Chapter 7
Heimdall looked worried, more so than he usually allowed his stoic face to show.
“He speaks to his master again. I cannot understand what they discuss. His eye is bluer than ever…”
Frigga shivered. She pulled her furs closely about herself and placed another block of flammable stone onto the fire. Their cave was habitable enough, but she had never intended it to be a place to stay for so long. But Odin, it seemed had given up chasing them. He had followed their trail as far as the vaults of Asgard and then stopped.
They had been waiting in this abandoned cave on an abandoned world for days now, and all Odin had done during that time was to prowl around his throne room, growling, and occasionally bellowing with rage. Frigga had thought that perhaps he was throwing off his enthrallment, but it appeared in the end that his efforts had only entangled him further in it.
“Tell me what he says,” she whispered.
Heimdall spoke in the stiff tones that meant he was relaying someone else’s words. “Yes, of course, of course, my master. It is clever, it cannot fail. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. I have been so confused. But all is clear now, there is only your will, your vision. Yes, I am sure it will work, it has always worked before. Ah!” Heimdall glanced at her, “He winces, he holds his head…”
They waited in silence for Odin’s master to stop tormenting him.
“He speaks again,” Heimdall murmured at last. “I know, I know, you are wise, Mighty Titan. I know I am watched. I will be more careful, I do apologize.”
Heimdall jerked, “There is a great pounding at the throne room doors.”
“Who is without?” Frigga asked, sitting up straighter.
Heimdall visibly changed his focus, and then sucked in a breath. “It is your brother Freyr with a body of elvish mages and warriors.”
“Oh!” cried Frigga, pulling her furs tight about her shoulders, “Freyr-brother, beware! Oh, he cannot hope to prevail!”
Over the centuries, Odin had allowed Frigga less and less communication with her first-family, so that she had neither spoken to nor seen Freyr since Thor was born, when she had been permitted to receive gifts from him at a formal event in front of thousands of watching eyes, including Odin’s.
She could scarcely remember the sweet intimacy that she and Freyr had once shared, when they were but children, promised to each other in a twin-marriage like their parents’. Odin had later told her that that Vanir custom was obscene and that he had rescued her from it. She had tried to explain to him that what might be obscene for peasants, with their chaotic, uncharted bloodlines, was perfectly safe, indeed desirable, for members of the royal family whose blood had been painstakingly cleansed of all flaws over the millennia. As was so often the case, Odin had simply informed her that she didn’t understand, that he knew things she didn’t know, and that she should trust his judgement.
She didn’t remember any obscenity in the tender love-dandlings between herself and her brave, clever, laughing brother. She remembered only a closeness, a unity with another that she wouldn’t know again until she was a mother, reading Thor’s wants from the tiniest tilt of an eyebrow or shifting of weight, long before he could speak. She and Freyr, too, had been able to communicate without words, sometimes over long distances. She told him now, with the tensing of her body, to be careful, to be strong, to be ready to flee if the fight turned against him.
“Tell me,” she begged Heimdall, “Oh, tell me.”
“The doors crack, they break. Freyr and his mages lead the attack-”
He stopped suddenly, his face rigid.
“Heimdall!” Frigga commanded, “Tell me!”
Heimdall’s voice had fallen to a whisper when he replied. “He turns the scepter’s magic upon them. Your brother and his mages are now embattled with their own warriors. Odin…laughs.” Heimdall closed his eyes, but Frigga knew that that did nothing to block out his sight. “They fight bravely….They die bravely.”
Frigga was silent, watching the pain and struggle on Heimdall’s face. Finally he hung his head, as if in defeat.
“And Freyr…?” she dared to ask, almost inaudibly.
Heimdall pulled himself back together, and met her eyes. “Wounded,” he said, “But he lives. A thrall.”
Frigga and Heimdall sat before the fire, their arms tight around each other under the furs, mourning, for hours.
Quietly, Heimdall would tell her something every now and then, but Frigga was almost beyond listening. They had personally known many of the greatest warriors of Alfheim, and Heimdall listed the dead sporadically, as he was able to see and identify the bodies. The deathtoll was in the hundreds, and still growing as the enthralled elven mages spread out through the palace to put down any last flickers of resistance. Freyr stayed in the throne room with Odin, still bleeding but apparently receiving silent instructions.
After all her store of tears had been wept, and her voice was hoarse with sobs, Frigga murmured her greatest fear to Heimdall.
“How can my sons hope to defeat Odin, when such a force could not? How can they possibly stand against the Mind Stone when Freyr and Odin himself could not? What have I done? What have I done, in setting them on him?” She buried her sore and reddened eyes against Heimdall’s shoulder and simply shook, too exhausted to weep.
More time passed, and Frigga fell into a fretful doze, sitting up.
She was woken by Heimdall’s voice, quiet and cautious, as if unsure whether he should speak.
“My queen…he speaks. He…chants. It is a spell I have seen him perform before. He is gathering dark energy. He prepares to travel to one of the Nine.”
Frigga bolted upright and staggered to her feet. She whirled in place, seeking a way out of this crisis, but there was none. She panted, crazed with panic, “He goes to them - he goes to my sons - he goes to kill my sons - I cannot let him - I cannot-” She understood Odin’s words now, the ones for which his master had rebuked him. It has always worked before, he’d said. Threatening Loki. That was what he’d meant. Threatening her child had always brought her to obedience before.
She made to step towards the silver case, tucked into a dark corner, but Heimdall grabbed her wrist.
She stilled as if his touch had turned her to stone.
“Frigga. Queen.” He reminded her of her duty with the simple word. “If you go to where Odin is, he can capture you, and capturing you, he will have the Space Stone. Odin is the gate to the Titan. Right now you have the key, and you can keep that gate locked. The safety of the Nine Realms depends on you. If Thanos comes here, all brothers will be lost to all sisters, all sons will be lost to all mothers…”
She knew it, she knew it. She knew that the duty of a queen must outweigh even the love of a mother. Her breath wheezed and whistled through her tightening throat.
“I cannot, Heimdall – I cannot stand in safety and do nothing while he destroys my children, I cannot, I will be torn to shreds, I am ripping down the center even now, Norns save me!”
Heimdall’s grip was not tight. She could pull away from it, do what her mother’s heart told her was the only possible thing to do: protect her children with her life. But she knew. She knew that Thor and Loki would die just as surely, and much more horribly, if Thanos came.
She bent over and sobbed as if her entrails were being torn from her body with hot pinchers. She writhed in Heimdall’s grip. But she did not pull free.
When she fell to her knees and huddled into a ball, Heimdall wrapped his body around hers and held her.
“Is he there yet?” she asked, her voice ragged.
Heimdall shook his head against her shoulder. “He still chants. But soon.”
“Don’t tell me,” she ordered him, “Tell me nothing of what you see, even if I beg you to, promise me!”
“I cannot see them now, anyway,” he told her quietly.
Even through her terror, this statement eventually reached Frigga. “What?” she pulled back enough to see Heimdall’s face, “Why not?”
“Loki hid himself from my sight again as soon as he had enough magic to do it,” he told her, “And I do not know where Thor is.”
“What?” Frigga was startled out of her panic, “What can that mean?”
“I do not know, my queen,” he confessed, “I looked away for a time, and when I looked back, Thor was gone. I assume that Loki has hidden him from me too.” At her confused expression, Heimdall added, “He has done so before.”
“Can it be that they are also hidden from Odin?” she asked.
“I think it hardly matters,” Heimdall said reluctantly, “They will go to him, if he appears on Midgard and threatens innocent lives. They are princes, after all.”
Indeed they were. Princes and heroes. Frigga wondered if Valhalla would still exist after Thanos had finished his cleansing of the universes, and if she would be permitted to see her brave boys there, once they had all three fallen under the heavy burden of duty.
But now that she had calmed somewhat, she knew that she simply could not sit here and do nothing. That was an impossibility. She must try something, however desperate. If she could not go where Odin was, could she send another…?
Mimir had as good as told her, though, that no other could defeat Odin if her own two sons could not. Could they? On their own? Now? She had told them they had a month to prepare, but now Odin was on his way, and it had been only a week. Loki’s magic would not have had time to fully grow back, and even if and when it had, magic hadn’t helped Freyr and his mages against the Mind Stone at all…
Who could she send against Odin, who that would not be instantly turned into a thrall?
A thought came to her then, a shy tentative thought.
Would the Mind Stone work against something that had no mind?
She voiced the perhaps-foolish thought to Heimdall. “Have you ever seen the Mind Stone used on something that has no mind?”
He looked at her keenly. “I have seen it used only on persons.”
“Never on an automaton?” she asked, and then remembered that the Destroyer had been destroyed, “Never on a beast?”
“Nay, neither…” Heimdall said. “But what beast or automaton could stand a chance against Odin? And if such a one existed, how could you be sure that it would not also overcome Thor and Loki?”
Frigga pondered this. Battle tactics had never been her responsibility before. She found it impossible to grab ahold of the thousand slippery chances that each plan presented. She had no experiences that would help her to judge the likelihood of this leading to that, or that to this, in battle. She only knew that she must do something.
“Perhaps we need only provide a distraction,” she muttered, “Surely that would be better than nothing at all…Something that will distract Odin, but which Thor and Loki can escape…”
As if a paving stone had been flipped over in her mind, Frigga saw something. A memory. A story that Loki had once told, boasting of his exploits when he was very young, not even at his full height yet. Everyone had laughed at his puppyish bragging, and told him that a warrior exaggerates, but never lies. That, in fact, had been the first time he had been openly called a liar. She could picture now the look of offended confusion on his face. He had been driven nearly to tears of frustration defending his absurd story, and then she had seen the moment when he had crossed some internal line. He smiled in a new, bitter way. He admitted that the story was not true: but was it not an amusing lie?
Even Frigga had had difficulty believing him, for how could such an untried youth have overcome the creature that had bested so many of Asgard’s greatest heroes? She had asked Odin at the time, “Could his story not be true? He is, after all, Jotun,”, and Odin had smiled at her and said “Every mother wishes to believe her boy a hero.” She had not cared, really, whether his tale was true or not, she had cared only that he had returned alive from yet another of the quests that Odin had devised for him.
But perhaps that was a more telling fact than any; he had returned alive.