Far below the war room, in the heavily warded storeroom off the lower armoury, Loki sat comfortably on the floor and tossed a small green light from one hand to the other.
He heard the boots long before they reached him. He knew whose they were by the fourth step, and he went right on tossing the light from hand to hand exactly as he had been.
The guards stepped aside. The door opened, and Thor stopped at the threshold with the golden light of the wards humming between them. He looked at the flame in Loki's hand and said nothing about it at all.
"I need your help."
Loki let the green light snuffle out in his palm. He stood up slowly, entirely without hurrying, and walked over to the barrier with his hands clasped casually behind his back.
"My help." He turned the words over and found he enjoyed the taste of them. "The golden prince, down in the dark cells, asking favors of a criminal. Odin said no to something, did he?"
Thor did not rise to the bait.
"I am going to Svartalfheim."
"Are you. How splendid for you." Loki tilted his head in mock fascination. "And what has any of that got to do with me?"
"Using the Bifrost would announce my arrival the moment I set foot there. And Heimdall cannot be certain of finding me again afterward, or of bringing me back at all." Thor met his brother's eyes through the barrier. "I need another way onto that world."
"And you thought of me."
"You know paths between the realms that nobody else uses. Can one of them take me to Svartalfheim?"
"It could." Loki tilted his head. "But why in any of the Nine Realms would I choose to help you? I would like nothing better than to sit in this very comfortable room and wait for someone to burn this city down to the rock it stands on."
"They put a blade through our mother. And they are still alive."
Loki's jaw moved. It was nothing. A fraction of a second, gone before it arrived.
But Thor saw it.
"Do not," Thor said. "Do not tell me you have no burning wish to go after them. I saw your face in Mother's room."
"I had a moment of poor composure." Loki turned away and walked back into the room, and his voice went perfectly smooth. "It was undignified. It has passed."
"Stop it."
"I am quite—"
"Stop it." Thor's fist came against the wards and the golden light flared white all along the corridor. "Stop being this thing you pretend to be. I am not asking the trickster. I am asking my brother. Please help me."
Silence.
"Let us say, for the sake of argument, I agree," Loki said, without turning around. "I take you there. I help you kill them. I bring you home. What happens then?"
Thor waited.
"You return triumphantly to the palace as a hero, and I return miserably to this room. Perhaps they will generously give me a cushion for my service."
"I will speak to Father about your sentence."
"How incredibly generous of you."
"I will ask him to end it."
Loki finally turned around to face him.
"He will say no."
"Then I will give him reasons to reconsider. Starting with what you do on Svartalfheim."
"You cannot promise me his agreement."
Thor held his gaze.
"No. I can promise you mine."
Loki was quiet for a moment. That answer was harder to dismiss than an easy assurance would have been.
Then, his mouth twisted bitterly.
"And the mage?"
Thor frowned in confusion.
"Did you forget him?" Loki asked. "I doubt the man who sent me back here will celebrate if Odin simply decides to open the door."
"Your binding is gone. You learned whatever lesson he meant for you to learn."
"Which does not mean he considers us finished."
Thor could not deny that. Nor did he think Arthur would count one single good mission as enough to erase everything Loki had done on Midgard.
"Then I will go and speak to him, too."
"Oh, good. Perhaps the two of you can discuss how much I have improved."
"Loki."
"He will enjoy that."
"Look at me."
Loki did, reluctantly.
"I will go to Arthur myself. I will ask what it would take for him to support your release. If there is anything I can do to satisfy him, I will do it."
"Anything?" Loki scoffed softly. "And if he makes you beg like a dog?"
"Then you will have something to laugh at me about for the next thousand years."
Thor said it simply. There was no challenge in his face, and no attempt to make the offer seem smaller than it was.
Loki searched his brother's face for the trick. He was extraordinarily good at finding tricks. He had been finding them in this face for eleven hundred years and had never once come away empty.
There was nothing there but a large, desperate, entirely sincere man.
Something went out of Loki's shoulders. The mockery came off all at once, like a coat, and what was underneath it was not the pale prisoner and was not the prince either. It was the other thing. The one that had frightened people for a thousand years.
"When do we leave?"
—
Svartalfheim did not have a night. It only had the dark, and then more of it.
The Ark hung above the dead plain with every light on the hull turned off. Nine ships had left Asgard. What was left of them sat in the black now, silent, close together.
Deep inside the flagship, one chamber was lit.
Malekith lay motionless in the healing cradle, his ruined armour on the floor beside him. Half his face was gone. Odin's fire had taken it down to the bone on the left side, and the flesh was coming back a little at a time. His eyes were closed.
Algrim watched his king closely. He had neither sat nor left the chamber since they had retreated from the golden city.
The light passed over Malekith's face once more and, for a fleeting moment, the eyelid on the good side twitched.
Then it was still again.
Algrim watched it, and waited patiently. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and rough and not entirely his own.
"Rest, my lord. Heal. Your enemies are tired, and we are not finished."
The drip went on in the dark, slow and steady, and did not stop.
—
Back in Asgard, the skiff sat idling in a hangar cut into the mountains at the edge of the realm, a long way from anywhere with windows.
It was a stealth vessel, low and dark and narrow, built for quiet work rather than the kind of fighting Asgard preferred to be known for. The hull hummed under its own suppression fields and threw almost no light.
Sif, Volstagg, Hogun and Fandral stood at the foot of the ramp.
Every one of them had asked to go. Odin had refused every one of them. Whatever had passed between father and son after the council, nobody had heard it, but the order releasing Loki into his brother's custody had come down under the All-Father's own seal within the hour, and it had been very clear. Thor's quest. Thor's risk. Nobody else's.
So the four of them looked at Thor with the plain, unwavering love of people who had followed him into every stupid thing he had ever done, and could not follow him into this one.
Then they looked at Loki, leaning against the hull with his arms folded, and the temperature dropped about forty degrees.
"If you so much as step wrong while you are out there with him," Sif said, with her hand on the pommel of her sword, "I will hunt you across the Nine Realms and I will slowly skin you myself."
"Always such a joy, Sif," said Loki. "Truly. You light up a cave."
Footsteps came across the stone.
Odin and Frigga walked out of the dark together, and the warriors bowed.
Frigga went to Thor first. She took him by both shoulders and pulled him down and held on to him, and said something into his ear that nobody else heard, and he shut his eyes while she said it.
Then she let go, and walked past him, and stopped in front of Loki.
He straightened before she reached him. She rested a hand against his cheek, and the touch brought back another room, and the moment her hand had slipped out of his and gone still.
This time, he caught it before she could lower it.
Frigga's face softened.
"Take care of each other out there," she said, looking back and forth between them. "Both of you."
"Yes, Mother," Thor said.
Loki nodded. He held her hand a moment longer before he let go.
Odin waited beside the skiff.
He had said nothing to Loki since giving the order for his release, and he did not say anything now. His eye stayed on Thor as he drew him a few steps aside.
"You have very little time, my son." His voice had gone low and heavy and slow. "I have spent a great deal of the Odinforce these last days. The sleep is pressing on the edges of me, and I am holding it off. Be quick. Do what must be done and come right back before I am forced to close my eye."
Thor stared at him, alarmed.
"You should have told me this in the council."
"I have told the commanders what they need to know. I am telling you because I need you home before it takes me."
The anger that had carried Thor through the meeting had cooled on the walk down. His father looked tired. Now Thor knew how much it was costing him just to stand here.
"I can stay."
Odin studied him.
"And spend every hour waiting for Malekith to return?"
"If you need me."
For a moment, Odin's hand rested on his son's arm.
"You asked for a chance to end this. Take it. But remember what we agreed. If there is no opening, you come home."
"I will."
Odin nodded, and stepped back into the dark beside his wife, and did not say anything else.
The two brothers boarded the dark ship in silence. The ramp hissed up.
Loki took the controls, and his hands went over the old Asgardian runes without a pause anywhere. The note of the engines climbed, and then dropped away into almost nothing.
The skiff lifted, banked hard out of the hangar mouth, and went for the mountains like a thrown knife.
Loki put it into a ravine narrower than the ship had any right to fit through and did not slow down. Rock went past on both sides in a grey blur, close enough to touch.
"You have used this path before?" Thor asked, gripping the railing.
"You heard me tell Odin I knew ways."
"I have heard you tell Father a great many things."
Loki smiled and pushed the speed higher.
Ahead, the ravine ended in a sheer wall of stone.
Thor looked for an opening. There was none.
"Loki."
"Hold on tightly, brother."
He aimed the skiff directly at the solid cliff face.
Thor tightened his grip on the rail. Just before the prow reached the stone, the air rippled like heat over a road, and a narrow darkness opened across their path.
The ship went through.
Behind them the passage closed, and the ravine stood empty and silent under the stars.