What Fools These Immortals Be
The door of my
chamber slams into the wall as my brother bursts through it. “Father says I
have to marry her!”
Well. “I take it
I’m going to be an uncle?” I ask dryly, setting a history of Vanir contact with
the Midgardian region Asia down on the nearest table.
Thor’s ears
decide that they would look better if they matched his cape. “No! This isn’t a
girl. It’s a woman whom he wants to build us a wall.” He gestures angrily at
the wall of my room, as if he fears I know not what one is. “We have masons!”
“What manner of
wall?” I ask calmly, arising. This is no ordinary building contract.
“I care not!”
Thor shouts, very helpfully.
“Right.” I walk
past him, out into the corridor, down it past windows admitting golden light.
A stranger
emerges from the door to the throneroom, a woman as tall as I am with a white
face, dressed all in coarse leather—the face and the leather being of the same
quality.
“The other prince,”
she says, stepping into my way.
“I cannot recall
being introduced to you,” I say. “I believe you are some manner of…mason?”
She laughs, pleasantly.
“Magician.” And then her blood-shot eyes shift from me and she looks back at
the throneroom and whistles—and a great black steed runs out, magic flowing after
it like another tail, and she springs from the golden floor onto its back and
they gallop straight down the corridor and leap out of a tall window, and I can
see no more of them.
Thor’s disturbance
is quite reasonable, I conclude as I remove a long black tail hair that adhered
to me as they galloped past, and gaze down upon the hoofmarks in the floor.
I hear softer
footsteps, Mother’s, and look up to see her with the expression she has when
she is not going to criticize Father but certainly could, were it not a contravention of a wife’s duty. I walk towards
her and fall into step beside her, offering her my arm. “What manner of wall is
this, Mother?”
She puts her hand
on my bracer, and we walk on, stepping where the horse galloped. “An ingenious
one. It is a device that will store magic and permit it to form a globe of
protection about the palace. Even should no magician be present.”
It would block
both earthbound and airborne enemies, and would free magicians for other work. Certainly a desirable defence, and not one
that anyone in Asgard knows how to manufacture. “I see. And what does this have
to do with Thor honoring me with the most doleful wedding announcement I’ve
ever heard?”
Mother sighs.
“She wishes to marry him, and will not so much as consider payment instead.
Your father has concluded that our need for this wall is absolute, and intends
to promise her Thor tomorrow.”
“I wasn’t even
asked,” Thor growls, stalking out of my chamber as we come to it. I hope he has
not thrown any of my books. Or my bookcases. Granted, he’s never thrown the
latter before, but he’s also never been forced into an engagement. “She says it will only take her three days,
one to make the device, two to fill it with magic—and then I’ll be married to
her.”
Mother goes to
him and begins attempting to make him calmer, as he rants, and I vanish out of
the nearest doorway.
The lavender’s
scented strong today, and the air’s rather warmer than pleases me; though most
love such warmth to the extent that they remind me of turtles. I walk slowly
but crisply down a gravelly path, just barely feeling the points of the rocks
through the soles of my boots, thinking. One day to make it, three to fill it
with magic. Mother or I could do the latter—I’ve been making protective magic
like a golden net since I was a boy. So this woman’s services are only needed for one day.
And for that,
Thor must be bound to a lowborn haggish flirt as long as she lives? I clench my
teeth, walking harder on the gravel. I quite understand his revulsion, since
mine would be even greater were I to be the victim. There is no hope of
persuading Father, not now that he has spoken publically.
One day, two
days—But why need she do all the crafting? I know what course to take. I smile
a little, and kick at some gravel to obliterate the hoofprint on the path where
she crossed it.
†
It’s not easy to
find Father alone. He scowls at me when I succeed in encountering him as he is
about to depart from the throneroom, and I quickly bow. “Father, may I offer a
suggestion?”
“If it’s brief.”
He looks as if he’d rather not hear it at all.
“Tell this woman
we need the shield immediately, that she has only one day in which to work or
she will forfeit her payment.”
“That’s folly,
she needs three days to construct it.” He walks past me, boots hitting the
floor rhythmically.
“One day to construct it, Father!” I say hastily.
“And then two days for the magic, which I could do as well as she.” He turns about, and it’s all I can do not to smile
exultantly. He’s listening. “She’ll finish the physical part of it, and that
will be the sum of it.”
Father nods
crisply. “Thank you, Loki.”
†
I stand silent
against the wall, watching her work—both from curiosity, and from a desire to
ensure that she is distracted enough to keep her from finishing early, if the
need arises for such distraction.
Her horse stands
beside her, watching as intently as I am, as she stacks metal parts. And
then—well, this wasn’t exactly how I thought she’d build it. One of her coarse
hands presses its palm against the horse’s side, and the other rises in the
air, swiping the form of the rune Othala in a strangely frigid gold. Her raised
hand cups and then its fingers twist and point.
Slowly,
gracefully, bits of gold begin to assemble themselves, far faster than she
could have done it by hand—though I can tell from her moistening face that this
is harder than manual creation. Soon the room fills with the putrescence of
frozen meat thawing and rotting. The leather she wears?
It matters not.
The device seems to me to be half completed, and she’s been creating it for
only an hour. I quietly walk up to the horse and reach out my hand to stroke
its face. It shrieks and leaps to the side, clashing its teeth together, and
then throws its head forward so fast that it succeeds in gnashing on my wrist.
I grit my teeth, glad that I’m wearing leather bracers, and glare into its red
eyes.
“Hei!” the woman
shouts, and the horse whirls toward her, letting my wrist go. It walks slowly
towards her, gentle and docile, and again she puts her palm on its flank and
raises the loose pieces of gold from the floor. “Don’t touch my horse,
Asgardian!”
Her magic failed
when her horse left her. “My apologies, sister,” I say smoothly. “I merely
wished to make the acquaintance of what will soon be a resident of my home.”
“Hmph.” She’s
paler then ever, so pale that she’s looking bluish, but that doesn’t concern
me. I slip out and away, and wait long enough for Father’s ravens to finish
fighting over somebody’s golden brooch before I conjure up an illusion of a mare
as golden as the brooch, with a mane and tail as black as Hugin and Munin.
†
In the foothills of the mountains that
brush the snowclouds, I feel my illusion break. I can’t see it, or the stallion
that seeks it, but I follow on.
When I enter the
valley into which they went, breathing hard, the only horse I can see is a small
black foal, curled up on the ground and looking up at me with gentle brown
eyes. It rises and I draw my breath in, for eight long, fragile legs are all
helping it gain the perpendicular. It
shakily ambles toward me, and if I were not engaged in looking about for the
stallion I would certainly wish to pet its short-flocked little face.
Behind me a horse
shrieks, and I turn and dart to the side just in time to avoid scalping at the
teeth of the stallion—who is now a foot taller, red-eyed, and white, and…I see
as it rears, silently killing the air with its hooves…a mare.
Frigidity fills
the air around it, and as I draw my dagger the monster crashes down at me,
knocking me to the ground and standing with great hooves, covered in frost
lace, on my coat. Down at me strikes its open mouth, cold mist clouding from it
from behind teeth like opaque icicles, down toward my throat—I throw up my left
hand, green light glaring from it, and as the monster tosses its head up to
protect its eyes I slash through its throat with my dagger, rolling away as it
leaps and tosses in the instants before it is airless and limp on the moss it’s
freezing.
I stand still, breathing hard, watching the
foal as it totters toward the dead monster. What does that soft black coat
hide?
It noses at the icy
neck of the mare, blinking as it smells the blood and as the creature does not
move, and then trots snarledly over to me, shaking, as if it thinks I can help…as
if its mother were not a monstrosity that I had killed. It looks up at me with
great, sad brown eyes. Its mother.
Faster than is
cautious, I push it away, expecting the illusion hiding its red eyes to vanish
if I touch it. But it doesn’t; the foal totters, and remains as soft and dark
and pathetic as ever.
Warily, I let it nibble
on the fingers of the hand that isn’t bloody, thinking that Father would call
me a fool for not killing it. But it’s no monster, in form or in desire.
Thunder booms out
from behind me, as far away as the palace is, and I turn to see lightning
glinting from the spire. Thor.
Uphill I run,
seeing more lightning at the top, hearing more thunder as I run down again,
seeing and hearing both as I race across the level ground, around the side of
the palace—there, in the garden, in a white ring surrounded by warriors, a blue
woman higher that the horse I just killed, so tall that when she holds Thor by
his feet his blowing cape never brushes the ground. Her other great fist is
shaking hard as Thor reaches desperately in its direction; she’s holding
Mjolnir in it, I realize as I run closer, and the white ring about her is a
great wall of sharp ice spears. Volstagg hacks at them, bellowing.
I stop and draw a
deep breath, drawing my dagger again. Thor’s face is red, his foot flopped at a
broken angle. Her face, blue, marked, red eyes. Her other fist, shaking and
shaking, about to fly open.
To the center of
the base of her palm, my dagger flies, piercing all its length. Her fingers
jerk, and Mjolnir slips out between them, flying into Thor’s hand and a moment
later from it again. Her head explodes in a storm of ice and lightning and night-sky
blood, falling to the ice with Thor—and she follows, falling almost onto him,
her shoulder breaking a gate into her icewall. I run forward and climb over
her, finding him prostrate and rejoiced. “Brother! I broke the engagement!” He
tries to stand up and walk, the result of which is that I have to catch him.
“I think you mean
you broke her head,” I say dryly, trying not to fall over as he leans heavily
on my shoulder. “Precisely how one should treat one’s betrothed.”
He laughs,
catching Mjolnir (which makes him just that much heavier!) “She was a Jotun.”
Fandral clambers
over the giantess and takes half of Thor’s weight. “It’s lucky the wine was
iced today. And that she put her whole head in the bowl of it!”
Volstagg’s axe
smashes through the wall, caving in just enough of it that I can see Father’s approaching
white hair.
†
I’ve collected my
dagger from the dead Jotun’s wrist, and now I sit on a stone that pokes off a
hill, sit looking at the columned triangle of the palace reflecting the light.
Really, Father
wasn’t quite thorough. He should have accused me of giving the giantess a love
potion that made her want to wed Thor, and declared that I had taught her her
illusory powers, just for tidiness sake.
I hate
remembering my soft words of apology, my humble bow, my penitent look that was
false, my look of fear that was real as for a moment his fist rose—
I was the hero.
Not the fool, and most certainly not the villain.
When I was
younger I would have made an effort to explain this. One of the reasons I am yclept
the god of Lies….
I gasp as
something wet bumps my cheek, and leap to my feet, dagger in hand. Big brown
eyes look up at me, long lashes fluttering. The foal bumps its nose into my
leg, for no apparent reason, leaving wetness on my leather trousers, and then
blinks up at me again.
“If you were a
little more intelligent, you’d be out for revenge against me,” I tell it
softly, taking a leaf out of its soft black mane. “And if I were sensible, I wouldn’t let the
foal of a Jotun monster live.”
I kneel on one
knee, and stroke the foal’s neck. “Why exactly do you have eight legs, young
one? You slip as you go, and slipped past my wisdom, right?”
He blinks and
puts his chin on my shoulder, making a smile spread across my face.
I suppose it
would be embarrassing enough to have one’s intended hold one upside down in the
air without having simply dangled there until the advent of one’s younger
brother.
I hear Mother’s
quiet steps on the grass only a few moments before she says, “He’ll need some hand
feeding.”
I look up at her,
smiling. “Perhaps a little more than most foals…four more legs to nourish.”
The foal uses
them and the other four to skid across the grass to her and rub against her shining
blue gown. She laughs softly and pets its forehead. “Whatever his mother was,
he certainly doesn’t take after her. His mother was the magician’s horse, was
she not?”
I rise.
“Indeed.” And that is the end of that. Father would want the foal dead if he
knew that, and so I will have found the foal in the hills, and Mother will
never say that I said otherwise.
The foal slips along
beside us as we walk back toward the palace, the darkening light a stronger
gold than at the height of the day. “I hope to finish the shield tonight,” I
say, for it is needed, though a Jotun began its making.
“A worthy goal, but Thor might make it difficult,”
Mother says with a smile, gently pulling her wrap out of the foal’s mouth.
“He’s searching the palace for you, as he wants to hold a victory feast.”
“Shouldn’t he be
having his ankle treated?”
“It’s possible
the two healers who are chasing him through the palace with melting ice in
their hands think so.” Her face is excessively serious, and then we both start
laughing.
Author’s Note
This
is Marvel fanfiction; credit to Marvel for the realm and
characters,
except the giantess. Credit to Norse mythology for some of
for
the information that Sleipnir’s name means “the slipper.”
