Loki Read online

  Thor had never offered a direct opinion on Amora. No one had—they just whispered about her behind her back the way everyone always had about Loki. Too unpredictable, too strong, shouldn’t be allowed out of Nornheim, even if the king and his sorceress thought the structure and rigidity of the royal court would temper her strong will.

  Suddenly, three thundering booms cut through the chatter ringing around the hall. The musicians silenced and the courtiers hushed, rotating toward the top of the grand stairway. Loki pivoted along with the rest of the royal officials in their receiving line and turned his face upward, to where Odin stood, dressed in his feast day robes of claret-deep red, his spear, Gungnir, in his fist. His beard was woven with golden thread, and on his brow was a circlet in the same style as Thor’s. Loki felt a twinge of regret. Perhaps he should have worn his after all, no matter that it clashed with the rest of his ensemble.

  “Asgardians!” Odin boomed, his voice echoing off the curved ceiling and carrying easily through the hall. “Friends, visitors, distinguished guests from across the Nine Realms, you honor us with your presence at this, our holy Feast of Gullveig.”

  Loki had heard some variation on this speech at every feast day since he was a boy. It was remarkable how many heroic warriors Asgard had decided to commemorate with their own feast days, and while the food was always good, it was never worth having to stand in an awkward receiving line, getting pats on the head from courtiers, and then enduring his father’s dull speech about whatever blond man with rippling biceps and an insatiable thirst for the blood of Asgardian enemies was being honored that particular day.

  But the Feast of Gullveig was different in one substantial way.

  “Today,” Odin continued, touching one finger to the patch that covered his empty right eye socket as he looked around, “we celebrate the day of the warrior king who, one hundred centuries ago, harnessed the rime flows of Niflheim in the Siege of Muspelheim and from it forged the Godseye Mirror. That same Mirror has been brought up from the palace vault and, with the strength and power of our royal sorceress from Nornheim, shall grant a vision of the decade to come and the threats Asgard shall need to arm ourselves against. This is the way we keep our kingdom safe from threats from across the Nine Realms, and from Ragnarok itself. The Godseye Mirror gives no answers, and no certainty. Its eye is open for only this one day each decade, but it is the visions it reveals that have helped keep Asgard fortified and strong for centuries. At the end of this feast day, I will confer with my generals and advisors, and we will devise the best strategies for the future prosperity of our people.”

  Loki had learned all of this from his history teachers in preparation for the feast—the first in his memory that the Godseye Mirror had been brought out and Karnilla had come to wield its powers—but he still pushed himself up on his toes for a better look as the curtain behind his father was drawn back by the two Einherjar soldiers.

  The Godseye Mirror was a wall of shimmering black obsidian—a perfect square set in a thin gold frame with carved gold staves curling around each corner. He had seen it before, when Odin had taken both him and Thor down to the vault below the palace and explained to them the power of each object kept there and the lengths to which he had gone to keep his people safe from it, but here, away from the dark walls and dim light of the vault and no longer surrounded by the host of artifacts Odin had captured to prevent the end of the world, it felt more imposing. More powerful. The Mirror stood straight on its own, with no feet or supports. The already silent hall seemed to sink into an even more absolute stillness.

  Karnilla had ascended the stairs, and when Odin extended a hand to her, they walked together to the Mirror. He took his place on one side, she on the other, her palms pressed flat against the surface. Odin handed Gungnir to one of the Einherjar, then turned to his people again, arms extended. “To another decade of peace and prosperity in our great realm!”

  Loki felt something brush his elbow, and then Amora’s voice was in his ear. “So do we change the tile now, while your father is occupied, or do we want to be certain everyone sees how poorly fuchsia clashes with his robes?”

  Loki’s response was cut off by a crackle of energy from the top of the stairs. He felt the hairs on his neck rise, the air suddenly feeling hot and heavy like the prelude to a lightning storm. A fork of white light erratically split the ceiling of the Great Hall. The assembled courtiers gasped, but from her spot across the Mirror from Odin, Karnilla raised a hand and the light flew to her fist, gathering around it in a cyclone. Loki felt his mouth hang open, marveling at the elegance, the control, the way the magic moved through the air and answered her call.

  He felt Amora poke him in the back. “Loki.”

  Karnilla opened her hand and pressed it to the obsidian surface. The staves at each corner of the Mirror glowed, the lines of each rune flaring so bright it seemed for a moment they might ignite. The surface rippled like a pond struck by a stone, and Odin’s eye turned white, the images of Asgard’s future flashing across the Mirror’s surface unseen by anyone but him.

  “I have a feeling you’re not listening to me,” Amora said, this time her lips so close to Loki’s ear that he felt her breath.

  “Quiet,” Thor hissed at them from Loki’s other side.

  Amora pivoted to him. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I interrupting something important?”

  Another crackle of light dancing across the ceiling flew to Karnilla’s hand.

  “Show some respect,” Thor hissed through his teeth.

  “Is something about my speaking disrespectful?” Amora replied.

  “Yes—the fact that you are speaking at all.”

  Loki felt a sudden hand on his shoulder, and turned as his mother stepped between him and Amora, her gaze still fixed on Odin at the top of the grand staircase and her grip very gentle. “That’s enough,” she said quietly. Loki wanted to protest that he had been the only one not speaking over this important ceremony. But Frigga squeezed his shoulder, and he swallowed his words.

  Another bolt of lightning leaped from Karnilla’s hand to the surface of the Mirror, but this one was different. Loki felt a change in the air, a shift in the magic that made him shudder. His mother must have felt it too—her hand spasmed on his shoulder. Odin took an abrupt step back from the Mirror, one hand rising like he was trying to push something away. Then an audible cry escaped his lips. On the other side, Karnilla paused, hand still in the air with the threads of white light whirring in a hive around it.

  Then Odin tore himself away from the Mirror, breaking the spell. The magic drained from his eye, leaving behind his dark iris flooded with panic. He stumbled, catching himself on the rail. There was a gasp from the assembled court. One of the Einherjar reached out to Odin, but the king pushed him away, snatching back his staff and starting down the stairs at a tripping gait. He may have been trying to pull himself together, but he looked frayed. Karnilla let the spell die on her fingers, the light extinguished, before she stepped out from behind the Mirror and started down the opposite side of the stairs after Odin.

  “Continue with the feast,” Odin instructed the captain standing in salute at the base of the stairs. “I’ll return shortly.” He paused, and his eye swiveled, first to Thor, then to Loki, the gaze heavy and meaningful in a way that made Loki’s skin crawl. Whatever vision his father had seen, Loki was suddenly certain in a way he couldn’t explain that they had been a part of it.

  Odin ran a hand over his beard, then flicked his fingers at Frigga, motioning for her to follow. “My queen.” Loki felt his mother’s hand leave his shoulder as she followed Odin from the hall, Karnilla and his sentries on his heels. The doors of the Great Hall banged behind him, and noise flooded back into the room, this time pitched and anxious.

  On either side of Loki, Amora and Thor were silent, staring after Odin. All thoughts of pink tiles that shifted colors beneath the feet of the court evaporated. Instead, Loki felt a cold pit settle in his stomach that he could not explain or banish.
He had never seen fear like that on his father’s face. If it even had been fear. That look had been so foreign it was impossible to recognize.

  “What happened?” Thor asked at last.

  “I think the question is,” Amora replied, “what did he see?”

  At the urging of the Einherjar captain whom Odin had flung leadership upon as he stumbled out, the feast was served in spite of the king’s absence. The musicians began to play again, now in a minor key—or perhaps that was Loki’s imagination. The energy in the hall had shifted into hushed whispers of speculation. Rumors were flying down the table before the first course had been cleared—Odin had seen his own death, he had seen Asgard surrender in battle, he had seen Ragnarok, the end of the world unfurling before him on that dark glass.

  “Is Father coming back?” Thor asked for the fifth time. He hadn’t touched his meal but was using a knife to hack his vegetables into precise squares.

  “When I find out, you’ll be the first one I tell,” Loki replied dryly.

  “I’m sure it’s taking him a while to devise a lie to cover up whatever it was he actually saw,” Amora remarked across from him.

  Thor glared at her. “Don’t speak ill of my father.”

  “Really? That’s your first concern?”

  “My father does not lie.”

  “To be clear, was it him who told you that little tiara looked pretty on you?”

  Thor’s hand flew reflexively to his circlet. “No. I chose it myself.”

  “Well, then.” Amora’s lips skimmed the rim of her goblet. “Perhaps his record is clean.”

  “He will not lie to his people,” Thor protested, thumbing the edge of his circlet. Loki could tell he was debating whether or not to remove it. “If what he saw concerns all of Asgard, he will tell the court.”

  “And everyone knows the first step to telling your assembled court something important is to flee the room in which they’re all assembled, waiting for you to speak.”

  Thor’s jaw set, and he turned his glare to Loki. “Do you always tolerate her speaking like this? It’s nearly treasonous.”

  “Aw.” Amora frowned in mock disappointment. “Only nearly?”

  Loki wanted to clap his hands over his ears and shut them both out. He couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his father’s face, his stumble down the stairs, the way he had surveyed his sons.

  “Loki,” Thor said again, and Loki couldn’t stand it a moment longer.

  He tossed his napkin onto the table and pushed his chair back. “I need some air.”

  Amora stood. “I’ll come with you.”

  “I need some air alone,” he said, and she froze, half standing. It may have been the first time he had denied her anything.

  Loki slipped unnoticed from the hall using the servants’ entrance he and Thor had discovered as children, hidden behind a tapestry of Valkyries extending their hands to the Asgardian warriors they were shepherding off the battlefield to Valhalla. Both the long-necked Valkyries and the broad-shouldered warriors had been the source of rather critical stirrings in his youth, but tonight Loki ignored the images as he ducked behind the tapestry and down the passageway it hid.

  Amora had taught him more magic in the months she’d been at court than he had learned in his entire lifetime. Part of her tutelage had been lessons in what she knew about using magic to shift his form. He was still learning to mimic the finer details of Asgardian features, but this disguise did not need to be precise to be effective. The uniform of the kitchen staff would be the most critical thing to get correct, and as soon as he had the dress on his form, made in imitation of two kitchen girls who scuttled by him with their eyes downcast, his body shifted to fit it. He snagged a tray of empty goblets from a table in the passageway and ran them hastily under a keg at the end of the hall.

  The form of a servant girl bringing the king and queen refreshment made him invisible in the hallways as he edged toward his father’s chambers. He was almost certain that’s where Odin would have fled with Karnilla and Frigga. Once he was in the room, the servant girl would likely go unnoticed enough to eavesdrop—certainly less noticed than a snake, which had been his initial plan, and which was easier to imitate than an Asgardian. But snakes tended to garner attention—Thor would pick up any serpent to admire it.

  Loki opened the door to his father’s chambers, only to find the staffs of the two Einherjar guarding the door crossed before him, barring his way. He pulled up short, nearly spilling his drinks in surprise. Behind the Einherjar, Loki could see his father perched on a couch in the antechamber, his back to the door, Frigga at his side. “Leave us!” he barked without turning around.

  “I was sent from the kitchens, Your Majesty,” Loki said, trying to pitch his voice into something girlish. His vocals still needed work. “To bring you refreshment.”

  “We require nothing from the kitchen,” Odin snapped.

  Frigga glanced over her shoulder at Loki, and he felt his face heat, though if she recognized her son, she gave no indication. “Return to the feast,” she said gently. “You’ll be summoned if we require anything.”

  Loki bowed, the long, loose tresses that all the servant girls wore immediately falling over his shoulder and dunking into the goblets he had brought. “I’ll just leave them.”

  He could feel the eyes of the two Einherjar sentries as he slid the tray onto a table beside the door, metal scraping metal with a cringing shriek that somehow made the silence that had fallen the moment he entered even more apparent.

  Loki offered the guards a shy smile, then, as though he had just noticed, said, “Oh, I brought too many.”

  As he reached for the fourth glass, he cast the spell. He had never been especially proficient at two-way communication charms, though he had read they came in many varieties. The only version he knew was the one he had devised when he was young—he used a charm to connect a pot of rouge on his mother’s dressing table to an inkwell in his own chambers so that he could listen to her discuss the gifts she’d be giving for that year’s Solstice. For some reason he could no longer recall, it had felt absolutely essential to know what she was giving him. The spell had unraveled quickly, partly because he still had a tenuous grip on his own power, and because his and Frigga’s chambers were on opposite sides of the castle, and any spell was hard to sustain over a distance. And partly because the spell ran both ways, and Frigga had noticed the talking rouge pot right away.

  But now he had a slightly less tenuous grip on his own magic, and when his fingers met the stem of the goblet, he felt the spell stick. It felt so good to feel a spell land that way, like the teeth of two gears locking together and moving each other. From the couch, he thought he saw his mother stiffen, like she had felt the prickle in the air, but before she could turn, he picked up the fourth goblet, dipped a quick curtsey to the Einherjar, then fled the room.

  As soon as the door shut behind him, he ducked around the corner. He chugged the contents of the goblet—it made him light-headed, but he was determined to empty it as quickly as possible—before pressing it to his ear. It took a moment—the speech crackled, dipping in and out. The mug he had enchanted to connect to was still full, so it sounded as if he were underwater, listening to someone above the surface. He could barely make out his mother’s words: “You don’t know that.”

  “I saw him,” he heard Odin reply. “Leading an army.”

  “That does not mean Ragnarok.”

  “Then what does it mean? What other cause—?”

  Someone grabbed Loki’s shoulder and he nearly dropped the goblet. He whipped around, the hilt of the dagger he kept up his sleeve sliding into his free hand.

  Thor was standing behind him, arms crossed. “What are you doing?”

  Loki, still in the servant girl’s form, bowed, attempting to subtly tuck the knife into the folds of his skirt. “Apologies, my lord, I was simply bringing the king—”

  “You can cease with the theatrics, brother,” Thor interrupted. “I know
it’s you.”

  “Brother?” Loki repeated, letting his bow sink so low he could have licked the floor. “What brother is this that you speak of?”

  Thor grabbed him around the wrist and held up his hand in between them, still clutching the knife. Loki scowled, then let the disguise drop. He pressed the goblet against his side, muffling any of their conversation that might leak through into his father’s chambers.

  “Are you spying?” Thor demanded.

  “Doesn’t spying imply some sort of visual component?”

  “Then you’re dropping eaves.”

  “Yes, that sounds much more refined.” When Thor continued to glare at him, Loki sighed. “I want to know what Father saw.”

  “If it is our concern, he will enlighten us in time.”

  “If it’s our concern, I’m almost certain he won’t. You saw his face. The way he fled. He was expecting to see a threat to Asgard in that Mirror—what must it have been to rattle him like that?” Thor bit his lip, glancing down at the goblet. “I don’t want to hear the rosy version he will present to the court. I want the truth.”

  “I trust he will give it to us,” Thor replied.

  “Fine. I hope your trust keeps you warm.” He twisted his wrist out of Thor’s grasp, pulling down his sleeve to cover the red streaks even his brother’s mild grip had left on his pale skin, and started to lift the goblet to his ear, but Thor tugged at the back of his tunic.

  “Loki. Don’t.”

  “If you don’t want to stay, begone,” Loki replied, wiggling his fingers at Thor like he was flicking a piece of dust from his lapel. “No one’s forcing you to stoop so low as dropping eaves.”

  He pressed the goblet to his ear, but before he could catch the conversation again, Thor leaned next to him, pulling the goblet so that it cupped both of their ears. Loki resisted a smirk. They pressed their foreheads together, straining to hear, and Loki thought how ridiculous they would look to anyone who happened to pass this way, the two Asgardian princes, huddled and intent over an empty feast goblet.