Chapter 374: What Victory Leaves Behind

The sea burned gold beneath the evening sky, but it was not the reflection of the setting sun.

Dozens of slender boats drifted slowly out toward the edge of Asgard. Each one carried a fallen warrior, laid beneath a banner with a weapon at their side, and the funeral flames had already taken most of them. Along the high harbor wall, the last volley of burning arrows sailed out over the water, found the dark wood, and the archers lowered their bows in silence.

All of Asgard had come down to the water to watch them go.

They filled the terraces and the great stairs and the whole length of the harbour wall. The Einherjar held the front ranks in dented armour nobody had ordered them to take off yet. Behind them stood the grieving families dressed in the dark blue of mourning, and behind the families stood everyone else. Tens of thousands of people, shoulder to shoulder in the cooling evening air.

Nobody wailed. Thousands of people watched their dead burn without making a single sound. The only noise in the golden city was the gentle lapping of water against the stone pier and the crackle of fires.

At the far edge, where the sea ran out of world and poured into the starry black, the first burning boat went over.

It did not fall.

Golden light spread through the vessel. The burning sail, the hull, the warrior beneath the banner, all of it came apart into bright specks that rose slowly out of the sea mist. The boat behind it went over, and did the same, and the one behind that.

Along the shore, the grieving families lifted the small paper lamps they had been holding and let them go. The lamps rose high above the harbor and joined the rest, until the whole twilight sky over Asgard was full of drifting gold.

Every face on the terraces turned up to watch it.

At the end of the stone pier, Wanda and Pietro watched it too.

They were not talking. They had barely spoken a single word to each other since the fighting finally stopped. There was plenty they could have said. But neither of them knew how to begin with the thing that sat heaviest.

Two days ago, they had wanted this.

A war of their own. A chance to stand in one and come out the other side of it with their names proudly in somebody’s mouth, the way the warriors did. So when Arthur sent them to Asgard with a quiet warning that there might be trouble, neither of them had been afraid for a single second.

They had been thrilled.

They had thought of everything they had spent years preparing for. The lessons. The sparring. All the times they had watched someone else leave to deal with a threat while they stayed safely at home.

Finally, it was their turn.

They had imagined the afterwards, too. Sitting with the warriors over a long meal, telling their part of it, Winky interrupting to correct Pietro’s exaggerated version of events.

Neither of them had imagined standing here.

They knew people died in battles. They had never needed anyone to explain that to them. They had buried their own parents, and they knew exactly how little comfort there was in being told that life goes on.

And yet, whenever they had pictured themselves fighting, they had only pictured the victory.

Never what came after it.

It was not really their fault. Everything they knew about war had come from stories and borrowed memories, and those had all ended in the same happy place.

Arthur had shared his battles with them dozens of times since they were teenagers, and in none of those thrilling tales had there ever been an evening like this.

They had watched Thor break the Destroyer and save a whole town in the doing of it. They had watched Arthur tear apart the Frost Giant king in the sky above this very city. They had seen Iron Man, Ariadne, and the Hulk put down the Abominations in Harlem, and they had seen the Avengers throw back an invading army and save the entire planet in a single afternoon.

The stories from Asgard had been no different. There was danger in them, certainly. Wounds, close calls, enemies strong enough to make even Thor work for it. But there was always laughter when the warriors told them, and always someone at the table ready to argue about who had struck the final, glorious blow.

They had grown up on all of it. Of course they had wanted their turn. They had spent years resenting Arthur for never letting them have one.

Standing here now, looking at the burning boats, neither of them could find a single complaint left in their heads.

Though a small, bitter part of them still blamed him, and that part was not entirely wrong.

He had warned them about the terrible cost of war, often enough that they had grown tired of hearing it. But he had never, not once, shown it to them. He could have ended every argument they ever brought him in a single afternoon, with a single memory, the one that came after the fighting. The dead. The boats. The families.

He had shown them the glorious winning and stopped there. Underneath every one of those memories, there had been a silence waiting that neither of them had ever thought to look for.

They were standing in it now, and there was no peace in it anywhere. It was a suffocating, weight that pressed down on the chest, and it had been pressing since the first arrow was loosed.

Pietro watched the families along the shore.

During the battle, there had been moments when he had felt unstoppable. He had crossed streets before the elves could turn their weapons. He had pulled people out of the path of plasma fire and reached places nobody else could have reached in time. He had felt like a god of speed, outrunning death itself.

He had been good at it. Better than he had dared to hope.

That was part of what made this so hard.

He remembered racing toward a group near the market as a ship brought its guns around. He had reached some of them before it fired. But by the time he turned back for the rest, the blast had already landed.

Most of them had miraculously survived it. These were Asgardians, after all. Men he had fully expected to find buried had thrown the rubble off themselves and stood up with their weapons still tightly in their hands.

Some had not stood up.

He had not been fast enough to save everyone. Nobody ever was.

He had overheard one of the Einherjar captains call it a "light day", as far as invasions went, and the terrible thing was that the man was right. The Dark Elves had never come to slaughter a city. They had thrown their own soldiers into the Asgardian shields by the hundred, spending them like coins, carving a straight bloody road to the palace for their king. It was a suicide run, not a conquest.

It could have been so much worse.

Pietro watched a boat drift past the harbour mouth and understood that it could have been much worse was worth nothing at all to the old man standing three places down the pier, who had not moved or blinked since the fire took his son.

Pietro looked away.

He had desperately wanted to be so fast that this could never happen wherever he was standing. Yesterday had shown him how much distance was left between that arrogant wish and anything he could actually do.

Wanda stood rigidly beside her brother. Her hands were tucked tightly into her jacket pockets to hide the way they were shaking.

She did not only see the grief. She felt it, a whole city’s worth of it, cold and rising against her mind like water coming up over her head. It came from people standing only a few feet away, from lowered heads and quiet faces, and she could feel it even when she stopped looking at them.

She knew she should raise her mental barriers. Arthur had taught her how to do it. She made the difficult effort eventually, and the weight pressing in from outside eased just enough for her to breathe.

Though her own sadness stayed exactly where it was.

They had wanted to be heroes. Nobody had told them the job included standing here afterward.

A heavy, armored hand rested gently on Pietro’s shoulder.

He looked up and found Fandral. The swordsman’s handsome face was badly bruised. His golden armour was scored black with burns, and for once there was no teasing smile waiting on his face.

"You saved many lives today," Fandral said quietly, his eyes on the burning boats. "Remember them too."

Pietro swallowed hard.

"I couldn’t reach everyone."

"No." Fandral watched a boat reach the falls. "Neither could we."

He left his hand there a moment longer.

"You fought well, young runner. Asgard honors you."

Pietro nodded. Yesterday, those words would have meant more to him than almost anything. He had wanted to hear them from Fandral for a very long time.

He was grateful for them now. He was simply too tired, and too sad, to know what to say back.

Beside him, without looking over, Wanda found his hand and held on tight.

—

Further along the wall, where the marble ran out to meet the palace stair, the royal family watched the same fire.

The All-Father leaned heavily on Gungnir. He wore no helm, and the evening light showed the weariness in his face more plainly than he would have liked. He looked far older than he had that morning.

Frigga stood beside him in plain mourning grey with her hair down.

There was nothing whatsoever wrong with her. Eir had gone over her twice and found a woman in perfect health, and had said so with the baffled look of a healer asked to examine someone who did not need it. The blade, the black threads, the seconds of death, all of it had been taken out of her so completely that nothing remained to treat. Even the bruises from before the blade had gone under the bracelet’s light.

She had walked to the pier under her own power. She had spent most of the afternoon organising the funeral.

Thor stood a half step behind his parents with Mjolnir hanging from his hand. He knew a good number of the names on the water. He had served beside some of the fallen, eaten with others, and passed a few in the palace so often that he had stopped noticing how long they had been there.

Volstagg had read the list out at noon. Thor had made himself listen to every name, and the grief sat in his chest like something swallowed whole and not yet gone down.

But his eyes kept going back to his mother.

To the grey robe and the loose hair and the steady, ordinary rise and fall of her chest.

He had run the length of the palace to her room already knowing something was wrong. Loki’s scream had told him that. He had been right for about four minutes. He had knelt beside her and felt her hand go still in his, and heard the sound his father made, and he expected he would go on hearing that sound for a long time.

And now she was standing three feet away, whole, looking like the queen she was.

She turned slightly to say something to Odin. Thor watched her mouth move, heard the low murmur of her voice, and felt the same relief he had felt every time he had looked at her since she woke.

She could have been on one of those burning boats.

He knew it was a cruel thought to have while other people mourned. He was standing among families who had been given no miracle, and part of him could only be selfishly grateful that his own had been.

He could not make himself feel otherwise.

Beside him, Jane had not said anything in a long while. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold coming off the water, small next to all of them, a mortal woman at the funeral of gods she had never met.

Most of the dead were strangers to her. But these were the people who had welcomed her into their city and fought while she was sheltered in the palace. Their queen had stood between her and Malekith.

Jane had no words that seemed useful.

So, her hand quietly found his instead, laced her fingers tightly through his, and held on.

She did not look up at him. She did not offer him any empty comfort. She simply stayed, at the edge of a grief that was not hers, for as long as it took.

Thor closed his hand around hers. Ahead of them, Frigga moved a little closer to Odin, and his hand came to rest against her back.

The family was together, except for one.

—

Far below the palace, Loki sat alone in a room the guards had emptied out that morning.

The dungeon was gone. Algrim had been the spark and the freed marauders had done the rest. What was left of it was a ruin nobody had gone down to check yet. So they had put him in a bare storeroom off the lower armoury instead, wrapped it in eleven layers of old Asgardian working, and posted six men outside a door that a year ago would not have needed a single one.

High in the outer wall, a narrow barred window framed a small piece of the evening sky.

He sat cross-legged on the floor with his hands open in front of him, watching green fire run between his fingers.

The binding was completely gone.

He had waited over a year for this. He had built the moment in his head a hundred times over, and there had always been laughter in it, before he went to find the man responsible.

Instead he had got his power back with his mother bleeding to death beside him, and had discovered the hard way that having it back was still not enough to save her.

He turned his hand over. The little flame followed obediently, endless and his again, and he felt almost nothing at all.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Algrim’s blade go into her chest. He remembered frantically reaching her, pressing his hands to the wound, and feeling the blood keep coming through his fingers.

He had been afraid of dying all through the attack. He had hidden from soldiers, run from falling stone, and hated every moment of being too weak to defend himself.

Then his mother had fallen, and his own safety had stopped mattering at all.

That was when the lock had finally opened.

He understood now what a year of cold and humiliation had failed to teach him. Being mortal was not the aching legs or the running out of breath on a staircase. It was that everything he loved could simply stop, without warning, and that all the power in his hands would not be standing in the way when it did.

For a few terrible moments, he had believed she was gone forever.

He looked up toward the window.

Outside, Asgard was saying goodbye to people who had not come back.

Loki lowered his eyes to the fire in his palm.

And then there was Arthur Hayes, who Loki did not know what to do with at all.

For a year, hating the man had been the tidiest thing he owned. Arthur had taken his magic and shut it behind a lock nobody else could open. He had left him mortal and small in a city that had watched him fall, and every humiliation since had traced back to that one afternoon. Whenever Loki had been cold or tired or frightened, there had been someone to blame.

He had enjoyed planning what he would do to the wizard when his power returned.

Then his mother had died on the floor of her own chambers, and a braided band on her wrist had gone quietly green and given her back.

He had watched it happen. He had seen its light effortlessly take apart a curse that his own magic could not touch, that even Odin had failed to break. Then the band had crumbled into dust, and Frigga had opened her eyes.

Arthur had ruined him, and then saved the only person whose loss he could not have survived.

Enemies, he understood. He had been making them since he could talk. He had no shape at all for a man like that.

He still deeply resented what had been done to him. A year of fear did not turn pleasant because the man responsible had also done something good.

But every single time he tried to go back to that familiar anger, he remembered his mother drawing breath.

He owed Arthur Hayes her life.

He did not know how to live with that yet.

Loki closed his hand, and the green flame went out.

His power had returned. His sentence remained. Learning the lesson inside the binding had not undone a single thing he had done before it was placed there.

He was a god again, and he was also a convicted criminal sitting in a locked room, and for the first time in a very long life he could not assemble a single argument for why he should not be.

A faint golden light moved across the dark ceiling.

Loki looked up. Beyond the bars, the lights from the funeral were rising through the small patch of sky he could see.

He watched them pass quietly until the last had faded.

Then he sat quietly in the dark, grateful that none of them was hers.