Chapter 895: Thor’s Proposal [Bonus - ]

Chapter 895: Thor’s Proposal [Bonus Chapter]

The Northern Corridor vanished beneath them in less than a heartbeat.

One moment, Kara was hanging upside down over Thor’s shoulder, watching the snow, the crater and Lara’s furious face shrink away below her, and the next, there was nothing under her but grey cloud tearing past at a speed that made her ears pop and her stomach climb into her throat…

“Thor,” she called out, raising her voice over the howl of the wind. “I’d like to point out, purely for the record, that I had a convoy down there, a deed in my pocket and a princess who’s going to be furious with me for weeks to come…”

Thor’s only answer was another rolling, delighted laugh that shook the clouds around them.

“GWAHAHAHAHA!”

A golden corona of crackling thunder-mana bloomed outward from Thor’s armor and wrapped around the two of them like a sphere of liquid sunlight, and the scream of the wind dropped away all at once, as though someone had shut a door on a storm.

The cold disappeared with it, and the pressure in Kara’s ears eased, and for the first time since she’d been scooped off the snow, she could actually hear herself think.

She stopped struggling and hung there over Thor’s shoulder with her cloak flopped over her head and her one arm dangling, and let out a long slow breath through her nose.

’Fine,’ she thought. ’Let’s see where she’s taking me before I decide how much of her I’m going to break…’

They burst through the top of the cloud layer and kept going.

The grey gave way to a blinding white sea of cloud stretching in every direction, then to a sky so blue it hurt to look at, and still Thor climbed, faster and faster, until the blue thinned and darkened and the curve of the world began to bend away beneath them like the rim of an enormous glowing plate.

Kara twisted around far enough to see it, the snowfields of the north tiny and white far below, the dark scribble of the mountains and the long bright line of the horizon glowing gold where the sun touched it, and above them, slowly bleeding through the thinning sky, the first faint pricks of starlight.

’Thor sure is amazing…’

Aki had told her about this once, curled up on the couch in the Keep with a mug of juice in her hands and her eyes shining, about the day Thor had carried her out of a penthouse window in Rhyx City in the middle of a thunderstorm and flown her up to the edge of the sky.

She’d said the whole world had looked like an ocean of clouds painted gold, and that it was the first time in her life she’d felt small in that kind of way.

’She wasn’t exaggerating,’ Kara admitted grudgingly, watching the sunlight spill across the cloud sea far below. ’It’s annoyingly beautiful up here… I’m still going to hit Thor, though.’

Thor finally slowed and stopped, hanging there at the edge of the world as if she were standing on a street corner, and swung Kara down off her shoulder and set her on her feet inside the sphere of golden light.

Then, before Kara could say a word, she reached down and ruffled her hair with one enormous gauntleted hand, the way she always did, as though Kara were a large and particularly well-behaved dog.

“There!” Thor boomed. “Safe and sound, and not a single hair out of place! Well… now there are a few but they look good like that!”

Kara straightened her cloak with as much dignity as a woman who’d just been carried off like a sack of grain could manage.

“You’ve got about thirty seconds,” she said pleasantly, “to explain why I shouldn’t drop you back on the Corridor headfirst and I’d like it noted that I’m being very generous with the thirty seconds.”

“Only thirty? You’re a stingy one today, Silas!” Thor rested her fists on her hips and beamed at her, storm-blue eyes still crackling with residual sparks. “Very well! I’ll be quick about it, since you asked so nicely…”

“I didn’t ask nicely, Thor.”

“You didn’t punch me, which is nice for you!” Thor declared, and then, because she apparently couldn’t help herself, she threw her head back and laughed again.

“GWAHAHAHA!”

Kara waited for her to finish with her purple eyes flat and unimpressed, and Thor eventually wound down, scratched the back of her neck and looked, for the briefest moment, very faintly put out.

“Bah… It’s a family matter,” she said, and her booming voice dropped to something closer to a normal person’s. “You remember when I left Blessed Land in such a hurry? With the herald and the golden scroll? I’m sure you were told.”

“Aki told me,” Kara said. “Something about a festival, and your father threatening to send a dozen Valkyries to drag you home by your braids if you didn’t show up.”

“Twelve Valkyries,” Thor confirmed darkly. “He wrote the number on the scroll. He even drew a little picture of them, the old goat, so I’d know he was serious.”

She folded her huge arms across her silver breastplate.

“It’s the Festival of Ancestors. Once every few centuries, the whole pantheon crams itself under the Great Dome to honor the old blood. Feasting, drinking, games, duels… It’s the best party in the nine realms, Silas, and I’ve never once missed it.”

Her face soured.

“Except there’s a rule… Every unmated heir of Father’s line has to stand up in front of the entire court and present a husband candidate.”

Kara looked at her for a long moment, and somewhere in the back of her mind, a memory surfaced with terrible clarity.

It was the kitchen at Blessed Land, with the smell of garlic and butter and Aki shrugging at the counter, and Silas laughing as he turned the meat over in the pan.

’God help whatever poor candidate gets shoved in front of that golden hammer,’ He’d said. ’He’s going to spend his wedding night in a healing vat.’

Kara closed her eyes.

’You have got to be kidding me…’

“Thor,” she said slowly, “I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that’s not why you came to the Corridor.”

“I tried everything else first,” Thor said, as though she hadn’t heard her, and started counting on her thick fingers with the air of a general reviewing a failed campaign. “I told Father I was sick… He laughed so hard he broke his chair… I told him I was busy protecting Midgard, and Mother pointed out that I’d been sleeping in your mess hall for a while… It was probably the dwarf that snitched… I offered to fight the whole court instead, one after the other, and Father said that was a lovely idea and he’d hold me to it right after I’d presented my candidate.”

She dropped her hand. “So I went looking for one, as the law says.”

“And?”

“And every unmarried god in the upper halls is useless!” Thor flung her arms out in disgust, and a small bolt of lightning cracked off her gauntlet and fizzled against the inside of the sphere. “Three days of suitors, Silas… Three whole days! One of them fainted when I shook his hand… Another one challenged me to a duel and then forfeited the moment I picked up Mj?lnir, because he said the sight of it gave him chest pains… The last one tried to read me a poem about my eyebrows.”

“What was wrong with the poem…?”

“It rhymed eyebrows with sky-cows!” Thor roared, deeply offended all over again. “There’s no such thing as a sky-cow! I’ve been to every realm with a sky, and I’ve never once seen a cow in it!”

Kara pressed her fingertips against the bridge of her nose.

’I’m not going to laugh,’ she told herself firmly. ’I’m absolutely not going to laugh at the sky-cows…’

“So I sat down on the steps of the hall with a cask of mead and thought about it properly,” Thor went on, and she said it plainly, the way she’d talk about choosing a weapon before a battle. “And I realized the answer was obvious… You’re the strongest mortal I know, you cook better than every chef in Asgard put together, you don’t faint when I shake your hand, and you once tried to kick me through a wall for eating your dessert.”

Thor couldn’t remember if he succeeded but she did know it was nice.

Her grin widened fondly.

“Nobody’s been so carefree with me in centuries… Father’s going to love you.”

“So you want me,” Kara said flatly, “to stand next to you in front of your whole family and pretend to be your husband candidate.”

“Pretend?” Thor looked genuinely puzzled. “Why would you pretend? You’d be my candidate. That’s just what you’d be…”

Kara opened her mouth, then closed it again, because she’d just realized that Thor honestly didn’t understand the question.

She turned away and looked down at the world spread out beneath them, the gold line of dawn creeping across the curve of the planet and made herself think it through properly.

Da Silva could run the convoy with her eyes closed, and the deed was already in her Inventory where nobody could touch it.

Aki would be furious, and Lara was probably already trying to climb a cloud… then there was the line she’d thrown at the King of the World across the Grand Table, about Odin personally inviting her to Asgard, which had been a shameless lie, and the look on Volkov’s face when she’d said it.

’Nobody in that room can check,’ she thought slowly. ’Unless I actually go… And I’ve been wanting to see Asgard since the night I opened that dusty old book in the library…’

The golden halls above the clouds, the rainbow bridges, the mead halls carved out of mountain stone and the streets paved with sunstone… She’d wondered about all of it for months.

She’d lain awake in the Keep wondering what a real divine realm looked like up close, what kind of man Odin was, and whether a human from Earth who’d climbed all the way to godhood would look at a Gold Core like hers and see something familiar.

And now someone was offering to fly her there for free.

’Well… when she puts it like that.’

She turned back to Thor and folded her arm across her chest.

“I want two things,” she said.

“Oho!” Thor’s eyebrows shot up with interest. “Negotiations! Very well, name them!”

“If I’m going to stand in front of your entire pantheon as your candidate, you’re paying for it.” Kara held up one finger. “First, you owe me a favor, a real one, the kind gods actually honor, and I decide when I call it in…”

“Done!” Thor said instantly, waving a hand. “I’d have owed you one anyway since you feed me.”

’I’m surprised you’re even grateful for eating my food…’

“Second.”

A second finger went up.

“At the last summit, I told a room full of very annoying men in very expensive chairs that your father personally invited me to Asgard. He didn’t. I made it up to win an argument, and now the whole World Council is waiting for me to come back with proof. So before I leave Asgard, I want something with Odin’s seal on it that I can drop on the Grand Table and watch the King of the World choke on…”

Thor’s grin turned wicked.

“Hah! You lied to the World Council in Father’s name? He’s going to love you. He loves annoying the Council. He’ll probably insist on writing it himself, in his own hand, so it’s extra rude.”

Kara lowered her hand and looked at her for a moment.

“And your family? What do they actually know about me?”

“That you’re Silas, Lord of Blessed Land, the man who feeds me of course and is pretty interesting,” Thor said with a shrug. “That’s all that matters up there. Nobody in Asgard cares what masks you wear down in the mud, and hardly any of them can even go there.”

She waved a huge hand dismissively.

“…Whatever you’re playing at with that World Council of yours, it stays down there.”

’Convenient,’ Kara thought. ’The one place in the realms where nobody can carry tales back to Earth…’

“Which reminds me,” Thor went on, and the grin came roaring back. “You’ll have to change!”

“Change?”

“Into the real you! I’m not presenting a woman to the court, Silas!” Thor waved her hand up and down at Kara’s slender black-clad figure.

“Father’s very open-minded, but if I walk into the Great Dome with a one-armed lady in a cloak and introduce her as my husband candidate, half the old aunts will faint into the soup, and Mother will make me pick them all up.”

Kara looked at her for a long moment, then sighed.

“Fine…”

She closed her eyes and let the Vespera persona go by taking off the ring.

It slid away from her like a cloak being lifted off her shoulders.

The long black hair shortened and roughened, the slender frame broadened and lengthened, the bones of the face shifted into harder, sharper lines, and the soft feminine weight of her presence settled into that of a man.

The midnight-black suit reshaped itself around him as he grew, the cloak falling into place across a pair of wide shoulders, and when he opened his eyes again, they were deep blue instead of purple, ringed with a thin circle of gold.

’Haah… this field should cover us from being seen from the outside right?’