Loki uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the opposite way. “Oh, I have been meaning to tell you, that was a brilliant move, destroying the Well of Wisdom, taking the Wisdom for yourself. But now you control it instead of Mimir. You’re already taking power out of the hands of others and putting it into your own.” A pause. “I’ll take your silence as agreement.”
“I thought you wanted Asgard’s throne,” she said, hoping to change the subject. But that was probably not a good idea, reminding him of why he should kill her.
“Who would not want to be king? Did you not wish to be Queen of the Remi? Just so you could do as you wanted?”
“I wanted to be queen so everyone could do as they wanted, not just me.”
“I don’t have Beast blood or tendencies like you do. Unless you consider my bedmates. Found an alpaca this morn.” He smirked, swinging a slender leg. “But we both want to do as we will without interference. The only way you can have that is if you have power. Otherwise, it’s always someone else making the decisions for you, always someone else who can take away your freedom. Like what the Romans did to you. The freedoms you cherish will become privileges.”
“Then why did you help the Romans?”
“My niece, I wanted to teach you as any good uncle would.” He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “I’ve intervened more than your father ever has. How do you think Odilia was able to do so much? How do you think she watched you through mirrors? We’ve always been watching you. She was a tool of my instruction. She’s instructed you, has she not? It is the same with Vercingetorix. Any master is still a master. Power will most likely be abused, and it is best if you are the one on the giving end of that abuse, not the receiving end.”
“Like the cattle you sleep with?” She wanted to laugh with relief that she hadn’t lost all her courage.
“Precisely.” Her remark hadn’t even made him blink. “Odilia believed most humans are nothing but cattle, needing to be shepherded by the right leader, or any leader really. I believe the same of most fey. They ran, crying to Lugh, because Hecate had a daughter with a few Bestial tendencies, asking him to protect them. A fool move. People do not want freedom, Freya. They can’t handle it. Why do you think Siegfried’s support dwindled? He gives his followers too many freedoms, unlike Rome, unlike Vercingetorix. People know they are too foolish to be entrusted with making their own decisions, they want their paths chosen for them.
“You, like me, adamantly don’t want that. We’re the renegades, the leaders. We forge our own roads instead of taking the roundabout ones already made. We make the waves, and others stay afloat or drown. Look how your men followed you when you endeavored to become Swan. Did the Romans bother them much? They never complained about it, not once. Yet, they followed you. You were the leader they needed. But when they had doubts about you, that was the time to seize upon their weakness and divert those cattle into another pen, so to speak. You could be a leader again, well, something of a leader, if we decide it’s what we want for you.”
“Are you saying you want me to be Woden’s heir? Your puppet? Woden already made me his heir. I’m confused.”
“As am I. You have all these lovely leadership skills, this desire to be above the law. The only way to do that is to be the law. Yet I’ve read your scrolls, watched you with Siegfried, and that in itself confused me.”
“Um, that’s really creepy. Can we not go in that direction?” Loki was her uncle. An uncle who gave her an eight-legged horse for a cousin. No, she definitely did not want to go there.
Loki laughed. “You mistake my meaning. I speak not of the fact that you enjoy the power he has over you, but that you need him to wield that power. Yes, I know much. I’m a shapeshifter. I can be a fly, a spider, a centipede on your foot. Or whatever creature with more than four legs in your hair. I can watch you. But that requires too much effort. Too much time. Mirrors, too. Watching you always through your mirror. The Averni had mirrors. I sent some with Merrick to sell. Small mirrors, encrusted with gems, placed on necklaces. The vain Freya always saw there were plenty of mirrors in Folkvang. You had no idea you were being watched, and that was the idea. Assess you at your most vulnerable, in your private moments. I deemed you worthy of this conversation.”
Freya felt nauseous. “You never tried to speak to me once. You were always trying to control me. You knew I was rebellious, and you tried to control me?”
“In the catacombs, the first time, I was trying to control you with the Marks. Siegfried ruined that. The second time, when I had Hartwin and Faramund give you tainted ale, I’d wanted to crush you without killing you. I discounted your abilities, a fool move. You should at least thank me for having you brought back aboard the ship before some idiot mortal slew you. Odilia really did want you dead.”
“But you weren’t worried about Siegfried and my mother fighting for me after I was gone, if Siegfried hadn’t been able to bring me back?”
“Siegfried would have been broken without you, Freya. But let me get back to all I’ve done for you, as your concerned uncle. This one is going to hurt you. I killed your human parents. Well, Odilia did. You loved them, but you didn’t like them much, and there is a difference. Do you even love them now? I love my brother, but I don’t like him much. I didn’t try to kill you. I knew the assassins wouldn’t be able to. I sent the ones I knew would fail first, then others became involved. And now I have you exactly where you should be. Yes, yes, I manipulated you. The same way you manipulated your men by batting your lashes or pouting. It’s no different really, except for the use of potentially deadly weapons.”
“Um, that’s actually a huge difference. If my lashes had poison barbs on them, that might be similar, but I’d have to get close enough to people to hit them with the barbs. That would be awkward.” She took a deep breath and wished she could be with all her friends again. Her real friends. Siegfried, Enbarr, Hedwig, Hecate, Woden, Berengar and Balder…Balder? “And why would you go after Balder? Because he’s an heir, too?”
“Don’t worry about Balder. He’s no blood relative.You, though, you are much more promising. Think on my proposal. I have been more involved than your immortal parents. I rid you of Adele and Iccius. I would still like you to be the next heir of Asgard. Make Siegfried your consort if you must, but don’t share leadership. You make me your advisor, keep me in your council. I’ll dictate the runnings of the realm. And both of us, well, both of us will live in Asgard doing as we please. Eventually, you get with child from Siegfried and abdicate your throne. I take over and keep you in high esteem. You call on me when you need a shapeshifter. I call upon you when some meddlesome kingdom in the Otherworld needs a famine.”
Freya had only one response for this. “Loki, you lost me at ‘alpaca.’”
Even now, through their bond, she felt Siegfried’s sorrow and anguish. It was difficult to tell what was hers and what was his. But he’d never force Freya to do such awful things. Freya would rather die.
****
Freya’s chest hurt from her heart beating so fast. The darkness around her seemed to swirl. She’d never thought darkness could swirl, but somehow, it did. No, she was dizzy with fear. She screamed again, but silently. She’d taught herself to do it silently. There were things on her, in her hair. She could hear them clicking in the darkness, imagining their shiny bodies and the many, many legs, the multi-faceted eyes, the long mandibles.
But if she screamed,
they
would come. Their faces had been torchlit, but their torches lit things she didn’t want to see as they beat her. The light had turned into an enemy. The shadows, even with the insects, made her feel safer. She’d never forget Hartwin’s taunts or Faramund’s as they pummeled her. How? Why? She could barely think.
Was it the itchy material of the sackcloth? Was it something else? What was on her? Something slithered from her thigh to land on her foot. She jumped, hoping to dislodge it. She only wanted out of the cell. She’d been in here for days? Or was it hours? Or minutes?
She couldn’t make a sound. Not so much as a whimper, lest they come back. They’d questioned her, insisted she’d murdered her parents, that she’d been plotting all along for this, even though they knew she hadn’t. She had no desire to die. She wanted out, would think of a plan later. So she admitted to those things, thinking they’d stop. They had left, but next time she screamed, they’d come back. Always, it was Faramund and Hartwin.
She’d been sick several times, but nothing remained in her stomach. Her random thoughts were gone, replaced only by this fear. They’d even taken over that space between her ears, that place that always brought her joy when much else hadn’t.
At least Brisingamen kept her warm here in Utgard.
This time, it wasn’t Faramund and Hartwin who opened the door, but Loki with his smell of heavy perfume and cattle. His heels clacked on the floor, long hair appearing as a scarlet cape flowing in his wake.
He grabbed Freya’s chin to inspect her face. She tried to turn away, but something darker than the blackness of this small room that smelled of blood coiled from under Loki’s red heels. Tendrils of black wrapped around her limbs.
“How does it feel to be powerless? If we can make your friends, the people you trust the most turn against you or erase them, like we did to your parents, what can we not do? In our world, Freya, the only thing you can trust in is our power. We can make things you believe impossible possible. I think we’ve proven that with Hartwin and Faramund. We can take them all away from you, and you’ll have no one. But you’ll have everyone if you just submit.”
“What are you talking about? I already told you no.” If Hartwin and Faramund had betrayed her, they were no better than Siegfried’s shitty friends.
Loki gestured upward to the mirror Freya had glimpsed earlier. It was positioned in the corner of the room. “I didn’t see you smile at all, not even from your own thoughts. I think you are ready for the next step in your reeducation. Who murdered your parents?”
“You said it was you.” Cold pain shot through the bonds of Oblivion, turning her stomach, causing her body to stiffen.
“No, it was you,” Loki said slowly, patiently. He raised a long lock of Freya’s hair and cut it close to the roots. The knife he used shimmered with some kind of purple liquid.
“Who killed your parents?”
Each time she answered with Loki’s name, and the process of cutting her hair was repeated, the pain growing worse in each instance, until Loki, with a sigh, leaned against the shelf. “Perhaps you are as stupid as I thought to ignore such potential, or perhaps, you’re not fit for power. You’ve chosen your course. We will soon control the movements of those in the Otherwold, their destinies, their day to day lives down to what jobs they must do, what they eat, where they sleep, and most importantly, that mush between their ears. Their beliefs, their reality will be crafted by what we tell them. It is truth if enough people believe it. That’s what power is.”
She thought of the tales of the Fomori, how easy it was for those in power to create whatever was accepted as truth, like the tales Nuada Airgetlam had written. She’d never really questioned it until she’d met her mother.
“Do you want to know why your friends continued to beat you even after you confessed? Because you didn’t really believe in that confession.”
Freya’s head was starting to ache. Only the chains of Oblivion kept her upright. She felt more of the despair from her bonds.
Freya’s attention snapped back when another blonde tress landed at her feet.
“Some wigmaker would pay well for this,” Loki said. “Look at you. Pathetic. Almost destroyed. You’re not laughing now. You’re not saying much at all. Laughter, foolishness, and vanity. That’s who Freya is, or was. The last will be gone with your hair. Then we can remake you into what we need you to be. That’s what power is.”
“No,” Freya yelled as another tress was snipped away. Her heart drummed in her breast. There had to be some way out. Thought ended when the pain returned. Her head felt very light. She just wanted to lie down, to be left alone to gather her thoughts. And then she blacked out.
When she came to again, she was on a cool, smooth floor, not stone at all. She opened her eyes and struggled to her elbows. She rubbed at her eyes to clear her vision, but that hurt, too.
Her vision did eventually clear, but she wished it hadn’t. The room was smaller than the cell she’d been in. The air here was still and sticky. For once, she wasn’t cold but sweating. The wounds and bruises on her body ached.
The remarkable and twisted thing about this room was that it was a mirror. One solid mirror with no apparent doors. It covered the ceiling, the floor, and the four walls. The mirrors reflected…her? Or what she had become. She’d grown gaunt, bones apparent against her bruised skin. Some of those wounds looked to be—she grew sick—infected. Her cheeks were hollow, eyes large. The sackcloth barely stayed on her thin shoulders. Her hair was almost all gone, hacked so close to the scalp. The purple Marks seemed oddly garish against her white flesh, still shimmering.
She slammed her fist against a mirror before her face, wanting to break it. Pain shot through her arm. It was sprained. Or was it broken? The mirror wasn’t broken, not even cracked or scratched.
“No beauty. No friends,” Loki’s voice intoned. She looked about, seeing no one but herself, all around, her appearance taunting her, mocking her, distorted monstrously where the floor and walls met the ceiling. “All alone and left with…nothing. Nothing except us. At our complete mercy. Accept it, Freya.”
“Siegfried will come for me,” she said.
“He left you, didn’t he? If he left you before, why would he want you now? Even your closest friends left you. No attachments, nothing holding you back. Nothing left but to serve. You don’t think we can make Siegfried afraid of you, too? Oh, yes, we can.”
“He’s my master. What are you trying to do? I can’t have another. I don’t want another.”
“We can make Siegfried join us, just like Hartwin and Faramund.”