Chapter 902: Preparing For The Festival of Ancestors [Bonus - ]

Chapter 902: Preparing For The Festival of Ancestors [Bonus Chapter]

“My personal seal,” he said. “Every god in the high planes and every Lord with half a brain in the lower ones will know it on sight… Tell her the All-Father of Asgard requests the pleasure of her company, at her earliest convenience, and that if she doesn’t come, I’ll be very sad and very loud about it.”

Silas took the letter and turned it over in his fingers.

He could feel the power humming inside the wax seal, feeling quite unmistakable.

He thought about the King of the World sitting at the head of the Grand Table, and about Volkov’s face, and the slow satisfied expression he’d make when he dropped this onto the obsidian between them.

“I’ll make sure she gets it…” he said.

“Good lad!” Odin beamed. “And tell her she’s welcome to bring a friend! Any friend of yours is a friend of hers, I’m sure.”

At the foot of the steps, Thor had both hands pressed over her mouth and was shaking so hard that her armor rattled.

Silas tucked the letter carefully into his Inventory and didn’t look at her.

“Now!” Odin heaved himself up off the throne, and as he rose to his full height, the whole hall seemed to shrink around him.

He towered over everyone, over Thor and Fenri and every god at every table, a vast grey-and-gold mountain of a man with a laugh like a landslide.

“Silas of Blessed Land, mortal Lord from the Earth, candidate of my eldest daughter! I, Odin, All-Father of Asgard, give you my blessing to stand at her side for the Festival of Ancestors!”

A murmur rippled through the hall, low and surprised.

“On three conditions!” Odin went on, raising three thick fingers. “First, you keep her happy. Second, you don’t let Loki poison you, because I’m not explaining that to your Lord Vespera. And third…”

He leaned down until his face was close to Silas’s, and his single storm-blue eye glittered.

“When someone in this hall challenges you, and someone will, you’d better give me a good show…”

“I’ll do my best, All-Father,” Silas said. “Though I can’t promise anything about Loki, She seems to have her own plans for me.”

Odin straightened up and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to send a lesser man through the floor, laughing so loudly the ravens took off again.

“GWAHAHAHA! That’s what I like to hear! Go on, then! Go and get some food in you before tonight!”

Silas inclined his head and turned to go, and Thor practically sprinted up the steps to grab his arm and drag him away before her father could say anything else.

“Oh, and one more thing!” Odin called after them, settling back onto his throne and stroking his braided beard. “The festival opens tonight at moonrise, under the Great Dome, so make sure you’re properly dressed… It’ll be quite a crowd this year, you know… The biggest in an age.”

He grinned.

“The frost giants have accepted our invitation.”

The whole hall went quiet.

Silas felt a sudden cold stillness that spread out from the throne and through the tables like a crack running across a frozen lake.

The low murmur of voices stopped.

A goblet somewhere halfway down the hall hit the floor and rolled.

Beside him, Thor’s grip on his arm went hard as iron, and at his shoulder, Fenri’s ears flattened against her skull and a low growl started in her chest.

“For the first time in an age!” Odin said cheerfully, either not noticing the silence or not caring. “Isn’t that wonderful? Old enemies, sitting down together under one roof to drink and feast in peace! It’s what the festival’s for, after all!”

Silas turned his head and looked up at the throne.

Beside the laughing All-Father, the small human woman in the grey wool gown was still sitting with her hands folded in her lap but Frigga’s smile had faded away completely, and her sharp hazel eyes had gone very still.

’What the hell? Does she have beef with the Frost giants too?’

…

“Hold still…”

“I am holding still.”

“You’re breathing,” Loki said sternly, circling him with a measuring tape slung around her neck and a pin clamped between her sharp little teeth. “Breathing is moving so stop breathing for five minutes.”

“I’d die, Loki…”

“Then die handsomely,” Loki said, and jabbed the pin into the collar of his jacket.

Silas stood in the middle of Thor’s chambers with his arms held out to his sides and let the second daughter of the All-Father fuss over him.

’She should hurry up though…’

Thor’s rooms took up an entire tower near the summit of the mountain, and they looked exactly like he’d expected them to look.

The walls were hung with weapons and battle trophies and the skulls of enormous beasts, the floors were strewn with furs, and the bed in the next room was big enough to hold a small army and had clearly been broken and repaired at least three times.

Every flat surface was covered with empty drinking horns, half-eaten plates of food and dented pieces of armor, and someone had carved the words ’THOR WAS HERE’ into the stone above the fireplace in letters a foot high, then underlined it twice.

Loki had arrived ten minutes after they did, scrubbed clean of troll snot and wearing a completely new outfit, a pastel pink bomber jacket over a white crop top and a pair of wide-legged cargo trousers.

She’d taken one look at the plain black clothes Silas had pulled out of his Inventory and let out a shriek of genuine horror.

“You can’t wear that to the festival!” she’d said. “You look like a mortician! A handsome mortician, but still a mortician…!”

She’d found him a long fitted coat of deep midnight blue, embroidered at the cuffs and collar with fine silver thread in the shape of storm clouds, and she’d paired it with a black shirt open at the throat, dark trousers, polished boots and a single silver ring for his right hand.

Loki swept his dark hair back off his face with something that smelled faintly of cedar, and now she was pinning and tucking and adjusting the coat with quick sure fingers and humming a mortal pop song under her breath.

“There,” she said at last, stepping back and putting her hands on her hips to survey her work. “Perfect… You look like a dangerous prince from a drama who’s secretly in love with the heroine but can’t say it because of his tragic past.”

“I don’t have a tragic past, Loki,” Silas said. “I had a fairly bad childhood at most, it’s not that serious.”

“Everyone has a tragic past, Silas… Yours is just hiding.” Loki grinned at him, all sharp teeth. “Big Sister’s going to love it. Well, she’ll say it looks sturdy, which is how she says she loves it.”

“Where is Thor, anyway?” Silas asked. “I haven’t heard anything break in at least ten minutes. It’s making me nervous…”

“Getting dressed.” Loki’s grin turned wicked. “Mother’s helping her but I wasn’t allowed in for some reason.”

’Ah right… for some reason… Like we don’t know why.’

She leaned in close and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Big Sister hasn’t worn a dress since the last festival, you know. Three hundred years ago. She wore armor to her own birthday party… Twice actually.”

The door to the inner chamber opened, and Thor stood in the doorway, and for a moment, Silas forgot what he’d been about to say.

She’d taken off her silver armor.

In its place, she wore a long, sweeping gown of deep storm-grey silk, cut close across her broad shoulders and her strong arms and falling in heavy shimmering folds to the floor, with a silver belt of linked hammers around her waist.

Her wild golden mane had been tamed into a thick crown of braids pinned around her head, with a few loose strands falling around her face, and around her throat hung a single heavy pendant of pale blue crystal that crackled faintly with trapped lightning.

She looked taller than ever, and stronger than ever, and completely beautiful.

She also looked deeply irritated about it.

“This thing’s a death trap,” she announced to the room, tugging at the silk around her shoulders with a scowl. “I can’t lift my arms above my head. I tried to swing at the bedpost just now, and I heard a seam crack. If anyone attacks us tonight, Silas, I’m going to have to fight them in my underthings.”

“Big Sister,” Loki breathed, clasping her hands under her chin with her rainbow eyes shining. “You look like a goddess…”

“I am a goddess, Loki.”

“You look like one, though,” Loki said. “That’s different. Usually you look like a goddess who fell into a barrel of ale…”

Thor snorted, and then her gaze slid past Loki to Silas, standing on his footstool in his midnight-blue coat, and she looked him up and down with the same frank approving thoroughness she’d used on him in the sky.

“Oho! Look at you!” she boomed, striding across the room with her skirts swishing. “Loki, you’ve outdone yourself! He looks like a war-prince from one of Mother’s old stories!”

She reached up and patted his head with great satisfaction, careful not to ruin whatever Loki had put in his hair, which for Thor was a remarkable act of restraint.

“Very good… Very handsome… The old aunts will be choking on their wine.”

Silas stepped down off the footstool and looked up at her, at the storm-grey silk and the crown of braids and the lightning crackling softly in the crystal at her throat.

“You look beautiful, Thor,” he said, and for once, there was nothing dry in his voice at all.

“I know!” Thor beamed, completely unbothered, and patted his head again. “Mother spent two hours on the braids… She’d have my hide if I came out looking like a haystack.”

She tugged at the collar of the gown again and grimaced.

“Still can’t lift my arms, though.”

Behind her, Loki slowly put her face in both hands.

’And she got a boyfriend like this…?’ Loki couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

’She has no idea,’ Silas thought, watching Thor wander over to the weapon rack and start picking out a dagger to strap under her skirts. ’I told her she looked beautiful, and she heard a report on her hair…? What’s going on in her head?’

Loki met his eyes over her fingers and mouthed out a blessing at least.

’Good luck.’

Silas found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was smiling.

The Great Dome sat on a broad plateau just below the summit of the mountain, and when Silas walked out onto the terrace above it at moonrise, with Thor on his arm, he understood at last why the festival only happened every few centuries.

…It would take that long to recover from it.

The Dome was a vast bowl of pale golden stone sunk into the mountainside, open to the sky above and ringed by tier upon tier of seating that climbed upward from a wide central floor, like an amphitheater built for giants.

It could have held the population of a small city, and tonight, it very nearly did.

Every tier was packed with gods and goddesses, lords and ladies, heroes and kings and stranger beings Silas couldn’t name, thousands upon thousands of them, all talking and laughing and drinking at once, so that the noise rising out of the Dome hit him like warm wind.

Long tables ran in great rings around every tier, heaped with food, whole roasted boars glistening with honey glaze, mountains of bread and cheese and fruit, and pyramids of cakes taller than a man.

Mead flowed from silver fountains set into the walls, and servants hurried up and down the steps carrying horns and pitchers and great steaming platters.

Lanterns floated in the air above the tiers, hundreds of them, glowing soft gold and drifting slowly in the warm air like fireflies, and high above everything hung the full white moon, so big and so close that it looked like it was resting on the rim of the Dome.

’Ah…’

There were guests from other realms, too. Silas spotted them scattered through the crowd.

There was a party of tall, pale, silver-haired figures with long ears and colder eyes, a cluster of broad, bearded dwarves in heavy jeweled armor arguing loudly over a barrel, and a woman with skin like polished abalone and hair like flowing seawater, surrounded by attendants with gills along their throats.

He guessed she was the sea queen Thor had mentioned, the one who cheated at dice… and in the center of it all, on the wide open floor of the Dome, stood the high table.

It was raised on a broad dais of golden stone, and sitting at it, in a long line facing out over the crowd, were the family of the All-Father.

Odin sat in the middle in a great carved chair, laughing at something with a horn of mead in one fist, his braided beard glinting in the lantern light.

Frigga sat beside him in a gown of soft white, calm and composed.

Two empty chairs waited beside them for Thor and her candidate, and there was another empty chair at the far end of the table that nobody seemed to be looking at.

Thor’s hand tightened on his arm, and below them, the Dome waited.