“Guilt is like a weed. Plant a little in the soul, and it will consume the whole garden.”
—Elven Proverb
Every sound and footfall startled me as we walked through Valaskjálf. I thought for certain that everyone who passed would know what had happened. By the time we were at Loki’s chamber, my hands were shaking. He unlocked the door, and I pushed my way in, desperate to be out of sight.
His room was like any of the other guest quarters, aside from a spattering of his own belongings. A set of drawers stood against one wall, a lush bed covered in furs and pillows across from it. A full-length polished metal mirror stood next to the fireplace. A small pile of his books were on the night table, and lying on the floor was a pair of sleeping trousers.
My heart was thudding against my chest as I willed myself to think past the haze of danger. Loki, on the other hand, seemed just fine. He pulled my cloak off his shoulders and slung it over the end of the bed, as casual as could be. I looked down. Long wisps of blonde hair were scattered on the floor.
I waved a hand at him. “Take off your tunic.”
He didn’t move, so I took hold of the bottom of his tunic and yanked it up. It got stuck around his shoulders, and he stumbled as I pulled, bending and wriggling.
“What the hel are you doing?” He tried to resist, but I slapped his arm and pulled the tunic all the way off.
I turned it right-side out. It was covered in Sif’s hair. “Make a fire.”
“Sigyn, calm down. You—”
“Make a fire! Now!”
He stared at me for a moment, eyes wide. Then he turned to the hearth and did as he was told.
I cracked the shirt like a whip, trying to shake the stray hair from it. Strands fluttered to the stone. There was still more. I picked off every strand caught on it, tears running down my cheeks, my breaths short and panicked. I wiped them away and went back to picking the tunic clean. The floor. My shoes. It was everywhere. I dropped to my knees, raking my fingers along the stone, trying to find an end to all this evidence.
“Sigyn.” Loki crouched next to me. “Hey. Sit down. Everything is fine.”
I threw the hair into the fire. It sizzled and curled in the flame, the acrid smell filling the room. It stuck to my hand, tangling and clinging to my skin like guilt made solid. I glanced at my dress. They were there too, spread over everything like a pox. No matter how much I picked off, there seemed to be another one to take its place.
Loki put his hand on my shoulder, and I whipped around to face him, seething. “Why? Why did you do it?”
He settled onto the stone, legs crossed underneath him. “Because she deserves it.”
“She was mean to you. How does that even compare to this?”
“It’s just hair.”
“It’s assault, Loki. Her hair has always been her pride and you know that, we all do. And depending who you ask, this is just enough of an insult to warrant killing you for it. So what makes it worth your life, hmm?”
He looked down at his trousers, plucked a hair from his knee, and tossed it in the fire. “You don’t know about my mother, do you? The real truth. If you did, you wouldn’t ask me that.” He shook his head. “Or maybe you would, I don’t know.”
I leaned forward on my palms. “Just tell me. Please. I need to understand this, or I can’t…I can’t be around someone who would just do things like this, Loki.”
There was a silence after. A long, heavy moment of weighing options. Of deciding what to say. Loki stared at the stone in the hearth, his eyes far away.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “My mother’s name was Laufey. She was there from the beginning, when Valhalla was built. She helped breathe life into this city along with the other gods. But she did something unforgivable. She married a Jotun.”
“Your father?”
Loki nodded. “Mother had gone out into the realms to make her own way for a while, and she came back with a family. I was just a baby at the time. The gods lost their minds. The Jotnar are enemies, and it’s all good fun to fuck one—Thor’s mother is Jotun, for godssake—but no one had married one before. But my parents loved each other, and the gods all but cast her out for it. The way people looked at us, the sneers, the things they said…it made everything hard. Impossible. My parents fought all the time, and it made them bitter towards each other. My mother didn’t care what the gods thought, but my father was always trying to follow the rules, so no one had an excuse to hate him. After a while, it didn’t matter what we did, and when my mother had two more sons—”
“You have brothers?” No one had ever mentioned them, not once.
“Somewhere. I don’t know where. But my mother wanted to pass on her gifts to someone, and I suppose I was the closest thing she had to a daughter. She taught me seidr when no one else was looking. And I was good at it. Like I’d always been meant to use it. It took years for my father to find out what we were doing. And he killed her for it.”
I sat back, the tenderness of his story taking the bluster out of my anger. Loki was so good at laughing, at being carefree; how could he have so much tragedy under his skin? “How did he do it?”
“Poison.” He still hadn’t looked up. There were no hairs left to remove from his trousers, so he started to scratch away the skin around his fingernails. “The night he caught us practising, he hit her so hard, it split her cheek open. I hid under the table, knowing he’d do worse to me; he couldn’t stand to have an argr son, a coward. But she peeled herself off the floor and burned the shape of her hand into his chest. The smell of burned flesh…it’s what I remember most. Farbauti never touched her again. He didn’t have the guts.”
He stared into the fire, his body seeming to curl in on itself, his elbows against his knees, face hidden behind a curtain of hair. “It was only a week later that she started to get weaker. Sicker. Even though gods rarely get sick. No one could figure out what was wrong with her. Or maybe they didn’t care.” He drew in a long breath. “I didn’t find the vial until after she was gone. She’d been dying for months, and he’d been slipping poison into her food every day.”
“Loki…” I reached out for him but withdrew my fingers. “I’m so sorry. What happened to you? Where did you go?”
“I told the gods, and my father ran. Heard later that he was killed for information about Asgard by his own people. Odin took me in. Raised me here, started calling me Blood-Brother, made sure I was taught the things he’d need from me. He took more from me than it was worth.” He rustled, wiping at his face with his hands, then sat straight again. There was the slightest hint of red around his eyes. “So now you know. Does Sif deserve it?”
I turned my gaze away from him. What should the cost of insulting someone’s murdered mother be? Is the price a head of hair? Is it more or less than that? “What you did was wrong, Loki. There’s no getting around that. And I can’t defend that action. But I might have done the same, I think, if I’d had a mother I loved like that. Lost like that.” I tucked my hair behind my ear, unsure of what else to say. “I’m sorry. You must miss her.”
He nodded slowly, and then the room grew quiet. I wanted him to speak, to say something, anything. To see him quiet, somber, was like watching a shell of him. Someone hollowed out. There was something so desperately unsettling about knowing what was underneath all the quips and sly grins. That he carried the weight of bodies on his shoulders.
The wood in the hearth crackled, spreading a new wave of warmth across my front. The smell of burnt hair was weaker, returning to the smokey comfort of burning wood. The adrenaline in my body was fading, and all I felt was tired, right to my core.
Someone was going to find Sif. After I’d failed to get my title, I’d been sure that I had no future. Now it might really be true.
I leaned my head against Loki’s shoulder and closed my eyes. If it was all going to end, at least I wanted a little peace before it did.