Chapter 3: Both Ends of the Thread
Frigga's tower room smelled of dust and lavender, and nobody had touched it since she died.
You went there straight from Lord Haldor, still barefoot, still in your robe, and bolted the door behind you and tore through her shelves until your hands bled from the paper. You found it at last in a small book bound in pale blue leather, tucked behind a jar of dried yarrow.
Her handwriting. Neat and small and slanting, the way it had been on every lesson she'd ever set you.
For the one who holds it, the first page said. Because I know my husband, and I know his council, and someone will try to tell you this thread is a weapon. It is not. I made it, and I would sooner have cut off my hand than make a thing to kill my son.
You sat down on the floor and read the rest by the grey light from the window, and when you were done, you were crying, and you were furious.
The binding could not stop his heart. It could only do two things. It could hold his magic still, gently, the way a hand holds a bird. And if the one who held it ever pulled in hatred, wrenched at it to do harm, the thread would not bear it. It would break. And when it broke, every scrap of seiðr it had been holding back would come loose at once, wild and blind, like a dam bursting.
Haldor didn't want you to kill Loki. He wanted you to try. He wanted the thread to snap in the middle of the council chamber and Loki's magic to tear loose in front of every lord in Asgard. Then he would have exactly what he needed: the traitor prince, unleashed and dangerous, and a hall full of witnesses. An execution by noon.
There was one more line at the bottom of the last page, written smaller, in a hand that shook a little, the way hers had shaken near the end.
It can also be cut. Freely, with love, by the one who holds it. Then it is simply gone, and whatever is left between you is only what you both choose. I hope you get to choose it, sweetling. I hope he lets you.
The council met at noon in the long chamber below the throne room, around a table of black oak older than the Bifrost. You came in last, in your formal robes with your hair pinned up, and took your seat at the foot of the table. Loki sat at the head, in his armor and his horns, and didn't look at you.
You'd felt him wake that morning. Felt him reach for you through the thread and find you gone, and the brief cold flare of hurt before he locked it away. He thought you'd fled. You couldn't tell him otherwise, not here. You kept your hands folded on the table and your face like stone.
Lord Haldor stood up halfway through the grain reports.
"My lords," he said, "before we continue, I must raise a matter of the gravest concern."
Loki raised an eyebrow. "Must you."
"It has come to my attention that the regent has been working seiðr in secret. Against the terms of his release." Haldor turned, ring-heavy hand outstretched, toward the tall windows behind the throne. "Look there, my lords, and judge for yourselves."
Everyone looked.
In the courtyard below, green fire was crawling up the walls of the armory. It moved like living things, licking at the stone, and at its heart, clear as day, stood a tall figure in black and green with golden horns, hands raised, laughing.
The chamber erupted. Lords leapt to their feet. Loki was on his feet too, staring out the window, his face white with fury, and down the thread you felt it all hit him at once, the shock and the rage and underneath it something far older and worse. Resignation. As if some part of him had always known it would end like this.
"Lady Mage!" Haldor's voice cut through the din. "You hold the binding. You know your duty. Pull it. Now!"
Every eye in the room swung to you.
You stood up slowly. You lifted your wrist, and the thread blazed into sight, a pale arc of moonlight running the length of the table to the center of Loki's chest. He turned to look at you. His face was perfectly calm. His eyes were not.
Down the thread, very quietly, so only you could hear it: Go on, then. I'd rather it was you.
You looked at the window. At the green fire crawling up the armory walls, and the laughing horned figure at its heart.
Then you raised your other hand and said one word that Frigga had taught you when you were first learning to see through glamours, and the fire went out.
Not out. Away. It simply peeled back like wet paint, flaking off the stones in a shower of harmless sparks, and the laughing figure in the courtyard wavered and thinned and wasn't Loki at all. It was a slight, frightened man in grey robes with his hands still raised, one of the minor sorcerers who served in Haldor's household. He looked up at the council chamber window, saw fifty lords of Asgard staring down at him, and ran.
The silence in the chamber was enormous.
"That," you said into it, "was a very poor illusion, my lord. The queen would have been embarrassed for you."
Haldor's face had gone grey as old ash. He opened his mouth. Behind you, the doors banged open, and Heimdall walked into the council chamber in his golden armor with his great sword in his hand and his amber eyes burning, and he looked at Haldor the way the sun looks at frost.
"I see everything in this realm, my lord," said the Guardian of the Bifrost. "Everything. Including the conversation you had in the east corridor at dawn. Shall I recount it for the council?"
Haldor didn't wait to find out. He bolted for the side door. He made it three steps before the guards took him.
You found Loki in his mother's garden at sunset, among the glass roses.
He was sitting on the edge of the frozen fountain with his helm in his lap and his armor undone at the collar, turning a crystal petal in his long fingers. He didn't look up when you came down the path. He didn't need to. The thread hummed between you, quiet and wary.
"You could have pulled," he said. "Even after you saw through it. They'd have let you. They'd have thanked you."
"It wouldn't have killed you. Haldor lied." You sat down beside him on the fountain's edge, close enough that your shoulders touched. "Your mother left me a book. She said she'd have cut off her own hand before she made something that could hurt you."
His fingers went still on the petal.
"She also said," you went on, more quietly, "that it could be cut. Freely, by the one who holds it. And then whatever's left between us is only what we choose."
He turned his head and looked at you then. In the low gold light his face was entirely unguarded.
"Don't," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because without it you'll have no hold on me at all. I'll have my magic. I'll have the throne, for now. I could do anything." His voice was very low. "You'd be giving up the only leash anyone has ever had on me, darling. You'd be trusting me."
"I know." You held up your wrist between you. The thread shone pale against your skin. "That's the point."
You called up your seiðr, warm and gold. You laid two fingers across the thread where it left your wrist. You thought of Frigga in her tower, spinning it with her shaking hands. Then you thought of him on his knees on the stone floor, looking up at you and asking you to say it plainly.
"With love," you said, and you cut it.
It didn't snap. It simply dissolved, a ribbon of moonlight unraveling into the evening air in a thousand tiny motes, drifting up among the glass roses like seeds off a dandelion. Your wrist was bare. For the first time in a month, there was no warmth there, no hum, no second heartbeat. Just your own pulse, and the evening breeze, and silence.
You couldn't feel him anymore.
You looked at him, and for a terrible moment you didn't know what he'd do. He was free. He could stand up and walk away and take the whole realm with him, and you'd never feel it coming.
Loki set his golden helm down on the edge of the fountain. He stood up. And then, without a word, in his mother's garden, with the last of the light catching in his hair, he knelt in front of you on the grass.
Nobody had asked him to. That was the thing. You felt it go through you like a blade.
"I don't need a thread to know what I want," he said, looking up at you. "I never did. I only needed someone to stay long enough to see it." He took your bare wrist in his cool hand and pressed his lips to the place where the thread had been. "You stayed."
You slid off the fountain's edge and into his arms, and kissed him.
There was no mirror now. No doubled sensation, no knowing what he felt. You had to find it out the old way, with your hands and your mouth and your eyes on his face, and it turned out that was its own kind of magic. He kissed you like he was trying to memorize you without the thread to help. You pulled his armor loose, buckle by buckle, and he laughed against your mouth and helped you, and when you got your hands on his bare skin he shivered and frost bloomed across the grass around your knees.
"Here?" he breathed. "In her garden?"
"She'd have wanted the roses to see something nice for once."
He made a sound that was half laugh, half groan, and laid you down on his cloak in the grass among the glass roses.
It was slow this time. Slower than his chambers, slower than anything. He undressed you in the failing light as if every fastening were a riddle. He kissed every inch of skin he uncovered, and when you were bare beneath him he sat back on his heels and looked at you so long you flushed.
"Tell me," he said. "I can't feel it anymore. You'll have to tell me."
So you told him. Every touch, you told him. Yes, there. Slower. Again. Gods, Loki, again. And he listened like no one had ever listened to you, his long cool fingers moving inside you, his mouth hot at your breast, learning you all over again by your voice alone until you came apart under him with your hand clapped over your mouth and the glass roses chiming faintly in the breeze.
When he finally pushed into you, he did it with his eyes locked on yours, his forearms braced on either side of your head, and he said your name like a prayer. You wrapped yourself around him and pulled him deeper and told him exactly how good it felt, and watched it undo him, and that was better than any thread.
He moved in long, deep, aching strokes, holding back, watching you. You dragged your nails down his back. You told him not to be careful. And he wasn't. He took your wrists and pinned them in the grass, and fucked you hard and sweet in his mother's garden, and you broke a second time with his name echoing off the glass, and he followed you down with his face buried in your hair, shaking, saying something over and over in the old tongue that you would make him translate later.
Afterward, you lay tangled in his cloak while the stars came out over Asgard. Loki was tracing idle patterns on your bare wrist, round and round the place where the thread used to be. Small green sparks followed his fingertip and faded.
"I could make you another," he murmured. "A thread. A real one, this time. Not a leash." He hesitated, which you'd never once heard him do. "Something that runs both ways, if you wanted it."
You turned in his arms to look at him. "Are you asking me to marry you, Prince Loki?"
"Certainly not. I'm far too wicked for marriage." He kissed your knuckles. "I'm asking you to let me try."
Before you could answer, two black ravens dropped out of the night sky and landed on the edge of the frozen fountain, side by side. Huginn and Muninn. Odin's eyes. They cocked their heads at you in perfect unison, and you felt Loki go rigid beside you.
High above the garden, from the direction of the Bifrost, a column of rainbow light speared down out of the stars and hit the city with a sound like distant thunder. And somewhere far below in the palace, deep in the chamber where the Allfather lay sleeping, a great bell began to toll.
"Ah," said Loki softly, sitting up. "My father is waking. And unless I'm very much mistaken, my brother has just come home."