'Uncle Loki!'

A child giggled. A small hand closed around his bicep and attempted to shake him awake. Loki groaned. This was it, there would be no more sleep this morning. He had never spent much time in the company of children, but the past week had been educational.

He opened his eyes to Hyndla's wide grin. She was the elder of Byleistr's two children and had quickly accepted Loki as her uncle. Loki had surmised that his integration into the family was no great upheaval for her. She had grown up surrounded by aunts and uncles from both her mother's and her father's side of the family. Loki, personally, still found it peculiar to be referred to as an uncle. To his knowledge, neither Thor nor Hela had ever produced an offspring.

'Hello, Hyndla,' Loki said. 'What can I do for you this fine morning?'

'Mother said I need to stop being a nuisance to her and that I need to tell you to keep us entertained until the afternoon,' the girl replied in a somewhat flat tone.

'I bet she used those exact same words too.'

Hyndla nodded, looking pleased with herself. Loki, on the other hand, remained unnerved by this habit of repeating what she had heard word for word. He suspected either her father or her grandfather had taught her to do this, which suggested that they used her to gather information. From what Hyndla and her younger brother had told him over the past days, neither Laufey nor Byleistr had much time for them, which the children lamented. There was an opportunity in that. Young informants craving positive attention from their elders could bring great gifts and asked very little in return.

'What's that?' Hyndla picked up Fandral's rapier. Loki had sharpened the previous night and had left it out atop the wooden chest that stood at the foot of his bed.

'It's a sword.' Loki carefully pried the weapon out of the girl's hands. 'Haven't you ever seen one before?'

'Can't you make a weapon out of ice?'

He frowned for a moment. 'I don't know, never tried. Where is your brother?'

'He's playing,' Hyndla replied, her eyes still on the rapier. 'I don't see why you couldn't do it, everyone can.'

'Is he playing with the model? I don't like how quiet he is.'

Loki nudged the girl out, hid the rapier, then pulled his blanket over his shoulders and wrapped it tight around him as if it were a cloak. Remaining in his Jotunn form kept him from feeling the worst of the cold, but the mornings were still too chilly for his liking. He yawned as he strode out to his sitting room. Or rather, Helblindi's sitting room. Practicality reigned in an era of wartime restraint and Loki had been handed the quarters previously occupied by his younger half-brother.

The rooms remained largely as Helblindi had left them, which Thrym, Byleistr's younger child, had taken advantage of. Helblindi had been fond of his niece and nephew, so he had fixed up some of his own old toys for them. There were well-armed soldiers, howling hounds and ferocious beasts to choose from, but the light of Thrym's life (and Loki suspected Helblindi's once upon a time) was a large model of Utgard carved out of oak and dressed with a thin coat of paint.

The model had been a boon to Loki. He had peppered the children with questions until he got a good sense of the city's layout. He had hoped also the model would help him narrow down where Thor was being kept, but there he had only found disappointment. At first, he had danced around the topic, then asked the question outright. Neither Thrym nor Hyndla had an answer for him. Either the children genuinely didn't know or had been coached not to tell him.

'What are you up to today, Thrym?' Loki asked.

The boy set down the warrior figurine in his hand. 'Helping protect Jotunheim from the enemy.'

Loki didn't have to ask who the enemy was. Thrym had lined up a dozen figurines painted to resemble the EInherjar against his frost giant army.

'You play the same thing every day,' Hyndla said. She pulled a chair over to the table that held the model and climbed into the chair. 'Uncle Helblindi wanted to steal back the Casket of Ancient Winters. We should do that. Wouldn't that be more fun? Now that Uncle Loki's here, I'm sure we can do it.'

'Have you ever seen the Casket?' Thrym asked.

Loki raised an eyebrow. 'I have.'

'What does it look like?' Thrym's eyes widened with excitement. 'Is it really big and shiny? Will you help us get it back?'

Sweet lord, child. I thought I'd be having this conversation with your grandfather, not with you.

'I don't know,' Loki replied. 'It's a dangerous quest, I'd wager more dangerous than anything you'd find here on Jotunheim. Are you up for that kind of danger?'

He had only meant to tease the boy a little, but Thrym struck out his lower lip and looked back at Loki with a confused expression.

Hyndla rolled her eyes, then whacked her younger brother's arm. 'Don't be a baby. We are up for it, aren't we?'

'And what will you do with the Casket when you get it back?' Loki asked. 'Invade Midgard?'

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

'Not Midgard.' Hyndla looked at Loki as if he had just sprouted a horn between his brows. 'If we're going to invade something, we'd invade Asgard. They deserve it. But first I'd fix Jotunheim. So yes, Jotunheim, then Asgard, then maybe Midgard. Midgard is much larger than Asgard.'

'Yeah, we'll kill all the soldiers on Asgard,' Thrym reached for the figurines representing the Einherjar and nudged a few over. 'Then we'll take their stuff.'

On first thought, the scene had sparked nostalgia in Loki. He and Thor had spent many days in their youth planning and acting out campaigns against the frost giants. But the war currently raging between the two realms coloured these children's fancies with a crimson tone. The game now seemed grotesque. One day Hyndla or Thrym would be ruling Jotunheim and would have the power to send their armies into whichever realm they pleased.

He tried to shake off those dark images and asked, 'What do you mean, fix Jotunheim?'

'That's what the Casket is for,' Thrym responded.

'Yeah, everyone...' Hyndla cocked her head. 'Or maybe you don't know. The Casket was made to fix the weather fluctuations across Jotunheim. It's hard to grow anything when one year the summer is three months long and the next year it's about nine. Winters too are like that often enough. In those years the animals have nothing to eat and we've nothing to hunt.'

Loki got down on his knees beside the girl and rested his elbow on the table before them. 'I thought Jotunheim was always cold.'

'Of course it's not.'

'I suppose the snow was melting when I came through from Asgard, perhaps spring is on the way already. How are the seasons so uneven in the first place?'

'It wasn't always like that, but it's got something to do with how the planet spins and other things around it. Father tried to explain to me; I didn't really understand,' Hyndla admitted.

'It sounds like you're talking about an unstable planetary tilt.'

With this nugget of knowledge, many things fell into place for Loki. The frost giants likely originated in a period when Jotunheim was more stable; now they struggled. Loki needed only to look around. Laufey's household was no more luxurious than the house of any well-to-do merchant in Asgard. The Bradi clan thought they had found a solution and sacrificed themselves to create the Casket. Perhaps it had been a viable answer, but then Laufey's father had an even more ambitious idea - conquest and relocation to a more hospitable planet. If not for Asgard, they would have succeeded.

On Asgard, Jotnar demands for the Casket's return had always been seen as a question of stubborn pride. It wasn't. It was about survival.

What then was the proper recourse? Asgard couldn't hand the Casket back. Not while Laufey lived.

Except Laufey wasn't the problem. The problem was that once a seed of an idea was out there, it could bear fruit just about anywhere. Thrym and Hyndla's fantasies about what they would do with the Casket attested to that too clearly. Jotunheim couldn't be trusted, so for the sake of other realms, the Casket had to be kept away from the frost giants.

They struggle, yet they do manage to survive on this planet. That will have to do.

Not quite satisfied with the conclusion he had drawn, Loki picked up one of the figurines and tried to shift the conversation in a different direction. 'Did your mother happen to say how I am to entertain you today?'

Hyndla shook her head. 'We can go down to the pools?'

Loki chuckled. Were it up to Hyndla, she would spend her whole days swimming in the thermal pools in the lowest levels of the city. Thrym, however, looked aghast.

'Aren't we going to play here?' he asked.

Loki sensed a tirade about his sister's obsession with the pools was about to follow, so he threw up his hand to get the boy's attention. 'After we recapture the Casket of Ancient Winters, we'll celebrate with a short dip in the pools. Set up, Thrym. I'm just going to change into proper clothes, I can hardly run from the Einherjar while wearing a blanket.'

'Maybe it can be a disguise,' Hyndla said.

'Maybe, but I think not today.' Loki climbed to his feet. 'I haven't eaten this morning yet. Hyndla, could you find something?'

'I will.'

The girl slipped out of the room a second later. Loki watched Thrym for a moment, uncertain whether to trust the boy not to cause havoc. The last time he had left him on his own, Thrym had tried to scale a bookshelf. Presently the boy seemed to be occupied with the figurines. Loki let him be and retreated to the bedroom.

He had inherited Helblindi's wardrobe together with his quarters, a fact Loki wasn't particularly pleased about. The fit never seemed right. Truthfully, he wasn't sure how the fit was supposed to be and there were few men about whom Loki could imitate. He did his best and tried to ignore the amount of skin Jotunn garments left exposed. So far, neither his sister-in-law nor her children had laughed at him to his face so he could only assume he made a passable job of it.

He was fastening the last buckle when he heard voices out in the sitting room.

'Will this be enough?' a woman asked.

'I think so,' Hyndla replied. 'He doesn't eat much and Thrym and I already ate earlier. What's all this food for?'

'For the guardsmen.'

'Is that an ointment too?' Hyndla riffled through something. 'Is one of them injured?'

Loki slipped the leather strap into place and moved closer to the door, careful to make as little sound as he could.

'Must be, they asked for it and they're not going to waste it on the Asgardian,' the woman answered. There was a pause, then she went on. 'If you say this is enough for you three, I'd best go. It's a long climb to Reaper's Peak.'

'I could go for you.'

'I don't think so. Your grandfather will have my hide if I let you get anywhere near that beast. I'll see you later. Keep yourself and your brother out of trouble for a change.'

Loki crouched down and tried to get a look at the woman through the keyhole, but the angle was wrong. He saw only Thrym examining the figurines one by one with the measured eye of an expert. Loki bit down on his lip to stifle the curses on the tip of his tongue.

Had the Norns smiled on him for once in his life? Loki had found no clues about Thor's whereabouts for a week, now the information he needed had simply been handed to him. He even knew where Reaper's Peak was; Thrym had pointed it out on the model the other day.

Or was this a setup to test his loyalty? Laufey was the type to make his own enquiries about a person's loyalty. And were the children in on this ploy too? Loki's constant anxiety about how he ought to interpret everything that happened and everything he would soon leave him with an ulcer. Yet, for the life of him, Loki couldn't work out if Laufey believed his tale or merely waited for Loki to show his true colours.

In Loki's experience, sentimentality was the easiest thing to exploit and with Laufey the potential was there. Baugi and other adults Loki had spoken with over the past week all talked about Laufey's genuine sorrow at Loki's disappearance at the close of the last war. Perhaps Loki's tale had tugged at the right heartstrings. Laufey wasn't one for hugs or tears of happiness, but he had permitted Loki to live as a member of his family.

On the other hand, a man as sly by nature as Laufey, seldom took what they were told at face value.

'Uncle Loki?' Thrym called out. 'It's ready.'

Perhaps crawling around Utgard in secret would've been easier after all.

Loki groomed his expression into a steady smile and opened the door. 'Is it? Good. Let's steal back what's rightfully ours.'