Something Strange
Loki was almost sure he knew exactly when it started.
Two weeks ago, the warriors that guarded one of Asgard’s more remote outposts had been rotated back, changing places with the company that went in relief. He remembered the sight, the ranks striding back along the rainbow bridge, shields gleaming in their hands, helms gleaming on their heads. He remembered clearly because he and Thor were there, watching. He and Thor and the little group of Thor’s friends, all of them lined up along the parapet that overlooked it, elbows perched as they gazed and chattered amongst themselves, with Thor imagining one day being the one to order Asgard’s armies here and there, and the rest envisioning themselves as his most decorated and renowned generals.
Loki had merely been watching, staring down at the marching figures in their orderly rows.
Their post was not a perilous one. Asgard was at peace. That was good, of course, and there was nothing about the marching ranks that gave any other indication.
But something had seemed strange to him even then, though he had not been able to put his finger on what. None of the warriors were wounded, as far as he could see. There were songs and shouts of homecoming, but…
Loki had glanced aside at his brother, wondering whether he had noticed whatever it was.
“It will be glorious, one day, when I am king!” Thor was telling the rest, his chest puffed out in pride.
Loki’s eyes rolled.
He hadn’t thought much more about it at the time. But a few days afterward, as he lay abed with blankets pulled up to his chin, he had found himself unsettled, his mind casting about, his body full of jitters. He could not lie still, and the shadows of the bedchamber squirmed.
“Was there something strange about Heimdall today?” Loki whispered to his brother, knowing by the sounds of his breathing that he was not asleep yet either.
That day, they had gone—the whole pack of them, as usual—out to the observatory, in search of new and interesting tales. It was one of their more standard amusements, no matter how little Loki liked it. The rest of them always did, asking Heimdall of what he saw all around the realms and then listening in fascination.
Today ought to have seemed no different. Heimdall had allowed them in and had answered their queries, gazing at the circle of youngsters as he gave them the tidings they craved.
But something about it had made Loki feel… unsettled. Golden eyes had stared through him, empty of feeling, as if barely acknowledging his presence.
Usually, it was not so. The whole reason Loki dreaded those particular visits was that he always felt somehow unwelcome. Heimdall never openly shunned him, but Loki was sure he felt it, some special reproof the bridge’s guardian reserved for him in brief glances, for no reason he had ever been able to discern.
Now, there was simply nothing.
Loki heard the rustle of bedclothes as Thor rolled toward him. “What do you mean?” Thor answered across the dark space.
Loki frowned. He’d long since given up on complaining to Thor that Heimdall didn’t like him. (“What?” Thor always answered. “Of course he does! Why would he not like you? He likes me, and you’re my brother. He has to like you.” It was a line of reasoning that Loki had not been able to refute, only huffing a frustrated sigh and trying to wheedle Thor into agreeing to go anywhere else but the Bifrost observatory that day in their adventures.)
“I don’t know,” Loki said at last. “He didn’t seem like Heimdall.”
Thor muffled a laugh. “What do you mean? Who else would he be?”
Loki’s frown deepened. There was nothing specific he could point to. It was simply a feeling. “I don’t know. He just seemed different. I don’t know.”
The shadows on the ceiling swayed and shivered. Loki rolled onto his side and smooshed his pillow into a more comfortable lump, and he blinked a few times as he gazed across the darkened room, just able to make out the comforting sight of Thor’s outline.
Thor had not answered with more than a faint hum, waiting for him to continue.
“I don’t know,” Loki murmured again. “I guess it’s probably nothing.”
“Mm,” Thor yawned. “Either way, we should try to sleep. It will look better in daylight.”
Loki bit his lip and sighed. “Yes, you’re right. Good night, Thor.”
“G’night, brother.”
Daylight had not banished the feeling, though. Instead, Loki had begun to notice more and more.
There was a guard often stationed in the hallway outside the young princes’ shared chambers, and it was Loki’s habit to tease him.
He was a young guard, only a few centuries older. Loki couldn’t quite remember how it had started, except that there had been a time when everything in Loki’s life had seemed terrible, and he had been terrible in response. Almost everyone had angered him no matter what they did, and though he did not dare ever voice that anger to his parents or his father’s court or his tutors or the countless warriors around the palace, it was the servants’ job to endure him, and he had taken advantage of that fact. In most cases, their faces purpled with the silence of bitten-back contempt, or their teeth clenched as they answered in mock deference, and Loki ended up only feeling worse, more stifled, more alone.
The guard near their door, though, had ignored Loki’s insults, answering his wordplay with a careless shrug.
It had startled Loki enough that he merely tried to best the guard’s repartee. Now, each time he saw the man, he had a volley ready, though they hardly ever spoke more words to each other than those brief jests. It was certainly not a friendship of any sort; their stations were too different. It was just a few amiable words here and there.
That day, though, the guard did not answer his usual opening quip with one of his own but only gazed back at Loki, brows drawn together slightly.
Loki let out a sharp laugh. “What, is your mind slow today, Ivar?”
Ivar’s grip shifted on the golden shaft of his spear, fingers twitching. His eyes were blank beneath the rim of his helm. “Milord?”
“Are you unwell?” Loki asked.
“Nay.”
Loki frowned at this terse reply, and he would have stopped to question the guard further if he had not been already late. As it was he muttered an awkward parting, turned, and rushed off in the direction his brother had gone some minutes before.
The strangeness of the interaction did not really strike him until later.
Some years before, their parents had suggested that it was time for them to no longer share a bedchamber.
Certainly there was no need for them to sleep in the same room. There were plenty vacant on their hallway; they would still be near enough to see each other whenever they wanted. But Thor was reaching an age where he might rightly wish for space away from his younger sibling.
Loki had at once looked to Thor’s face after their parents said it.
But Thor merely shook his head, as if it were the simplest and most obvious answer in all the realms. “Why would I want that?” he said. “Loki and I like doing everything together.”
And that, at Thor’s will, had been the end of the discussion.
To Loki’s mind, it certainly made sense. They had rarely been apart all their lives, as long as he could remember, and why should that change? From practically as soon as he could walk—certainly far too young for some of the trouble they had gotten into but he did not care—he had been dragged along at Thor’s side in play, wherever Thor went and no matter what anyone else thought. There had been a few years when he was too small to join Thor in training on the practice yard, but he had been content to watch, and soon enough the training masters had let him begin, even if his early attempts at mimicking his elder brother’s skill left much to be desired (and had never quite caught up). And at their studies, despite the difference in their ages, Loki had quickly raced ahead so that their tutors could more or less teach them both at once.
Thus it was that Loki was darting through the hallways, trying to catch up to Thor and managed it—barely—skidding up to his side just as he reached the door of the room where their morning lessons were held.
Thor cuffed him playfully on the shoulder, and Loki pushed him in response, and it swiftly turned into a bout of roughhousing that lasted until they were both decidedly late.
Of course, there was nothing new about that, and usually the greybeard who taught them about the old sagas and laws, about the histories of the realms and the motions of the stars, would have already been out in the hallway to glare them into submission and scold them for their lack of discipline.
That morning, though, Loki, out of breath from laughter and exertion, poked his head around the edge of the door, wondering if perhaps the tutor was late as well.
Instead, the man sat where he always sat at the tall stool overlooking the pupils’ table, and he glanced at Loki neutrally and did not take his gaze off him until they had both filed dutifully inside.
“Are you ready to begin?” the tutor asked as they took their seats.
It was Thor who nodded. “My apologies for our tardiness,” he offered.
The old tutor barely reacted to that either, just a brief nod, which was… strange. Most days, the man greeted them both with a sour look: Thor for his propensity for dozing off or gazing longingly out at the sunlit practice yards when he was supposed to be listening, Loki for answering the questions put to him as insolently and flippantly as he could while still being correct.
Today, he simply began the lesson, droning his way into a lecture on the trade exports of various regions of Vanaheim.
Loki listened, partly trying to come up with infuriating responses to the questions the tutor was likely to ask, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was distracted. First Heimdall, then Ivar, now…
The notes on Loki’s tablet trailed off into doodles. For once he was the one gazing out the window.
The people on the walkways far below looked tiny from where he sat. It was the cliché to think that they resembled ants, wasn’t it? But Loki found himself frowning. They resembled ants only if ants kept all the same pace, steady and even and orderly, even as they went on their own countless paths.
Had they always seemed so?
He was so caught up in watching them that he did not notice when the room fell silent. He did not notice until an unsettled feeling came over him, and he turned his gaze back to the front of the room.
When he did, he gasped.
The tutor stood over him, staring down, uncomfortably close. His face was blank, and as Loki stared the tutor turned his head to glance over at Thor—Thor whose eyelids had slipped closed.
Usually that would be the moment when the tutor would give a loud clap of his hands or a bark of reproach to wake the napping prince.
This time, his eyes returned to Loki and his hand lifted, outstretched—
“Thor!” Loki yelped, pushing his chair back so violently that the legs screamed on the slate floor, and from one noise or the other Thor’s eyes flew open.
“What was the question?” Thor blurted in confusion.
The tutor continued to gaze down at Loki for a moment, and then stepped away as if nothing had transpired.
“The question was which of Vanaheim’s export crops suffered a catastrophic blight during the final decade of Bor’s…”
Loki barely heard the words and certainly could not focus on them. His heart was pounding, palms clammy with sweat, whole body juddering.
When they were finally excused from their lesson an hour later, he pulled Thor along the corridor as fast as his legs would take him, until they were alone, away from everyone else, and he tried to explain to Thor what had happened.
“When he saw you’d fallen asleep he didn’t try to wake you, he reached for me!” Loki said.
Thor frowned. “Are you sure? That doesn’t make sense.”
“That is exactly what I mean!” Loki hissed.
“Well,” Thor mused, cracking a grin, “even if we’ve somehow pushed him past his breaking point, he wouldn’t dare do you any real harm. Father would have him in the dungeons, greybeard or not.”
Loki scowled. “It’s not funny, Thor. Don’t you think any of that was peculiar? It wasn’t like him. It’s the same as with Heimdall. Something strange is going on.”
Thor thought about this, but it ended with a shrug. “He did seem a little distracted today. But he’s an old man, so he’s probably going to be strange sometimes. And anyway, what can we do about it?”
Loki didn’t try to argue any more just then, instead giving a sighing nod.
But the uneasiness lingered at the back of his mind for the rest of that day and into the next.
He knew he wasn’t imagining it. Something strange was happening.
The next afternoon, the whole group of Thor’s friends was abuzz when he and Thor arrived, so deep in animated discussion that the princes’ approach was barely noticed.
“I’ve seen something too!” Bragi cried in the middle of the huddle.
Bragi was one of the younger ones, barely older than Loki, and only recently admitted into their ranks. He was still trying to prove himself, and he was wide-eyed and red-faced with bluster as he spoke. “My neighbor was just married last week, and today two of her brothers-in-law brought these big casks to their door early in the morning, before the sun was up. I’d not have seen them if I hadn’t gotten up to use the privy!”
Volstagg cuffed the younger lad on the shoulder. “That’s not strange. That’s just wedding presents. ”
Bragi frowned and rubbed at his arm. “Who brings wedding presents before dawn, three days after the wedding?”
This elicited a round of titters and guffaws from the rest.
“Don’t you know anything about weddings, Bragi?” Fandral piped up, his grin spread wide on his face. “They clearly needed more mead for their honeymoon!”
Bragi’s cheeks grew redder as the others laughed. “Still. It was strange. I think it was strange.”
It should have been gratifying, Loki thought. He wasn’t the only one to notice.
The chatter around the huddle continued; most of them, it seemed, had spotted something unusual, someone behaving oddly in the last few days, but no one could agree on exactly which times counted in that number or what it all meant.
“That isn’t so strange,” Sif insisted. “What was strange was the women I passed on the way to the training yards this morning. They didn’t say anything at all!”
The whole group, of course, knew of that long-running feud, the court ladies who disapproved of Sif being allowed to train with the boys and told her so at every opportunity.
Bragi, evidently still smarting from having his story dismissed, just shrugged. “Not saying anything isn’t proof of much.”
“If you knew them, you’d know that it is!”
“Or maybe they just didn’t notice you. It could mean anything, or nothing!”
All the while, Thor and Loki had been hovering at the edge of the circle, and Thor chose that moment to speak up.
“Loki and I saw something strange as well,” he said, and instantly all the little group’s attention was on him.
Loki squirmed a little.
“It was our tutor. We were in the middle of a lesson and I’d…” Thor’s voice trailed off, hesitating, eyes flickering briefly to where Loki hunched beside him. “I’d gotten distracted, and usually our tutor would have me reciting lines for that, but instead he…”
“What did he do?” Hogun interrupted, frowning.
“He’d been acting a little peculiar the whole lesson, really. And when I got distracted he reached out like he was about to clobber me, but then when I noticed him, he didn’t. And then he acted like nothing had happened at all.”
The group took this in, glancing back and forth between the brothers.
“If not being punished is strange, I’m in favor of all this strangeness, personally,” Fandral said with a grin and a shrug.
Loki said nothing.
It wasn’t that there was anything new about Thor lying like that, changing the tale just enough that it seemed to be coming from him rather than his little brother. It wasn’t Thor taking the glory, exactly, or the blame.
Thor always insisted that none of the things Loki remembered his friends doing had happened. At least not the way he said. Yet Thor now put himself between them whenever he could.
Loki was sure it had happened. He remembered it. Years and years ago, following Thor’s friends out of the palace at the promise of—what had they offered? That part was a blur. To let him be part of their group without complaint, maybe, or perhaps they just told him that Thor was waiting and they would lead Loki to him.
Loki had followed eagerly along, even when the kids began to climb up the side of one of the stables, wedging his fingers and toes into the cracks between plank and stone and shinnying up after them.
Only, they had then gone running across rooftops and leaping between them, and the gap he had to cross to follow seemed so vast. The air beneath dark in shadow. A space between two buildings, not dropping all the way to an alley but instead angling into a hidden crevice, barely a gutter for rain, debris-strewn and forgotten.
Loki didn’t remember jumping, or deciding to. He only remembered the fall, how it happened too fast for him to even scream, and then the smack as he landed, which knocked all thoughts away.
His leg had been broken, bone through skin. His ears had been ringing. Eyes dazed, the slit of blue sky and the sudden appearance of dark heads silhouetted against it, high above. The sound of whispering.
How much trouble they would be in. Their mothers and fathers would kill them for getting the younger prince hurt. They couldn’t tell.
Loki tried to call out to them, to plead for help, but the pain and shock made his voice weak and shaky.
They couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Maybe, if they just left, no one would ever find out.
One by one, the dark heads disappeared, and he had tried to push himself up, palms scratched and scraped by twigs and dead leaves, gritty dirt rough against his skin, but he was dizzy from pain and sprawled back down again, panting, chest tight, tears dripping down his temples. He began to feel terribly cold, staring up at the brightness of the sky.
Thor insisted it hadn’t happened like that when Loki mentioned it years later.
“They came to find me as soon as you fell. They weren’t leaving you there.”
And of course Loki couldn’t deny that it probably hadn’t actually been more than a few minutes until help came, even if it had felt like forever.
He hadn’t bothered to suggest that it never would have happened in the first place if they hadn’t intended for him to fall. He already knew Thor would insist it was only an accident, and that his friends would never have done such a thing on purpose.
But still, Thor was the one speaking for both of them now, so that Loki would not be confronted with his friends’ questioning.
He was grateful for it. And at the same time his body hummed with nervous tension that he could not explain. It should have been gratifying to find them all discussing exactly the same thing Loki had been noticing for days.
That wasn’t what he felt at all.
“If you are right, what do we do?”
It was Hogun who said it, a quiet but insistent query.
Thor looked around at all his friends as they mulled the question, not wanting to put in his opinion until they’d had their say.
Volstagg was the first to answer. “Well, we can’t really decide what to do until we have some idea what’s actually happening. It’s all well and good to say ‘something strange,’ but that gives us no hint how to stop it, or if it even needs to be stopped.”
“And how do you propose we find out what’s happening?” Fandral replied. “Unless you plan to go ask Thor’s tutor or Sif’s court ladies why they’re behaving oddly all of a sudden!”
Sif snorted.
“Shouldn’t we just… tell someone?” Bragi’s hesitant voice piped up.
“Bragi, even we don’t think much of your story,” Sif said. “Who are we going to tell that would take all of this seriously if they haven’t spotted something themselves? At the very least, we’d need to find some actual evidence first.”
The silence of uncertainty stretched until Thor could wait no longer.
“There is one thing that’s obvious from what we’ve all seen,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s not happening to just one or two people in one spot. It must be something happening all over the city. So maybe we can find out more if we simply find someone behaving oddly and follow them.”
“Follow them?” Bragi repeated, horrified.
The others looked dubious as well.
Thor felt himself digging in his heels. He grinned. “Of course. Don’t you want to be there when we triumph over whatever it is and bring my father back the news that we’ve saved the realm from a peril no one else even knew about?”
The frowns and dubious looks wavered.
“It won’t even be dangerous, I bet,” he added. “We surely handled worse on our last camping trip. All we’ll be doing is investigating whatever we find around the city, and if it does turn out to be something too big for us to handle, we’ll go and tell the Allfather, obviously. But just imagine if we can thwart it!”
It felt like a warm glow in Thor’s chest when their eyes all began to gleam instead with the suggestion, and when they began to chatter amongst themselves with ideas, preparing for the endeavor.
He grabbed firm hold of Loki’s hand when they all set off.
Thor hated not knowing what to do. It was maybe his least favorite feeling. He was supposed to know what to do. His father had made that clear to him all his life: he was born to be a leader, and a leader could not afford to ever be uncertain.
But it wasn’t just that. He needed to know what to do because he was responsible for those around him. And most particularly, he was responsible for looking after his little brother.
That wasn’t so difficult these days; Loki could mostly take care of himself now, at least in practical matters. But once it had taken all of Thor’s devotion.
His earliest memories of Loki’s arrival in his life were a tangle and he still couldn’t entirely sort out how it all actually happened, but in his memories, it had been sudden; his parents hadn’t explained anything to him beforehand or told him he was to become an older brother. There was just his father collecting him from the nursery, taking his hand, and leading him to the adjacent room where a small bundle lay in a crib that had once been his.
“This is your brother. I have named him Loki,” Odin had explained while Thor studied the tiny figure swaddled tight. “It is an elder brother’s duty to protect the younger. Will you do that for me, Thor?”
Thor had promised he would, and he had taken the promise seriously. So much so that he remembered growing upset over how often Loki had to be whisked away over the months that followed, kept from him by the constant stream of wetnurses and others.
He barely remembered seeing their parents at all in those days. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed, enthralled as he was with the task of looking after his brother, whispering to him of how much fun they would have when Loki was big enough to come out to play in the gardens at his side.
The dilemmas he hadn’t known how to solve came later.
He hated not knowing what to do.
It always felt better, even when he wasn’t certain, to simply decide on what seemed like a sensible course of action and take it. Better still was convincing those around him to follow—he was born to be a leader, after all.
And that afternoon, he led the group as they crept, surreptitious, out of their usual meeting spot in the palace gardens, heading toward the city market. He had decided on that as their destination, as it seemed like somewhere they could observe a lot of people at once without calling much attention to their own presence.
Of course, they had no hope of going entirely unnoticed, no matter what they did. No matter what route he chose, they would inevitably cross paths with at least a handful of guards who could not fail to recognize their young princes. For that matter, the whole gang of kids—the prince and his chosen companions—were well known among the populace. On countless occasions they had been greeted with a wave or a wink or an indulgent glance as they roved the city’s walkways in their adventures, or at worst by impatient reprimands when someone remembered them mainly for their wilder antics.
Thor hoped that meant that everyone would be used to them skulking around at play and would not realize that anything was different about this particular expedition.
As they went along, though, more and more pairs of eyes began to track their progress, silently, and Thor felt his hands clenching unconsciously. His grip tightening around his brother’s fingers. He glanced briefly at Loki’s face, the slightest wrinkle in Loki’s brow as he tried not to react to their situation.
Thor hadn’t wanted to really consider the possibility. Not that he hadn’t believed that there might be something unusual going on around them. Not that he hadn’t believed Loki’s words, or his friends’ speculations.
It’s just that he didn’t know what to do about it if it was true.
It was easier to just hope that they would go on their expedition, perhaps make nuisances of themselves in some new and interesting way, and eventually turn up some clue that something strange was merely something they had misunderstood.
But now for the first time he felt it himself.
Faces appeared at dark windows to watch them pass, without so much as a twitch of a lip. No one called out greetings. Passersby glanced at them without recognition. They seemed both ignored and scrutinized.
“They’re watching us,” Loki whispered, almost too quiet to be heard.
“I know,” Thor murmured in response.
“They’ve all turned strange,” Loki said, voice even more strained and thin.
Thor squeezed his hand and felt Loki press closer to his side.
They couldn’t all really have been affected by whatever was causing this, surely? He was only noticing the ones that were. Or perhaps there were particularly many in this neighborhood.
A leader could not show uncertainty.
Anyway, if there were so many, it would not prove difficult to find something, some evidence to tell them what was happening. Or something they could bring back to the palace to show the Allfather as proof that they were not imagining this.
Thor gathered the group into a huddle again when they reached the little grassy lawn adjacent to the market.
“Does anyone see anything? We need to find out what’s causing this. Everyone, keep a look out!”
Usually such an exhortation would have his friends setting out to be the first to find whatever they were seeking. This time, they all hovered there in a tight cluster, peering around, breathing nervous air.
People passed by them all around. People went about their business in the nearby market. The sky above was a lovely blue scattered with wisps of cloud, and the wind was hushed so that it did not even stir their hair.
Loki beside him squinted toward a particular alleyway on the other side of the market, gaze fixed upon it.
“Where are they all going?” he whispered.
“Hm?” Thor peered the same way, trying to see what he saw, but it merely looked like an ordinary walkway, people moving this way and that.
The others turned to look as well.
Thor gazed so long that he was about to grow impatient, his eyes losing their focus.
And only then could he see it.
Each going about their individual business by their own route, still the crowd moved with a peculiar order. They moved like water in a stream, a smooth measured tread that was all the same, and like water in a stream the preponderance of them flowed on a shared pathway. Just visible beside the building’s own shadow, in the mouth of the alley, the back bay door of some shop hung wide open, and people moved in and out, busy. The ones leaving mostly carried some jug or bottle with them, or else the sack slung over their shoulder hung heavy with weight.
The ones entering brought boxes and cartons, sometimes, or empty containers of glass. Carts, too, arrived to load and unload, weaving in among all the foot traffic.
Thor frowned, squinting at the dark wall, trying to spot some sign or marker. “What is that? What are they doing?” he asked, tossing a glance back toward the huddle of his friends.
“I know that place,” Volstagg offered. “It’s a vintner’s. My uncle goes there often. He says it’s very good.”
Fandral peered with them. “Looks like they are certainly doing brisk business today. Perhaps there’s some festival?”
In the pit of his stomach, Thor could not make himself believe that. He watched the way the people moved, and he felt the fine hairs rising on his arms, on the back of his neck.
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard about any festival.”
“See, I told you!” Bragi said, harsh and triumphant. “It was strange!”
“Well,” said Sif, “I guess we should go and get a closer look, shouldn’t we? I mean, that was supposed to be the point of all this.”
No one moved. Thor tried to tell himself that maybe if they did, the fear that gripped his insides would dissipate. Taking some sort of action had to be better than simply standing there staring, letting the whole group grow more and more unsettled.
“You can go first,” Fandral whispered to Sif instead, wry. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Sif’s mouth twisted. “Draw straws?”
If anyone was to go first, Thor knew, it ought to be him. But he was also aware of the feeling of Loki’s hand in his—Loki’s skin had gone clammy, his fingers stiff in Thor’s grip—and for the first time the weight of that responsibility made it impossible for him to step forward.
The silence that ensued was broken by Hogun’s low grumble. “I have an idea. Follow me.”
And since he at once stalked off in a direction that was not toward the dark alleyway and its steady stream of people, everyone did.
Hogun led them instead on a roundabout path, weaving into the lanes full of smaller residences that spread out past the market, ducking between hedges and slinking along beside low stone walls, and finally bringing them around to the opposite side of the same building that housed the vintner’s shop.
Oddly, it was much less crowded here. Practically empty, in fact. The shop’s sign hanging over its front entryway swayed on its chains, and the sunlight—now a coppery color as the dusk drew nearer—glinted on broad panes of the glass displays, various bottles and ornaments visible like half-seen specters within.
As the group crouched across the lane from the shop, peeking out from behind an ornate fountain, the door did not swing open once.
But Thor began to notice other things. The steady sound of the fountain made him realize it, in fact—there was a trail of fluid seeping from under the shop’s door, as if someone had broken a bottle and the spill had gone unnoticed. The trickle flowed down across the walkway and into the gutter, down the angle of the lane, making a dark, wet strand that disappeared at last into a drain not far from where they hid.
Thor also noticed the odor that hung in the air. Of course, it was not strange to catch a whiff of wine or mead near a vintner’s shop. But this was a smell he did not quite recognize. Cloyingly sweet, but at the same time it made him want to gag.
They needed to get one of those bottles. Then they could find out what it was. They could prove that something was wrong, and maybe they could stop it and save everyone from whatever was in that wine.
Thor didn’t want to even touch one of them, and by the looks on his friends’ faces, they all felt the same.
And just then the horn rang out, its sound carried all over the city in echoes, the familiar music of the evening call.
Shoulders fell in sighs all around their group, and a spell seemed to break.
“I have to go home now,” Bragi admitted. “My mother and father will be expecting me.”
The others murmured the same. Taking it upon themselves to investigate strange happenings around the city was one thing; disobeying their parents and breaking curfew was quite another.
So without any further discussion, merely agreeing to meet again in the morning to continue where they left off, they turned and headed back as a group, one or two peeling away here and there as they neared their own houses.
And then at last it was just Thor and Loki approaching the palace alone.