Stormbringer: Book 2 of the Wyrd

Eight

When Þrúðr Þórsdóttir had been very young, Váli Lokason pushed her into a river.

She'd been sitting on the edge when it'd happened, studying the shine of her hair in the water. The only warning she'd had was the sound of wicked laughter, and a single flash of red across the corner of her eye.

The next thing she knew, she'd been wet, some very startled salmon brushing cold scales against her cheeks. By the time she'd struggled to the surface, Váli had been nowhere to be found.

But she'd known he'd been the culprit.

Váli had always been an odd boy, as perhaps befitting his heritage. Long-limbed and gawky, with a mess of loose copper curls twisting too far below his chin to be seemly. Váli's brother, Nari, had been the luckier of the pair, blessed with his father's handsome looks and his mother's gentle heart. But where Nari was kind and pleasing, even to Þrúðr's eyes, Váli was rough in both personality and in features. A wild and feral thing, more jötunn than áss.

Eventually, Þrúðr had pulled herself from the river and up onto the rocks. Had stripped out of her hangaroc and dried her shift beneath the sun.

There, alone, with only Sól's gaze upon her, she'd cried. Just a little. Cried, and considered telling Father of the prank.

She'd considered it, but she hadn't. Because what would that have made her? Eldest of Thor, unable even to handle the least of Loki's smirking brats? And were it not but for her sex—but for Mother's disapproving gaze—Þrúðr would have pummeled Váli into the ground for daring to put a hand upon her.

She'd dreamed of it, at the time.

Particularly when, next she saw him, Váli had sniffed the air and mentioned fish.

Þrúðr had wanted to kill him. Instead, she'd plotted. An elaborate revenge, or so she'd thought. To extend a hand of friendship to her foe, only to snatch it from him at the cruelest time. It would not take much to have all of Ásgarðr laughing at the folly of one of Loki's house, would take less still to have them side with her against its demise.

Váli had no friends, only a brother. And Þrúðr was Thor's daughter, as radiant and beautiful as her mother. There was no plan of hers that could fail. Not in this.

And so she'd gone into the woods behind Loki's house, to the one place in Ásgarðr where few æsir dared to tread. And there, as she rounded one crumbling side of the ugly little cottage, Þrúðr stopped.

For there was Loki's wife, Sigyn, hanging linen out to dry. A young daughter standing by her side.

Even from a distance, even dressed in shift and hangaroc, Þrúðr had not failed to know Váli's plain, unpretty face.

Þrúðr had fled before they'd seen her. Or tried to, rounding back around the house with such shock she'd barreled into her uncle without knowing. Loki had caught her in his thin hands and stared at her with eyes that burned like poison, even then.

"Tell no one," he'd said, voice a serpent's hiss. "And you will be even."

Þrúðr had nodded, too stunned to do otherwise, and Loki's dark fingers had unwound from her shoulders. "Go," he'd said, and she had. Running from the house without so much as a backward glance.

Not a glance, but nor could she fail to hear a delighted scream, voice not quite that of the boy she thought she knew.

"Papa!" it had called.

"Valdís!" had been the response.

Then the sound of three voices, laughing with unselfconscious joy.

True to her word, Þrúðr had never told a soul. True to his father's, Váli had never touched her again.