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Sigyn has finally returned to my rooms and her work. She still mourns for the babe she once cradled in her arms, a little bundle of magic. She begged to visit him, but Odin was adamant. Even now that she has returned to us, she works only gifts for him, as if he were still chained beneath a serpent. And perhaps he is. No one knows what happened in the void, how he fell in with the Chitauri. He will not speak of it. And I have not handled it well. He hides himself behind illusions and bates me into arguments I never would have succumbed to in the past. Sigyn weaves trim for a shirt, sigyls for healing and clear thought woven in her own bright blue and silver. Perhaps I will weave the linen.
The pages in this volume of Frigga’s journals are crisp and new, the ink sharp—only a year gone since the words were scratched in to the page. Loki had forgotten Sigyn—or perhaps not so much forgotten as refused to remember. She was a constant presence when he was a child, healing his bruises, sneaking him sweets, finding distractions when Thor and his friends chased him away from their games. And the serpent. He shuddered, though the memory paled to what had awaited him in the void. Sigyn had always been kind, defending him as fiercely as his mother—sometimes moreso. But as he reached his majority other concerns consumed him, and what had seemed comfort before felt patronizing as he pushed to gain Odin’s approval and remain in Thor’s arbitrary good graces. Well, they they had felt arbitrary, anyway.
Loki sighed and ran his fingers over the pages once more, thinking how Frigga’s hands had graced them. Then he shook his head, chiding himself, stop sailing on this lake of nostalgia, you fool. You need information, not sentiment.
What he needed was to start going to through his mother’s archives, so the next night he once again snuck into Frigga’s rooms, fairly certain he had discovered how to connect his own not space with hers.
He noticed the difference right away. Frigga’s loom had been stripped, threads carefully snipped and the unfinished cloth vanished.
Who would dare! Who even had access?
Loki had placed powerful wards about the room, as had Odin prior to his, ahem, drifting off to sleep. Loki ran careful hands over the doorframe looking for evidence of tampering, scanned the floor for stray footprints, searched through the disturbed cobwebs on the loom, scanned the room for other items that might be missing. Ah. There’s the answer—they were all gone. All of the abandoned projects that Frigga’s handmaids had left out—they were all gone.
Sigyn.
It could only have been her clever fingers and quiet feet that had found their way back into these rooms. Loki collapsed into a chair. He wanted to scream, she has no right! But he knows she has every right. A lifetime of service. Of course she would want mementos, and what better than the work of her mistress’s hands. As much as Loki ached for the loss, he couldn’t begrudge her impulse, though he wondered at the timing. It had only been a few days since his first visit, and everything had been intact. Why come now?
He rubbed his face and let it go, indulged his self pity for a few long minutes, and then returned to the business at hand.
The archives.
The first thing Loki did was to build a back door from Frigga’s library to his own not-space collection of oddments, guaranteeing himself access without having to return through Frigga’s rooms. Eventually he would remove the anchor that kept her space attached to the closet, but he left it for now.
Sentiment.
Next, he located the rest of Frigga’s journals, found the few years that he wanted, and returned to Odin’s study to gloat a bit as he began to read.
“Ha! Look what I found, you insufferable old man!” Loki brandished the volumes at the sleeping hulk that rested under the golden glow. “Shall we see what your wife had to say about your hidebound counsellors? Or even better, what she had to say about your conduct during the last war? How did she feel about your penchant for bringing home feral children, eh? I can’t imagine she was immediately enamored of your newest acquisition. Shall we look? Let’s try this one.”
Loki opened a volume and read aloud:
Finally, Thor has gone to sleep and I have a minute to jot down a few thoughts. He is a voracious eater!”
“No, I don’t care to read about Thor’s eating habits, do you? Let’s skip ahead a bit.”
The war seems to be coming to a close. Odin’s last missive tells of Laufey’s forces cornered in Utgard Keep. Heimdal tells me there are families there—the king’s family among them. It will be a desperate defense.
“No, perhaps a few pages on, yes?”
Odin has finally returned to me, but such an odd return. He shadow-walked into my chambers, bypassing the Bifrost altogether, with a tiny bundle beneath his cloak. I would not have believed it, had I not seen it myself. “Laufey’s babe,” he said. “We will foster it with one of your ladies as a hostage. He won’t dare start another war.” He thrust the child into my arms and said I must keep it hidden until after he speaks to the council. He has placed a glamour on the child. “Loki” he called it. It makes no sense. What use is a hostage that’s kept secret? And the child is so small—smaller even than my Thor. Surely the Jotun will not fight for the return of a runt such as this.
“Oh! Your dutiful wife was not so pleased with the souvenir you brought back from your winter vacation, then?”
For all of that, he is a fine child, he fit into my arms as though he were my own. I would keep him, if I could. It’s not as though I’m likely to have another. But I know Sigyn yearns for a babe—she and Anna have been seeking ways to adopt. I worry, too, about Odin. He delayed the Odinsleep so he could see through the end of the war. His temper is short, and I’m sure some of his advisors have begun to balk at his terseness.
“I don’t know how she could tell the difference. Short-tempered always seemed to be your default mood, though I suppose it explains why you were so quick to banish your golden child—late for your millennial nap, I suppose—how like a toddler! You certainly don’t seem to have been making your best decisions in the past 20 years. What was that mess with Vanaheim 5 years back? I barely managed to smooth that over. Their ambassador still won’t drink a toast in your name at yule. It seems you were well overdue for this hiatus. You should be thanking me for this.”
Loki skimmed over the next few pages quickly. As much as he wanted to read closely, the weight of Thanos still pressed on his shoulders. He took in details quickly—Sigyn took in the babe; Odin slept; Frigga served as regent; Sigyn . . .
Sigyn returned the babe to Frigga. Which Loki knew must have happened—obviously. He wasn’t raised by her, but . . .
Sigyn begged I would take Loki back. She is utterly distraught. Anna cannot forget her father’s death in the war, and . . . it hurts to say it . . . she takes it out on the child. She refuses to hold him or feed him, telling Sigyn that since she wanted the “little monster” Sigyn can take care of him. What could I do? She fears Anna will leave her—after a 500 year partnership. She begs me not to punish her, or Anna. That will be the hardest boon she has ever asked of me. I can hardly look at Anna without wanting to spit. How dare she? Well, Loki is mine now. I care not how Odin will take it when he awakes. I will tell the court that I was very happy when Odin returned from the war, and am exceedingly grateful for the results! Who would question another war baby—there are so many!
Loki shouldn’t have been surprised. It shouldn’t have hurt the way it did. He’d always known Anna disliked him, nearly as much as Sigyn doted on him. And now it made sense—to Anna, he had always been a little monster. A proxy for the monsters who had killed her father.
Maybe, he thought, he should look through some other part of the archives this evening. He could come back to the journals some other time.