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Prince Loki oversees Jotunheim for his father, because that is where his mother was born. Younger than most of his brothers and born to a less favoured concubine, it is no surprise to anyone that the king has sent this son to the far reaches of the world, where snow covers not just the mountains but often the valleys between them as well; Jotunheim is famously cold and infamously hard to govern.
Farbauti tells her son that their presence here shows that Odin has great confidence in Loki’s abilities, but she suspects (and Loki must come to suspect this too, eventually) that this realm has been chosen for its distance and its difficulty, and that she is the one who brought this on them by failing to be a sweet enough consort to the all-powerful king.
She was not thinking of the son she didn't have yet while she was being stubborn about her place in the hierarchy around her. This was a mistake, possibly the worst one she has ever made. It remains to be seen if her son can advance to higher things than the ones she inadvertently burdened him with.
The throne of Asgard is half a world away, and his brothers - and perhaps more importantly, their mothers - are every bit as ambitious as he and Farbauti.
Prince Thor is assigned to rule his mother’s home too, but Vanaheim is far closer to the empire’s capital and so the choice is also a mark of his father’s favour – Thor will have something of a head start over his half-siblings when the old king dies and the race to replace him begins.
His mother, Frigga, never thought she would be a queen, and this is good because she never was one. A title like that cannot be shared as easily as a husband can and Odin, like those who went before him, placed his mother in the highest position at court (after himself, of course).
This, then, has been the focus of Frigga’s ambition - to put her son on the throne and retire in comfort as the power behind it. And why shouldn’t she? She has a good brain beneath her slowly-fading beauty and with those two gifts she has made the best of her lot.
Farbauti sees all this from the angle of a compelled competitor; Frigga, she thinks, developed airs as soon as she had provided an heir, and playing catch-up to her in that regard was never easy. But Farbauti was never particularly pretty, just politically-convenient and everyone, of course, saw this as the root of her supposedly petty envy - this being an acceptable explanation for the antagonism of women, since it bestows on them such unpleasantly unfeminine interests as power and purpose.
Eventually, inevitably, the rivalry of Odin’s consorts becomes the rivalry of their sons; their mothers teach them with the greatest care and they learn their lessons well.
(They are such good boys.)
Farbauti tells Loki tales of his siblings, all of the things she remembers about them as children and all of the strengths and weaknesses she has gleaned from weary travellers in the years since.
Loki sharpens the blade of his favourite dagger as she rambles on, idling in the heat from the fire in the hearth and only half-listening to her words.
His mother notes how his attention wanders and she tells him, sharply, “This is information that will save your life one day. This is how I’m going to win you your throne.”
Loki nods, apparently contrite, and drags the whetstone along the length of the knife. “I’m listening, Mother. I always listen.”
“To me?”
“To everything,” he answers, just as she wants him to.
Farbauti continues; “The one you must be most careful of is Thor. You were only small when he left the palace and he wasn’t much more than a boy himself, but he takes after his mother. Which means he would slit her throat if he saw any advantage in it. Perhaps he already has.” She laughs at that, loud and scornful.
Loki does, in fact, remember Thor. He remembers golden hair and easy laughter. He remembers the two of them playing together, dodging behind tall pillars in a game of chasing and hiding. He remembers, quite clearly (too clearly, perhaps - this part might be a later invention of his own imagination), that the game ended with both of their mothers scowling.
He and Thor might have been the best of friends, if only things were different.
Since things are not different, and seemingly never will be, he will someday have to kill Thor. He will do this while Thor is trying to kill him, and this fatal fight will ensure that their people will get a strong, fearless, ruthless king.
Loki’s mother has often reproached him for daydreaming, and his mind slips off into imagined futures once again as the blade in his hands catches the firelight, sparking possibilities in his once-more-wandering thoughts.
He is not quite able to imagine a future where he has a living brother at his side while he rules.
The rules of the succession are harsh but fair; when Odin dies his sons will head for the capital, along the way doing their best to get rid of the others, and whichever of them makes it to the throne alive will take it. This is the way things have been done for centuries and the empire has been ruled well for all that time. The excitement of a coming coronation is always a little dampened by the morbid certainty that it will be scheduled alongside a large number of royal funerals, but this is a small price to pay for stability and peace.
And what would they do with all those spare princes otherwise? A brother without a throne of his own is simply a threat, an enemy biding his time as he waits for a chance to overthrow his kin. A sister can be married off to help the family through diplomacy, but a brother? What use are they to anyone once they have already lost the crucial fight?
No, this is better. Bloody, but better. There will be no fear of another claimant leading a rebellion, because the battle to reach the capital makes sure that there are none. This way is simple, and efficient, and effective.
This way works.
To Frigga’s relief, Thor loves to fight, and he is good at it too. She teaches him strategy and rewards the imperial soldiers who teach him the things a woman cannot.
(As if no pretty rival was ever found with a knife in her back, or with the silk she was sewing with suspiciously wrapped around her neck.)
Thor grows tall and strong, and vicious when he needs to be (when his mother tells him that he should be). He learns to tell good advice from bad and he learns that the only person he can truly trust is his beloved mother, the giver of good advice, to be promoted as he himself rises higher within the empire.
Frigga is so, so proud of her son, and rightly, but sometimes…
Sometimes she wishes she had only birthed a daughter instead.
Farbauti has never hidden the fact that she hated Odin, and while she went to great lengths never to insult him or sneer about him in public when someone else might overhear, when she and Loki were alone together she whispered so much poison that she can still taste it on her tongue.
She knows how much Odin resented her for having a son before he learned to loathe her in return, and she knows that Loki being sent to Jotunheim as soon as he was old enough was more to get rid of her than to give her boy a chance to see the home of his ancestors, but neither of of these facts really matters now; Odin is far away, and so is any power he had over her.
What matters now is this: that Loki has grown to be as devoted to her as she has been to him, and if he is quick enough to reach Asgard before his brothers and claim it as his own then when he summons her to join him she will tear down every statue of himself that Odin put in place, and she will grin, and laugh, and gloat while she does it.
“They shall call me ‘My Lady, the King’s Mother,’ says Farbauti grandly, daydreaming of the brightest future yet again.
Yet again, Loki nods obediently. Yet again, Farbauti rewards him with a proud smile.
Thor is in a particularly dull council meeting when the news finally comes, with his mother at his side supposedly focussed on her embroidery but anyone smart enough to keep an eye on her will note the occasional nod or smile as she silently signals her opinions to her son in these meetings.
She is less subtle this time; the time for being discreet has ended along with Odin's life.
The news takes longer to reach Jotunheim, which is part of the reason Loki and his mother were sent to govern it.
Struck uncharacteristically silent, Loki reads the note again before passing it to his mother with a trembling hand.
Farbauti finds a word at once - only one but that is all that either of them need. She lifts her eyes from the scrawled news to her son’s troubled frown and she says, without any hesitation, “Run.”
Pride swells in her breast when Loki is on his feet and moving as soon as the word has left her lips.
Thor and Loki both run, and so do all the others. Odin’s sons swarm towards the capital from their distant exiles, their numbers thinning as paths cross and shared blood spills, the way it always has and always will. Odin left behind him many children but he only left one kingdom and one crown. This is the fairest way to award it to his successor - only one of Odin’s sons will live but he will live in glory for the rest of his days.
(As will his mother.)
Those who have been paying attention to dispatches from far-off provinces (which is anyone with any ambition at all, as well as anyone with the wit to worry about their own future) are not as surprised as their less prudent colleagues that the first to reach the capital are Thor and Loki. The brothers enter the city from opposing directions, tired and bloodstained and determined, and then they weave through the palace’s golden corridors, following mental maps drawn while they were still boys and still foolish, giggling friends.
Thor catches sight of the glistering throne a moment before he spots his half-forgotten half-brother entering the room through another doorway.
He stops, and stills, and with the practised politeness of a prince he says, “Hello, brother,” and then adds, “I must admit, I expected to find you already on the throne.”
Just as politely, Loki answers, “My apologies for the disappointment.”
“It’s down to us, then?” asks Thor, who already knows the answer.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Well, then,” says Thor, with muscles so tense that even smiling is painful.
“Well, indeed,” agrees Loki.
And really, what else is there to say?
Frigga was never much favoured by luck, but she bore Odin a son and has raised him as well as she was able. Her glowing, golden boy has made her proud on every day of his life.
Farbauti does not believe in luck, having encountered it so rarely that to her it can be nothing but a myth. She believes in biding her time and preparing for the future as carefully as she can. Her son believes in very little, but what matters is that she believes in him. He will win her a comfortable widowhood, she is sure of it. (What would be the worth of him if he didn't?)
They have been set against each other all their lives and now stand glaring at each other, within a single murder's distance of the throne.
Loki feels the steel weight of victory in his hand, warmed by his own ambition and rage and fear; he is the blade Farbauti has sharpened for twenty years, ready to strike and slaughter and win.
Thor, who was raised to fight with his fists as his mother’s people always have, has already thought of a dozen ways to disarm his half-brother and leave him defenceless; in Vanaheim they say that those who rely on weapons dig their own graves with them.
They haven’t really been brothers since they were parted as children, have they? Neither of them has been willing to nurture such a weakness as fraternal sentiment since they were old enough to understand what having brothers meant. Perhaps if things were different they would get to find out how much they still have in common, but things are never going to be different and there is no point in pretending otherwise - a kingdom cannot have two kings, everyone knows that, and who knows it better than them?
There is no alternative to one of them dying in the next few minutes and the other being crowned on their father's throne as soon as the blood as been cleaned away (or at least covered with something less ugly and less guilty than family bloodstains).
They might not like it, but what else can they do, really? What else could anyone expect of them?
(Their mothers expect a great deal from them.)
At what seems like it must be the very last moment, the silence is broken by a careful cough and equally careful words: “Might I make a suggestion, dear brother..?”