Journey
I was the last to wake the next morning, as servants brought in our breakfast at the usual time. I glanced at the couch I’d curled around, and was relieved to see that Loki had already hidden himself under an illusion of invisibility. The others were in their Aesir forms, gathered around the table where plates were being distributed and talking quietly. By now the attendants that had been assigned to our care were accustomed to seeing us in our native forms, and didn’t do more than glance in my direction as I raised my head and yawned.
I shifted into my Aesir guard form, clothed in my own illusion of armor, and padded over to the table, pouring myself a mug of steaming tea and smiling at the servants as they finished their work. A couple of them smiled back as they left, which I considered to be a minor diplomatic victory in its own right. As soon as the doors closed, Loki dropped his invisibility and joined us at the table.
“Scathsa has been excused from guard duty to work on the ansible,” Malalik said as we ate. Scathsa wriggled like a hatchling until e realized that we were smirking at eir, then flushed and was still. Malalik chuckled and shook her head. “The rest of us are officially on duty for the negotiations today,” she continued. “We can cover for one absent guard without raising questions—and if you had to choose one, we know who you’d pick,” she added, raising an eyebrow at me. I managed to keep my head up by an effort of will, but now it was my turn to feel a flush creeping across my face. “Sigyn should be able to handle removing your pattern lock with zir training, but it would probably be quicker and easier on your system to have Laharu and Daucus go along. Of course, we couldn’t cover for all of them without calling off the talks today.”
“Which would raise questions no matter what I said, especially after—the Queen’s speech last night,” Loki said. He sipped his tea, then shook his head. “I’d rather keep this as… private as possible, until I’ve had more time to think about it. I’ll tell my—Frigga that I’ll be absent for the day, with a hint that I need some time to myself that she will understand as a request for privacy.”
“Very well.” Aizerue stood up from the table and nodded to us. “Sigyn, Scathsa, be careful. Remember that you are responsible for more than just our lives.” Eir expression bordered on a scowl, and both of us bowed our heads, subdued by the reminder.
Laharu wove an illusory copy of me to join the procession to the negotiations and they filed out of the rooms, doors closing behind them to leave the three of us to finish our tea. An unexpected urge to grab Loki and drag him through the portal to my homeworld caught me by surprise, and I blinked, fighting it down. It would solve a couple of problems, but it would also cause several much larger ones.
“Ahah! I have you in my power!” Scathsa gloated, leaning back in eir chair with a wicked grin. “You have to remain invisible and can’t open the doors without me! I could keep you trapped here all day!”
Loki put down his cup and smirked right back. “You could, but then you’d spend all day sitting here with us rather than working on the ansible—with Jari.”
Scathsa opened eir mouth, closed it, then laughed. “You’re good,” e said, shaking eir head and standing up. “I think we all have somewhere else we’d rather be.”
Loki and I pulled illusions of invisibility around ourselves as Scathsa opened the door, and followed eir out into the hallway. Scathsa walked down the corridor deeper into the palace while we turned to the balcony, where a skybarge sat unattended. I settled myself on the bench as Loki took the tiller and the barge rose smoothly into the clear morning air. After setting a course, he held up a finger to his lips, which I took to mean that I should remain invisible as he dropped his illusion and wove a small aetheric pattern. He whispered a message into his cupped hand, then sent it darting back the way we had come. Finally he drew the shroud that blocked Heimdall’s sight around the barge and looked at me.
“How long do you think it will take to—unbind me, or whatever it is you’ll be doing?”
I shrugged. “From what I’ve seen, the pattern that’s locking you down doesn’t seem to be very complex,” I said. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour or so. I’d like to give you a couple more hours afterwards to acclimate before returning here, though.”
“Not Nidavellir, then.” He made an adjustment to the controls and turned the barge in a different direction. “I know a route to a nice place in Alfheim that’s closer.” He looked up as I released my illusions, then blinked as he realized that I’d removed all of the illusions over my Aesir guard shape. He tilted his head, and I wondered which question he would ask first. “If I may ask… why did you choose those forms to use while in Asgard?”
“They were very carefully designed,” I said, pleased by his decision. “We wanted to emphasize our willingness to abide by the terms that were set at the end of the war, to never pretend to being Aesir. Our appearances were intentionally not set to look like any other particular known species, while also looking quite different from each other. At the same time, we decided to use the basic Aesir body shape and proportions, to put your—Aesir more at ease with us.”
He caught the hesitation as I rephrased, and looked away over the side of the barge for a moment. “How many others know, do you think?” he asked. I recognized the change of subject.
“Very few, I would guess. Your parents, of course, and likely Heimdall. Very few species are as constantly aware of the aether as we are, without effort or assistance. Even powerful, practiced Aesir mages wouldn’t bother keeping up the energy and attention to stay aware of it all the time, especially not in the capital, where they would expect Gungnir and its security web to protect them from possible dangers.”
“I can’t help feeling that I’ve been played for a fool my entire life.” Loki shook his head and glanced at me, then looked back to the horizon. “Odin said he wanted to protect me from the truth. I don’t know how they were expecting me to react when they finally told me, after centuries of lies.”
“We didn’t say anything because we thought there was some political or diplomatic reason it was being kept secret. We never suspected that you didn’t know. If we had known that they were keeping you ignorant, we would have told you.” I paused, then shook my head. “I would have told you, and to the void with the consequences. I’m sure they thought they had perfectly good reasons for doing it, but they were wrong.”
He glanced at me sidelong. “It’s nice of you to say so, but…”
“No,” I said, the words coming out in a snarl. “They’re not shapeshifters, so some of it can be attributed to ignorance, but given that they have access to vast stores of information, it’s—” I took a breath, trying to calm myself. “Pattern-locking a person into the form of a species other than their own as a child is almost a guarantee of emotional instability, at the very least. Not telling you, depriving you of the information and access to answers that you needed, was a reckless and needless endangerment of your well-being. Among my people, deliberately withholding that knowledge from you would be considered gross negligence, at its mildest.”
I realized he was staring at me, and that I’d unconsciously shifted my fingers into claws, gripping and piercing the cushioned armrests. I very carefully shifted them back and folded my hands in my lap. “They didn’t tell you because they didn’t want you to feel different—but you were different, you are different, and you’ve always known it on some level. Pretending that would go away just by not thinking about it was utter foolishness. It was less that they wanted to protect you, and more that they wanted to protect themselves from having to deal with the consequences of a decision that they’d made.”
Loki let out a breath, his shoulders relaxing. “I don’t want to… hate them,” he said. “But I don’t know how else to feel. Did you know that I was Laufey’s son?”
“Laufey?” I said, blinking. “The king of Jotunheim? We wondered if you were given to Odin as a hostage—”
“I wasn’t given,” he said bitterly. “Father—Odin—said that he found me in a temple, abandoned, and that he took me with some notion of an alliance someday.”
“If he found you abandoned, how did he know you were Laufey’s son?” I asked. Loki looked surprised, but I continued before he could respond. “And… he found you in a temple… hmm.” I realized I was clawing at the armrest again and sighed.
“Never mind that,” Loki said. “What’s important about the temple?”
“Jotun shapeshifters are rare,” I said, dredging up memories from early lessons about Jotunheim’s society. “It might have changed since the war, but Frost Giants used to believe that natural shapeshifters were gifts of fate. They were usually given to the priests to be raised and trained in secret, then sent to cause trouble for their enemies from within.”
“Just another stolen relic.” Loki sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Odin would have known that when he found me, wouldn’t he?”
“He would have heard stories about it, if nothing else,” I said. “Regardless of your parentage, he would have wanted to prevent you from being used against Asgard later in your life.” I stopped short of pointing out that Loki was fortunate Odin hadn’t taken the alternative of simply killing him. I wanted very badly to spare Loki the pain this conversation was obviously causing him, but I knew that he’d had more than enough of being “protected” from the truth.
We rode in silence for a while. Loki stared off into the distance, rubbing a finger across his mouth, while I attempted to repair the damage I’d done to the barge’s cushions. “I wonder why he thinks I’m Laufey’s son,” he said eventually. “It could just be wishful thinking, unwilling to consider anything less in order to accept me as an adopted child.”
“He might have read it in your runes,” I said. Loki gave me a questioning look, and I shook my head. “I don’t know much about it, other than that Jotun inherit patterns of runes on their bodies—like skin patterns, or eye colors on other species. There’s legends that the Frost Giants can read an infant’s future in the runes on their bodies, but we don’t know if there’s any truth behind it. I haven’t studied it, and I haven’t met enough Jotun to know the difference by sight, but Odin might have recognized your markings before you were changed to look like an Aesir.”
“Inherited rune markings?” Loki laughed harshly. “There’s another question—now that I’m heir to the throne, what are they going to do when it’s time for me to take a wife and make heirs of my own?”
I turned away, startled and confused by a sudden pain in my chest as the thought flashed through my mind that there was absolutely no way the king of Asgard could justify having a dragon as a mate. I had to bite down a surge of anger at myself for the fantasies—I couldn’t even call them hopes—that I’d been allowing myself to cultivate without realizing it. “You’d have to protect against pattern flux, but that’s not difficult, once you know what to do,” I said, grabbing at a change of subject.
“Pattern flux?”
I shoved my turmoil aside and turned to look at him, carefully arranging my aura into a semblance of calm. “It’s a possible problem when shifters have children,” I said. I couldn’t see anything in Loki’s aura to indicate that he’d noticed my agitation, but then it had been in constant agitation since Svartalfheim.
“If the child has the potential to be a shapeshifter, it’s vital that the parents stay in a fixed form for some time before and during gestation and for a while after birth,” I continued. “The child needs to imprint into a stable shape until zie can control zir shifting. Shifter energy can manifest in other ways with offspring that don’t inherit the shifter trait, leading to… variable results.”
“That sounds ominous,” Loki said.
“It can be alarming to parents who don’t know what to expect, but we’ve had hundreds of generations to find solutions for anything that might be actually dangerous, and of course we would make that expertise available to you.” I hoped my smile was appropriately bland.
He seemed to search my face for a few moments, then looked away. “Well, I expect that won’t be a problem for a while yet,” he said, his tone casual. “And for now, it’s time to land. We’ll need to cross the bridge to Alfheim on foot.”
The barge descended into a clearing in a dense, tangled forest on the side of Asgard’s central mountain. “The Svartald,” I said, looking up at the dark trunks of huge trees that towered on all sides.
“It’s said that this forest rises from the roots of Yggdrasil itself.” Loki stepped out of the barge, then paused and raised his hand to me. I blinked for a moment before I understood the gesture, then gripped his hand for balance as I disembarked. He leaned back into the craft and set something on the controls. The barge rose up into the branches of the trees, where it nestled like a strange bird, still concealed under Loki’s spell.
“Of course, the Yggdrasil is a construct of aetheric bridges that connect the places we call the Nine Realms,” he said, leading me into the forest. “It’s a name for a convenience, not a real thing, much less an actual tree. But for whatever reason, there are passages to each of the Nine Realms in this forest, as well as several others. Even I don’t know where all the paths go—and they change over time, too.”
“We keep careful track of the connections in our realm,” I said thoughtfully as we picked our way through the gloom. “Some of our people make a hobby of it, but the information is considered strategically valuable. It’s not feasible to move large forces across the paths, but a small group, or even a single individual, could cause a lot of trouble.”
“The roots of Yggdrasil are considered unfashionable in Asgard these days.” Loki walked along a fallen trunk, glancing back at me with a smirk. “There’s wards up around the forest itself, and of course there’s always Heimdall and Gungnir’s security system, so people think it’s secure, if they think about it at all.”
I shivered as the pattern of aetheric threads all around us shifted, following the tide of immense cosmic forces. Like crossing a high bridge in a windstorm, walking the paths was always at least a little bit dangerous. No matter how well-established the connection, there was the chance that a surge or sudden change in energy could break the fragile thread between worlds, snapping us back to one end or the other—or stranding us somewhere far from any realms we knew. The patterns of the threads that we walked through were charged with power, heady and disorienting to my aetheric senses, a silent storm of information that I couldn’t control or even hope to understand.
“Of course, when I’m king, I might set up regular patrols, make people take an interest again.” I could see Loki walking right ahead of me, but his laugh seemed to be echoing distantly down a long tunnel, trees and branches shifting around us. “But what would be the fun of that? I think I’d rather keep these paths my secret.” He paused, turning to look back at me, and for a second as I stepped up beside him the shadows gave his face the strange illusion of a wolf’s muzzle grinning at me. I blinked as wind tossed the branches high above and splashed us in bright sunlight, revealing a clearing in the forest blanketed in lush meadow grasses and flowers.