Chapter 899: Loki’s Reputation [Bonus - ]

Chapter 899: Loki’s Reputation [Bonus Chapter]

“If there’s time between the feast and the drinking,” Silas said politely. “Thor tells me the schedule’s very full…”

’I just want this dude to piss off…’

Sigurd’s eye twitched.

Thor was shaking silently beside him, her face red and her lips pressed tightly together and Silas could feel her whole arm vibrating against his with suppressed laughter.

Brynhildr watched the whole exchange with her cold grey eyes, and something in them shifted very slightly, from contempt to a more careful expression.

“We should go, my lady,” she said to Thor. “The high hall is expecting you…”

Brynhildr swung back up into her saddle, Sigurd fell in beside them with his cloak swirling dramatically, and Thor dragged Silas on up the mountain.

Behind them, the plaza erupted into a storm of whispering that followed them all the way up the next street, and the next, and the one after that.

Silas could hear it spreading through the city like fire through dry grass, from tier to tier and hall to hall, until it felt like the whole mountain was talking about the same thing.

’Lady Thor brought a man home…’

’A mortal man…’

’And he told Sigurd he’d have gone with soap…’

They came out onto a wide quiet terrace lined with marble statues near the top of the city, where the crowds thinned and the golden hall at the summit loomed close above them.

Thor finally let her laughter out in a huge wheezing burst.

GWAHAHAHAHA!

“His face!” she gasped, doubling over with one hand braced on her knee. “Silas, did you see his face? ’I’d have gone with soap!’ Nobody’s ever said that to him, nobody, he’s been telling that story for a thousand years…”

“I stand by the soap of course…” Silas said.

Thor howled even harder, and even Brynhildr, riding ahead of them on her silver horse, turned her face very slightly away so that nobody could see her expression.

Silas walked on beside the laughing goddess, past the row of tall marble statues lining the terrace, and the gold ring around his eyes was dim and relaxed.

Which was why he didn’t see it coming.

’H-huh…?’

Something hit him square in the back of the head with a wet heavy splat, and an enormous wave of ice-cold pink sticky goo exploded over his head and shoulders and ran down the back of his collar in thick glittering streams.

SPLOOOOSH!

Silas stopped walking, and beside him, Thor stopped laughing so abruptly that she choked on it.

Brynhildr’s horse stopped dead in its tracks, and Sigurd let out a strangled noise that might have been horror or might have been joy.

From somewhere high above them, perched on top of one of the marble statues with her legs swinging, came a small wicked giggle.

…The goo kept dripping.

It ran down the back of Silas’s neck in cold glittering rivers, soaked into his collar, slid down his spine under his shirt and pooled very slowly in the waistband of his trousers, and it smelled, very faintly and very sweetly, of bubblegum.

He stood perfectly still in the middle of the terrace and didn’t wipe his face.

High above him, sitting cross-legged on the head of a marble statue of some stern bearded god with her chin propped in her hands and her legs swinging, was a girl.

She was small, much smaller than anyone else Silas had seen in Asgard, a petite little thing who couldn’t have stood much taller than his chest, though she was far from flat, and she was dressed in a way that made her look like she’d fallen out of a music video and landed on a mountain of gods.

She wore an oversized cropped jacket in glossy pastel lilac with chunky silver zippers, a pleated plaid skirt over knee-high socks and a pair of enormous platform sneakers, and around her neck hung a choker with a tiny silver bell on it.

Her hair was the most ridiculous thing about her.

It fell to her shoulders in loose messy waves and shifted color as it moved, red at the roots melting into orange and gold and green and blue and violet at the tips, like someone had poured a rainbow over her head and left it to dry.

Her eyes did the same thing, swirling slowly from one color to the next, and they were sparkling at him with pure delight.

She grinned down at him, and her grin was full of small tiger-like teeth.

“Hiiii~” she sang, and waved her fingers at him. “Welcome to Asgard, Big Sister’s boyfriend! Do you like your present? It’s a special recipe! Troll snot, honey, a little bit of glitter and a whole lot of love…”

“Loki!” Thor said, in a voice like distant thunder.

“Hi, Big Sister!” Loki waved at her too, completely unbothered. “You brought a man home! An actual man! Do you know how much money I just won? Half the court bet you’d come back alone and the other half bet you’d come back with a troll you’d knocked out and dressed up in a cape. I bet on ’actual man.’ I’m rich now!”

She cupped her hands around her mouth and called down to Silas.

“Thank you for existing! Sorry about the snot, it’s nothing personal, it’s tradition!”

“It’s not tradition,” Brynhildr said through her teeth from the back of her horse, with the long-suffering weariness of someone who’d been through this many, many times. “There’s no tradition, my lady… You invented that tradition just now.”

“Every tradition got invented by someone once, Brynnie~” Loki said serenely.

Thor took one heavy step forward, her fists clenched and small arcs of lightning starting to crawl up her gauntlets, and Silas put out his hand and stopped her without looking at her.

“Leave it, Thor,” he said. “I’d like to handle this one myself, if you don’t mind…”

Thor stared at him.

“It’s not fine! She dumped troll snot on your head on your first day in Asgard!”

“I know,” Silas said mildly. “Which is exactly why I’d like to give it back properly.”

He lifted his hand and drew a slow small circle in the air beside his head.

The wind came.

It rose around him in a soft smooth spiral, gentle as a breath at first, then tighter and faster, and every single drop of the pink glittering goo lifted off his hair and his shoulders and his collar and out from under his shirt and spun up into the air above him in a slowly turning ball.

…Not a speck of it was left on him, and his hair settled back into place, completely dry.

Loki’s grin faltered very slightly.

“Oh,” she said. “Ooh. That’s neat. Okay, so you’ve got wind, that’s fine, that’s still very funny, I still win…”

Silas looked up at her and flicked two fingers.

The spinning ball of troll snot shot straight upward like a cannonball, and it moved so fast that Loki only had time to open her mouth before it hit her square in the face.

SPLOOOOSH!

The whole terrace went silent.

Loki sat on top of the statue, dripping.

Bright pink glittering goo ran down her rainbow hair in thick ropes, oozed down her lilac jacket, dripped off the end of her nose and the tips of her eyelashes and plopped wetly onto the marble shoulders of the bearded god beneath her.

The little silver bell on her choker was completely clogged and made a sad muffled clunk when she moved.

She blinked slowly, and a blob of goo slid off her eyelid as Silas turned around and kept walking up the terrace.

“Bubblegum,” he said over his shoulder. “Good choice…”

For three long heartbeats, nobody on the terrace moved at all then Loki burst out laughing.

It was a high delighted cackle that echoed off every statue on the terrace, and she threw her head back so hard she nearly fell off her perch.

She rolled over onto her back on top of the statue’s head and kicked her platform sneakers in the air and laughed until she was wheezing, and she was still dripping pink goo everywhere the whole time.

“Hehehehahahahahaha~!”

Thor stared after Silas for a heartbeat with her mouth hanging open, and then she slapped her thigh so hard it rang like a gong and bellowed with laughter loud enough to shake the statues.

Brynhildr had put her face in her gauntleted hand while Sigurd looked like someone had just told him dragons were made of cheese.

“Nobody,” Brynhildr said faintly, from behind her hand, “has ever done that to her. In four hundred years… Not once.”

That was because they would get bullied even more, this man had essentially signed himself up for a lifetime subscription of bullying!

Loki flipped off the statue in a neat little somersault and landed on the terrace in front of Silas with a wet squelch, blocking his path, and she was still grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.

“Okay,” she said breathlessly, peering up at him with her swirling rainbow eyes. “Okay, okay, okay. Who are you? What are you? Where did Big Sister find you, and are there any more of you, and can I have one…?”

“Silas,” Silas said. “Lord of Blessed Land, in the Umbral Basin and, apparently, the newest target on your list…”

“A Lord!” Loki clapped her goo-covered hands together with a sticky splat. “A mortal Lord, from the lower realms! Oh, Big Sister, you didn’t just bring home a man, you brought home a mortal man from the mud, and he threw troll snot at me, and I love him!”

She spun around to Thor with her eyes sparkling.

“Can I keep him?”

“No!” Thor roared.

“Can I borrow him at least…? What’s your issue…? Why are you being so stingy all of a sudden?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Can I watch when the old aunts meet him?”

Thor paused at that, visibly considering it.

“…Yes,” she said reluctantly. “You can watch that.”

“Yay~!” Loki threw both arms around Silas’s waist and squeezed, getting pink goo all over the front of his clean shirt, then let go and skipped backward with her hands clasped behind her.

“Hi, Silas! I’m Loki! The second daughter of the All-Father and the Lady Frigga, and the best sister, and the cutest sister, and the only sister with any taste in clothes…” She did a little twirl to show off her ruined outfit. “I go down to the mortal realms all the time, you know… Your fashion is so much better than ours. Everybody up here dresses like they’re going to a funeral or a war, sometimes both at once.”

Silas glanced down at the long smear of pink across his shirt, then sighed and lifted his hand, and the wind came again and stripped it away.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said.

“All good things, I hope~”

“Thor’s warned me not to eat anything you hand me… and also avoid you a lot.”

“That’s fair,” Loki said, nodding seriously. “That’s very good advice, actually… I’d follow it if I were you.”

Out on the street beyond the terrace, a cart full of pastries had stopped dead as the driver spotted Loki, and the man immediately snatched up a tarp and threw it over his entire load, then hunched protectively on top of it, glaring at her.

A pair of guards walking past the end of the terrace caught sight of her too, and Silas heard one of them groan out loud.

“Not her again. Not today, not on the first day of the festival…”

“Has anything blown up yet…?” his partner asked nervously.

“Not yet.”

“Just give it an hour…”

Loki waved at them cheerfully, and both guards immediately turned around and walked very quickly in the opposite direction.

“They love me~” Loki said happily.

“Loki’s banned from eleven realms,” Thor told Silas flatly. “And from the infernal planes twice… They had to make a special second ban.”

“It was one tiny fire,” Loki protested. “In a realm made of fire… How was anyone even supposed to notice? How is it my fault that the whole realm burnt alive?”

“You set fire to the fire, Loki…”

“And it was beautiful,” Loki said dreamily. “Blue flames everywhere and the Fire King cried as well~ Man I want to see his face again”

“There’s a saying in Asgard,” Brynhildr said to Silas from the back of her horse, in the tone of a woman offering a warning to a doomed man. “Whenever war is declared on Asgard, the first thing the All-Father asks, before anything else, before he even reaches for his spear, is whether Loki caused it…”

“And how often did she?” Silas asked.

Brynhildr was silent for a long moment.

“More often than you’d think…” She said at last.

“Only some of the time!” Loki said, outraged. “Half! At most! Maybe two-thirds…”

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The howl came out of nowhere and rolled across the whole upper city like a wave, so deep and so loud that the marble statues on the terrace trembled on their bases and a flock of ravens exploded out of a nearby tower in a storm of black wings.

It sounded like a wolf, but bigger than any wolf Silas had ever heard, huge and wild and hungry, and somewhere underneath the hunger there was something almost joyful, like a hunting dog that had just caught the most exciting smell of its entire life.

Every person on the terrace froze as Loki’s grin slowly grew wider.

“Oh no,” Thor said. “Oh, no, no, no…”

“She smelled him,” Loki sang delightedly, bouncing on her toes. “Big Sister, she smelled him from all the way up at the hall! Oh, this is going to be so good…”

Something was coming down the mountain toward them, fast.