Lower Your Eyes (A Loki Romance Fanfic)

Chapter Twenty-Two: In the Dark of Night

"This is pointless," Loki hissed, pacing around us as Thor leaped back from another attack that left me shaking in the middle of the training arena.

"It's not pointless," he said. "She needs to be able to defend herself."

"What do you think is going to happen when her couple weeks' worth of combat training faces the king's hundreds of years of experience?" Loki snapped, irritation splayed across his features. "We need a better plan; we can't rely on this."

Every word was a stab of truth into my heart that made me frown at my own weakness, my stark inability to even hold a sword up properly. "And what, exactly, do you have in mind?" Thor responded—he hadn't even broken a sweat in the hours we'd been at this. "She can't very well kill the king in his sleep."

"And why the hell not?" Loki muttered, and I wasn't altogether sure that he was joking.

"Because she would be dishonored," Thor said, shooting his brother a sharp look. "I know you don't like rules, brother, but Aila would end up with nothing if she did that—nothing but murder charges that even you could not save her from."

Loki's eyes turned to chips of ice as he stared at his brother, seething with tightly controlled emotions. But then he folded his hands behind his back and continued pacing, the same dour look on his face. Silence fell between us as Thor stabbed his sword into the ground, all three of us trailing off into our own realms of thought. "I'm sorry, Aila," he said. "We'll keep working at it, I promise. Everything will be alright."

He couldn't promise that. No one could, and we all knew it.

"Lilette says that their laws don't allow the use of magic," I said. "What if I found a way to do it undetected?"

Loki stopped pacing, turning to look at me. "How do you mean?"

"Mother and I evaded your attention for years—long before you even knew that I existed."

He shook his head. "I don't know what you're getting at, but it won't work—not even a dullard like your father would so blind as to miss a shot of seidr to the face, and you would have to be sure that it would take him down," Loki said, a look of distaste coming over him. "And even then, there will be witnesses. You won't be crowned queen, even if you do manage to kill him."

"I don't care that much about the crown," I said with a touch of uncertainty. "At least my life will be out of immediate danger. They'll just disqualify me."

"Right—until it comes time to execute you for your crime."

I sighed in frustration and plunged my own sword into the ground—unlike Thor, I could barely nick the surface, and the sword fell over onto the ground instead. I stared at it bitterly for a moment, then turned on my heel to leave. "You're right, this is pointless," I said, unhooking my armor plates and tossing them to the ground. "Excuse me, I need to take a break."

I left Thor and Loki on the field, fully intending to return—instead, I found myself walking through the hallways of the palace, still in the shirt and breeches I'd been wearing during training. They'd figure out soon enough that I wasn't coming back, and I'd be seeing Loki later today anyway.

Guards stood at attention the entire time as I walked, and I could swear that their numbers had doubled over the past few days. I made my way to the library, straight to the section on the histories and strategies of Asgard's greatest practitioners of magic. The moment I turned the corner, I had to stop at the sight of the chair sitting beside the row of books. As a single ray of light poured down onto it, memory blazed to life of Loki sitting in that exact chair, sending me off for lunch—not to fetch it, but to eat it. I wasn't altogether sure that he wasn't trying to get me killed at that point, but in the end, I lived to find that he was very much serious about the exact opposite: keeping me alive.