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One cold day in spring when Loki had come back from an adventure all bruised up and bleeding from small wounds that were easy to hide, having kept up his front among the others only to collapse at the hearth at home, Sigyn made up a roaring fire. She dragged out piles of wolfpelts for Loki to lie on, cleaned his wounds and bound them with fresh linen, mixed a healing salve that she smeared all over every small patch of him that needed aid, and told him to lie still while she cooked stew.
Then, after she had finished the stew and made him eat it, she took the drinking horn from its hook on the wall and filled it from a barrel of Brage’s best mead (Loki had won it in a bet some time back).
As he began to drink from the horn silently, she sat down, took up her spindle and asked him, while she spun, “Loki, tell me about the times long ago. Tell me of the days when you and Odin were still young, when you wandered in the early world and swore brothership to one another.” Her reddish-golden hair was gleaming in the light of the fire.
At first he grumbled against it. “Why do you want to know that kind of thing, all of a sudden? Are you not just trying to find out secrets you will use against me one day? Even if it’s just to win a petty argument. I know what you women are like.”
Sigyn was not impressed by this line of thought. “No, you know what you are like. That’s what you would do, if you could gain from it. Don’t judge everyone else to be the same.” She drew out more flax and whirled her spindle once more. “I want to know it because I want to know it. Anyone would want to, if they could. I wasn’t born back then, and Allfather will likely never tell me.”
“So you’re just bored, then,” he shot back. “A tale to while away the evening.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” she replied. “You need to stay where you are for the salve to work anyway. And you do want to tell it, don’t you? You want to tell it to someone.”
He huffed and braided his fingers behind his head, staring up towards the smoky ceiling. “Don’t think you can just guess what I want. Anyway, I don’t know if I even remember back that far anymore. And there’s no great saga to be told.”
She dragged a hand through his hair, rubbing his scalp. He sighed with pleasure, taking her hand and rubbing her palm with his thumb. “Well, then,” he said. “But I’ll need more mead.”
He still wouldn’t tell all of it. Not of the very first meeting between him and Odin, nor what he had done in his life before then, nor anything about his mother and father and brothers. Those were all still unknown to Sigun, just the names of mysterious giant in-laws she had never met. Still, she didn’t press him on the matter, for Loki did tell her of other things, that were perhaps true and perhaps lies.
He told her of the distant years long before Valhalla was built, when time itself had not had long to shake its hair dry from the dew of the very first morning. In those days, the scrying pools did not yet have much depth of age in them, and so only the most stubborn and most powerful could reach past the happy, unconcerned glittery water on the surface of knowledge. The forests were wide as oceans, the trees as tall as mountains are now, and the mountains were so tall you could not see their peaks. There were humans back then, knowing little of the world, scattered in the woods and hills, unwarlike, curious and childlike, so rare that you could walk for weeks without meeting a single one. Other races too were small in number, giants and elves and dwarfs and trolls. And the gods, of course.
Even the very nine worlds themselves had not reached their true shape back in those day. Yggdrasill the world tree was still young and tender, not yet connecting all the worlds; on the other hand, the boundaries between the realms were much looser, easy to cross. All the worlds were not even named back in those days -- Midgård and Asgård and Vanaheim were all just one great green place, and to reach Jotunheim from there you only had to step over a creek so narrow a child of four could have done it.
Odin’s eyes had been green back then, not the grayish blue they were now, sometimes shifting into black. His hair had been dark brown, darker than Loki’s, without a single gray hair. He had looked much different, in that time before he hung for nine days and nine nights in a sacrifice to himself, before he tore out his own eye and placed it in Mímir’s well, before he gained great wisdom and his hairs turned grey. But he had also not been different, not truly different from now. Even back then, he had the air of someone who saw deeper and aimed higher; and balked at nothing that could grant him either knowledge or power. So said Loki.
Sigyn pointed out, “Odin and Vile and Ve shaped the whole world. They carved it from Ymir’s body. He must be a great deal older even than you.”
“But he did not seem like it,” said Loki, “and time worked differently in those days anyway. You saw new valleys appearing from one day to another yet there were people in them who said their grandparents were born there. Things that happened were one thing, memory another. It was a jumbled world, and it took work and patience to put it all together.”
It was uncommon to hear him talk this way, not trying to win or sidle out of an argument or nudge a point or tell an entertaining joke. Sigyn fancied that she probably saw more sides of her husband than the other gods did, save perhaps Odin, but most of those secret glimpses of vulnerability were quiet ones, silent and wordless. When he would hold his tongue for once and just sit quietly by the table and look at her, or embrace her from behind and lean his chin against her ear. Talk was another matter. Perhaps he had indeed been thinking of these matters for some time, waiting for the right moment to tell someone about them.
“So did you help him with that work, putting it all together?” she said, reaching for more wool fibres to spin.
“With chores that took much work and patience?” he said, laughing. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“I know you’re not incapable of either,” she said. “Even if your intentions are not always easy to guess at, even for me.” There was Angrboda, for one, and even more the monstrous children that Angrboda had borne. That parentage was a secret, and one she had never talked with Loki about: she would have liked to have disbelieved Angrboda if she could have, that one time they had met by a sacred spring in the darkest of forests, when so many things had been said and read in words and gazes. But while Sigyn’s own scrying powers were not great, she could tell when a woman like the giantess was telling the truth about such matters. She remembered Angrboda’s dark eyes with rings of gold around their edges: she remembered her strong hands full of untamed power, her dark hair falling down around her as she unbound it during the time they talked together.
There hadn’t been rage there, nor even bitterness, it seemed, but there had been a hard truth in her eyes that had sought acknowledgment from the Asynja, had deeply desired for her to listen and to know. They had both drunk the cold water of that spring together. No accord had been struck that day, no promise of peace or friendship, but Sigyn knew she was no longer truly fearful of that woman or of what she might mean to her husband. It was the children, the monsters, that made her worry.
But she was not going to talk about that now. In any case, Loki was waving her remark away. “I’ll only do work like that if I really have to,” he said. “No, I was content to leave that kind of tiresome business to Odin. He said he’d been striding through the world that he had helped build and now he discovered so much more of it already. He wanted to learn more. Especially about magic.
“I’m not saying I completely believed him when he said he and his brothers had carved out the world. I’m not saying I was certain he was full of it, either. He was a sly one, always ready to spin tales, and you had to spend days, no, weeks with him to start making out the true wool from the moonbeam nonsense. I did tell myself that, even if it was true, he shouldn’t get to have everyone he met just believe him like that, just venerate him from the start. Even if other beings were credulous, at least I could be someone he wouldn’t too easily win over.
“Of course that’s why he wanted me to join him on his journey. I said I didn’t have anything to do so I might as well keep him company, and at first he said yes because he was curious about me, that I was the first person he had met who he didn’t have an easy time figuring out, then already the next day we had a quarrel and he stormed off -- I think it was about the best way to cook fish we had caught together -- then we met again a few weeks later and he wanted me to join him again. But I snubbed him, until he lured me in with delicious cooking smell and a warm coat he had tricked off of someone. See, you couldn’t make him admit it, but he liked having me around, even more once he’d shown himself to humans and they started to sacrifice to him. It was the contrast of it, I suppose.”
Sigyn smiled. "You were like the maiden who encourages her suitor the least, and thus inspires the hardest ardour.”
“Oh, don’t even talk to me about maidens…” groaned Loki. Already back then, he said, the Spear-Shaker had been easily distracted by a teasing smile and an alluring gait from any pretty young woman he crossed paths with, and had often delayed his journey for the sake of trying to get between the legs of his latest fancy.
“Mind you, he was more awkward back then, for all that his hair was brown and not gray and he still had both his eyes. He’s much smoother these days when he goes to Midgård in disguise, that old tomcat. I swear it, back then he’d seem more eager sometimes to improve his wooing skills than his strength as a warrior or his magic. It was annoying, so now and then I made the effort to steal whatever girl he wanted away from him, just to spite him and so we could get going again. Heh, it always worked, too. He’d be pushing me to leave as soon as possible and he’d glare at me and grumble for hours.”
“But after a while, we would both forget about that, as we wandered onwards. I remember waking up and watching the sunlight in a valley somewhere that was not yet Midgård, early in the morning… I remember listening to him and knowing we were different, we did not see the world the same way, we did not know the same things… but I stepped into his footsteps and he stepped into mine, and we would know the seven names for the sunrise and I would forget we were not the same. I remember I set him up once, a prank really, when we got close to the mountains where I was born and I talked him into a trap where an angry troll lived. Then I appeared right in the nick of time to save him and look like a hero.
“Two days later was the first time he suggested we should become foster-brothers and mingle our blood together. We were crossing a moor at the time and were sitting down on a rock to catch our breath. I said to him, but you already have two brothers and so do I (not that I have much use for mine). He said he didn’t have much use for his brothers either but that wasn’t the point. I laughed and told him the truth about the prank two days earlier. He guffawed much more than me and claimed he already knew that.
‘It’s because of that kind of thing we should become brothers, Loki son of Laufey,’ he said. ‘We are not the same, but we are the same. If I only take my time, I can cast my thoughts around every person in this world that I meet and figure out what kind of being they are and how I can use them, or how I should rule them. But I can’t do that with you. When someone is like that, they either become your enemy, or you should make them very close to you, closer than the best of friends.’
‘Your eyes almost look like they’re changing colour,’ I said, because already the green in them was becoming flecked with grey. ‘Will you really become king of the gods? An Aesir king with a Jotun blood-brother, that might look strange, you know.’ Not that I really cared much, and the enmity between giants and gods was much milder back then, anyway. I put my hand over his, wondering if he would pull away - then I could make fun of him - or let it remain. I wasn’t sure what to do if he didn’t pull away.
I couldn’t seem to stop from looking at him, all of a sudden. Like my eyes wanted to devour him. He was the one who was talking like he wanted to possess me, to know everything that I knew, to tie me to him with strong bonds… but I was the one who was looking at him, and my eyes had the same desire his words held. I inched closer to him and stared at him, waiting for what he would do.
Odin let his hand remain where it was. He met my eyes calmly. ‘It will look how it looks, but it’s what I wish, and if I become king of the gods, the others will just have to get used to it.’ Already so regal and full of himself! ‘Loki,’ he went on. ‘You have not given me your answer.’ Now he moved, but only to rest both his hands on my shoulders.
It occurred to me to wonder if he had picked up more magic than I knew, if he was using some of it on me. Then I stopped caring. (I know that feeling, thought Sigyn.) ‘Not here,’ I said. ‘This is not the right place for something like that, not dry, dour moorland where lonesome wolves howl mournfully at night. It should be by a meeting of two streams, if it should happen at all. Ask me again when we find one.’
He was smelling of cool moss and of sunlit pine forest. Nobody else could combine those two scents all at once.
I coughed to clear my throat and said, ‘But enough about that. Use the seidr you have learned to hide us even from the eyes of the hawks and the falcons.’
‘Hah, I didn’t know you were so bashful,’ said Odin. He grabbed me close and seemed to dare me to take the first step, so I kissed him.
I think he must have put some of his magic into that kiss, too, because with his lips on mine it seemed like a cold wind from far up in the mountains came down to the moorlands with their balmy sun and as I kissed him back and we started to undress one another, I let my thoughts take the shape of a falcon climbing high, and he was an eagle flying even higher with majestic wingbeats. Then we both swooped towards each another, circling, first one of us doing the chasing and then the other, before we dropped down towards the ground. And our thought-shapes were no longer in the flat moorlands where our bodies were, they had moved to the high mountains we had been walking towards. Mountains like the ones that I come from, like the ones where we first had met, where the bones of Ymir bunch up against each other and rear so high up in the sky they nearly touch the stars.
Again we chased one another, from the sky into the lake, where our thoughts turned into fish instead. We swimmed through the lake in our fish shapes, and we felt weirdly happy and whole. Odin’s scales were glittering like they were made of sunlight, and that’s not usually something you can say about the Rune-God; as if he was a Vanir-fish. Or something you can usually say about Loki, for that matter. I doubt my scales were shining quite that brightly, but I know they were gleaming, as if they were pearls. Like I said, it was a strange time.”
(“I am starting to wonder if Brage did not put something a little strange into his mead,” said Sigyn. “Or perhaps you are starting to get dizzy with fever.”)
“Anyway. So that’s how it was, Odin with no maiden around was happy to pull me into his embrace instead, but I was too young and too haughty to just be willing to take the woman’s part, we had to at least take turns I said, and he hardly even grumbled about that. I did at least apply myself so he would enjoy it both ways.
That was more fun to me, too, hearing him enjoy my touch and my flesh that much. So yes, I don’t advise you to gossip too loudly about this, wife: but it turns out that when Odin really wants you to do something, he can employ that seductive side of his even to other men. And he was much better at it than I would have thought. The strength I could have guessed at, the fire and the endurance, but I did not know he could be that gentle.
“It’s all rather foggy in my memory what happened right afterwards. It should have taken us at least one more day to cross the moorlands, but it seemed after we had lain together we only walked there for one more hour. Then we climbed a steep hillside and through a narrow mountain pass, into a deep valley where the air was fresh, the shadows had hard edges, and a small mountain creek rushed through that valley, cold and bright. We saw a man standing there, as if to greet us.
“His eyes were made of gold. His mouth was open, but he had no tongue. But we knew that his name was Morgunn, Morning. Coming up towards him walked one of the Svartálfar in fine clothing, and when he saw us walking there, he cried out, ‘A Jotun and an Ás walking so close together! Today alone I will hand you two a gift.’ Then the Svartálfr turned the man called Morgunn into a knife, made of stone. Even though it was just stone, its edge was sharper than fine swords of well-wrought iron. And Odin seized the knife and thanked the Svartálfr without words, and then he turned and looked at me. ‘Well, then?’ he said. ‘Here we are, now. Let us become brothers.’
See, he kept pushing me, and already back then I thought it was odd, because when he had first brought it up I figured he would be the one to soon change his mind and give up that wild idea. I crouched down by the brook and filled my waterskins and said, ‘That is all well and good, but we should wait until this brook flows into a river. And when you find your new home and when you build your jarl house on it, I want to come and go there as I please. I don’t want to be tied down but I want to be welcome.’ By now I had drank from the water and the world seemed a little less heady and golden, and I came to understand that the man called Morgunn had only been an illusion, a haze that had come from mixing two kinds of magic together. The Svartálfr also wasn’t real, and was no more to be seen. There had only ever been just the stone knife there. I was starting to feel like Loki again.
I didn’t want to just be swept away by Odin, so I took him by the hand and we walked the together by the mountain brook for the last part of the way, until it reached a river and we made our vow right there. We cut our hands with the stone knife and mixed our blood together. I made him laugh from a dirty joke. Later that night, we quarrelled again over the right way to cook fish, but this time I applied myself and made him see reason. He still bit my shoulder, though.”
Loki stopped his telling and rolled over where he lay, calling out in a whine not for more mead but for water. For some reason, he was sulking as Sigyn held the cup for him and muttered something inaudible when she checked his bandages. She changed the linen wrapped around his upper arm, but removed all the rest, as those wounds had stopped bleeding and started to heal up. Her salve was doing fine work.
“You made me talk too much,” he complained. “Just because I’m in a vulnerable position.”
She went to put her spindle away.“Is this Loki I’m hearing now? Talking too much is what you’re known for. And it wasn’t all new to me, anyway.” She had heard of Loki and Odin lying together sometimes from Angrboda, and it had not been unexpected to learn that it had first happened such a long time ago. She wondered what Frigg might think about it. It might be better not to know that much.
The hearth was now down to just a few embers, gleaming in the darkness. Sigyn shed her overdress and her underdress, and lay down on the wolfpelts close to him, leaning into his heat. She knew of other times when her husband could be all too cold, closed up and frosty; but right now, he was warm.
“Eh,” he mumbled, sounding sleepy. “That’s just what a woman would say. You always have to pretend to know more.”
“It’s the plain truth. I don’t lie to you, husband.”
“Mm-hm.” He didn’t say anything more, but did move with her when she nudged their positions closer, fitting together in the night.
“Fishes and falcons,” she murmured, her mind already half slipping down towards the well of dreams. “You men might claim those for yourselves, but we… we are bears and wolves.” Like they had walked once, through the wildest of forests, her and her shadow-sister, the mother of monsters. Not soaring or plunging but roaming, like the four-legged beasts.
They had not held hands, but she knew: she could return in her head whenever she wanted to that day, the calm and the trembling, the clear deep spring and the wood in twilight. She wondered if it might be the same way for him. Long before the cornerstone of Valhalla was placed, long before Odin drank from Mímir’s well and hung for nine days, when the worlds were so different and not yet fully shaped, perhaps the actions from that day already lingered within him, holding him and binding him and giving him shape.
The northern wind was getting louder outside. She kissed him on the lips. It would be many hours until dawn.