes again for a moment to concentrate on here-and-now. She didn't usually make quite so much of an effort to ground herself -- either she was working, in which case her thoughts were off in mathematics and outer space or fixed on her instruments, or she wasn't and it didn't matter that much. What Sigyn had said so far was probably enough to fuel several hours of questions, minimum. Jane resisted shaking her head at herself. Of course it was. It was enough to fuel literally centuries of study, by a lot of different people, for whom a war that happened a thousand years ago was recent and still stinging. She wanted to ask everything, but right now she was supposed to be learning how not to get herself lost or eaten completely by accident. Focus. 'Are you going to teach me just about world-walking,' she asked, 'or do I get to ask about all nine?'
'Just world-walking today. Or how to avoid world-walking, to be more exact. As for the rest...' Sigyn tilted her head. 'I've been teaching some of my better fire magic secrets to frost giants who aren't even allies. I don't think there will be a problem teaching you.'
Jane shifted and pulled her feet up to sit cross-legged, partly to see if the chair would adjust to that. Dividing her attention was starting to get easier, and she was starting to feel less like she might turn and drift off. 'I didn't mean to ask about, uh, anything proprietary,' she said uncertainly. She was inexperienced with industry and new to governmental paranoia. Academia was largely about publishing, and while it was sometimes a good idea to keep things quiet, it was mainly so you wouldn't lose credit when you did publish. And that was a nod to practicality, not part of the collegial attitude intended to encourage the spread of knowledge.
That, and her main problem until recently had been getting anyone to listen in the first place. People did not normally jump aboard the work of crackpots.
'There's nothing wrong with asking,' said Sigyn. 'For that matter, it's entirely traditional to go nosing about trying to find out other magicians' secrets that they aren't willing to tell you, although it's not especially safe. But I like you. You should be fun to teach. And it would probably be useful for both our worlds.' A thoughtful look. 'You're having misgivings. Is it about the spying? That's really not something you're likely to have to worry about.'
Jane felt her cheeks warm. Was she that transparent? 'It's not that,' she said, trying to put words to the sudden unease. 'It's more... I do want to learn. But you're right about Thor's key point being that magic and science weren't contradictory, because I think he'd picked up that I had always assumed they were. That if magic was real and wasn't sufficiently advanced science, but was about... spirits, and objects not playing by the laws of nature, and doing things just by willing them, we'd never have been able to figure out the patterns.' Sigyn was looking baffled, and Jane wasn't sure whether this was encouraging (not a problem!) or disheartening (failure to communicate). 'How am I going to be sure I'm not subconsciously messing with the results of my own experiments?'
Sigyn shook her head. 'How do you know you haven't put your thumb on the scales when you determine a mass? You should learn enough control not to do magic at all without intending it, especially as it isn't strong enough in you naturally to be used by instinct. You should certainly be able to recognise whether you're doing it, despite not growing up with the idea. It shouldn't be a problem.'
Jane thought about that. Sigyn was treating what you did with magic, and with your mind, as something that was as observable and controllable as what you did with your body. Which made sense on one level, but she also thought about clinical trials and placebo effects -- things that weren't normally an issue in her kind of work -- and decided she might have to think about whether she could work out some blind tests as extra experimental controls. Just to be safe. 'Okay,' she said. 'And we work around the behavior of conscious agents all the time. Of course.'
A nod. 'You're doing well at that part so far. You seem comfortable with not accidentally moving into extradimensional space, and that's actually one of the trickier examples of magic to contemplate without carrying out.' Sigyn grinned suddenly, and she flicked her fingers toward a candelabra, which suddenly flared alight and then went immediately back out. 'So, want to learn to set something on fire?'
There was a frost giant on the television. Loki had been watching it in case Midgard’s rapidly expanding web of extraterrestrial relations affected his plans. And to keep an eye on his brother. Somehow he’d missed that the diplomats had changed, there was someone he didn’t recognise from Asgard and then, when he’d expected Freya, instead the producer had announced Frey, the new diplomat from Vanaheim, and his wife, Gerd, the diplomat from Jotunheim.
Loki missed whatever he said next because there was a frost giant on television. In a dress. She was wearing a sheer white silk gown, tied with a white sash, and little white silk slippers that should have looked ridiculous on a frost giant instead of somehow elegant. Deep bronze hair was coiled on her head, held there with carved wooden pins. Somehow he was surprised she had hair, which was stupid. He had hair, Lopt had hair, there was no reason for them to be the only frost giants to have hair. Her jewellery was wood too, rosewood polished to a high shine.
It was rather disturbing to realise she looked gorgeous.
Not that she looked greatly feminine, without the dress he might not have been able to tell she was a woman. Less muscular than the warriors, but that was true of him and Lopt as well. Even then she would have been a beautiful man, though, with her even cobalt skin and amazing cheekbones. Disconcertingly the mortals seemed to agree, acting around her as they would any beautiful woman, even as she towered over them.
‘What are you watching?’ asked Lopt, folding his arms over the back of the couch as he paused to see. ‘Oh, Gerd’s here. Too bad Freya left.’
‘You don’t like her?’ said Loki, feeling unreasonably embarrassed and keeping it out of his voice. It wasn’t as if Lopt could read his mind and tell he’d just been admiring a frost giant’s beauty.
‘What? Oh, she’s here because Frey’s replaced Freya, is she? No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just funnier when you have the two contenders for most beautiful person in the universe in the same room.’
‘She’s here as Jotunheim’s ambassador, although it does seem like she’s come with Frey,’ said Loki. ‘Why would Jotunheim send an ambassador?’
‘Maybe they’re in need of friends,’ said Lopt. ‘And there’s trade. The interesting thing here is that so far Alfheim haven’t.’
‘Hmm,’ said Loki. Alfheim was known for maintaining relationships with everyone. They’d even managed to have both an Asgardian and Jotun ambassador throughout the war. ‘Nothing they want, no military or magical strength?’
‘That wouldn’t stop them normally. Things like that can change,’ said Lopt.
Loki nodded. ‘What would Jotunheim want from Midgard? In a trade situation, rather than trying to take it over.’
‘Chocolate,’ said Lopt promptly.
Loki twisted his head around so he could give him a look, and Lopt ducked his head to hide a giggle. Both of them liked chocolate, and had a fondness for Midgardian sweets in general, but the question had been serious.
‘Really,’ said Lopt. ‘Fruit, sugar, sweets. There’s very little on Jotunheim that’s sweet and, as a race, we have something of a sweet tooth.’
Loki looked away sharply, disturbed that something he had thought was him turned out to be a Jotun thing. ‘And Asgard?’ he asked.
Lopt snorted. ‘Nothing, or they’d have maintained contact.’ A pause. ‘Maybe science. I don’t think they’ve done anything we haven’t, but they have done it in other ways.’
‘Did you realise you use “we” to refer to both Jotuns and Asgardians?’ asked Loki.
‘Why not?’ said Lopt, cheerfully.
On the screen Gerd was smiling at Frey with open affection, red eyes full of love.
The largest piece of bridge came into view, a huge jagged thing. Glimmers of rainbow light shimmered through a lumpy coating of what appeared at first to be dried grass and then proved to be wriggling. Occasionally a fatter, tentacle-like piece would drop off and wander out of sight. As they changed angles, Thor saw that there was a large protrusion on one end shaped like a broken eggshell, streaked in black and green, with no squirming grass on it. It took him a moment to put together the shape and size. 'Is that the control room?' he asked in surprise, coming to a halt. 'It exploded. I didn't think there would be that much left.'
'We did build it to be sturdy.' Sigyn sounded rather satisfied. 'That will help a bit.' She looked over at him. 'Well, it will make the retrieval a bit more difficult, but it will make everything else easier.'
Thor grinned at the hint of apology in her tone. 'So I should try not to break any more of it, then?'
Sigyn laughed at him. 'If you don't mind!'
'I'll see what I can do.' He squinted at it. 'Is it moving toward us?' He didn't feel any pull along that direction, so he wasn't sure why it would be.
'Yes,' Sigyn said. 'Mind -- intelligent thought -- is among the attractive forces here, so we're disturbing its course.'
'So if we had them both, we could just bring Jane and Loki out here and get it to follow them home?'
His aunt, at this point, broke down in giggles. 'It doesn't work quite like that. But it would probably have drifted farther if not for the minds of the population of Asgard, for instance. And it may stick to you until you get back into our home dimension.'
'That may be good.' Thor studied the shape they were approaching. 'I was trying to figure out where I could get a grip on it.'
When they reached the end of the Bifrost, Thor took his hammer and began systematically knocking away the creatures clinging to it. Sigyn watched his back and fended off strays, with spell and sword.
'I didn't know you trained with weapons as well,' he remarked. Sif would be interested. Sigyn didn't move like someone who used a sword regularly or exactly expertly, but on the other hand, she didn't seem to be uncertain about it. She was really quite deft for someone who had to be a thousand years out of practice.
'They're not my best area, and I'm better with a knife than a sword, but sometimes I need the reach.' She lashed out with magic, then skewered a tentacle coming up hopefully toward the underside of the chunk of bridge. 'It's also useful to have a quick alternative to spells here -- some creatures will simply eat the magic you hit them with if you don't tune it properly.'
'Is that like striking a chord?' Thor punned without quite thinking about it, then hoped he hadn't offended her. Loki usually responded to music-related jokes about 'tuning' magic with a sour look or a swat, when he didn't join in, and while there had usually been what Thor thought was a hint of amusement lurking about the corners of his mouth when he wasn't already in a foul mood, he was starting to second guess himself there. And even if his brother had enjoyed them, that was no guarantee about his aunt.
Sigyn laughed, though, and then answered the question seriously. 'Not quite. You want dissonance; harmony makes things easier for them.'
Freed of the tentacle-creatures feeding on it, the material looked strange. Instead of smooth and flat on the original surfaces and sharply jagged at the broken place, it was worn down all over to rounded bumps and pits. 'It looks like they've been licking it.'
Sigyn looked it over. 'Close enough.'
Thor hung Mjolnir back at his belt and turned off the falconskin, which was necessary in order to get his arms around one of the remaining protrusions. From this point he would mostly be relying on Sigyn for defence as well as guidance, although dropping the bridge to fight would be somewhat less hazardous here than in a place where gravity worked normally.
She moved ahead of him, taking a few steps back toward Asgard, and Thor leaned toward her. The piece of bridge... budged. Reluctantly. The problem wasn't precisely that it was heavy, but that he didn't really have anything to dig his feet into.
Sigyn looked back at him after a moment, analysing the struggle. 'We do need your physical strength for this, but you're thinking of it too physically. You don't need the ground here any more than you do when you fly.'
'I don't fly without Mjolnir.' Though that still might be the way he needed to think of moving. After a few more laborious steps, however -- and realising they were still steps -- Thor shook his head and let go. 'And maybe that's what I need to do after all.' He went around to the other end of the chunk and braced his shoulder underneath where the remnants of the control chamber curved upward, then hefted Mjolnir and pointed it forward. 'To Asgard!' he cried, and set off.
Only to promptly veer off in a weirdly shaped swerve, because of course he was propelling it from a strange angle. He slowed and brought it under control again. 'Oops.'
'It's not a bad idea for propulsion,' Sigyn said, slapping away a few interested scavengers and sounding as if she was trying very hard not to laugh, 'if you can get the angles right.'
Thor reoriented himself based on his extremely amused aunt, shot her a grin, and set off again. It took a few tries and a great deal of effort to find a way to hold the bridge and keep it pointed forward, but he mastered it. As they began drawing closer to Asgard, more scavengers began to find the exposed Bifrost energies and swarm around; Sigyn drove most of them off, and they mostly bypassed Thor anyway, but the weaker ones that touched him felt like midges, and the stronger ones like wasps. He gritted his teeth and pressed on faster, until Sigyn shouted at him to stop and, with a slight sideways tug on his arm, brought him back to normal space, next to Heimdall.
Several women -- sorcerers all -- who'd been called upon to work on the repairs, standing with Odin a little way down the bridge, jumped back. The chunk of bridge thudded down, making the intact part of the Bifrost vibrate with a hum that was still going on when they finished mopping up the scavengers that had followed them through.
After a few minutes of scurrying around and double-checking that the area was clean, there was a pause, and then everyone broke into a cheer.
Loki paced back and forth along the bench as if looking at the last two pieces from several different angles might be the way to solve the problem. The boy was standing a little way away, red eyes following Loki’s pacing.
‘I think we can do it,’ he said. ‘We’ve done the analysis three times now.’
‘And the analysis says that using magic on either will trigger both,’ said Loki. ‘They’re going to have to be deactivated at the same time. And they’ll both trigger as soon as we start, so it won’t be a case of doing the deactivation first and then separating them.’
‘So we’ll take one each,’ said the boy. ‘I know I haven’t done the…quick deactivations before, on the active ones. But I’ve deactivated dormant ones. And it’s not the same as the ones that activate when we get it wrong, I already know the deactivation spell.’
‘You’ll have to do the slowing down at the same time though,’ said Loki. ‘Are you sure you can do this?’
’Yes,’ said the boy impatiently. ‘Please have some faith in my assessment of my own abilities. What about you? Should I let you access the casket?’
Loki looked at him in surprise. It would make his chances of pulling this off much higher, but he hadn’t even considered asking. ‘It would help,’ he said.
‘You have permission to access the casket. For this one task, and this task alone,’ said the boy. ‘Now, will you stop dithering?’
Loki nodded, smiling slightly. ‘You’d better start by summoning the casket. We’ll need it nearby if we’re both going to use it.’
The boy nodded and spread his hands, bringing the casket out to appear between them with the normal drop in temperature. This time he placed it on the bench, ice crackling along its sides as it formed. Loki felt there was something satisfying about using the casket that went beyond the practical; Laufey’s most precious treasure in the hands of his unwanted sons.
Loki picked up a pair of pliers and held them out to the boy, realising, with slight amusement at himself, that he was offering them with the same ceremony a warrior might use in handing over a sword. The boy took them solemnly and the two of them took their stations on opposite sides of the bench. Taking the pieces apart would trigger them as surely as using magic, but starting with the separation meant there was less chance of the deactivation spells interfering with one another. They each carefully closed the pliers around their pieces and Loki started to count. ‘Three…two…one…now.’
They each pulled and started the deactivation spell at the exact same time, the murmuring of a completely different spell a distraction Loki tried to ignore to focus on his. Something made harder by his desire to keep track of how the boy was doing. Maybe the need to concentrate on something else was making them sloppy, but the casket responded to both of them drawing on it by coating most of the workshop with ice. Loki could feel the ice crystals in his eyelashes.
As soon as the magic faded from his piece Loki turned to help the boy. But the boy had his piece dormant before the motion was even finished. They both reached for bags at once, motion almost mechanical, and wrote out the tags before putting them gently into the box with all the others. Then both of them just stood for a moment, filled with the emptiness that sometimes follows the completion of a task that has, for a while, been all consuming.
Then the magnitude of what they’d just done hit him and Loki started grinning. ‘Freya’s going to be furious,’ he said. ‘And Odin…he’ll be furious too. And delighted. And definitely jealous.’ He started laughing. ‘You have to give me permission to tell him this. It’s too perfect.’
‘Not yet,’ said the boy pensively. ‘We don’t know if we can build one of our own yet.’
‘You sound just like him,’ said Loki, delight making him thoughtless. ‘When you complete an impossible task you should celebrate. Not complain that there’s another you haven’t done yet.’
The boy looked away and said, ‘This is a stepping stone. If this as as far as we get then all we’ve done is turn a useful item into a useless one.’
Loki put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Humour me,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve tried to do this for centuries and I couldn’t. Not even with Odin. Let me enjoy success for a while.’
A sigh. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Celebrate properly. A meal out, good food and wine. And tomorrow we can get back to work.’
‘Very well. I doubt we could continue today,’ said the boy.
Loki squeezed his shoulder. ‘Thank you.’
The restaurant they picked was a nice one. The food was good, the portions were large and the waitress was pretty. They started off with salad and breadsticks and then the main course arrived, in Loki’s case a steak in bearnaise sauce while the boy had lambshanks. To his surprise the boy took a mouthful immediately. He seemed equally surprised when Loki ignored his and just sipped his wine.
‘You’re not eating?’ he said.
‘Too hot for me,’ said Loki. ‘You can eat it at that temperature?’ For the first time he wondered what Odin had meant by “deeper than glamour”. Just what had he changed to make the boy seem Asgardian?
‘I’d prefer it cooler,’ the boy admitted. ‘But at feasts they normally stop serving if I take too long.’
‘We’ve got time,’ said Loki. It was progress that the boy was willing to admit it, he thought, rather than claiming that being able to eat hot food made him less of a Jotun.
By the time the food cooled to the point he preferred Loki had managed to talk the waitress into giving him her phone number. She really was very pretty, he thought, watching as she went into the kitchen with a blush still reddening her cheeks.
‘And a few months ago you couldn’t use a telephone,’ said the boy dryly. ‘Aren’t you married?’
‘Sigyn doesn’t mind,’ said Loki, putting the number in his pocket. ‘I’ve never been faithful but I’ve always been honest.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘It was her choice,’ said Loki. ‘She was eager enough to marry me.’
The boy looked down, eyes on his plate. His reaction to surprise always seemed to be to still himself rather than fidget. ‘It wasn’t political, then?’
Loki briefly considered taking offense before realising where the assumption had come from. ‘Because I’m a frost giant?’ he asked.
The boy shrugged. ‘I suppose you can glamour yourself,’ he said.
Loki shook his head. ‘Sigyn is a very adventurous woman. And quite fond of me in all my forms. But, unless you want to grant me permission for conjugal visits, she’s also not available.’ He stopped to take a bite of his steak. Excellent. ‘It would have been a stunningly useless political marriage, actually. Laufey was perpetually embarrassed that Asgard kept remembering I existed.’
‘I thought you were a prince,’ said the boy.
‘I was disowned. It made the politics of the situation interesting when I became Odin’s family after having been cast out of Laufey’s.’ The boy was tense and nearly managing to hide it. They probably needed to discuss Laufey, if only to clear the air about his death. But not while celebrating their triumph. Loki picked up his glass. ‘To us,’ he said. ‘And our next project. May it go as well as this one.’
The boy picked up his own half-full glass and gazed at it as if it might hold answers. ‘To us,’ he murmured, and drained his glass.