19

Six years past and worlds away

I’d spent the morning painting, alone in the clearing with the bridge stone and my trinkets, sunlight flashing dozens of miniature rainbows among streamers of gem-colored silk. I’d mostly been trying not to think about anything but the colors and the texture of the paint beneath my brush.

Not about Loki and the sad set of his shoulders as he’d walked away from me and the fact that he’d avoided me since. Not about Heimdal and his blatant lack of faith in me and the fact that, despite my avoidance of him, I missed him. I missed both of them.

As my brush worked silky-smooth paints across the canvas, I imagined what it would be like, if Loki were less tormented and sad, if we could again go on long walks, talking and laughing while I watched the sparkle in his dark eyes. If Heimdal were truly the golden god he’d first seemed, and not caught in bonds of denial and mistrust. If we again shared meals and stories and…

A bed.

It was, after all, merely a daydream.

But maybe, if I thought about it long and hard enough, I could find some way to help Loki, to reconcile with Heimdal, to make a life in Asgard that was less complicated.

I was listening to the gentle rustle of leaves and bursts of birdsong, thinking such foolish thoughts, when a woman’s wail shattered the morning’s calm.

I jerked hard, sending a startled scrape of vermillion raking through the cerulean sky on my canvas. Instinctively, I looked around, but whoever was screaming did so from the far side of the trees—from inside the city.

The wail rose and fell. What it didn’t do was end. A chill filled my chest.

I dropped my brush onto my palette and left it where it fell. Clutching my skirt into one hand, I ran out of my clearing and toward Valhalla.

At first, winter grass whispered beneath my feet. Then my slippers thumped the planked path leading into the cluster of buildings that made the city. Valhalla’s peaked roof rose higher than all others. That also seemed to be the source of the scream.

As I neared Valhalla, that one wailing voice stopped. A shouting created by more than one voice filled the void.

Outside Valhalla’s vaulted facade, a crowd had gathered. What they looked at, I couldn’t tell right away. Backs and shoulders and a multitude of golden-haired heads blocked my view. Spying Sif’s short blonde hair in the crowd, I shouldered up alongside her.

And finally saw what everyone else had already seen.

Frigg knelt upon the path. Odin stood beside her. He slumped, shoulders down and gray head bowed. Frigg rocked as she knelt.

Baldur lay before his mother, his head cradled in Frigg’s lap.

Blood soaked Frigg’s skirts, pooled beneath the shoulders of Baldur’s ceremonial armor, soaked his blond hair a deep crimson.

His eyes were open. They didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. Gods died, but not easily.

And the blood. So much of it. The stink of it hung heavy in the air.

Frigg hunched over Baldur, her face turned down toward him. My own expression instinctively mirrored the one I imagined she wore—tear-filled eyes fixed on her dead son’s face, her mouth twisted into a horrified wail of grief. Even though she’d stopped making the sound itself, I knew it would never stop rending her heart.

“Weep all you like, Old-Mother.”

Loki’s voice wove between the notes of Frigg’s continued weeping. With it crept a slow and horrible dawning of suspicion. My heart clutched with dread.

Frigg’s shoulders shook. She wagged her head side to side, as if wishing she could cover her ears with her hands. But her hands held Baldur in her lap and were covered in his blood.

Odin stood over Frigg, staring with a blank expression at his dead son. But when Loki spoke, Odin lifted his head.

I followed Odin’s gaze to the source of Loki’s voice.

Thor and Heimdal stood one on each side of Loki, each with fists wrapped like steel bands around Loki’s arms.

Loki’s hands were dark with blood.

If he’d had any intention to run, Loki showed none. He stood perfectly still and straight in the twin grasps of the golden gods who flanked him, his sharp little face sneering beneath his mop of dark curls.

“He’s killed Baldur.” Sif’s voice dripped like icy raindrops beside my ear. “Will you defend him this time?”

Even though the ring of truth filled Sif’s words, I struggled to understand what she meant.

“How?” It was the only question I could wrap my head around, for the moment. “How is it even possible? Baldur is—”

“A god?” Loki’s black eyes fixed on me. A toxic glee coated his voice, like poison on a dagger. “Not so difficult, really. All the protection enchanted on that pretty armor? Good against everything on this world.”

On this world. A tickle of comprehension stirred. Hard as he was to look at, I glanced again at Baldur’s body.

A makeshift dagger lay on the ground nearby. The tip was twisted, like small branch taken directly from a tree. It had been sharpened and lashed onto a straighter shaft.

“He laughed.” Loki dropped his voice even further, as if talking to himself. I looked up and caught him staring at the weapon as well. His expression had gone as emotionless as his voice.

Shock. He’s in shock.

Loki raised his eyes again to mine. His face remained slack. “‘Just some stupid twig.’ That’s what Baldur said. ‘I can do whatever I want to you, whenever I like. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’“

Slow layers of comprehension drifted through me, half-understood realizations awash in uncertainty.

Baldur, laying his hand on Loki’s shoulder, and Loki’s unsmiling flinch and ashen complexion. Me, foolishly telling Loki and Baldur we could all get along, and Loki’s faltering smile in reply. Baldur’s fingers, pinching Loki’s flesh as he whispered into Loki’s ear.

“Nothing that it would do me any good to repeat.”

Dear gods. What Baldur had been doing finally began to dawn on me. For how many years? How young had Loki been when it began?

“That’s what Baldur said,” Loki repeated. “So I proved him wrong.”

Frigg broke out in fresh sobs. Thor tightened his grip on Loki’s arm and gave him such a ferocious shake that Loki’s head snapped side to side. On Loki’s far side, Heimdal only clenched his jaw and grimly refused to look at me.

Loki’s gaze shifted from the weapon to me. He smiled, deceptively sweet. “All I needed was a twig of the proper sort of wood. One from a different world.”

My pulse ceased beating. My breath froze in my throat.

“Mistletoe. We don’t have it on Asgard.”

The stink of blood hit me all over again, thick and metallic. Nausea washed over me.

“Thank you for indulging my whim, little rainbow. You are a true friend.”

Gods. What had I done?

I stared at Loki. I stared at his defiant stance and the twisted smile on his mouth.

And beneath them, I saw the small boy who had only ever wanted to be loved. Who had been pushed and tested, until maybe this time he’d been pushed too hard.

“You didn’t mean it.” I tried to sound like I believed. I wanted to believe. “Tell them you didn’t mean it.”

Tell me. Tell me you didn’t mean to do it.

Loki’s smile trembled. His shoulders dropped.

He can’t tell me that. Because he did mean it.

“Then tell them why.” I fairly whispered. Tears welled in my eyes.

Just a boy. He was just a boy.

Then Loki’s face twisted even harder toward hatred, and he glared at me, harder even than he’d glared at those who’d already condemned him.

“I saw you with him, you know. With your precious Watcher.” Loki practically growled that last.

I blinked. Standing beside Loki, Heimdal did much the same, evidently as confused as I was by this new shift of topic. The only thing I could think of was the day in my clearing, when I had nearly convinced Heimdal to kiss me.

“Do you know what Heimdal did?” Loki’s growl leveled into a perfectly reasonable lilt. “All those years ago, when he caught Thor and Baldur tormenting me?”

“Someone shut him up!” Frigg’s voice rose in pitch and shattered on the final word.

Thor gave Loki another fierce shake and then dragged at his arm, as if to haul him away. But beside Loki, Heimdal fell perfectly still. Old pain suddenly haunted his face.

“Nothing.” Loki mouthed the word at me, near-silently.

Heimdal flinched. Loki only kept looking at me.

“Wake up, little rainbow.” The words lurched from Loki as Thor gave him yet another shake. “The Aesir always come first. The only protecting the Watcher does is for them.”

“Did you intend to kill Baldur?” Heimdal’s voice cut through Frigg’s sobbing and the murmur of the Aesir crowded around the scene.

Loki’s expression went blank. He blinked. Blinked again.

With his eyes still on me, Loki smiled.

“Of course I did. I’ve been working toward this end for years. Do you know how hard it is to kill a god?”

I could think of nothing else to say. My heart felt petrified inside my chest. As horrified as I was by the sight of dead Baldur and by the certainty that Loki had killed him, what gripped me in that moment, more than any other emotion, was grief.

Loki truly was beyond redemption, beyond help. If any doubt had lingered, it fled from me now. I mourned as much for the friend I’d maybe never truly had as I did for Baldur. More, probably.

He used me. Just like Heimdal said.

“Why?” I realized I was staring back at Loki, although I hadn’t necessarily intended the question be directed at him.

“Iris.” Heimdal’s steady voice interceded. Standing beside Loki, his hand locked around Loki’s arm, Heimdal shifted his position. His face, strong and calm, drifted into my vision alongside Loki’s. “Go home now. You don’t need to be a part of this.”

Despite Heimdal’s stony expression, a gentleness filled his voice.

And he calls me Iris. He and Loki are the only ones who ever have.

But the emotion in Heimdal’s words was more than gentleness. I understood that, however he felt about Loki personally, he’d been not only wounded by Baldur’s death but by its possibility. Heimdal was supposed to be Asgard’s protector, guarding this world and me, the way into this world, from the threats beyond.

What we’d all needed protection from had turned out to be inside with us all along.

Beside Heimdal, Loki’s smile twisted into a sneer. I couldn’t decide what expression I gazed on now, his fox-like face seemed so alien.

He murdered a man. There should be no room left for compassion. No room for redemption.

Loki’s next words sounded as much a snarl as a spoken sentence. They reverberated in my skull, imbued with an odd and terrible relief, as if by crossing the line between mischief and murder, Loki had somehow set himself free.

“You chose your path, little rainbow. I’ve chosen mine. There is nothing you can do for me now.”

I didn’t take his meaning, immediately. Then Loki’s gaze cut to the side, toward Heimdal—Heimdal who was also watching me, a concerned frown cutting lines across his forehead.

Loki believed that I had chosen Heimdal over him. That perhaps I’d chosen Asgard in general over Loki. In truth, I’d hoped there would be a way to have both my new home and my new friend. I hadn’t realized I’d been making choices, certainly not ones that would lead to this moment.

And now it was far, far too late to undo any of them.