Utgard

Utgard, the capital of Jotunheim, couldn't have been more different to Asgard. Nestled in the mountains, with narrow, easily-guarded passes to the north and the south-east the only overland routes in, those few who did find the way into the city, were bound to be disappointed by the few crude structures they would see sitting precariously atop the steep mountainsides. When Loki had gone to Laufey to discuss Odin's assassination, he had certainly found nothing to be impressed by. Utgard had looked like a half-abandoned village, not the capital of an entire civilisation.

On this occasion, however, Loki quickly discovered that the inhabitants of Utgard spent little time in the open air and all the artificial structures on the surface were merely approaches to frost giant dwellings inside and beneath the mountains. It was easier to hide in the caverns, both from the weather and the enemy. But the fact that he had been permitted to know this nagged at his thoughts as the guards led him through the main avenues of Utgard. Was this a peace offering from his birth father? Or was Laufey leading him straight to his death? Or was the old front giant merely reluctant to leave his house in wartime?

No answer was immediately forthcoming. At the end of the busy thoroughfare, the crowd, who hadn't been shy in their curiosity about Loki, dissipated. The guards halted before a pair of obsidian doors that were easily four times their height. Despite their size, the doors swung open without sound, revealing a vast, shadowed place beyond.

'Go on,' one of the guards said to Loki.

The Great Hall of Utgard – Loki guessed when he crossed the threshold. A few more steps forward, he recognised it. This was the place Laufey had been in when they had spoken through the Eye of Angrboda. Now that Loki stood there in person, the hall seemed even larger and colder. He couldn't see how this place could ever be used for grand events and celebrations as Asgard's Great Hall often was. It seemed like there weren't enough lights in Jotunheim to melt away the murk.

'Thor Odinson is not here,' Laufey spoke from the other side of the vast room. He hadn't spoken loudly, but his words echoed down the hall.

Loki nodded. The only sign Thor had ever been in this place were the heavy rings embedded into the walls, which had held Thor's chains. Loki made a concerted effort to keep his disappointment from showing as he crossed the length of the hall and offered Laufey a shallow bow.

When he straightened up he found himself staring right into Laufey's eyes. He inched away from the intensity of that gaze.

'No,' Laufey said. 'Come closer. I want to see you.'

Loki took two steps forward. That wasn't enough for the King of Jotunheim. Laufey rose from his seat and moved towards Loki. He circled Loki, then leaned in, his nose almost brushing against Loki's ear and sniffed him. With a huff, Laufey hooked his finger around the collar of Loki's shirt and pulled the material back, fully exposing the remnants of the sores on Loki's neck and throat.

'What happened here?' he asked.

'A dwarven collar to bind my magic. I haven't gotten around to healing it just yet.'

Laufey took a step back, his lips curled. 'A collar? Why not kill you?'

'I expect they feared Odin's wrath should he ever wake again,' Loki replied.

'He does have a vile temper,' Laufey replied. He laboriously retraced the steps back to his throne and peered down at Loki. 'Have you the Casket?'

'No.'

'Then why are you here? Did I not say —'

'You said,' Loki cut in, 'Asgard is to lay the Casket at your feet if Asgard is to get its king back. I don't give a damn about Thor. In the years I called him brother, he has been nothing but a source of embarrassment and frustration. He is not a man fit to be king. Even Odin saw that. Had he had a viable alternative, he wouldn't have passed the kingship to Thor.'

'That must have caused you a great deal of heartache. I ask again, why are you here? Why do you introduce yourself as Laufeyson?'

Loki smiled self-consciously, uncertain who was playing whom here and who was being played. It was one thing to profess his enmity towards his adoptive family to Baugi, it was another to come to Laufey with the same story.

'That is my name, is it not?' Loki said.

'I won't deny the resemblance.'

'That is most gracious of you… father.' Loki shook his head; obsequiousness wasn't the path to Laufey's heart. Actually, he wasn't certain Laufey possessed a heart, but assuming he did, Loki thought there were some emotions his birth father would relate to easier than others. 'In truth, I don't quite know why I'm here. I couldn't stay on Asgard after you exposed me. Thor's councillors turned on me, stripped me of my regency without a single solid scrap of evidence and threw me in the dungeons. Once I found a way out of my cell, Jotunheim seemed the only path forward.'

'You're after revenge for what the Asgardians did to you.'

Loki paused for a long moment before he nodded. 'I suppose so. My entire life I felt the odd one out among them and they preyed upon it. And at the first opportunity, they acted.'

'That opportunity arose by my hand. Are you not aggrieved by that?' Laufey clasped his hands together and rested his chin on top. 'Come now, be honest. You were trying hard to strike a bargain and I ruined it all for you.'

'I don't know. You tell me, should I be? You are my father and I your son. You chose to say what you did, surely aware of the danger you could place me in by your actions. So why did you do it? In fact, explain how it all happened in the first place! You called me well-beloved and from what I have heard, you held great affection for my mother, yet the Asgardians believed I had been abandoned when they found me.'

Loki had hoped to elicit at least a spark of an emotional response, but Laufey's face remained as hard and cold as the stone around them.

'You were abandoned, that's correct,' he said.

'Why? What fault did you find with me?'

'None,' Laufey replied sharply. 'You were perfect and that made the decision all the harder. Early in the pregnancy, the war was going well, but then we suffered several routs and before we knew it, we were on the brink of disaster. Jotunheim needed your mother's skills. A child would have drawn too much of her energy and time, so a sacrifice had to be made.'

Loki lowered his gaze and let his birth father's words wash over him. He had suspected something of this sort had happened, but it was difficult nonetheless to have confirmation that he had been discarded because he had become an inconvenience to his parents.

'Loki.' Laufey's words took on an odd undertone as he spoke. 'I am a king, it is the king's duty to put his people about himself. Even when it concerns his own kin.'

This is as close to an apology as I'll ever get.

'Did the sacrifice pay off?' Loki said tersely.

'No. Jotunheim was defeated, your mother killed in the last of the fighting and you went missing. We searched; there weren't many children born that year so you would have been hard to hide, but I never thought to look among the Asgardians. I presumed you were dead until Helblindi's men returned from Asgard with a strange tale.'

Loki chuckled. 'Yet upon realising that I still lived, the first thing you decided to do was to turn the Asgardians against me.'

'Whatever my personal feelings might be, my duty is to protect my people. I judged political infighting in Asgard would be in Jotunheim's favour. Your adoptive father would have done the same.'

'That's probably true,' Loki replied.

Laufey leaned back until his spine was flat against his high-backed chair and his expression turned thoughtful. 'I will concede, I pondered those words for some hours before I made my decision. There was undeniable political expediency in it, but in part, I also hoped to show you that your place is not on Asgard. Be mindful, I didn't prepare a coup against you, I merely said a few words and the Asgardians made their own choices from there.'

'But you expected there would be consequences for me after you said your piece.'

'Asgardians despise the Jotnar no less than we despise them. There was never a chance you would be live in peace among them once the truth about you became known. Even Odin understood that.'

Manipulative swine.

After he had killed Laufey, Loki had at times indulged himself in imagining how his life would have turned out had Laufey realised that the Asgardian prince with whom he plotted Odin's assassination was his own son. Now he was glad Laufey had exited his life quickly the first time around. Loki could see what Laufey was trying to do. A young man who believed everyone from his previous life had turned on him and that you were the sole reasonable, if somewhat harsh, benefactor could be made into a potent weapon. Were he still feeling as angry and betrayed as he had been when he first discovered he was not Odin's son by blood, he might well have found himself genuinely drawn to Laufey.

Thor had better thank me for this later.

Loki rubbed at his face with the back of his hand, then sighed. 'I don't think I can go back to Asgard.'

'Stay here then,' Laufey said. 'Your half-brother is leading the warrior clans, but his wife and his children remain in Utgard. They will look after you.'

'Uncle Loki!'

A child giggled. A small hand closed around his bicep and attempted to shake him awake. Loki groaned. This was it, there would be no more sleep this morning. He had never spent much time in the company of children, but the past week had been educational.

He opened his eyes to Hyndla's wide grin. She was the elder of Byleistr's two children and had quickly accepted Loki as her uncle. Loki had surmised that his integration into the family was no great upheaval for her. She had grown up surrounded by aunts and uncles from both her mother's and her father's side of the family. Loki, personally, still found it peculiar to be referred to as an uncle. To his knowledge, neither Thor nor Hela had ever produced an offspring.

'Hello, Hyndla,' Loki said. 'What can I do for you this fine morning?'

'Mother said I need to stop being a nuisance to her and that I need to tell you to keep us entertained until the afternoon,' the girl replied in a somewhat flat tone.

'I bet she used those exact same words too.'

Hyndla nodded, looking pleased with herself. Loki, on the other hand, remained unnerved by this habit of repeating what she had heard word for word. He suspected either her father or her grandfather had taught her to do this, which suggested that they used her to gather information. From what Hyndla and her younger brother had told him over the past days, neither Laufey nor Byleistr had much time for them, which the children lamented. There was an opportunity in that. Young informants craving positive attention from their elders could bring great gifts and asked very little in return.

'What's that?' Hyndla picked up Fandral's rapier. Loki had sharpened the previous night and had left it out atop the wooden chest that stood at the foot of his bed.

'It's a sword.' Loki carefully pried the weapon out of the girl's hands. 'Haven't you ever seen one before?'

'Can't you make a weapon out of ice?'

He frowned for a moment. 'I don't know, never tried. Where is your brother?'

'He's playing,' Hyndla replied, her eyes still on the rapier. 'I don't see why you couldn't do it, everyone can.'

'Is he playing with the model? I don't like how quiet he is.'

Loki nudged the girl out, hid the rapier, then pulled his blanket over his shoulders and wrapped it tight around him as if it were a cloak. Remaining in his Jotunn form kept him from feeling the worst of the cold, but the mornings were still too chilly for his liking. He yawned as he strode out to his sitting room. Or rather, Helblindi's sitting room. Practicality reigned in an era of wartime restraint and Loki had been handed the quarters previously occupied by his younger half-brother.

The rooms remained largely as Helblindi had left them, which Thrym, Byleistr's younger child, had taken advantage of. Helblindi had been fond of his niece and nephew, so he had fixed up some of his own old toys for them. There were well-armed soldiers, howling hounds and ferocious beasts to choose from, but the light of Thrym's life (and Loki suspected Helblindi's once upon a time) was a large model of Utgard carved out of oak and dressed with a thin coat of paint.

The model had been a boon to Loki. He had peppered the children with questions until he got a good sense of the city's layout. He had hoped also the model would help him narrow down where Thor was being kept, but there he had only found disappointment. At first, he had danced around the topic, then asked the question outright. Neither Thrym nor Hyndla had an answer for him. Either the children genuinely didn't know or had been coached not to tell him.

'What are you up to today, Thrym?' Loki asked.

The boy set down the warrior figurine in his hand. 'Helping protect Jotunheim from the enemy.'

Loki didn't have to ask who the enemy was. Thrym had lined up a dozen figurines painted to resemble the EInherjar against his frost giant army.

'You play the same thing every day,' Hyndla said. She pulled a chair over to the table that held the model and climbed into the chair. 'Uncle Helblindi wanted to steal back the Casket of Ancient Winters. We should do that. Wouldn't that be more fun? Now that Uncle Loki's here, I'm sure we can do it.'

'Have you ever seen the Casket?' Thrym asked.

Loki raised an eyebrow. 'I have.'

'What does it look like?' Thrym's eyes widened with excitement. 'Is it really big and shiny? Will you help us get it back?'

Sweet lord, child. I thought I'd be having this conversation with your grandfather, not with you.

'I don't know,' Loki replied. 'It's a dangerous quest, I'd wager more dangerous than anything you'd find here on Jotunheim. Are you up for that kind of danger?'

He had only meant to tease the boy a little, but Thrym struck out his lower lip and looked back at Loki with a confused expression.

Hyndla rolled her eyes, then whacked her younger brother's arm. 'Don't be a baby. We are up for it, aren't we?'

'And what will you do with the Casket when you get it back?' Loki asked. 'Invade Midgard?'

'Not Midgard.' Hyndla looked at Loki as if he had just sprouted a horn between his brows. 'If we're going to invade something, we'd invade Asgard. They deserve it. But first I'd fix Jotunheim. So yes, Jotunheim, then Asgard, then maybe Midgard. Midgard is much larger than Asgard.'

'Yeah, we'll kill all the soldiers on Asgard,' Thrym reached for the figurines representing the Einherjar and nudged a few over. 'Then we'll take their stuff.'

On first thought, the scene had sparked nostalgia in Loki. He and Thor had spent many days in their youth planning and acting out campaigns against the frost giants. But the war currently raging between the two realms coloured these children's fancies with a crimson tone. The game now seemed grotesque. One day Hyndla or Thrym would be ruling Jotunheim and would have the power to send their armies into whichever realm they pleased.

He tried to shake off those dark images and asked, 'What do you mean, fix Jotunheim?'

'That's what the Casket is for,' Thrym responded.

'Yeah, everyone…' Hyndla cocked her head. 'Or maybe you don't know. The Casket was made to fix the weather fluctuations across Jotunheim. It's hard to grow anything when one year the summer is three months long and the next year it's about nine. Winters too are like that often enough. In those years the animals have nothing to eat and we've nothing to hunt.'

Loki got down on his knees beside the girl and rested his elbow on the table before them. 'I thought Jotunheim was always cold.'

'Of course it's not.'

'I suppose the snow was melting when I came through from Asgard, perhaps spring is on the way already. How are the seasons so uneven in the first place?'

'It wasn't always like that, but it's got something to do with how the planet spins and other things around it. Father tried to explain to me; I didn't really understand,' Hyndla admitted.

'It sounds like you're talking about an unstable planetary tilt.'

With this nugget of knowledge, many things fell into place for Loki. The frost giants likely originated in a period when Jotunheim was more stable; now they struggled. Loki needed only to look around. Laufey's household was no more luxurious than the house of any well-to-do merchant in Asgard. The Bradi clan thought they had found a solution and sacrificed themselves to create the Casket. Perhaps it had been a viable answer, but then Laufey's father had an even more ambitious idea — conquest and relocation to a more hospitable planet. If not for Asgard, they would have succeeded.

On Asgard, Jotnar demands for the Casket's return had always been seen as a question of stubborn pride. It wasn't. It was about survival.

What then was the proper recourse? Asgard couldn't hand the Casket back. Not while Laufey lived.

Except Laufey wasn't the problem. The problem was that once a seed of an idea was out there, it could bear fruit just about anywhere. Thrym and Hyndla's fantasies about what they would do with the Casket attested to that too clearly. Jotunheim couldn't be trusted, so for the sake of other realms, the Casket had to be kept away from the frost giants.

They struggle, yet they do manage to survive on this planet. That will have to do.

Not quite satisfied with the conclusion he had drawn, Loki picked up one of the figurines and tried to shift the conversation in a different direction. 'Did your mother happen to say how I am to entertain you today?'

Hyndla shook her head. 'We can go down to the pools?'

Loki chuckled. Were it up to Hyndla, she would spend her whole days swimming in the thermal pools in the lowest levels of the city. Thrym, however, looked aghast.

'Aren't we going to play here?' he asked.

Loki sensed a tirade about his sister's obsession with the pools was about to follow, so he threw up his hand to get the boy's attention. 'After we recapture the Casket of Ancient Winters, we'll celebrate with a short dip in the pools. Set up, Thrym. I'm just going to change into proper clothes, I can hardly run from the Einherjar while wearing a blanket.'

'Maybe it can be a disguise,' Hyndla said.

'Maybe, but I think not today.' Loki climbed to his feet. 'I haven't eaten this morning yet. Hyndla, could you find something?'

'I will.'

The girl slipped out of the room a second later. Loki watched Thrym for a moment, uncertain whether to trust the boy not to cause havoc. The last time he had left him on his own, Thrym had tried to scale a bookshelf. Presently the boy seemed to be occupied with the figurines. Loki let him be and retreated to the bedroom.

He had inherited Helblindi's wardrobe together with his quarters, a fact Loki wasn't particularly pleased about. The fit never seemed right. Truthfully, he wasn't sure how the fit was supposed to be and there were few men about whom Loki could imitate. He did his best and tried to ignore the amount of skin Jotunn garments left exposed. So far, neither his sister-in-law nor her children had laughed at him to his face so he could only assume he made a passable job of it.

He was fastening the last buckle when he heard voices out in the sitting room.

'Will this be enough?' a woman asked.

'I think so,' Hyndla replied. 'He doesn't eat much and Thrym and I already ate earlier. What's all this food for?'

'For the guardsmen.'

'Is that an ointment too?' Hyndla riffled through something. 'Is one of them injured?'

Loki slipped the leather strap into place and moved closer to the door, careful to make as little sound as he could.

'Must be, they asked for it and they're not going to waste it on the Asgardian,' the woman answered. There was a pause, then she went on. 'If you say this is enough for you three, I'd best go. It's a long climb to Reaper's Peak.'

'I could go for you.'

'I don't think so. Your grandfather will have my hide if I let you get anywhere near that beast. I'll see you later. Keep yourself and your brother out of trouble for a change.'

Loki crouched down and tried to get a look at the woman through the keyhole, but the angle was wrong. He saw only Thrym examining the figurines one by one with the measured eye of an expert. Loki bit down on his lip to stifle the curses on the tip of his tongue.

Had the Norns smiled on him for once in his life? Loki had found no clues about Thor's whereabouts for a week, now the information he needed had simply been handed to him. He even knew where Reaper's Peak was; Thrym had pointed it out on the model the other day.

Or was this a setup to test his loyalty? Laufey was the type to make his own enquiries about a person's loyalty. And were the children in on this ploy too? Loki's constant anxiety about how he ought to interpret everything that happened and everything he would soon leave him with an ulcer. Yet, for the life of him, Loki couldn't work out if Laufey believed his tale or merely waited for Loki to show his true colours.

In Loki's experience, sentimentality was the easiest thing to exploit and with Laufey the potential was there. Baugi and other adults Loki had spoken with over the past week all talked about Laufey's genuine sorrow at Loki's disappearance at the close of the last war. Perhaps Loki's tale had tugged at the right heartstrings. Laufey wasn't one for hugs or tears of happiness, but he had permitted Loki to live as a member of his family.

On the other hand, a man as sly by nature as Laufey, seldom took what they were told at face value.

'Uncle Loki?' Thrym called out. 'It's ready.'

Perhaps crawling around Utgard in secret would've been easier after all.

Loki groomed his expression into a steady smile and opened the door. 'Is it? Good. Let's steal back what's rightfully ours.'