She is at the loom when the news arrives.

In the great halls of Vanaheimr, when she had only just been a girl of a dozen years and golden hair that falls in spiralling curls to the curve of her waist, there had been a loom. A gift from the dwarves and wrought with gold and silver, a spindle of fine dark wood. There she wove, a grand tapestry to hang in the receiving room of her father, a length of embroidered cloth for her mother's gown. There is a peace, Frigga thinks, in the play of thread between her fingers, in the fall of individual strands into a unified whole.

"Tell them to stop that commotion, Dalla." She says calmly to the serving girl.

There is shouting outside. A sound carried on the air to her chambers, like a scream, like hissing. She drops the spindle, and stands.

When the door bursts open, it's a page boy, one of her husband's, out of breath with sweat running down the sides of his face—he is dark haired, and bright eyed, and breathing hard. A strand of hair falls into his green eyes, and Frigga fights the urge to reach out, and push it back. "What is it?"

"My Queen," he exclaims. "Queen Frigga—"

"You have burst into my rooms," she says calmly. "And intruded upon the privacy of your queen. I would like it very much if your intrusion could be brief."

"It's your son, my Queen," the boy says. "Prince Thor, and that traitor Loki—"

She is out of the door before he could finish his sentence, her heart hammering against her chest.

Her youngest son is eight, and he has taken to roaming the halls at night.

"Loki is afraid." Thor says bluntly one evening, through a mouthful of boar. He is barely a year older than his brother, and he is a merry child—always ready with laughter and unthinkingly honest. Sometimes he gets into fights with the older children. "He says there are monsters in the shadows."

Loki, on his left, shoves him, and says nothing. Thor sways slowly, and when he resumes his seat, carries on eating.

"Is that so, Loki?" She asks calmly, setting down her glass. Her husband, by her side, flicks her a glance. They are princes, not toddlers, he was fond of saying. We are raising warriors, wife. They cannot be soft. "What kind of monsters?"

"Big and scaly," Thor says, and chokes on his mouthful of boar. "I told him I would kill them with my sword, but—"

"You're an idiot." Loki snaps. "You're an idiot and a fool and an oaf, and I hope they eat you."

Thor shrugs, and carries on eating.

Her voice is gentle when she asks again. "What kind of monsters?"

Her sons are beautiful boys. One day, she's sure, all the girls of Asgard will chase them through the halls, and a few of the boys too; some of them her sons will even chase back. Thor has his father's steadiness, a strong brow and a strong jaw and wide, laughing blue eyes. Loki—Frigga suppresses the thought. Loki is thinner, tapering, shadows and corners to Thor's broad swaths of light.

Now Loki looks up, and his eyes are as green as his brother's are blue, and just as bright. "The books in the great library," he says softly, and she doesn't miss how his fingers shake on his dagger. "Says that in the last Great War, a Jotun squadron found its way into the palace. They say that some of them may still be here."

She feels, rather than sees, her husband freeze by her side. "Nonsense," Odin says steadily. "What books have the keeper been giving you? You are a prince of Asgard, Loki. You should be reading histories, not fables."

"I like fables," Thor pipes up, coming to his brother's defences as Loki's ears go pink. "Fables are more interesting than histories."

"Nevertheless," Odin waves a hand. "We can't very well allow you to pursue fun ahead of knowledge, can we? There are no monsters in the shadows, Loki. I will hear no more of it."

Her mouth is dry. Inside her chest, her heart is beating hard and fast, and she watches Loki shrug and turn back to his boar with her breath held tight in her throat. There are no monsters in the shadows, Loki. There are no Jotuns in Asgard.

That night, she finds him in her chambers, fingers tracing the line of the spindle.

"Is father lying?" Loki asks.

She stills. "Why would you say that?"

His feet are bare on the ground, a splay of silver moonlight filtering through the grand floor to ceiling windows, and he stood bathed in it. The light turns her son's skin almost translucent. "He didn't ask any questions." Loki looks up. "He usually asks a lot of questions."

He is shivering. She pulls the heavy fur from her shoulders and drapes it around him, tucking it tightly around his small body. "Of course he's not lying to you." She bends so that she is staring him in the eyes, and her smile is too tight, a rictus cut of teeth. "Your father would never lie to you, Loki. You are our son and we love you. We would never lie to you."

"He lied to the diplomats from Vanaheimr," he says, and his eyes blink heavily. There is no way to describe the quirk on his mouth except sly. "He told them we haven't stationed troops at the portal, and we did. Father lies."

"Not to you," she says firmly. "Not to you, and not to Thor, and not to me. We are a family. Family don't lie to each other."

He blinks at her, and she can tell he is holding back a yawn. "Mother," he asks, softly. "Are there Jotuns in Asgard?"

Tell him, she had told Odin so many times, watching Loki laugh in the gardens, tussling with Thor, watching Loki sprinkle salt into Thor's mead with a sparkle in his eyes. You need to tell him, now, before it's too late, before he finds out and hates us forever. Tell him.

"No." She says. "There are no Jotuns in Asgard. And if there are—" she stands, and takes his hand, leading him down the hall to the room that he shares with his brother. "I shall slay them for you myself. Would you like that?"

Loki giggles, and runs towards the open door of his chambers, her heavy cloak left on the marble floors.

When she bends to pick up the cloak, she finds that her fingers are shaking.

He trusts me, Frigga thinks. He trusts me. He loves me. He trusts me.

She loves her second son as if he is of her own flesh. But sometimes, watching the gleam in his eyes, watching him stare at Thor with eyes too old for his age, she wonders if blood trumps water after all, if she can truly know this silver child not of her flesh; so clever, so sharp. She makes her way back to her rooms, and realizes with a chill that in a few more years, not even a mother's lies will be strong enough to hold him back.

"Get out of my way." She snaps at the soldiers crowded outside her chamber, and her breath comes out fast and unsure, there is a steady pressure at the back of her head and her throat is dry and her son, her son, her son is alive— "Get out of my way, out of my way—"

Her son is alive, her son is here, her son is unhurt, her son is alive—

The hall seems to stretch on for an eternity, the crowds beyond in the great hall itself shrieking and shouting, she can hear laughter and taunts and a snarl and her husband must be in court already, her sons must be in the room already, Loki must be there and oh, her son is alive—

"My Queen, Your Grace, I've been given orders to—" the guard at the door begins.

"Move," she snarls. And bursts into the hall.

For a moment she sways on her feet, her head unsteady as the sight reaches her. The roaring of the crowds shrink into a dull hum at the back of her ears, indistinguishable from the blood running towards her brain. Her eyes focus.

Her son, in chains. Her son, muzzled like an animal, marched down the hall by the son of her blood. Loki's head is held high, and he doesn't seem to hear the jeering and screaming from either side of him. Thor's hand is clenched tight against the small of his waist, and neither of them look anywhere except up towards the throne. They are Odinsons. They will not give the crowds the pleasure.

When Loki is forced to his knees, Frigga screams.

They are growing into men.

They are boys, on the brink of manhood, all the world sprawling vast and open and conquerable beneath them like a ripe fruit about to fall into a waiting palm. They are boys, and they are the princes of Asgard, the sons of Odin, the inheritors of the universe. They are boys, and they are growing into very different men.

Thor likes hunting trips. He likes mead from Vanaheimr, the hind legs of a good young boar. He likes girls with hair as gold as Sif's, though when asked he never admits it and blushes and will in all likelihood start a fight. Thor likes to sit at the Warriors Three's table during feasts, and fancy himself a soldier. Thor likes sparring with Sif in the training yard, and he likes his brother to watch. On golden afternoons, Frigga sits at her balcony and watches him fight, and she does not miss the proud light in his eyes when he throws a partner to the ground, the smile on his face as he glances over to where Loki lounges under the trees, the slight fall of his delight when he thinks that Loki had not seen.

Frigga sees. And Frigga sees that Loki had seen, and had shifted his eyes at the last second to appear nonchalant. Thor likes a great deal of things, but Thor loves very few. She supposes that it is one of the strange ironies of the palace; to have the world, and yet nothing at all.

And Loki—what does Loki like?

She does not know as much about her younger son as she does her eldest, and this worries her. She knows he likes solitude; he likes the old aisles of the great library, where few wander except the aged scholars. She knows he does not drink much at the table but prefers to keep his eyes clear and watch Thor embarrass himself. She knows that sometimes he looks at Sif the way a snake looks at a mouse, the way his eyes tighten sometimes when she laughs at Thor's jests. It is what she does not know that can fill a volume: where he goes when he is absent, how far he goes when he is absent, why he is absent. How he first came by his magic. Why he goes on to the roofs at night, and what he looks for in the stars.

Frigga loves her son. But it is only now that she realizes she does not know him.

"The weapons master tells me you've been missing his lessons." She says lightly one afternoon. He is slouched at her window, a heavy tome open on his lap. She is weaving for him an undershirt.

"Perhaps we should cut out his tongue," he suggests without looking up from the book. "The old punishment for spreading lies."

"Hush," she says sternly. "Your father is not pleased."

"Is he ever?" Loki replies. His mouth tightens. "I am no good with a sword, or a mace, or a spear, or even the arrows. I have no talent for warfare. Yet father would have me toil for last place in the mud." He looks up at her. "I won't sweat and bleed to humiliate myself, mother. I don't need to."

The muscles of her throat works. His eyes are too bright, and he is too young to talk like this, barely at an age where the hair has started to grow on his chin. She would not have him speak like this.

"You will not come last," she says to him, dropping the thread in her hand. He does not respond. "Failure isn't in your blood."

"Then it's just me." He drops his gaze, laughs. "For I am of the same blood as Thor, am I not?"

Her hand clenches, and she bends at his side, tucks a stray strand of dark hair behind his ear. "We are gifted in different ways," she says carefully. "We have strengths and weaknesses, all, Loki. And failure doesn't come from having weaknesses. Failure comes from not recognizing them."

He looks up.

"Similarly," she says. "Strength is not the lack of weakness, but the recognition of it, and then making up for it where we can. A young girl, in Vanaheimr, once learned that she is not as tall or as strong as the boys in the ring." She smiles at him. "She made up for it by being faster, and realizing that one does not always need to be honourable to win."

"Honourable?" He asks, smiling. "Mother, are you suggesting—"

"Cheat." She says, and presses a kiss to his forehead.

A week later, she gives him a gift. A box of small, delicately wrought daggers, and his eyes gleam when he turns them over in his hand.

"No," she whispers, and then her voice rises to a shriek. "Let him go, let him go!"

There are arms around her suddenly, as tight as vice grips, and the look Thor sends her is pure anguish. Loki's eyes are hooded and he is forced to his knees, his brother takes a backward step and her husband's sceptre comes down hard on the ground. "Proceed."

No, no, no, no no no no—

When the mage holds out his hand, when the mage curls his fingers, Loki's spine contorts, and he screams from behind his mask. They're killing him, she thinks, oh gods they are going to kill him, they are going to kill her son and make her watch—

Loki's spine contorts and his entire torso is shaking, his legs thrashing under him as the mage's magic begins to unravel his cells, begins to pick clean every strand of seidr from his flesh, a thousand needles in every cell, following each strand to the core of him. Loki is screaming and she is too, trying to crawl forward and out of the vice grips of the soldiers on either side of her. Thor is on his knees next to his brother, one hand against his throat; a threat or a comfort, she can't tell.

When it is over, her son is lying still and prone on the ground, chest unmoving. The soldiers on either side of him haul him to his feet, sling an arm around each of their necks.

When the guard at her side lets her go, she runs to him, pushes the soldiers out of her way; her knees feel like they may buckle.

Loki is barely conscious, dark lashes quivering on his cheeks, shadows dancing as he struggles to keep his eyes open. His chest does not rise up and down in breath, and she feels a cold chill working its way up through her stomach. When she presses her hands to his cold cheeks, his eyes blink open. They are pale, and they are unseeing. It is as if he is dead already.

"Loki," she whispers. "Loki, it's me, it's your mother—"

A pause, in which his eyes gain something almost like recognition, and then he bares his teeth. "I have no mother."

Her hand drops. When he pushes himself bodily off the two soldiers supporting him, he falls to his knees. The hall is silent, and when Thor moves forward to help, he whispers, "Get off of me."

She stands still and unmoving, watching him climb to his feet and limp away. She bites down hard on her lip, bites the cry into her flesh.

She waits for her husband in the grand bedchamber.

He has aged, in the year between Loki's fall and his return; hair entirely white by now, more lines around his eyes and mouth than there are rivers in Asgard. Beneath the ceremonial armour, he is just an old man.

"You stripped him." She says when Odin comes in. He waves a hand, and the page boy at his side leaves them. "You took his magic."

"He's harmless this way." Odin says tiredly, and moves to remove his breastplate himself. "The mage assured me he would not be able to conjure a suit of armour, much less wreak havoc in the heart of Asgard."

"You may as well have killed him." She says flatly. "Cut his throat in front of the court, and we could have washed our hands and called it mercy."

He does not rise to the bait. "I would have thought you'd come to ask for a lighter sentence, not death."

She clenches her hands tight, and stands. "You are Odin Allfather, King of the Aesir. And he is a war criminal. You would not grant it if I got on my knees and begged."

"Then don't." He says, and moves to his writing desk, only to find her in his way. "What have you come to ask for?"

"Let me see him." She says quietly. "Let me visit our son. I can talk sense into him."

Her husband had never been a cruel man, had never been unnecessarily brutal; always kind when he could afford to be, generous when the occasion calls for it. An unswerving sense of justice in his very veins; that's where Thor got it from. She's beginning to think that that's where Loki gets his streak from as well.

Now his eyes are cold. "Were you not in the hall, wife? He has no mother. He is not your son."

In the silence in between, she feels her heart skip, and as he moves past her it seems that the walls are spinning. She presses her hand hard against the bed.

"You sent the boy." Her voice seemed to come from very far away. "You wanted me to see—"

"We both need to accept that we only have one son now." Odin says quietly. "Loki Odinson died when he fell from the Bifrost. What has come back to us is a monster wearing his skin."

There is a thought rattling around her head, something that has whispered to her at night and kept her cold in the day for months, now, and it is only now that she lets it out. "Is that," she says, voice shaking, "what you told him in the vault?"

Silence.

"Is that what you told him?" Her voice is rising. "Did you tell him that he was a monster? Did you tell him that he was a beast wearing Aesir skin? Did you? Did you?"

"I told him he was my son!" Her husband snaps back. "I told him that he was the key to the future, I gave him the chance to be the arbiter of a permanent peace, and he threw it back in my face."

Is that what you said to him? Is that what you said?

You don't know your son at all, she realizes with a chill.

A hand flutters near her mouth, and she feels as if she might be sick. When she stands, she has to grip the bed until her knuckles are white, just to keep from crumpling.

"You've already lost him." She says, as she leaves. "If you don't think he knows what that means."

Her son throws knives, and he learns not to miss.

The silver knives she gives him he infuses with his own strange magic, a blue glow along the edges of the metal, sharper and longer and he learns to aim for the jugular, learns to throw to kill. When he goes hunting with his brother and their friends, more often than not they come home with two types of prey. A wild boar, the size of a horse, taken down with Thor's sword through its sternum, mouth open in the face of a greater strength. And Loki's stags, still graceful and still beautiful, looking for all the world to be still alive, with the smallest incision in the left eye. Even his kills have lies in them.

The night before the great feast to celebrate their inauguration into the ranks of Asgard's warriors, the two of them come to her in her chambers when she is at her loom, and behind them, Sif trails.

"Mother," Thor says, and his voice is beginning to deepen, the cracking has stopped. "Mother, we have come to speak to you of the Lady Sif."

She smiles, looks up. "I see the Lady Sif is with you, my son. Perhaps she'll like to speak for herself."

Thor's ears go pink, and Sif steps forward. "My queen." She bends, presses a kiss to her hand.

"Darling girl," she replies.

She swallows hard. Over her right shoulder, Loki has his hands clasped loosely behind his back, his cheeks a little pink from the mead at the feast. His head is slightly dishevelled, and his eyes are careful and sly. He is watching Sif carefully as she stands.

"I wish to be inaugurated along with the princes tomorrow night." She says, and Frigga does not miss the slight shake beneath her words. "My queen, I have joined the expedition against the elves of Alfheimr, and slayed many of Asgard's foes. I have tested my mettle in the training rings of Asgard against the princes and against all the youths of the noble class. I have battled and bled for Asgard, though I am a young girl. I have not shirked in any form, and I have achieved no less than your sons. The only thing that separates me from the life I am destined to have is my sex." She looks up then, voice steady, eyes calm and still. "I hereby ask you, as guardian of the maidens of Asgard, to allow me this honour. Let me bleed for the realm. Let me fight for all of Asgard, and when the time comes, allow me to die in battle and ascend to Valhalla."

Frigga stares calmly at this girl, with her fall of golden hair and those fierce green eyes. She is beginning to see why both her sons are enamoured. "You would not like to be a Valkyrie?"

Sif shakes her head. "No, my queen. I have no quiet within me. I have no serenity. I would make a poor Valkyrie."

This girl wants, Frigga realizes with a start. This girl has her blood singing for war and for carnage, for strategy and for sharpened steel. The loom is not for her. Yet—

"The warriors of Asgard are men," she replies lightly. "Sif, you are a fine fighter, a fine soldier even; but you are a woman. More than that, you are a lady, a relation of Heimdall. A noblewoman. Your place is not on the battlefield."

"My queen," Sif's eyes flick side to side, watching her put an end to the matter with a desperate lilt in her voice. "Surely there must be some way, surely if I can prove myself—"

"You are a lady. The Lady Sif." Frigga says calmly, and looks pointedly at her. "And a lady cannot be a soldier, can she?"

Afterwards, Sif is lead away by Thor, and only Loki stays in the room, his hands clasped behind his back still. His voice is calm. "A lady?"

Frigga looks at him. His eyes are calm and sharp, and the set of his mouth only slightly hints at a displeasure. Behind his eyes she can see the gears working away, and she has to turn to hide her smile.

"Yes." She says calmly. "A lady."

Loki looks at her contemplatively, and leaves.

Thor comes to her chamber a month later in the night, and she has forgotten how quiet he can be when he wished it. How for him, silence is an effort that he makes only for those dearest to him.

"Hurry, mother." He says. "We don't have much time."

He takes her floors below the palace, through the servants' quarters and the hidden doorways of the palace, down to where the light ends and the darkness begins, where Sif is waiting, hand on her sword.

"We have ten minutes." Sif says. "I've managed to hold the roster for as long as I can, but we can't stay longer than ten. It's the best I can do, my queen."

Frigga's breath rises in her throat, and she presses a kiss to Sif's hair.

Inside, the chamber is brighter than she could have imagined, white stone and white light and it's a wonder how anyone can sleep in here, how anyone could even close their eyes and not be blinded by the brightness. Her son is slumped in the corner of the room, and for a moment she thinks he is asleep, she thinks that she is here only to watch him have this small slice of peace.

"I don't suppose you're here to tuck me in." He says, without moving. His hair is dark and unkempt, and she realizes with a mother's instincts that he's lost weight. His collarbones stand up starkly beneath the thin undershirt, the bones at his wrists protruding too far. He is pitifully small and thin and tapered. When he turns to look at her, there are heavy dark shadows under his eyes.

"Loki," she breathes, and rushes forward, pulls him bodily into her arms. He doesn't try to resist, but is still and he does not move. Embracing him is like embracing a tall thin pillar of rock, as if this body has no life in it.

"What are you doing here?" he asks quietly, barely an inflection at the end of the sentence. "I thought I made myself quite clear in the great hall."

She stills, and looks at him. Without his magic, he is as real as he could be, the Allfather had rendered him into common flesh, and on his mouth she traces the faint white scars from his last punishment; a trifle by this standard, for a crime done out of mercy. She touches her fingers to those scars. "H-how long?"

"Since that day. Since I was a boy." He quirks his mouth at her, a smirk curving across his lips. "Queen Frigga; such a clever woman, and yet. And yet—so helpless and so useless in the face of her men. One could laugh at the irony."

She pulls back her shaking hand. "I'm only here to tell you that I love you, Loki. You are my son, and you have always been my son, you have always been in my heart if not my flesh. I love you then and I love you now, and I will love you always. Even if you don't regard me as your mother, I will always regard you as my son."

For a slight moment, he blinks a few times in quick succession, as if he is trying to hold back tears, his breath exiting his mouth in a rush. His throat works, mouth tightening as if he is trying to swallow his own tongue.

"So many lies." He breathes, and throws her off him with a wordless, muffled cry of rage. There is a yell outside the door, and then Thor's weight against it. She had locked it.

"You lie and you lie," he screams at her. "This family is nothing but lies, this rotten decaying disgusting family full of liars and traitors and you lie, and you pretend and you lie to me, over and over like this is some damned game—"

"Loki—"

"You're doing it again!" He shouts at her, the veins in his throat standing tight. His eyes are bright and desperate. "You! And Odin, and Thor, over and over and over again—you think I don't know? How stupid do you think I am? How much a fool do you think me, to fall for the same lies over and over—"

He breaks off, his voice dying in his throat as he hunches over the table in the centre of the cell, his shoulders shaking as he tries to suppress the wracking of his own body. For a long time, there is only silence, on this side of the door and the other, and she thinks, woodenly, that Thor must have heard as well.

"There are no Jotuns in Asgard, you told me once. You and Odin and Thor." He says quietly when he has stilled, still a tremor running down the length of his arms. "There are no monsters left over. Family don't lie to family."

A lifetime of false words, one over another over another over another, threads of sentences working itself between the cracks in the palace and through the cracks in them, until they become stronger than a battering ram, until they are thicker than the stones in the walls. Threads go into the loom, and it's a tapestry that comes out. Take one careful strand and you can unravel it all.

She doesn't think to counter it. Frigga is not her husband; she may not know her second son well, but she knows him better than her husband.

"And they call me Liesmith." Loki laughs, the sound empty and mirthless. "When it is you and your husband who should have had your tongues cut out."

On the other side of the door, Thor catches her before she falls.

"Take me back to my rooms." She says thickly. "Don't—don't mention this to your father."

Neither Thor nor Sif can meet her eyes.

Loki is silvertongued and clever, with too much wit for his own good. When Thor is proclaimed a warrior of Asgard and a defender of the realm, and asked "what is it that you desire?" he replies, a weapon to make the universe shake. The crowds had roared in response.

Loki kneels at his father's feet, and Odin asks "what is it that you desire?"

Her second son looks up, and his eyes are mischievous and sly when he meets her gaze. A nonchalant shrug, a quirk of the mouth, and the crowds laugh. Even Odin's mouth curves.

"Make it quick, son." Odin says, and Frigga watches Loki's eyes shine at the word. "It does not suit a prince of Asgard to be unsure. I hope you don't carry this trait into battle."

Loki laughs softly. "It is of battle that I speak, Father, and requests a shield to protect me from all harm."

"So granted." Odin's sceptre hits the ground, and the laughter subsides into silence. "I shall send a special ambassador to the finest dwarven workmen—"

"Not," Loki cuts him off softly. "A shield like that."

Silence wracks the hall, the entire vast scope of the room a spread of taut bodies, men and women suddenly unsure as Loki stands, a tall and tapering figure. Frigga watches his eyes shine, his hands curl in anticipation, the sudden curve of his mouth when he realizes he is at the centre of attention, when he realizes he is the focus of a thousand eyes.

He raises his hand slowly, and claps once, twice.

The double doors open, and the crowds gasp. Thor laughs, with surprised delight.

Sif walks down the length of the hall in steady, sure steps, her green eyes blazing bright as the crowds begin to hiss and whisper among themselves, fingers pointing. Frigga sees the muscles of Sif's throat work, the muscles in her arms and legs tight as she kneels where Loki had kneeled. "My king."

Her head was bare. Not a wisp of her famed golden hair, which had once fallen to her waist. Now there is nothing but a thin layer of fuzz, the curve of the back of her neck startlingly clear, her throat thin and fragile.

Loki stood on Sif's side. "This is the shield that I require."

A woman bursts through the line of guards. "What did you do?" Brunnhilde, Sif's mother snarls. "What did you do to my daughter?"

"Restrain the Lady Brunnhilde." Odin says, and Frigga can sense a threat of uncertainty in his voice. Evidently Loki could as well, because his eyes gleams a little brighter. "Lady Sif—"

"It is not the Lady Sif anymore." Loki counters lightly. "Do you not see, father?" he gestures to Sif's bare head. "She is no lady. Sif has too wild a spirit to be contained by loom-craft. She has no patience for embroidery; with thread, at least. Grant me this shieldmaiden."

Sif does not break eye contact with Odin.

Clever boy, Frigga thinks. No request from a new warrior of Asgard may go ungranted this day. No plea unheard.

Odin inclines his head, and the elders move forward to anoint Sif. Her eyes close when Odin's spear touches the ground, the tremor running through the earth. "Sif, daughter of Brunnhilde, honoured relation of Heimdall, whose brave deeds stretch from the shores of Asgard to the walls of Nornheim: your blood is hereby signed to Asgard. You are a defender of the Realm Eternal."

When Loki bows at the waist, Brunnhilde wrenches herself from the guards holding her back with a snarl. "Odin Allfather!" She calls to the high seat. "My husband is dead. Heimdall is at his duties. By the laws of Asgard, children and unmarried girls cannot claim a blood promise. This girl is underage and I am her mother. I claim it."

"No," Sif whispers. "Mother, no, no, no, what are you doing—"

"I claim it!" Brunnhilde's voice is high and clear. "Do you grant it, Allfather?"

Odin's hand tightens on Gungnir. Frigga's nails are biting into her palms, with a slight give, they break skin. "So granted."

"Then I ask that the Liesmith be punished." Brunnhilde's face is dark, and her voice is low and steady when she turns to look at Loki, his face slowly draining of colour. His eyes are wide, as if he still had not grasped what was about to happen. "I do not ask for the old punishment. But let his greatest glory be taken away from him, as he has taken it from my daughter."

A silence in which the hall holds its breath. And the Brunnhilde lifts her chin. "Sew his mouth shut."

"No!" Sif screams, and launches herself between Loki and her mother. "Have you gone mad?"

Sif's hand is clenched in Loki's tunic, clutching him to her side as Thor breaks from the lines of warriors, and takes his place by her side. "You cannot do this. He is a prince of Asgard."

"So granted." Odin says. At the base of the throne, Loki makes a sudden movement, as if he is about to fall to the ground, and only just caught himself. Frigga steels herself, the corners of her vision are beginning to bleed red.

"Father—" Thor makes a step towards the throne. "I take back my request. Grant that my brother may be spared this cruelty, grant him clemency—"

"Declined." Odin says. "Proceed."

When Loki is forced to his knees, when the elders send for a hot needle and thread, when Thor and Sif are pulled back screaming into the crowd, Frigga looks up; at the dark night sky beyond the hall. She bites the inside of her cheek until she tastes copper, and listens to her son scream.

That is what she dreams of, in the years after, when Loki turns from her, when Loki's eyes go cold upon the sight of her, when Loki folds himself into the darkness between words. When Loki could bring himself to smile at her again, when Loki finally understands—that sons may defy their fathers, but queens cannot do the same to their kings—the die is already cast. His smiles are careful now.

And she will always dream of the needle descending into his flesh. She will always dream of herself, helpless and silent by Odin's side. She will always remember, in terrifying clarity, Sif and Thor pulling the thread out of his mouth that night, their young fingers stained with his blood.

Frigga thinks to herself: never again.

She promises herself she would never stand by and do nothing while her son is forced to kneel, never again, never again, not until she takes her last breath. Not until her body is taken by the spirits, not until mountains float and Yggdrasil herself implodes.

Never again.

Frigga dies with a dagger in her hand, and six slain Elves littered around the room. They find Jane Foster kneeling over her body.

"When do we start?" Loki smiles in his cell, the gears of his brain working away, the factors falling smoothly into their compartments—Malekith, Jane Foster, the Dark Elves, an unguarded vault. A new world of possibilities. Thor, outside, looks at him steadily, and he realizes with a start that something is missing, a variable should be filling in a slot, and something settles inside him that he can't quite name, something almost like dread, almost like horror, and—

"After mother's funeral." Thor says. His hands are calm and his eyes are steady, and even his voice seems for all the world to be unfeeling, but it doesn't make sense, none of it makes sense, how, what, why—

"What?" Loki whispers. "Wait, Thor—"

His brother turns, and fades away into the darkness.

She has lost too much blood.

Frigga lies on the ground, her breathing shallow, and overhead Jane Foster is screaming for help, her voice ripped raw from her throat. Frigga's lids are heavy; it is a struggle to stay awake.

"Hush, child." She murmurs, and her hand is slick around the hilt of the dagger—her blood or the elves', she can't tell. "Hush…"

"I'm going to get you out of here," Jane whispers, pressing a piece of cloth hard down on Frigga's abdomen. "I'm going to—I don't have a PhD in medicine but I know how to—I'm going to get you out of here, stay awake, stay awake, please, please—"

"Shh," she says softly. "There's no point. Just—"

She presses the dagger into Jane's hand. Her own arm feels like a mountain, her bones are about to crumple from the weight of her own flesh. "Give this to my son."

"Thor?" Jane whispers. "You don't—you can give this to him yourself, I'll get you out, just try to stay awake—"

"Loki." Her eyes close. "Loki appreciates daggers—it was a gift from my father. He'd… he'd know how to use her."

She wants to tell the girl a thousand things—leave Thor alone when he is angry, don't argue with him about his brother, he likes mead better than ale or wine, but don't let him have too much or else he'll start a fight. He has a bad reaction to berries from Alfheimr, don't let him fight with his father, he will love you until he dies.

Don't look for Loki unless you know he wants you to, he is at his most soft-voiced when he is about to strike, he never smiles when he jokes, don't interrupt him when he is reading, don't lie to him, don't lie to him, don't lie to him—

She wants to say, tell my sons I love them. But then her voice is gone. She breathes until she doesn't.

Jane Foster hands him a foot-long dagger the day before he is about to join her and Thor on their little expedition. Her expression is still and something in her eyes looks almost like pity.

"She wanted you to have this." She says, as he unwraps the cloth around the length. "She says you'd know how to use it."

He wills his hands not to shake, wills the bile not to rise to his mouth. He had sat in his cell after Thor had left, and had listened to the bells of Asgard ringing for her fair queen, ringing for a woman who was better than her husband and her sons combined, ring for a woman floating away in a barge now lit with fire, about to fall to the other side of Yggdrasil. He had sat in his cell, and listened to the sounds of the city mourning his mother, and he had replayed his last words to her in his head, over and over and over again.

The dagger is long and sharp, silver; dwarven, most likely. The hilt is of gold, carved with runes, and when he turns the blade, his vision shakes, and his breath comes out broken.

There is a tiny spindle, carved into the steel.

"They say that I am a coward." Her second son doesn't look at her as he says it, eyes fixed on a single line in his book. He hasn't turned a page in over fifteen minutes.

Her hands still on her loom. "Who says that?"

"The noblemen's sons." Loki says quietly. "Fandral. Volstagg. Hogun doesn't say it but I know he thinks it."

She clears her throat. "Anyone else?"

He grasps her meaning instantly. "Not Thor. Not Sif. But—"

"Does it bother you?" She asks.

A beat. Loki closes his book, and looks up. "Of course it bothers me."

She stares at him calmly. "Why?"

"Because I'm not!" He bursts out, and then, with a great effort, calms himself. "Because I'm not. I just—I don't see the point." He huffs, frustrated. "They talk about dying, gloriously, in battle, in war, but I don't—why die, when there is no need? Why not survive today and take vengeance tomorrow? I don't—"

He breaks off. Closes his eyes. "Mother, I think there is something wrong with me."

Her heart aches, her entire chest thrums with a love too big and too vast for her body to contain—her darling, bright, quicksilver son, her son with darkness in his veins and more cunning in his little finger than grown men have in their entire bodies, her son, oh, her son. The universe doesn't understand, what a star it has here. A black hole to Thor's blazing sun. Her chest aches, and she takes his hand in hers.

"There is nothing wrong with you." She whispers to him, presses a kiss against his hands. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. The Norns have great deeds planned for you, my son, and one day all the worlds will whisper of your bravery and your cunning, and they will see how wrong they are. There is nothing wrong with you."

His eyes are bright, and he does not speak.

"Not all men are swords," she murmurs to him. "Not all men are hammers. Some are daggers, sharp and quick, and some are needles, precise and calm. You are both. Never forget that. Never doubt your power."

When he smiles at her, it is a hesitant smile. "If only," he says, and his voice is shaking. "If only I could believe in myself half as much as you do, mother."