Loki

by Mackenzi Lee

  Instead, he did what he had long ago learned was best when it came to his father: he bowed his head and swallowed his pride. He had years of practice pretending to be at peace with Odin’s choices. He was accomplished at sitting quietly and letting anger simmer unseen inside him.

  “Yes, Father,” he said, and when he left the throne room, Odin did not call him back.

  Loki returned to his chambers, feeling more a prisoner in his own bedroom now than he had when his father had exiled him there as a child as punishment for minor offenses. Though just like in the days of his youth, Loki allowed himself a very dramatic flop of despair onto the bed. He stared up at the hangings, rage funneling through him despite his best attempts to quell it. How many times had Thor behaved far more recklessly than he had while on missions for Odin? He’d never been benched like this, forbidden from participating in the assignments that were so clearly meant to test the princes for how well suited they were to kingship. Was it the baiting that had been his downfall? The premeditation? Or was Odin simply looking for a reason to keep him as unfit for the throne as possible?

  Thor didn’t knock, but Loki recognized the sound of his entrance. No one else’s tread was quite so galumphing. “Leave me alone,” Loki said, his cheek still smashed into the fur blanket on his bed.

  “I’m sorry,” Thor said.

  “No, you’re not.” Loki sat up, resisting the urge to comb his fingers through his hair. He knew he’d mussed it on the bed covers, but vanity had a way of getting undercut by one’s anger in moments like these. “If you were sorry, you would have taken the responsibility that was yours. Weren’t you listening to Father?”

  “None of it was mine.”

  “Oh, that’s strange, I remember a blond giant with me when we broke into the Ice Elves’ Prism chamber. He was trying to smash his way out, but that must have been a hallucination of my small mind.”

  “My presence does not mean I am responsible,” Thor countered.

  “But you supported me,” Loki said. “You could have told him that at least.”

  “I’m sorry, Loki, but I cannot risk our father’s anger right now.” Thor’s voice was so devoid of anything besides righteousness that it made Loki want to scream.

  “And you think I can?” Loki demanded.

  “I’m trying to help you. So is Father.”

  Loki fell backward onto the bed again. “Go away, I’m sulking.”

  “Please don’t be angry with me.”

  “Oh, I think we’re a bit late for that. You’re lucky I haven’t set my horde of tiny dragons upon you. Their teeth are very sharp and their appetites insatiable.”

  “Loki, if I have caused you some offense—”

  “If?”

  Thor let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know what it is that I have done,” he said, his voice softer than usual.

  Loki snorted. “Oh, please.”

  “I’m trying to apologize.”

  “And yet you can’t even work out what for, so I don’t think it counts.”

  Thor stared at him, his hands working in and out of fists at his side. Loki braced himself, ready for Thor to strike something, possibly him, but instead he said, his tone soft with hurt, “You are so determined to despise me, aren’t you?”

  It would have been better to be struck. Loki flinched as though he had been. “I don’t—”

  But Thor held up a hand. “Spare me, brother. Whatever you hold against me, whatever I have done to wound you, I hope you know that I am not your enemy. I want to fight by your side, not against you.”

  They stared at each other. Loki wished he knew how to explain the way he could not separate his brother from all the unseen forces that had shaped them both. It was everything that had dug the trench between them. He did not know how to exist in this world that had been built around them, the world they had kept building for themselves because they knew no other way. A world that had decided that what waited for him was the fate of a traitor.

  At last, Thor said, “Father and I are returning to Alfheim.”

  Loki rolled onto his back, pulling his knees up to his chest. “Send me a raven when you get there so I know you’re safe,” he replied dryly.

  Silence. Then, “I wish you were coming.”

  “Not me,” Loki replied, staring at the wall. “So glad to be going to Midgard with all the humans and their adorable little human faces and greasy food and magicless blood.”

  “Be careful,” Thor said.

  Loki flicked his fingers in Thor’s direction. “Begone.”

  Loki stared at the ceiling, counting the dimples in the coffered tiles and waiting for the sound of his brother’s boots to retreat, followed by the soft snap of the door. He finally pushed a hand through his hair—it had gotten long, nearly to his shoulders. He wound it around his palm and curled his fingers into it, the way Amora used to when she was thinking, but rather than unfurling like hers always had, it tangled into a knot. Loki let his hand fall away.

  Be the witch, he told himself. Be cleverer and sharper and quicker than everyone else. Come up with something.

  But his brain felt thick and stalled with jealousy and fury. For the first time, he wished that he too had a hammer. He wanted to break something.

  But perhaps there was some destruction he could do on Midgard. Not much. And not obvious. Just enough to get him noticed. Just enough to be the hero when he cleaned up a mess of his own making.

  When the shimmering haze of the portal that had sent him from Asgard to Earth cleared, Loki discovered that he had been dropped in the middle of nowhere. Midgard was already fairly middle-of-nowhere as far as the Nine Realms went, and in this particular spot, there was also no discernable speck of civilization. And it was raining. He hadn’t even taken his first real step on Midgard and he was already up to his ankles in mud.

  The countryside around him was not altogether unpleasant, but it was just that—countryside. Rolling hills in riotous green where small white dots of sheep grazed, soggy and bleating in annoyance. Loki wished he could join them in their protestations. He took a step, prying his foot from the sucking mud. He nearly left a boot behind, and was shocked when his foot landed not in another puddle of squelching mud but on something hard. He looked down. He had been deposited on some sort of track, two parallel iron bars driven into the ground connected by perpendicular wooden boards.

  An earsplitting whistle startled him so badly he nearly tipped over. He looked up. Something was barreling at him along the track, spitting black smoke into the sky. The rain spat and fizzed off its metal siding. It let out another shriek, clearly having no intention of slowing down, and Loki leaped out of the way, conjuring his knife on instinct.

  It was a train—he only realized it as it chugged past him, pistons pushing the wheels along the track. From his perch in the engine, the driver shouted something that Loki was certain was an obscenity. He struggled to his feet, tucking his knife back into his sleeve. He had forgotten just how primitive Midgardians were, how fantastically behind their technology was compared to the Asgardians’. Steam trains were archaic. What backward hole had his father dropped him into?

  Loki watched the train pass, the first few cars lined with windows behind which Loki could make out the dim, crouched shapes of humans. The back half of the train was black windowless cars. On the sides an emblem had been painted—a snake eating its own tail surrounding a skull with crossed bones beneath it. There were words as well, but the train was moving faster than the Allspeak could translate them.

  He looked down at himself, mud now splattered up to his knees and his clothes sticking to him from the hot rain. He sighed, then conjured a small spell to shield himself from the rain. Frigga had warned him that Midgard would drain his strength faster than Asgard, and without magic thick and native like it was on his home realm, his power would be slower to replenish. Small spells would take more energy, and in excess, would eventually bleed him dry. Magic didn’t live in the air here like it did in Asgard—he wou
ld have to rely on the built-up reserves of strength his mother had taught him to carry like canteens of water on a desert expedition.

  But surely his own comfort constituted some kind of emergency.

  His father had given him the name of the meeting site where the SHARP Society would be waiting for him—the Norse Wing of the British Museum in London. Like that meant anything. Whatever it was, he was certain it wasn’t in the middle of this emerald landscape and driving rain. He followed the train tracks up the hill, and when he crested it, he could see where the sky darkened ahead, black smoke from stacks turning the sky smudged and thick. Even the rain seemed to flinch away from it.

  London, he thought, and began to follow the tracks toward it.

  After a lifetime on Asgard, he had known Midgard would disappoint him. But did it truly have to be so dramatic about it? The shift—from the crystalline skies over his father’s golden palace, streets so clean they sparkled, and white water dripping from the fountains in every square, to the streets of London, where the skies were gray in a way that made it hard to tell if it was twilight or hazy and towers spit hideous smoke into the sky—was disorienting. The air felt chewy, the streets swampy, and all the people seemed as gray as the sky. Figures passed along the street, hunched inside ratty clothes, shouting and screaming at each other over the clanking of great machinery out of sight. On the corners, tiny boys in ragged clothes thrust newspapers into the air, shouting headlines in chorus with the screams from brothels and taverns, though it couldn’t have been more than midday. People tossed greasy hair from their faces, their skin rugged and brown as old boot leather, while they led half-starved-looking horses, their flanks vibrating with flies, the contents of their stomachs emptied onto the street, then left to lie where it landed.

  He hoped it was just mud on his boots.

  But London was not entirely unpleasant, if one subtracted the filth. It felt like a battlefield, somewhere raucous and dizzying, where it took an overabundance of wits just to stay on your feet. Asgard was as quiet as a funeral procession in comparison. Perhaps this was how Thor felt when he stared down an enemy across a battlefield and primed for a fight. This chaotic energy, this heat emanating off the city, this was Loki’s kind of fight.

  If Asgard failed him, perhaps this could be his kingdom. The city seemed in desperate need of some leadership. They may even build a statue of him.

  It took a few moments of observation before he changed his clothes from the green-and-black tunic he always wore on Asgard to mimic what he saw the Midgardian men wearing: a dark suit and a high-winged collar cinched with a necktie. He held out a hand, conjured a tall, dark hat, and set it upon his head. A glamoured outfit wasn’t a sustainable spell, but it would do until he could find the SHARP Society and some actual clothes. Though he wasn’t planning on staying long enough to truly need to replace them.

  He walked a block, decided the hat was far too tall, and pushed it down into a soft wool cap.

  It only took questioning a newsboy to get the location of the British Museum—a newsboy who demanded a coin for his trouble. Loki gave him a rock he enchanted to appear as a shilling, and the boy was pleased enough by this that he offered to take him there.

  The British Museum was puny compared to the libraries and galleries Loki had grown up visiting in the capital, but with the black city surrounding it, he guessed it was meant to be impressive. The stone front was lined with curl-topped columns and had a peaked roof, the stone still sparkling beneath the layer of grime from the factory smoke. Inside, more stone arches were stacked atop each other to form the entry hall, and voices echoed off the high ceiling, shouts of laughter and greeting occasionally breaking free from the tumult. Loki followed the map he had taken from the entrance, past two taxidermic animals with long necks at the top of the stairs, through the hallway with low glass cases where gold tombs were laid out in a row as neat as piano keys.

  Loki didn’t know whom he was looking for, or how he was meant to find the SHARP Society, but he knew as soon as he reached the Norse Wing. It was strange, to be surrounded by so many things that looked like items from his home, but not quite. Perhaps if Asgard had rolled around in the mud, cracked off a few edges, and then decayed for several thousand years it would look something like these relics. The shapes were familiar. The engraved bronze, lines interweaving and twining like the roots of Yggdrasil, the round domes of dragon heads carved on ax pommels, ornate shields and goblets that, had they been shined up and decorated with a few jewels, he could imagine the lesser nobles of his father’s court drinking from over a feast table. The cases were crowded, and a second tier of galleries closed off to the public held ancient-looking books bound in heavy, creased leather. Tables topped with glass ran down the center of the hall, with pendants, cutlery, and small fragments of stone lined up on cushions inside each.

  It was absolutely mad, Loki thought as he examined what looked like two shapeless lumps of rock that a small plaque identified as a pair of dice, the things the humans saved as vestiges of their ancestors and deemed worthy of putting on display. Who wanted to be remembered by their fork or their comb? That told you nothing about the way people were.

  “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Loki turned. A young man was standing behind him, his ruddy-brown hair curling out in unruly tendrils from under a flat cap, and his pale skin covered in so many freckles it looked like he had been splattered with mud. Perhaps he had been—Loki didn’t trust this filthy city. Loki was no expert in judging the age of Midgardians, but the man must have been young, though he was leaning on a cane, his weight carefully balanced on one leg.

  Loki tucked his hands into his pockets, then turned back to the case, adopting what he thought was an unmistakable leave me alone posture. “It’s fine.”

  “Fine?” The young man was either relentless or oblivious to social cues, for he limped up to the case beside Loki and prodded the glass, leaving behind a smudged fingerprint. “Do you even know what it is that you’re looking at?”

  “Cutlery,” Loki replied.

  The man frowned at the fingerprint, then pulled his sleeve up over his hand and tried to wipe it away, only succeeding in lengthening the smudge. “Cutlery from a civilization of people who lived thousands of years ago.”

  “Are you some sort of docent?” Loki asked. “Because I’m not looking for a tour.”

  “No, I’m just deeply offended when I see people not appreciating the artifacts. Look at those.” He turned to the case behind them. Inside the case, two skeletons were laid out and arranged like they were still lying in the earth. The bones looked brittle and shaggy, but someone had folded the fingers of each over the pommel of their swords, the blades gone black with age. One of the skulls was caved-in on one side, the other wearing a helmet with a protective stave carved upon the front.

  The boy was watching Loki’s face, like he was waiting for a reaction. Loki purposely kept his features as blank as possible, just to annoy him. “They’re warriors,” the boy finally prompted.

  “No, those are definitely skeletons.”

  “In life they were warriors.”

  “Does that matter?” Loki asked. “Death makes every man the same.”

  “Well, they weren’t both men, for a start,” the man interrupted. “That one’s a woman. The swords were exchanged as marriage rites. Better than rings, I think. More practical.”

  “If you’re a warrior.”

  “Or if you don’t care for jewelry.” The man offered a hand. His nails had dirty crescents beneath them, and his skin was dry and chapped. “I’m Theo, by the way. Theo Bell.”

  Loki gave his hand a disdainful pat, then turned away. “I’m not interested.”

  “Aren’t you impressed by all this?” Theo asked.

  “Am I supposed to be?” Loki replied.

  “Well yes, since this is one of the most interesting wings in one of the most interesting places in London.”

  Loki laughed. “They’re not very impr
essive for the finest treasures of your realm.”

  “Realm?” Theo repeated.

  “Your...world.”

  “It’s your world too.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to be impressed by what someone dug up in their back garden and stuck a plaque to.” He nodded to the case, where a pair of objects sat that a sign said were called “pans,” though they looked more like lumps of fused metal, roughly hewn and chewed around the edges by rust.

  “Do you know the stories?” Theo asked as Loki turned away. “The gods and the myths. And the ships and swords and things. Odin and Thor and Loki.”

  Loki stopped and glanced backward over his shoulder. Theo must be trying to give him some sort of sign, and Loki was desperately trying to ignore it. If this was the representative for the SHARP Society, he was turning around and heading straight back to Asgard. He’d rather scrub the palace floors with his fingernails while his father and Thor searched for the Stones than deal with humans.

  Theo smiled at him. His ears were too big for his face, and they stuck out like leaves. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  Loki sighed, resigning himself to the fact that this was indeed his contact. “Well, aren’t you sharp?”

  Theo’s grin broadened. “Can I show you something else?”

  “You might as well.”

  “Try not to sound too resigned to the fact.”

  Loki followed Theo across the gallery, toward a closed door that Theo unlatched using a key from his pocket with a quick glance around the room before ushering Loki through. He thought it would lead to the next exhibition, but instead it seemed to be a dark storage area with no windows and nothing but long wooden crates that looked eerily like caskets, their insides spilling over with soft white straw to protect whatever had been carried inside. They looked big enough to transport the married skeletons and their swords.

  The door snapped shut behind him, and Loki turned to face Theo, arms crossed. “What am I supposed to see in this closet? More skeletons? Don’t you humans have a saying about that?” Theo didn’t reply. He had leaned his cane against the door and was fiddling with a small silver case. “What’s that?”