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The Ironwoods leave most jötnar uneasy.
The trees there would dwarf even the oldest jötun: the youngest sprouts are as wide as her amma is tall. They stretch their limbs far into the sky, translucent leaves fluttering on rust brown branches and making moonlight dance on the forest floor.
As Loki watches, a copse of trees start to glow like hot coals just before water bursts forth from somewhere beneath their roots in a billowing tower of steam. The place smells strange, like a kalli egg gone rotten. There’s a metallic taste to the air, as though her mouth’s been filled with blood.
It’s making her hungry.
Bluegreen moss coats the ground. It makes wet squelching sounds as she steps on it, soft and moist underneath her feet. She digs her toes in, marveling at the texture.
There’s a tug on her braid, Amma’s chill hand on her shoulder. “Pay attention to the trees, carrion bird,” she warns, “lest you boil yourself.” Her mother’s long white hair is sticking to her face. Loki’s is little better: dark strands have escaped her braid and now cling to cheek and brow, curling from the humidity.
She pays it no mind. It's a small price to pay for the way the water in the air cools rapidly against her skin, leaving her feeling alive and charged in a way she’s only ever experienced after a long soak.
Drops trail down her rime lines in cold rivulets as they walk, taking care not to move too close to the steam vents. They skirt at the edges of one glowing cluster of trees. Loki can almost feel them burning. Curious, she places a hand against the bark of the nearest one - and pulls it back with a hiss immediately after, skin smoldering. Amma chuckles.
She tries it once more with a trunk that’s cooled, and is surprised when it doesn’t scorch her palm. The bark is warm and rough; if she stretches her senses a little further, she can feel the water rushing up the tree’s veins beneath her fingers.
“I see you’ve spawned,” comes a deep voice from the woods.
Loki retreats behind her mother, hands grasping at her kilt, safe in the knowledge that she is protected. She looks up at the owner of the voice warily.
The unknown jötun is at least two heads over her mother’s height, and more than twice as thick. The swirls and whorls of her rime lines compliment her round shape. There’s a cloak hanging from her plump shoulders, sown together from numerous small white pelts. Her kilt is the same brownish red as the trees around her.
Amma is unafraid. She tosses her hair back and lifts her chin in challenge. “And I see you’ve not lost touch with the obvious,” she replies with no lack of rancor.
The other jötun lets out a booming laugh, jowls shaking with mirth. “Fine. Offer me no explanation,” she says as she crouches down and looks at Loki, who peeks at her from behind her mother’s legs. “But allow me an introduction, at least. The little one seems as frightened of me as a jackalope faced with an aarnirepo.”
Loki gives her amma a dirty look as she’s pushed away from her hiding spot to stand in front of the stranger. “Loki, this is Angrboda,” Amma states with disdain, “the Witch of the Ironwoods. She's as presumptuous as she is ugly.”
“You speak nothing but envy,” Angrboda counters, “born out of your own sense of inadequacy. I pray your child has the wherewithal to recognize your words for the lies they are.” She winks at her, and Loki giggles. Amma harrumphs and calls her “petturi” under her breath.
“Hello, little Loki,” Angrboda says to her, “Would you come and greet the witch of these old woods?” She extends her arm, wrist exposed and fingers curled in a loose fist. Loki stares at the proffered hand a short while before she gets up enough courage to step forward and hesitantly press the rime lines on the inside of her left arm to Angrboda’s.
Loki can feel the ice flowing through the witch's veins. The skin against her own is smooth and tough.
It takes no more than a moment before her courage deserts her and she goes scampering back to her mother. Angrboda doesn’t seem insulted; her smile is very kind, as soft and cold as falling snow. Loki stares at her face until she rises from her crouch.
“Tell me then, what brings you and your cub to my doorstep? As scarce as you’ve been these past cycles, I’d begun to think you dead. Now it seems you’ve simply been hoarding your treasure,” she says to Amma, throwing another wink at Loki. It makes her hide her face between her hands and peek at Angrboda from between her fingers.
For the first time, her amma hesitates in her reply. She shifts on her feet, hand coming down to grip tightly at Loki’s shoulder. “I must away to Utgard for my own ends, but the whelp is too young to accompany me.” her tone tries for surety, but fails to hide the plea underneath it.
Loki starts, looking up at her mother with wide, betrayed eyes. Amma averts her gaze from her accusing stare.
The silence is as deep and vast as the Ocean.
Loki knows her amma is lying: she’s taken her along on journeys far worse than a trip to the city. She also knows it’s not Loki’s age that likely worries her, but the timing of her leave.
It will be Mourning Tides soon, a moon long public memorial in honor of all those lost in War. It’s an open secret among the jötnar in Utgard that the event is held in honor of the King’s first child, whose body was never found after the Invasion.
They’re mourning the person Loki never became, Amma would say.
The event always makes her too nervous to take Loki where others might see her, so they never go anywhere populated during it. Amma says it’s unlikely that Loki will be discovered, but she thinks it unwise to tempt the Wanderer so.
Her mother has never had to leave before. Why would she? And why wouldn’t she tell her before now?
Loki is beyond distraught.
“Oh?” says Angrboda, who looks suddenly uneasy. She keeps glancing down at her with the same sort of helpless terror that strikes Mother whenever she thinks Loki’s about to cry.
“I’ll pay you.” Mother hefts the bag at her shoulder, handing it towards the other witch. She makes no move to accept it. “Please,” her mother’s voice breaks on the last syllable, “I have nowhere else to take her.”
You could take me with you! Loki wants to scream. The thumb of her mother’s hand is rubbing soothing circles on the junction of her neck and shoulder. She shrugs it off with an angry jerk of her torso.
Angrboda sighs, deflating with the exhale. She takes the bag from Loki’s mother and asks, in a tone befitting the vanquished, “How long?”
“Just until the next surge,” Amma assures her. Loki lets out a keening wail in protest. The grown around her both wince.
“Ei se ole niin pitkä aika.” Mother crouches down and tries to take ahold of Loki’s arms, but she twists out of reach. Her hands hang empty in the air as she pleads with Loki, “Ei miulla kestä pitkään. Sie voit luottaa Angrbodaan. Se pitää siusta huolen, ja kun mie tuun takas—”
”No!” Loki snarls at her. “I don’t want you to go and I don’t wanna stay with Angrboda and if you’re gonna l-leave then you might as well not c-come back!” her voice hitches and stutters as she screams in her mother’s face. The ice is crawling up and down her rime lines in a thick sheet of tears.
Amma looks hurt. Her face goes slack with shock before she wipes her expression clean and freezes it over, as inscrutable as a glacier beneath a foot of snow. “Fine,” she spits out, “I won’t.” She shoots up from her crouch, hands balled into tight fists, and strides away without a second glance.
“No, wait!” Loki panics, scrambling after her mother, but her foot strikes a root hidden beneath the squishy moss. She stumbles to her knees. “En ollut tosissani. Äiti, en tarkottanut sitä!” she yells after her mother’s retreating back, “En tarkottanut sitä! Tuu takas! Amma, tuu takas!”
“I didn’t mean it. Come back! Mother, come back…”
She can’t breathe. Her chest aches and her skin feels too tight with ice. She curls up at the root of the same tree that tripped her, sobbing for breath. Her side scrapes against rough bark as she digs her fingers into the mossy ground and struggles to work her lungs, whimpering and whining like a wounded animal as her body betrays her.
Her mother is gone.
“Shh,” comes a whisper from above her, “it’s alright, child. It’s alright.” Angrboda is crouching over her, hands raised and fluttering as though she wishes to reach out. “Look at me, Loki,” she commands softly, and Loki lifts her head to stare into her face. “Good, that’s good,” she croons at her. “Now, I’m going to put my hand on your ribs. Will you allow it?”
Loki nods. A gentle hand eases its way against her side, aligning its rime lines with her own. “Can you feel that, Loki?” Angrboda asks just as a pulse of cold flows through her skin. Loki works her throat, trying to answer out loud, before she gives up and just nods once more. “Focus on that,” Angrboda tells her, “focus on the cold, and try to match its flow with your body.”
She tries to do as told, pressing herself more firmly against Angrboda’s arm as she feels for the ice pulsing beneath the other jötun’s skin in a steady rhythm, flooding and ebbing as surely as the tide. It washes over Loki, cool and comforting. She lets it carry her away as her breathing slowly evens out and the ice covering her skin melts away.
“There we are,” Angrboda breaths out with relief. Loki has crawled closer to her without realizing it; they are leaning side to side, with one of Angrboda’s large hands pressing her more firmly to the portly jötun’s soft belly. She rubs her face against it, letting loose a piercing keen that quickly turns into harsh barks of distress.
“No, no, no,” Angrboda cries out, “why do you still weep? Oh, what did I do wrong?”
She starts humming frantically, smoothing careful fingers over Loki’s hair while Loki hides her face against her stomach.
The sounds of her grief eventually peter out. Angrboda holds still and silent beside her, obviously worried that any word she speaks or move she makes might set her off again. “I didn’t mean it,” Loki croaks out from a throat grown raw and hoarse from crying.
“Oh, child,” Angrboda sighs, giving her back an awkward pat. “Neither did your mother.”
Loki is not convinced. “What if she doesn’t come back?” She looks up at Angrboda, eyes pleading her to make things right.
"She will."
"But what if she won't?"
“Then she doesn’t deserve to keep you, so I’ll steal you for my own,” the witch states.
It doesn’t make her feel any better. She doesn’t want Angrboda, she wants her amma.
They sit side by side in silence until the tree at their backs starts heating up.
“Well, come along then,” Angrboda says with forced cheer as she pulls them both up, “lets get to the homestead so you can settle in before all the water boils over.” She slaps at her kilt, shaking off bits of moss, before setting off deeper into the woods. Loki follows her in subdued silence.
“We’ll have to set you up a bed, now. Hope you don’t mind sharing space with vargs – no, huh? Of course not. You’re surely used to it, living with Nál. They’ll be getting hungry by now. Are you hungry? Come now, you must be at least a little hungry, coming all the way over here from Aurgelmir’s Brood. How about this: I’ll lay out some local delicacies, and you can try what you like.”
Loki remains mute throughout the journey, merely nodding or shaking her head to all of Angrboda’s increasingly desperate inquiries.
Her mood lifts a little when they reach the homestead, as they’re immediately beset by vargs, which wag their long tails and leap around their owner in excitement. A few trot up to give Loki a cautious whiff. She spreads her arms wide to let them snuffle about her person until they’re satisfied, laughing as their stiff whiskers tickle her.
These vargs are larger than her mother’s, with pointier heads and striped coats ranging in color from the rusty brown of ironpine to a white as pure and glaring as driven snow. Instead of yellow or copper, they’re eyes gleam blue as the sky and sea under sunlight.
One, a young pup by the looks of it, butts its snowy head against Loki’s chest. She wraps her arms around it, scratching with vigor at the sides of its neck and the underside of its chin. “That’s Mánagarmr,” Angrboda tells her, smiling wide, “bred from my best trackers, she is. She’ll be something once she grows up, I’ll wager, though right now all she’s good for is howling at the moons.”
“I like her. You should give her to me,” Loki states with solemnity as Mánagarmr licks at her, long tongue leaving wet trails on her face and neck.
“Now why in the Ocean would I do that?” her owner asks with wry amusement. Loki turns wide eyes on her, cocking her head so a strand of dark hair falls across her face.
“To keep me from thinking of my mother,” she answers boldly, “and how she abandoned me.” Real distress makes her voice waver, but she’s able to stay steady by focusing on her new goal: her own varg, different from all the ones her mother’s raised.
She’ll need it, if her mother never comes back.
Angrboda gapes, hairless brows rising so high they almost reach the top of her bald head, before letting out an incredulous bark of laughter and slapping her knees so hard her thighs wobble. “You’re Nál’s alright,” she huffs out with a shake of her head. She gives Loki an assessing look, as though seeing her for the first time.
“Tell you what,” the Witch of the Ironwoods says to her, “you promise me you’ll make your mother grovel when she comes back, and I’ll let you have first pick of the litter once Mánagarmr’s old enough to start whelping.”
She bends down and offers her wrist. Loki looks at the vulnerable lines of exposed inner markings.
“Pact?”
She puts her own wrist on top of Angrboda’s and grips her arm as tight as she can.
“Pact.”