Chapter 1: The Binding
The thread was the color of moonlight on water, and it was tied around your wrist.
Queen Frigga had spun it herself in the last year of her life, in the tower room above her garden, while you sat at her feet sorting dried yarrow and pretended not to watch. You hadn't understood then what it was for. You understood now. It was the finest piece of seiðr you had ever seen, light as a spider's silk and strong enough to hold a god, and at the other end of it, invisible to everyone in the throne room but the two of you, was Loki of Asgard.
He was sitting on Odin's throne. Of course he was. He sat it the way a cat sits a windowsill, one leg hooked over the golden arm, Gungnir propped against his shoulder as if he'd simply found it lying around. The great horned helm caught the light from the high windows. Below the dais, the court of Asgard stood in their silks and armor and watched him with the wary stillness of a herd watching a wolf that had wandered into the meadow and lain down.
"So," said Loki. "This is my keeper."
You had walked the length of the hall to stand before the throne, the way the herald had instructed. You had not bowed. The herald, who was very old and had served Bor, had turned the color of curdled milk.
"I am the court mage," you said. "Appointed by the Allfather."
"Before he fell asleep." Loki tilted his head. His eyes were very green. "Convenient, isn't it? He names me regent with one breath and hands you my leash with the next, and then he lies down for a nap and leaves us to sort it out." He smiled at the court. A few of them flinched. "My father always did enjoy a joke."
"It's not a leash."
"It is tied around my soul, darling. I'll call it what I like."
You held up your wrist. The thread glimmered, visible now, a pale arc of light that ran across the hall and up the steps of the dais and vanished into the center of his chest. A murmur went through the court.
"It is a binding," you said, "made by your mother. It does not command you. It does not compel you. It only stops your magic, if I decide you've given me cause. You can rule as you like, Prince Loki. You can be as clever as you like. You simply can't set anything on fire while you do it."
"Not even a little fire?"
"Not even a candle."
His smile went thin and sharp. He stood, unfolding from the throne, all long black leather and green silk, and came down the steps with Gungnir in his hand. He stopped one step above you, so that he towered. He smelled of cold air and old books and something faintly metallic, like the edge of a knife.
"Then let us start as we mean to go on," he said, pitched to carry to the very back of the hall. "Before the court of Asgard. Kneel."
The hall went silent.
You had known this was coming. Frigga had warned you, in her gentle, amused way, on one of her last good days. He will test you at once, sweetling. He'll want to see if you're afraid of him. Everyone has always been afraid of him or sorry for him, and he can't abide either.
What should I be, then? you'd asked.
And she had smiled the smile he'd inherited from her, though neither of them would ever admit it, and said: Unimpressed.
You looked up at the god of mischief, one step above you on the dais. You looked at Gungnir and the horned helm and the long pale throat above the gold of his collar. Then you looked at the throne behind him, and back at him, and raised one eyebrow.
"No," you said.
The silence turned to ice. Somewhere near the back of the hall, someone dropped a goblet.
Loki looked down at you for a long, long moment. Then, slowly, his face changed. The sharpness didn't go. But something came up underneath it, bright and dangerous and delighted, as though you'd handed him a gift he'd stopped believing anyone would give.
"No?" he repeated softly.
"I knelt to your mother. I'll kneel to your father when he wakes. I don't kneel to someone holding a spear that doesn't belong to him."
He laughed. It rang off the golden pillars, startled and real. Then he leaned down until his mouth was beside your ear, and the court strained to hear and couldn't.
"Oh," he murmured, "we are going to have such fun."
He tested the binding that same night.
You were in the library at the top of the east tower, reading through Frigga's notes by witchlight, when the thread at your wrist went taut. It didn't hurt. It tugged, a sharp sweet pressure like a plucked string, and you felt rather than saw a surge of seiðr gathering somewhere below you, green and cold and enormous.
You followed it down. Through the empty corridors, out across the moonlit terraces, into the garden that had been the queen's.
He was standing in the middle of it among the white roses, with his hands raised and green fire crawling over his fingers, and every rosebush within twenty paces had turned to ice. The petals were glass. The thorns were crystal. A fountain stood frozen mid-splash, its spray hanging in the air like a chandelier.
"Stop," you said.
"Make me."
You touched the thread. You didn't pull. You simply let it know that you were there.
The green fire on his hands flickered and went out like a pinched wick. The ice held. He turned to look at you over his shoulder, and in the moonlight his face was white and his eyes were wet.
You stopped walking.
"Do you know," he said conversationally, "that I wasn't permitted at her funeral? I watched from the dungeon. They told me afterward. The boat, the arrow, the light going up into the dark." He looked at his frozen hands. "This was her garden. I wanted to see it once without anyone watching me. I thought if I froze it, I'd be able to keep it as it is. Before it all dies back in winter and some gardener replants it wrong."
You didn't say anything. You couldn't. Your throat had closed.
"And now you've come to put out my little fire," he said. "Very dutiful. She'd be proud."
You walked to the nearest rosebush. You touched one of the frozen blooms, and it was so cold it burned your fingertips. Then you laid your palm flat against it and called up your own seiðr, the warm gold kind Frigga had taught you first, and you felt it go into the ice like water into dry ground.
You didn't melt it. You did something harder. You sealed it, the way she'd shown you once with a pressed flower, so that the glass would never crack and the frost would never fade. A preservation spell. It took everything you had. When you were done your knees were shaking and the rose shone in the moonlight, perfect and clear and permanent.
"There," you said, your voice not quite steady. "Now it won't die back. Now nobody can replant it wrong."
Loki stared at you.
You turned to go. You made it three steps before his voice stopped you, very quiet, nothing theatrical in it at all.
"Why did you do that?"
"Because she was my teacher," you said, without turning around. "And I miss her too."
You lay awake that night in your chambers in the east tower, watching the thread glimmer faintly on your wrist, and tried not to think about his face in the moonlight.
You were very bad at not thinking about it. That was the trouble. You'd hated him for years in the abstract, the way everyone did. The traitor prince. The one who'd brought an army through the sky to Midgard. And then you'd seen him crying in his mother's garden over a frozen rose, and the hatred had come apart in your hands like wet paper.
You thought about the long pale line of his throat above his collar. About his voice in your ear. We are going to have such fun.
The thread at your wrist pulsed.
You sat up. It pulsed again, warm this time, a slow deep throb like a second heartbeat. You hadn't touched it. You hadn't called on it at all. And under the warmth, faint as a voice through a wall, you felt something come down the thread toward you that was not your own. Surprise. Hunger. A startled, sharp-edged awareness, as if someone at the other end had just woken up in the dark and discovered he wasn't alone.
Then, clear as if he'd spoken it into your pillow, you heard his voice in your head.
Well, now. Isn't that interesting.
You went cold all over.
Frigga's binding didn't just run from you to him. It ran both ways. And for the last half hour, while you'd lain here thinking about his throat and his mouth and the way he'd smiled when you told him no, he had felt every single bit of it.
Darling, Loki murmured through the thread, sounding enormously, wickedly pleased. You should have told me you felt that way. I'd have knelt much sooner.