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Chapter Text

She wakes, toes scraping the wall as she stretches, and sags into her blankets with a grumble. It was not a good sleep, full of petty dreams about the worries she fell asleep with and resolving none of them.

For a moment Freya has no idea what woke her - the lamps in the common room are ever-burning, the realm between realms ever-speckled black and violet, so it was no action of light -

A low chuckle, and the smell of food, and her stomach growls. Ah.

Freya doesn't bother with her cloak or overdress for this, shuffling past Kratos at the stewpot, Mimir balanced on the sill.

"Morning, your highness!" he calls to her, and even after all this time the urge is in her to correct him: I am not your queen. But no. "Look who's awake, brother!"

"Freya." Kratos stirs the pot once more, then closes it. It bubbles, and the fire crackles, and her stomach growls.

She tells herself there is no shame in hunger. "Is there hot water?"

"There will be," says Kratos in his implacable way, as if he would carve his way through realms if that was what it took. There is comfort in promises which are kept.

She makes her way to the outhouse, past the few plants that thrive here, mysterious and faintly carnivorous as they are, and squats in the little house with a relieved sigh.

Even here in this they benefit from Sindri's goodwill - an arrangement with Ratatoskr to grow the feed for his stags, sparing them disgusting logistics while keeping the place clean.

She rinses, though the water is cold, and dries herself with a whisper of magic, and pads back to the door to wash her feet in the basin beside it. Sindri cared for such things, and if this is all they can do in his absence to show they care for the gifts they abused, then they will do it. Or so Kratos says. Not that she disagrees.

There is a pail of water closed and steaming outside her door, with a smaller ewer beside it, and one of the long scratchy cloths she's found best for her skin.

Her ablutions take too long. It is still not nearly enough time to sort her thoughts, make sense of the necessities that come with being -

Being, in truth, a queen of the realms. Not the way Odin had her, a trapped war prize to display, to keep from friends and self and real influence, but with responsibilities. Things to consider. People to consider.

Like Vanaheim, and the ongoing conflicts, and she fell asleep thinking of Sif and now she is thinking of her again, thinking of her as she was, drunk and scowling and hateful, triumphant over Freya, triumphant in her sons who she beat and berated and yet still loved her -

Freya shudders, scrubs a little too hard over her neck.

His hands were so warm on her throat. They hadn't been warm in so long. She'd forgotten what his touch felt like. Her own son and she forgot.

"It is time to eat," says Kratos outside her door. He has never come in, never pressed her the times she sends him away and curls into her bower of plants and humid regrets.

This will not be one of those times. "Almost," she calls back, and blacks her eyes though there is no longer Fimbulwinter to require it and she is not in Midgard. The habits of survival are hard won and hard broken.

The food is hot and smells good and she falls upon her bowl of stew and vegetables and sticky broth, savours the second ladled for her when she holds out her bowl and burps into the back of her hand.

Kratos can cook, and cook well, and tends the pot without complaint. She doesn't, herself. It was never a skill she much needed, surrounded as she was by slaves and servants most of her life, and thereafter grim rage seasoned her tongue with ceaseless grief.

"Where to?" she asks when her stomach is full and her body pleasantly heavy with nourishment she can feel in her blood and fingernails, the roots of her hair.

"Jotunheim," says Kratos. He has a tear stretched between his fingers, needle and thread in the other hand, fabric crumpled against the table. His stitches are slow and awkward but strong. "And Vanaheim if you wish."

Does she? No. No, not really. But she should, and she must. "Visiting Angrboda again?"

"Fenrir as well," says Kratos.

"Yes, the dog is of equal importance to a daughter-in-law," Mimir drawls.

"It is Atreus' dog," says Kratos, unperturbed.

Mimir rolls his eyes expansively.

She does not enjoy Mimir's company. But. It is good to know someone else understands the depth of what a ridiculous, absurd man Kratos is.

It helps, that she has the choice to go at all. Only to Jotunheim or only to Vanaheim, as she pleases. It helps. "First Vanaheim," she says, sopping the last of her stew with bread. "At least Fenrir might be pleased to see us."

"Mm," agrees Kratos.

"Leave me with Lúnda while you're at it," Mimir huffs. "She knows how to carry a good conversation. Unlike a royal pair I could mention."

"You could," says Kratos.

***

Hildisvíni is furious as she's ever seen him. "I am not making myself understood," he tells her lowly. "I am not - I do not know how to make myself understood. It is as if I say one word and she hears another. You speak to her." He glances between her and Kratos, unnervingly desperate. "Please."

"We will," says Kratos.

Freya has never liked Sif, and Sif has never liked her. It is difficult to see her here and now, making demands in Freya's realm, and not think: Aesir monster, you dare, you dare, your only good here is the wealth of your blood to feed my trees, and even then -

"I do not understand what is so wrong with starting a farm and having a granary," Sif says as soon as she sees the three of them. Her arms are folded.

Freya's temper lights, as she knew it would, and yet this is her realm, her home. If not for her home and people, then for what is her passion worth? "If you wish to make another Asgard for yourself, do it in Midgard. This is Vanaheim."

"You are telling us to leave?" Sif is stiff-shouldered, insulted. "We are trying to make a life here, work together -"

"Together. Not to shape our ways to yours," Freya corrects. There is a twitch to her shoulders that passes down to her elbows as if she is a horse remembering a cruel bridle, a stinging fly. "You are here because we are generous and your lives were worth saving. You are not here to make us Aesir."

Freya's venom is not only for Sif, she knows: it is for her people, it is for the wars before and since, it is for Odin, it is for the whole fucking mess. Still and still, it is in her, this is how it lines her throat and airs from her lungs as poison. It was her only weapon for so long.

Sif is narrow-eyed, focused. "You think we are trying to remake Asgard?"

Freya remembers this woman well in the rare gaps between hangovers and drunkenness. Shrewd and bitter and coiled. Much more brilliant than she let most see. But Freya was a warrior made a mouse by peace and shackles, and she saw. She did. "Aren't you?"

"Let us talk about this." She lifts a hand. "You are all misunderstanding me. I don't mean to change the land -"

Freya lifts her chin. "Only to plant upon it crops that do not belong here. Only to treat the natural life of this realm as vermin for preying on what you steal for yourself. Only to dam the rivers for your soil, and tear tree from root to tool your labours -"

"Frigg, would you see reason -"

"It never ends!" There is a rhythm inside her. It is an old wound flexing with the sound of Odin's renaming. It pulses with the heart of her land: this is the truth, this is true, this is what has been done to us. "We have seen this before. It is never only one granary. It is never only one field. Never. Do you think we're too stupid to learn how this ends?" Her voice is fully raised. The earth is hers. Her realm is hers. It surrounds her, cradles her for its own. Vanaheim is with her, and echoes with her fury.

It settles her as nothing else could to feel her realm again, and she whirls, prepared to fight, to firm her stance and flex her wings and show her, show her all that Odin stifled.

But Sif is not planting her feet as she remembers her doing in the Great Hall. She is not readying her fists, she is not snarling. There is no fight here. She is twisting the end of her braid in her fists and her face is surprised. The idea that perhaps she didn't know sags something tired and furious inside Freya into a writhing knot of vines. How could Sif not know? And yet: with Odin at the helm, how could she? That man never let anyone else know anything. And yet: Sif could have tried harder and earlier, she could have been an ally, she could have -

Freya had hoped, once, to have an ally in Odin's hall.

"A single granary against the collected memory of the realm will not succeed," observes Kratos beside her. "It is unwise to try."

Which is as good as backing her up. Which as good as don't even think it. She has support. Freya blinks hard, exhales. Exhales again. Looks at Sif once more. Looks at her with her fists in her hair, her tired eyes and the bitter set of her mouth. Looks at her again. "Do you know what Aesir did in this realm?"

"I have heard of it," Sif begins, stiff once more as if there is some kind of book or tale curated by Odin that would even begin to cover it. It isn't enough. Not to work together, not anything, not even this conversation. No wonder Hildisvíni was having such trouble. This is a different beast altogether, one that is Freya's duty alone. Yes. This is her duty.

"Have you seen it," Freya presses, a different kind of determination. "Have you seen what Aesir did to us?"

Sif's bearing flattens. "I was told not to leave camp and I haven't."

Freya turns to Kratos. "The valley." She will need him for this. She will be distracted by Sif, distracted by memory and history and the swelling, suffocating weight of the ages she missed. She will need his watchful eyes and sharp blades to guard her. Vanaheim does not wish to provide Sif further weapons and Freya will not gainsay her realm.

"Mm," he agrees, as she knew he would. "There should be evidence enough."

"Plenty," Freya says, and as she longed to do a long, long time ago, before she knew far better than to hope, she takes Sif's arm in hand. "Come with us. You don't know what you're arguing with, and you should."

Sif eyes Kratos with wariness that most of the scattered leaders have begun to lose. "And him?"

"I will row," says Kratos.

A bird screeches. In its timbre is the cough of her laugh. Yes, the mighty general of Ragnarok; he will row.

***

Sif at first refuses to believe, then believes too strongly, then circles round to disbelief, then sags against an outcropping and eases her palms against her dry cheeks. Beside them the dam they broke, the joyfully leaping river spraying droplets arcing a thousand colours of Hati's eternal chase. Beside Freya is Kratos, and all around them is a part of Vanaheim relearning its own living spirit.

They fought a dragon, also. It wasn't a difficult battle by her reckoning, but it was a dragon, and it was very funny how little Sif knew about hiding from an enemy.

Saving her hide - and her hair from being burnt off - makes Freya like Sif better, but she knows herself. It is a like born of smug self-satisfaction, and will not last long.

"I was not having the argument I thought I was having," Sif says eventually, dropping her hands, wiping them on the skirt of her dress. Dirt laces her boots and cakes pale red in her hair and the crevices of her ornament. "I see that now."

"Vanaheim will provide for you," Freya says. She feels limitless out here. Curses lifted, Odin dead, Asgard fallen. Vanaheim enveloping her. "But you cannot force it to give more than you need. It will never work. Siege after siege and all that time, all that fighting, and he never learned. He could control this realm. Not conquer it." She glances to Sif to see how she is taking this; there is a frown on her face, a thoughtfulness. It is promising.

Sif gathers her braid in her arms, holding it close in a kind of hug. "I am not used to trusting…" She gestures. "To be provided for is a poisoned chalice." Her expression is very firm. "You know this."

"It's more a symbiosis," Freya says. "Not a cup to drink from, but a promise to each other. Not to take more than you need. Not to have more taken from you than needed. There are stories," she tells Sif, watching closely. "Take too much, and you will lose some in turn. Keep too much, and you will more than lose it. Greed is not rewarded here."

"You speak as if what I ask for is greed itself, and perhaps in this realm, it is," Sif concludes. She squints at the sky. "I still don't understand how to live that way. How to explain it to the others. But I have been teaching myself restraint. And I know when I reach someone's bounds," glancing Freya's way. "So…"

Freya remembers Atreus saying Sif seemed like a good mother. Overprotective, but good. Of course she remembers. It is why Freya allows her here. She would not have let the Sif she knew as Frigg to set one foot on Vanaheim, not for anything. But Thrud's mother - maybe. Perhaps. So far. "Trust this, then," she allows. "Trust that I do not wish you dead. Trust that because I don't wish you dead, neither will my realm." She says it lighter than it is, than she feels. "Trust that I'm not him."

Sif nods slowly. "True, you are not."

Freya can remember a time when this very woman would have said that as the vilest, most scathing insult.

"It will rain," says Kratos.

Freya starts badly, and so does Sif, which makes her feel better about the way she reached for her sword when he spoke. The truth of the impending storm tingles in her feet, makes her teeth feel overlarge as if a beak will take root on her face. Storms make her want to fly ahead of the rush and roil never to be caught.

Sif's hair is already suffering in the humidity of Vanaheim. Less so out here, but that braid of hers may mildew for lack of care. Not auspicious.

"Take shelter," Freya directs, and they find a carved-out pavilion with a roof more or less intact, and an old campfire Kratos kneels to coax alive. Sif leans on a wall and watches him work, and Freya watches her watch Kratos, a little, but most of all she curls her knees to her chest and watches the clouds gather, burgeoning water a sheen of silken blues to sweep the earth and give rise to new life.

For once it is a light wistfulness, without regrets, that takes her.

"Our sons would like this," she says.

She expects Kratos' agreement. Freya doesn't expect to hear Sif's murmur too, and turns.

Sif doesn't flinch, gaze level. "A warm rain without thunder? Of course."

Freya does not especially respect her. She would respect her not at all if she didn't know the damage she'd done. Magni was, once, sweet. Brutish even then - but sweet.

She remembers him learning from her one idle day how to pick flowers without harming the vines, and how to know which ones to take and which to leave. Bruises painted his arms and throat and there was a twist of vile pleasure in her gut at knowing her own son would never look that way. She remembers Sif slapping him for his idleness, how the smell of petals and blood filled the air as he cowered wide-eyed before her.

Freya remembers, too, Odin that day. How he gripped her chin and asked her about the look on her face in the hall after, crooning that he just wanted to know, and she tried to avoid it, and in the end couldn't, and Odin chuckled as if she had handed him a gift he liked, and told her she was a queen now, and better than grubbing about in the soil like a servant; wasn't she, wasn't she? And he was touching her cheek, and for a moment speaking as if he liked her again, and -

And she doesn't remember what she said. She's afraid of knowing. Did she betray her people and realm and herself with agreement? Did she hold strong and fast and true and disagree? Did she say nothing, do nothing?

Rain falls in a torrent of heat and warmth that comes above and below in a drowning drumbeat, and she gathers herself. Freya steps forward, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling. From all around, from within: warmth. Life. The waters of the realm and the song of its mending washing her whole.

It's so good to be home.

Freya turns and Sif has curled against the driest wall, combing out mud with her fingers, ornament laid aside in the dust. No surprises there.

Kratos is crouched by the fire watching her. The weight of his keen attention blankets her like the rain. Prickles against her knuckles. Falls upon her, splits about her as water on stone and gathers just the same at her feet. She feels… strong, looking into his eyes. She is strong.

The front passes. Her realm glistens. Stones washed dark and already drying. Every leaf gleams. She shakes out her hands and wipes her arms, sighing pleasure. Frogs sing and creatures creak and chitter and she is here.

"This realm suits you," says Kratos.

"It is mine," she answers, and crosses to the fire. Freya has the urge to change to her bird form, and shake her feathers, and perch and chirp and preen. She resists.

"I suppose you don't have handmaidens either," Sif says, grimacing. Muck is creased into her palms already.

She herself could have handmaidens if she asked for them. But Vanaheim will not serve Aesir. Even in this. "No. Perhaps Kratos can help you with his vast knowledge of women's hair."

Freya means it as a joke. Mimir, for his many faults, would have picked it as one even if he then ran it down and flogged it to death. But Kratos only studies Sif for a moment. "I will need comb, needle, and good thread, and you may not like the result."

"Well now," Freya says. It's a very Mimir thing to say, and it's strange to realise she misses his presence at Kratos' hip, that she is picking up some of his phrases. "I wasn't serious."

"I am," Sif says abruptly. "If I am to live here without handmaidens or lice, I have to change my ways." She looks between them sharply. "Don't I?"

Freya chooses her words carefully. Everyone knows the story of Sif's unbreakable golden hair, how it serves her well in battle. How Thor prized it of his wife at a time they openly liked nothing else of each other. She will not suggest cutting it; that is not a cruelty Freya yields to anymore. "There is still time to join other settlements in Midgard."

"What you plan to do, can it be undone?" Sif asks of him.

"Yes," says Kratos.

"I will consider it," she says, and pulls her ornaments from her hair with a grimace Freya well understands. In Midgard her hair often clinked in her ears, iced through, and still that was better than enduring the stink and itch of it unwashed. "Do we have time to clean it now?"

Kratos glances to Freya for permission and it calls to a fierce pride in her.

Her realm, her choices, and he knows it. "You don't know the herbs you need."

Sif proves to be as canny as she once pretended not to be. "Then will you help me, Freya?"

Will she? Oh, how she'd love to refuse. The pleasure of it hangs tantalising on her tongue, waiting to be called forth.

But if Sif is willing to sacrifice the sole weapon she wears as her own for the sake of this attempt at, what is all of this, what is this twisted uneasy creature they're attempting to birth, this co-existence -

Freya tastes refusal and vengeance and reminds herself that she has made herself whole and home.

"Certainly," she says. It emerges tight and sour and she likes it. Yes, she'll help. But her reservations are hers to hold onto for so long as she wills. "You'll need to clean it first. How long has it been?"

Sif picks at the tail. "Not since Asgard fell."

Time enough to have suffered enough for Freya to do this willingly. "I'll be back. Get it wet," she says to Kratos. "Thoroughly."

He inclines his head and strips off his gauntlets, then kneels beside Sif. His scars shine swollen and red. "If I may."

"You can make sure I don't fall in," Sif says, heaving apart the thick central twist with a frown. Freya is glad she is not close enough to smell the smoke and the perfumes of Odin's hall that surely must linger at the core.

She leaves them to it, distracted by her search for the appropriate bushes, the memory of that scent. It lingered in her room, sometimes, at Sindri's. For a time she thought her traitorous mind was reminding her of everything she'd lost and given and had taken from her. For a time she wondered if she was growing mad.

But then, Tyr who was not Tyr, who was Odin, who - who had almost certainly been in her room, had been there and left his scent lingering.

Her stomach knots thinking of everything he must have touched and stroked and remarked on. Everything she cared about. Her plants, her light sources for them. Her herbs drying in bundles. Her bed. Even replacing every layer, changing out every chest she lies on, it still - she still - did he lie in it, did he sniff her blankets, did he murmur to himself O, Frigg the way he used to when she pretended to sleep in hopes he wouldn't touch her and he blew in her ear -

Freya stops herself before she goes over an edge, a root catching her foot in warning.

"Thank you," she whispers to her home, breath burning in her throat. Freya reminds herself of the truths she lives in.

She is in Vanaheim and free. She is free. Odin is dead and Asgard has fallen. Odin is dead and soon there will be nothing in all the realms that smells of him anymore. To think her room might still be one of those things is a cruelty of the mind, a crack planted which Odin forced wide. Nothing more.

The land is generous, and leads her to bushes of repellant and a patch of tubers to heat and grind for the liquid within. She harvests both with thanks to her realm, careful to retrace her own route so she does not disturb anything while this distracted, and finds Sif in trousers and breastband and her head nearly in the river, scrubbing her scalp, Kratos squeezing handfuls of water along the rest.

It's a strangely cooperative picture. Freya doesn't hear any grumbling from either of them.

"I have what you need," she announces.

"Good," Sif grunts, leaning on Kratos to pull herself upright and out of the river, Kratos gathering the length of it into his arms and holding it level to her ear. She groans and rolls her neck, Kratos moving slightly to pace her. "My head's about to fall off."

Freya knows she will never forget the sight of his arms draped in Sif's hair. "I'll go and prepare it at the fire. You can dry a little, just enough for it to pull smoothly through. Wet, not sopping."

"At least I'm cold on a warm day," Sif says with a certain fatalism, and kneels up again to grip around her nape. "Well? Squeeze me."

Freya snorts and leaves them to it, the fire merry and her bowl eager to warm to it, her pouch of essentials producing her favourite mortar and grinding-stone. The tubers soften in the flames and her leaves grind with a little ash to begin a good, pungent paste.

"Perhaps now that you're here, Freya," Sif calls, "he will tell us how he is so comfortable with a woman's hair."

She looks up from her work. That, of all of this, does interest her, and also this leaf, after so many ages, still makes her want to sneeze if she bends too close.

"I did not learn from women," says Kratos.

Freya blinks and realises she at some point decided all the men in his land were bearded and bald. But they were warriors, she knows. And she knows warriors. "Your fellow soldiers?"

"Mm. Spartans die well-combed with a strong face. Atreus…" His hands pause. Freya rescues her slab from being lit by the fire and continues to watch him. "My son's namesake." His attention shifts, visibly, to Sif, and his hands begin to slowly wring her hair again. "His was not so long as yours. But it was difficult to control."

She doesn't mean to share a glance with Sif, and definitely not one this weighty. Yet Sif catches her eye, or Freya catches hers, and it is clear they are sharing a single thought on the nature of the kind of intimacy that has a man caring for another's hair, naming a child after them, and grieving them so well that they speak with such present fondness as if that long-ago man has only just stepped out of doors.

In Freya's realm - this land that is Vanaheim - it is good fortune, a sign of prosperity, a widow or widower's blessing. In Asgard it was a thing Odin did not understand and Odin despised every single thing he could not take apart into pieces to become his own. Do not, she mouths to Sif, ensuring her lips curve wide and plain to see as the venom of her tongue.

Sif's eyes narrow.

Kratos, she realises, is watching them both. Is aware. The man reads everything he can get his hands on and no grasp of language is so imperfect it cannot realise absence.

"There is a wave pattern in your beard," Sif says. It is not quite concession in her voice. Something else. "If curls are common for your people, then of course mine is easier."

"I did not say it is," says Kratos.

Freya snorts, a part of her spine relaxing away from bracing her shoulder for the movements of bow and arrow, quiver and scabbard. "I'm almost done here. You'll feel clean enough soon."

"Oh, do I look forward to that," Sif sighs, grimacing at the tips of her fingers, and Freya carries over the berries she has crushed, thins the paste with water.

It is the work of all three of them in the end, Kratos' arms wet to the shoulder and pale foam shrouding Freya's finger tattoos, before Sif's scalp and roots are truly clean enough to apply the repellent oil.

Kratos combs it through with his big fingers, working sections at a time, while Freya pays particular attention to the paler gaps of colour he leaves behind. She never meant to get involved but he was leaving patches and she never was good at allowing imperfection.

"I can braid it here," says Kratos once they are finished, "but I cannot secure it."

"Use my tunic if you must," Sif says. "My clothing will have to change too, anyhow."

It's one of his more ponderous silences, this one, and Freya busies herself cleaning the remnants of her work at the fire, gathering what is left to share with others. "The longest edge," says Kratos at last, indicating the length of his thumbtip. "Three strips, this wide."

She pulls free the ornamented belt and heaps the rest in her lap as if she were not recently a lady of Asgard, as if the fine weave and clear colour were not also her last marks of former status. "I don't care. Do what you must. This way -" She strokes along a seam. "This way, I will still wear it. In a way. It shall have to be good enough. Your knife?"

Kratos places his dagger in her palm and she begins to pick apart threads.

Freya stands at his shoulder, well out of his light so she does not cast shade on his work, and watches him begin. It is a slow process, Sif's hair cumbersome for any one person, but Kratos, as always, forces what is impossible to yield beneath his will. There was a time Freya hated that about him more than anything.

"It will not grow further?" asks Kratos.

"This is as long as it gets," Sif answers, though it is distant, and Freya peers to see her face for herself. Trusting Aesir is a skill Freya will never fully develop; part of her will always, she thinks, suspect duplicity. "Kratos, my decision to aid you… it was my handmaidens."

Freya leans back on her heels. "What?"

"Odin took them. I thought he was getting back at me for trying to pull Thor from his grasp. And probably it was that. But he sent them to his machines. To die. To…" Her hands lift, flex, drop listlessly. "I swore to protect them. They were my responsibility."

"He threw everything away," Freya says, and there is a righteousness in speaking of the past this way. "He claimed every oath and respected none. Not mine, not yours. No-one else's."

"Nor Thor's," Sif says. She lifts her chin forward, and here, yes, in the distance there is the lightning, there is the streak which holds this place frozen in a memory of what once was, in this place is the memory of a battle which tore it and all its souls apart. "He loved his father so much."

"Baldur did too," Freya says. It curls and roils in her gut to share anything at all with this woman, and yet. And yet. She was once Queen of Asgard, was she not? Once they shared Odin's hall. Once they shared a table and broke bread together. Her rule may have been a lie, but the title: it is hers. The memory: it is hers.

Kratos hums. "Brothers."

"They were," Sif says. "Freya. I would not have you hate me."

"Then don't make it necessary to hate you," Freya says with all the sharpness of her heart, all the ancient recounting of her realm and its still-healing wounds. "Listen to what Hildisvíni tells you. Listen to why he tells you it. Remember what you learned today. Don't argue with things you don't understand as if we don't have our reasons. Remember you are in Vanaheim. My realm." Freya circles the bluff, crouches with her back to the river. The sound of its waters running free is a thud in her ears alongside the battle-drum of her heart.

Freya stares Sif in the eyes, a mighty beak gaping hungry within her soul, so large to show it would make Hraesvelgr small forever thereafter.

"Offend it and it will drink your Aesir blood and pick its teeth with your Aesir bones, and I will help it if I must."

Sif does not flinch. Losing the gold she wore at her temples has aged her. "Spoken like a Valkyrie."

"I am." Freya looks over Sif's shoulder at Kratos whose hands continue to move steadily, who is watching her as he watched her across the fire.

There is an urge in her to test him. Yes, he did not interfere in this conversation of realm and subject, yes, he was silent as he should have been - but she wants to know what he was thinking.

If he held his tongue for lesser reasons than respect. "No condescending words of caution for me? No temptation to air one of Mimir's oh-so-wise platitudes in his absence?"

"No," says Kratos. "I have no wish to interfere in your affairs. It is not my task." He jerks his chin down at the mass in his hands, the lengths of sectioned loose hair waiting their turn in tied-up coils on his thighs. "This is."

"What is it you are doing?" Sif asks. "I have trusted you this far, but I am curious. I have a right to wonder," with a glance so sidelong Freya bites her lip on her own temper.

As ever, Kratos is silent for a moment. "Your hair was unbalanced and cumbersome. It need not be."

Sif turns her head just far enough to arch an eyebrow and have it be seen. "And you think you know what I need?" It is so practised a move, so casual a tone, that she must have argued with Thor this way, sat at her work with him pacing the skins at her back.

"Brok the blacksmith blessed my spear at its creation, saying this: May it be put down when its job is done. Do you not intend to disarm?"

Freya inhales, and hears Sif do the same. It is one thing to know Kratos pays attention. It is another to be told the sum of that attention. "I also would like to know," she says. "For the safety of my realm, and my people."

"Let us be clear. I will not humble myself," Sif says, holding Freya's gaze with a very straight back. "I won't have you be All-Mother in his stead."

She recoils, stung. It is an accusation of her worst fears. It is an accusation which belong in her nightmares of Baldur, living, speaking, accusing. That he might live: she yearned, desperately. But she feared as well. How she has feared in her dreams. "I wish no such thing. You should know that!" Freya forces a semblance of calm. "Even you should know."

There is, strangely enough, a sheen to Sif's eyes as if such foul words also hurt her to say. "You chose this stranger to lead all the realms, Freya. For Ragnarok! Am I not allowed to know why? Is it so wrong of me that I wish to know if I can trust the man who destroyed my realm, my people?"

"I cannot earn that with one act," says Kratos. "I do not wish to. It would be… shallow."

"You have not hurt me yet," Sif says, brittle as the tips of the stone-grasses that snare the unwary with shards which become sores that weep and itch.

"I will not," says Kratos.

Sif makes a sharp sound in her throat. It's a noise Freya associates with the thrown-open doors of Odin's hall, a particular remembrance of watching Sif watching Magni beat Modi near-death, listing with her ornament in her fist, bright-eyed and unfocused and drunk. A bone snapped wetly and Sif tilted her head against the lean of her body and made that sound.

Freya scratches her nails in the dirt, settling herself. Here, Vanaheim. Here is the dirt in its abundance and provision, caking dustily in the whorls of her fingertips. Here are the small pricking fragments of leaves, here are the small pieces of stone. Here is her own self. Asgard is fallen; Odin is dead; she is free.

Someone is watching her. She lifts her head, knowing it is Kratos who is watching her and in the wake of his watching a space is held open for the direction of her soul in this moment, her wish whatever it may be. It helps. Freya would like there to be in the future a time when there is nothing for Kratos' patience to help, but that time is not this day.

She studies the slow overhead arc of Skoll's chase. They haven't called the wolves often lately, and Vanaheim's rhythms have settled into a kind of expectant anticipation: this fall of leaves, this bounding prey, this soaring wind. All of it alive. "How much longer?"

"I do not know," says Kratos.

Freya inspects his progress, trying to make sense of the tight twisting lattice he has made of Sif's roots, bound stronger still with strips of fabric gleaming blue among gold. "What's that for?"

"To sew her hair without causing pain," says Kratos. "It is too much weight without. It will slip."

"I see." She kneels and watches the movements of his hands. Kratos watches her, yes, often; and she in turn watches his hands most of all. Odin used his hands to point and counterpoint, to cast his spells, to have her tremble cold in sunshine before him. They showed his mood more than his face or words. This habit, too, remains. But she cannot bear it for long. "I'll scout the canyon for dragon dens," Freya says, rising. "We don't know if they laid eggs before their deaths. There might be hatchlings."

"Do not fight recklessly," says Kratos. "You will light a flare if you need aid?"

He has never told her not to fight without him. Only that she shouldn't overextend and leave openings, which she knows she has a habit of doing. Generally she is fast enough that it doesn't matter, but against an opponent like a fully-grown dragon, or Kratos himself - yes, he does have a point. And still he does not claim her fighting spirit for his own, to serve at his beck and call. Has not. Perhaps never. It is… strange, to trust someone this much again. It is strange. "I will."

"See you soon," Sif says. Her eyes are closed. Her tattoos gleam at her throat. They are the same colour as the oath Baldur chose to lay on his arms again and again: that he will never forgive. The same artist of legendary inks and greater patience, now a corpse in the wreckage of Asgard. It was Freya he could not and would not forgive. It was her.

Freya murmurs and becomes as a sliver of Vanaheim made manifest: feathers and keen claws, sharp eyes and trilling calls. It is easier, with such a canyon, to fly over its crags and outcroppings, to browse its ruins and see for herself what remains.

They have done much here. It is a dead settlement, but not forgotten. There are signs of what once was: a bowl tucked into a dusty shelf in a room broken open to the passing of ages and winding vines. A scroll half-open on a shattered stool, its writing too faded to read. Cabins tucked into stone for ease of living which became caves, which became refuges she investigates for nests.

She flies the river, and perches in trees lined in loose parched bark that lifts beneath her claws. She flies and her wings span memories of a time when her people called this home and when they found it entirely abandoned and overrun with what should not have been. She flies in this half-waking of finding a place, knowing it, and yet not inhabiting it.

There are empty shells in one of the caves, but they are old and dry, fragile. Whatever was birthed here lived a long time ago. It may be they already killed the dragon which once crawled small and mewling from beneath its mother.

Freya reminds herself that they should ask Ratatoskr about the Lindworms. If he and they are doing well. Nidhogg was killed because of Odin, yes: but Nidhogg was killed for her.

This is a place which could easily become a settlement again. It has water and shelter easily repaired to wholeness. There is food to be found all around and nowhere an Aesir could be tempted to think of as a field if they wished to defy Vanaheim's ways. And Freya has seen no further sign of dragons.

Perhaps the Aesir could settle here. It is close enough by boat. Far away enough that they may stop itching Hildisvíni's tusks, as the man himself puts it. Her friend has been through too much for her to ask this much more of him forever, and Aesir, in close quarters, forever… that may be too much. It would be too much for her.

She crouches in a ruin she remembers as the home of a friend whose face or name she cannot recall. It was barely her friend she visited at the time; her friend's father was generous and kind, and the scent of his cooking tangled with aromatic spring flowers to make her mouth water ferociously as she climbed the terraces and claimed a mouthful of - of… of something she no longer remembers either. It was honey-sweet. That much she knows if she closes her eyes and breathes through her mouth and tries her best to recall.

What were their names? What was it the father made? What else did it taste of, what else was in this valley? What else has she forgotten? At times her head is an overstuffed bowl, stalks and petals falling through her fingers whenever she attempts to crush it all to fit. It should not have been so long ago that she and Yngvi played here, and yet it was. It should not have been so long ago that she made that choice to marry Odin for peace, hoping her realm - and Yngvi - would understand her reasons, and yet it was. It should not have been so long ago that she had… a home. Family. Something hers.

Vanaheim is her realm: yes, yes, she knows, she feels and lives it. But it is with her, it is of her and she of it, and that was the circumstance of her birth. To be a god is to have a role and this is hers. Though it was torn from her and she wished it back, and she is not unhappy to have it again, it is just - it is simply - she is simply -

Freya leans her cheek on her knuckles, allowing her sight to fade from her eyes alone and spread around her, awareness sunken into soil and roots cracking stone in the way of things, sunlight falling on ruffled leaves which shade her shoulder into coolness in turn.

Clouds drift. Birds argue nearby about who is hungrier. The river flows. Insects crawl over her toes and a beetle meanders, jewel-bright, along her arm.

"Freya," says Kratos nearby, and she stirs, returns to herself and eases the beetle safely from her shoulder to one of the leaves beside her. His shadow is long across her shins with the passing of time. "I have done what I can here. Are you ready?"

She rises, covering a yawn with the back of her hand, spying Sif waiting on the lower level of the terrace, tunic folded over her arm. "I am. I didn't find any nests. To the boat, then."

"Yes," says Kratos, and she takes the lead. Spending time with her realm that way, calm and peaceful, has helped. It solved nothing, only shortened the shadows in her mind, and still her next sleep may come easier.

"You didn't like his idea?" Freya says to Sif; surely there was more to it than that fabric-woven lattice on her head and the braids doubled along their length so they only reach mid-thigh. The repellant has stained her golden hair a little red, and with that tint she is very obviously Thrúd's mother.

Sif still holds herself very regally. "There is a mirror at camp. I'll have a say in my appearance."

"Of course," Freya says. Her temper would like to rouse, to say and what of how you Aesir cut our Vanir headdresses, and shaved our servants, and burned the feathers of our warriors? She herself would like to say such a thing. But she is tired, and she has taken in enough sun that she is a little slow with it, existing in a space between thought and action that is rare and precious and worth holding onto. Not pointlessly sacrificed on the likes of Sif.

She trails her hand in the waters of the river, murmuring thanks for its kindness in giving them a swift and safe journey, fish wriggling cool beneath her fingertips, scales flashing. She catches three fine and large, kills and guts them, and brushes her hand against Kratos' arm to stop the boat and leave the entrails in a place where animals may feed without entering the camp itself.

Hildisvíni is not there when they return, but Beyla comes forward and takes the fish into her hands, thanking her and ignoring Sif altogether. Byggvir shrugs from where he stands at his mixing bench. Freya expected no different.

"We have needle and strong thread, don't we?" she calls to him.

Byggvir begins to move forward, an alarm in his gestures. "Is someone hurt?"

"No," she says quickly. He is much more expressive than those of his race in Alfheim, and it still startles her. "No. Be calm. We are all all right."

"It is better if it is not very fine thread," says Kratos, moving forward. "But I will make do."

Byggvir's shoulders ease, and he nods. "Well met, Kratos. Let me see what I have, yes? Any colour preference?"

"Pale," says Kratos. "Bring me what you can spare. Find me at the mirror."

"Uh, certainly."

There is only one mirror in camp. It is a polished rectangle of metals, made reflective through magic and alchemical compositions, and it is greatly prized. Everyone is welcome to look in it, and it belongs to no-one other than Freya herself. It is a collective good that a person might find pleasure in their appearance and thrive in their own confidence.

Sif sits before it on a stool as if it is she who owns it, and Freya stands beside it, angling herself carefully away from any impression of waiting on an Aesir. She is no handmaiden.

Kratos is patient with Sif arranging her own hair, supporting the coils she forms as she frowns and peers at herself. "It feels strange not to have it on my shoulder," she says, lifting that same shoulder to her ear and down again. She doesn't seem to have noticed that she is still technically half-dressed, though Kratos is very close and touching her, has been close and touching her for most of the day. It is something that - if she did not already trust Kratos - would weigh Freya's opinion of him in his favour. "I am used to the weight."

"You do not have to be any longer," says the man who never misses an opportunity to make every ponderous phrase a metaphor for a person's circumstance. He and Mimir deserve each other.

"Like this," she decides eventually, her hair a mass of braids folded on themselves and wound over top of her head. Freya would not allow a diadem, not in Vanaheim, but it is nothing of the sort. "I don't… I think I would like my shoulders bare, after all. Can you? And will you?"

"Yes," says Kratos.

Byggvir has brought a large blunt bone needle and thread which Kratos tests now for strength, and he knots the thread in the eye of the needle and begins to sew. This, too, takes time, and she watches the camp, returns nods that are given to her. She casts her gaze over her people who are slowly gathering themselves from the forests and the secret hidden places, who are slowly trusting her again as Vanaheim has always trusted her.

And, too, watching them: Aesir. Sif's people, who cluster in wary waiting knots like unbudded blooms. They look at Sif uncowed and at Kratos tending her hair and the longer it goes that nothing untoward happens, that Sif is not harmed, that she is calm and his movements are sure and gentle, the more they ease.

It bothers her to see Aesir relaxing in Vanaheim. Aesir should never be safe and comfortable in her realm, it is hers, it is not theirs. This realm drinks their blood and crushes their bones and it is only as they deserve. But no: that is when they bring war and weapons and strife. Not when they have only themselves and the memory of Ragnarok crushing all they strove toward. It is different. This is different.

She reminds herself that discomfort sometimes is the price of mercy. Her mercy, and Freyr's. He would laugh at her if he were here. He would say: I united Alfheim! You think this is hard, sister? Come on!

Her Yngvi was always so foolish. She smiles to herself and it is an afterthought to notice how the Aesir unbend a little further, as if they were watching for her indication as well as Sif's. Freya is both pleased to know they are fully aware of being at her sufferance and bothered to know how deeply they have taken that lesson to heart.

Yes, it is like that, but these days Freya tries not to be vengeful. She has tried.

"I am finished. It will hold," says Kratos, drawing Freya from her thoughts, and she straightens to see for herself. Sif is gingerly touching the wide bands of woven-sewn braids that shade her nape and eyes, crossing and folding upon themselves. Beauty and use formed from nuisance.

It all feels very pointed, like most of what Kratos does, and Freya can't decide if she's more impressed or irritated. "Make sure it won't fall apart. We have much more to do in all the realms than fix your hair."

Sif shakes her head tentatively at first, then firmly. It holds, and she rubs her shoulder which Freya has never before seen bare. There is a valley worn into the muscle beside her neck as if in accepting Kratos' help, Sif has cast aside a yoke. Perhaps she has. Perhaps that is what all of this was, in the end: another kind of freedom from Asgard's restrictions. Metaphor made manifest.

Freya is not especially comfortable with metaphor. She deals in it, but her motives are more practical. Her people can be driven forth by metaphor, but they cannot eat of it. Her realm exists as more than the plaything of Skoll and Hati. In the end this interlude means little that could not have been said by oath and deeds. And still that is not true.

She has never liked uncertainty. "If you're finished, we should discuss the crater."

"Thank you, Kratos," Sif says to him, and rises. "Yes, I would like to speak to you of that as well. There are shadows there that we should take responsibility for." There is an ease to the way she inclines her head, as if before she was always too stiff, too weighed, to be able to show respect. "If you would allow us."

Freya was going to say that. It irks her that Sif got there first. "In that crater, you'll have no chance to impose your ways. Vanaheim won't let you. Especially not there. You will change or die."

"I want my people to live," Sif says. "You say we must in order to live. So be it. Asgard is gone. There is no choice."

Kratos hums. He is wrapping thread around his fingers, bundling it into a kind of butterfly. It must be the remainder. "Your people… there will be resentment."

"I know." She looks between them both. "I will need help, if it comes to that."

Freya shakes back her own braids. There is a freedom in the loose nape of her neck, a freedom in the wind ruffling her feathers and tangling flyaway strands in her lashes. Vanaheim is free, and so is she. "You'll have it."

Sif holds out her arm, hand open and her face smooth. "Then, may we have an accord?"

Freya cannot help but think of how Freyr would laugh at her for her reluctance. Take it, he would call to her, hands cupped round his mouth, urging her on with the same laughing timbre as when they were mischievous children. Go on! Don't get boring now! Take a chance!

The chance has been taken. The promises have been made. But this is different. Even Freya can acknowledge that this is different. Don't let me regret listening to you this time, Yngvi, she thinks, and clasps Sif's outstretched arm in turn. "We have an accord. And you'll explain all this to Hildisvíni yourself."

"Perhaps he may smile at me for it," Sif says. There is a curve to her mouth Freya remembers from when the boys were very young and Thor was too fascinated by roly-poly fatherhood to bother raising a hand to stein or hammer. "I don't enjoy us being at such odds."

Hildisvíni pleased by the words of an Aesir that aren't we are leaving never to return? Unlikely, and yet. "Stranger things have happened," Freya says, gesturing at Kratos, the whole of him, the whole of what he has done, the whole of all that has passed and tumbled upon itself to shake them all out into these pieces of new, naked beginnings.

"Am I so strange?" asks Kratos. He is a man who smiles with the depth of the wrinkles around his eyes.

"Yes," Freya says, and Sif with her, and they exchange glances. For a moment it is a rewriting, an illumination of what was once hoped for. There was a time Freya was truly naive and knew nothing and thought they could have become friends. It is still unlikely as Hildisvíni warming to an Aesir. It is… less unlikely than Ragnarok. It is less unlikely than the realms they live in now where it was only Asgard and Odin which fell, rather than the rest and Odin supreme over ashes.

It is less unlikely than the man she attempted to destroy for years on end saving her from his own son simply because she once saved that same son. It is less unlikely than some day being grateful to be saved from her own son, and yet she is.

Freya draws back from Sif and grips his arm in turn, a warrior's clasp she cannot and will not explain. The roughness of his fingers on the swell of her forearm steadies her. "Strange can be what we need."

"That is true," says Kratos. He is watching her. He is looking into her eyes. He is speaking to her. Of her. Her belly is empty as a chalice, full of life as the crater they just left.

"I believe there is fish left," Sif says. "I will leave you to it. Thank you again, Kratos."

Freya watches her go. She still walks with her shoulder at an angle. Freya is not the only one with old habits.

"You have no right to wash and dress her hair for hours and then call me strange," she tells Kratos firmly, turning back to him and his hand on her arm. Insects laugh on bark, and birds call in her trees. Vanaheim sings with the swell of her soul.

"Mm," says Kratos. The lines around his eyes remain deep as his touch is welcome. "Peace in your realm is a worthy goal, Freya. I would do more."

"I know." She knows. It is strange to be free, and it is good. It is strange to have a friend, and it is good. It is strange to have days she is glad to live through though her son is dead. But it is good.

Chapter Text

Hildisvíni is openly relieved when they tell him. "I see. That's good."

"You did not expect success," says Kratos.

"Oh, I didn't doubt you," he says quickly. "She has been - I don't want to say inflexible, I am a shapeshifter, but…"

"You didn't know how deep her ignorance was," Freya says, too upset to echo his humour. "I should have told you, warned you. The fault is mine. I'm sorry."

Usually he would wave her off, but this time he only sighs and nods slowly. "I appreciate that, my lady. Thank you. I suppose it shall be easier now. Or I hope it will be." He smiles briefly. "Will you stay a while, my lady, or is it to be more adventures?"

Freya considers it, but shakes her head. She likes Jotunheim. It is absurdly beautiful, and terribly empty, and Angrboda is such a lonely girl. And Freya is not ready. "The older I am, the more I am like Yngvi," she tells Hildisvíni. "His wandering feet have passed to me."

"Have they?" he asks mildly. "I would have no idea how that feels."

She winces. She has been asking too much of him.

Between them, unspoken: the century they spent together in Midgard. Trapped, stuck. Unable to defend herself. Hildisvíni unable to change from his boar form. It was a place of beauty, of red leaves and thriving blooms, and it was a cage, their cage, and Vanaheim is an entire realm, the way Midgard was an entire realm, and it still is not enough. One day she might choose to stay somewhere. But not for a long time. In having this choice for herself, she is not allowing Hildisvíni his own.

He was trapped alongside her. Freya offers him her arm warrior to warrior, friend to friend. "It will ease," she promises. "I will make sure of it. The groups in the jungles - they will return, form a new council. There will be guilds and decision makers. It will not all be on your shoulders."

"It will go quicker with your direction, my lady." He does return her grasp, but not for long, and she has the sensation that perhaps her old friend is slipping away from her. "Failing that, your presence. It would help."

"I -" He is right. She knows he is right. "Not today, Hildisvíni. But soon."

He sighs. Braces himself. She has never known him to look so tired. "Vanaheim has never not needed you. But very well. As you say, my lady."

"I also will return," says Kratos.

Hildisvíni nods to him as if they are truly comrades. "That is good to hear, my lord."

***

"If it would help not to accompany me," Kratos starts when they are walking the tree.

"It's not that," Freya interrupts. She is always reminded of Sindri's house on these branches, unsettling mosses cushioning her feet. "If you didn't ask I would go anyway. But I would be alone when I did." She meets his eyes over her shoulder. "It wouldn't help to be alone. I know that now."

"So do we, your highness," Mimir says from Kratos' belt. "I do love going to meet giants. The memories! Those were the days!"

"Mimir of the Bifrost Teats," says Kratos, slow and deliberate.

Freya nearly trips on her own startled chuckle. "What?"

"Brother, did you have to go and say that?"

"I did," says Kratos.

"Explain," Freya orders, dropping back to watch Mimir speak. If she were a head on a belt, she would wish to see what she was talking to. She wants it when she is a bird.

What follows is a tale Mimir tries not to tell, except that then Kratos tells it for him, and Mimir objects to everything about the way Kratos presents the story, and she is laughing when they arrive in Jotunheim, a hand clutched in the strap of Kratos' bandolier for balance.

"You would have seen better and further if they'd done that," she tells him, straightening at last, smearing spittle from the corner of her mouth.

"My lady, it is as if you don't like me."

"I don't," she tells him.

"Kratos! Freya! Mimir! Hello!" Angrboda's voice is distant and distinct. "Sorry! I'll be there in a little bit!"

"Don't rush! We'd rather you not hurt yourself," Freya calls back.

"Aye, Atreus would never let us hear the end of it," Mimir puts in. "Though I still think it would be worth asking how she feels about the lad -"

"Do you have to?" she counters. "Or are you just unable to keep your nose out of anyone's business?"

Kratos lifts Mimir from his belt. "Do not ask."

"Aye, aye, all right."

Being here - it is so desolate. And yet it lifts her spirits. There is magic here, skeined and wound through the world, ancient and deeply wise. It is a kind of glad smallness that surrounds her, like the hands of a beloved father lifting her to his lap. She could linger beneath a tree and open her heart and get drunk on it.

Angrboda scurries from her mount - Jalla, is that the name? and rushes over, wiping her hands on a rag already covered in paint. "I thought you'd be here around this time but I wasn't sure when exactly." She smiles at all of them. "Kratos, can I ask you to do something for me?"

"Name it," says Kratos.

"Oh. All right, well, this way. And you too, Freya. Or you can look around, I don't mind."

"I'll come," she says. Atreus is not her son, but she does love him. To love Atreus is to love who he loves; and it is clear Angrboda is very special to him. "Is it a rock you need broken?"

"Not exactly," Angrboda says, slowing her stride and facing them, a wince in her voice. "Kind of. But…"

Kratos holds up a hand and drops to one knee, peering into her face. He sees something in her composure that Freya does not. "Angrboda. What is the matter?"

"I'm really glad you're here," she says. "How do you feel about being a grandfather?"

Mimir sputters. "It is far too early for that conversation! Though, I wouldn't mind being an uncle, now that I think about it."

"I would like nothing more," says Kratos after a moment, "but when you and Atreus are ready." He lowers his hand to his knee. It is bittersweet to watch him with children now, to compare him to others she has known. Odin never knelt to a child this way. "I do not think you are ready. What has happened?"

Angrboda stares for a moment, then waves her hands. "Oh no, no, I'm not - we haven't - I'm not, we're not…" She shakes her head, beads rattling. "I've had dreams about it, that's all. Giant visions, you know, and you looked happy, but I thought I'd ask. It doesn't seem right to enjoy a dream so much if the people in it don't like it."

Kratos clasps her arm, palm swallowing the length of her bicep, and Freya breathes against the pang in her chest. Baldur was this small once, and already so angry. "Enjoy it," says Kratos. "It is good that your family makes you happy."

"Oh, good," she says. "So you won't mind helping me move some corpses, then?" Angrboda glances at Freya then, clearly seeing her alarm and misreading it. "Actually, your magic might help too."

"That wasn't my - what do you mean, corpses?" Angrboda is sometimes a worry for Freya. She is so young and so independent, so used to doing for herself, that sometimes she says things that… Freya worries about her.

"What have you got yourself into, lassie?" Mimir sounds as concerned as Freya feels.

Kratos is the only one of them who has not reacted outwardly. "You speak of the bodies on the mountains."

"Yeah. The visions Groa and the others had, they didn't extend this far. So they didn't know. But like I said, I've been having my own visions now, new ones, and I need those mountains. One of them, at least, or a cave in one. I can't explain it, I really can't. But that's where the biggest giant is, and I…" She stares down at her hands. Yellow paint rimes her fingernails. "I can't ask Fenrir to do it, he won't go that way, and I know they aren't really in there, but I still…"

"I will do it," says Kratos, firm and calm as if there is no path where he would have refused her. It helps Freya to hear it, even as she sometimes hates what he's actually saying when he sounds like that.

Angrboda eases visibly, then flings her arms around Kratos' neck. "Thank you, I'm so glad - I thought, but I wasn't sure, you know." She pulls away, Kratos' hand dropping from her back and catching her elbow. "I even know where you can move him. It isn't far. He's just very big."

Kratos is characteristically unconcerned about feats of strength or the dust on his knees. "I will manage."

"Oh ho, hugging your father-in-law now? The lad'll be pleased to hear about you two getting along."

"Well, I haven't married Loki yet," Angrboda says as if it's a given that someday she will.

"'Yet', she says! You hear that, brother? Confidence!"

Angrboda smiles up at Kratos. "There's no rule we can't be family before that, right?"

Kratos nods, crinkles deep. "There is not."

If this goes on much longer Freya's heart will blacken and her teeth will rot with envy. "How far is the - I'm sorry, I don't know if this was your relative…"

"They're all my relatives," Angrboda says, picking up pace again. "But some are more distant, it's true. He's my… I think he's my dad's uncle's brother-in-law? He used to be a shipwright."

"In my past, I sailed," says Kratos. "This giant made the hulls?"

"You got it!" Angrboda ducks down through a gap in fallen rock that Kratos lifts to let Freya through. "And he made Skidbladnir with Ivaldi's sons, but that was different."

Kratos hums. "You plan to fly the boat to the top of the mountain."

"Oh, I didn't know that was what I was thinking," Angrboda says. "But now that you say it, yeah, that's it!"

Freya considers the size and weight of such a corpse. The damage it might do if it falls any which way. Thamur is only an example, but she has done that before. "I can guide its direction if you work with me when you push."

"Then that is what we will do," says Kratos.

"I suppose we did find another dead giant for you after all, your majesty!"

She doesn't want to find amusement in any part of the worst day of her life. "Shut up, Mimir. Is there a good place to launch the boat? A cliff would be best, if there's no river."

"Nearly there," Angrboda says. "Tell me how it is in the other realms. Is everyone all right? Are the pieces of Asgard still falling? My visions aren't good at showing me solutions to today's problems, if you know what I mean."

"You do well with them," Freya tells her, and means it. One prophecy - that she thought was a prophecy - and look what Freya did with it. Look how Freya twisted her life around it, and her son's, and twisted him so far he broke in her grip. That was just the one. Visions like Angrboda's, Groa's, overlapping, multiplying, uncertain… she can't imagine the burden.

"We are dealing with the remains of Asgard," says Kratos. "There is a piece in Niflheim."

Angrboda half-turns. "He doesn't talk much, does he?"

Freya blinks. "Who?"

"Oh, never mind, you haven't - Sorry. Confused! But just remember he doesn't talk much. He's more of a listener. It's really how he is."

She exchanges a glance with Mimir, the pinch between his brows echoing hers.

"Just to be clear, lassie, you're saying we should investigate that piece in Niflheim as soon as possible?"

"I'm not saying anybody should anything," Angrboda says hastily, lifting her hands in a warding sort of gesture. "I don't do that anymore. I mean, I try not to. But if you wanted to you could, and it might help some stuff, that's all."

"Still hearing that we should look it into immediately, brother."

"We help Angrboda first," says Kratos, inclining his head to her, and Angrboda puts her hand on his arm with a smile. She is so small, her smile so genuine. It is clear that she has seen a future where Kratos is kind to her and her children and acts accordingly - and it is clear as well that Kratos has simply chosen to like her because Atreus likes her.

Freya could hold that simplicity in contempt. Easily. She's done it quite often in her life. Largely against her brother who never took anything seriously. Against her council who were frightened by the offer of peace, frightened that she as hostage-queen might be all which stood between them and Odin's wholesale annihilation. Not only of their people, but her realm, that whole living being blooded within her and her within it.

But she already was that. There was no-one else, even then. Her family was already dead but for Freyr, her house scattered but for an aunt and a few cousins. Her council said they have already burned Freyr, what next? and she told them: then tell me what else next, so I do not have to do this.

They could not offer her an answer that was not continuing to fight, continuing to loot the fallen, continuing to retreat into jungles and caverns to fight from above and below, until there was no-one left but her and Odin anyhow, anyway, inevitably.

It felt a vision of the future then. As alone with Vanaheim as Angrboda is with Jotunheim now.

She thought she had asked enough. Forced enough protections. Specified enough concessions from Asgard and promised far fewer. Few enough, she thought, and then -

It was not to be. None of it was to be. Not for her, and not for Vanaheim, and she cannot make that up to anyone, and neither can her realm make it up to her.

Freya really did not want to acknowledge what she has to do.

But this existence of living in Sindri's abandoned home, continuing to take what was once freely given even as she is haunted by Tyr-who-was-Odin, this continuing visitation of Vanaheim without truly making a difference, leaving Hildisvíni to act in a position he never wanted and was never trained to bear - it cannot be this way anymore.

Vanaheim deserves better and so does Hildisvíni, and too Kratos who should not be tending stew and thanklessly fetching her bathwater, no matter that he does not complain.

She herself deserves better than to be left adrift with a crooked crown, circling her own realm like a wary stray beaten afraid. To be alone with Vanaheim in the end was the fear, yes. But it is not what is, and it will only come to pass if she continues to avoid her responsibilities. Continues to abandon those who fought in her absence.

To borrow the phrase Kratos likes so much: Freya must be better than this.

It is this way, and if she must choke on it to accept it, then choke she must. If Vanaheim must choke for her presence, then choke it must.

When they stop again for Kratos to haul aside a rock blocking their way, Freya pauses beside him as he holds it in place. "I meant it when I said we would rebuild the realms together. I promised you that, and I hold myself to that oath. I will come with you. But my duty to Vanaheim is unfinished. If that means I have to make my home there for a time…" She shrugs and ducks under, wishing not to look at his face, to see his response.

He follows after her with a bare grunt as he sets it down. "Then I will maintain Sindri's home for him, as his friend, and come to you when there is need."

"No," Freya tells him seriously. She draws on herself as Queen of Vanir, as Queen of Asgard, as Queen of Valkyries. Three times she has been made queen: three times she has been something other than Freya, daughter of Vanaheim. It is Freya speaking now. "Not when you decide there is need. When we are needed by others you will come to me first, so I may choose to go with you. You will promise me this."

He searches her face then, and she doesn't know what he finds but he nods slowly, holding her gaze. "Of course. Together."

"Besides, Vanaheim likes you."

"Your realm… likes me," he says slowly, jaw slack as if he never considered such a thing possible.

She doesn't bother suppressing this chuckle. "You think my wishing pond yields the finest armour to anyone who pleases it?"

"Brother's very bad at receiving compliments," Mimir tches. "Don't take it to heart, your majesty."

"I assumed it was because of the crystals," says Kratos.

Freya shrugs and moves a branch out of her way with her a bow, careful not to break the bark. She knows very little about what inhabits Jotunheim; it is better not to risk contact poisons. "You assumed wrong. Many have tried to get something from it. They all failed. Once Freyr asked it for a weapon to defeat Odin, and it produced a crystal bird. He swore the pond belched it at his head like a laughing drunkard."

Kratos makes a considering sort of noise. There is a gap, here, where once Atreus would have asked for more, for the pieces that turn fragments into story. He fills it awkwardly. "What happened to the bird?"

Those days are jumbled and tumultuous in memory. At the time they felt so very long and dreary, full of her council arguing in pointless circles as more of their people fell to Einherjar. Again and again she defended her people in the passes and trees of Vanaheim, and again and again she stood with enemy blood on her hands while they all fretted whether the peace could be trusted, if Odin could be trusted, if Thor would truly refrain, if Freya would be safe.

They are all long, long dead and in the time since she left their high honoured houses died as well, temples desecrated and family biers destroyed, all of them including her own, and it is done. That power to undo the past may have existed in Kratos' homeland, but not here.

It is good that it does not exist here, and it is good that she does not contemplate it any further. "I used it in my arguments. I asked why the pond would present a representation of my bird form if it did not mean the realm's permission, and it convinced some. Convinced enough. I don't know where the bird went in the end. Crushed under someone's heel, no doubt."

Aesir or Vanir? She doesn't know. That a council hasn't gathered in her absence - that is not surprising. That there will not be a council without her - how she wishes that would be a surprise. But calling together the grand houses of Vanir always fell to her by default, and it seems it always will.

She considers how her people might respond to her forming a council only to bid them an excellent reign with all powers but her veto, and feels the first returning flickers of amusement. Perhaps it won't be all bad.

"The pond has a playful nature," says Kratos, stepping aside for her to go first through a crack. "You may find it again."

"I just might," Freya says. Her realm teased her, once. Would play with her and she with it. She misses those days. "What was the object of your ascension, then? In your homeland."

"An object?"

"Every god-story has one. I was queen, so I am Queen Freya. Mimir has his horns, and he is Goat-horned Mimir. Odin had his eye, so One-Eyed Odin. Mimir, you know what I'm talking about."

"Am I being consulted for my expertise now, and by your highness no less? This is truly a wonder."

Freya rolls her eyes. "I could have not asked," she mutters.

"I do believe this is what they call an epithet in your homeland, brother," Mimir continues. "Her highness is not wrong about ours. But you would have one of your own, I'd have thought."

"In my language, I am referred to as 'the cruel bladed'. Because of these," says Kratos, closing his hand around a twin hilt.

Ah. Those things. Freya would be lying if she said they didn't make her uneasy. They are so clearly not of the nine - now eight - realms, and just as clearly dangerous. And yet her first encounter with them was on Kratos' back, his face desperate as he gave her the bridge-keeper's heart cut whole from that great personage's chest. She knows well the sharpness of weapons used to protect.

"Faye asked what I was called, as well," says Kratos. "I told her, and she told me she would name me Farbauti among others of these lands when she spoke to them. So none would ask where I had come from."

"Cruel striker," Angrboda says, and Freya collects herself before reaching for a weapon. How in the realms is that girl so quiet? "Sorry! I'm used to making myself not be noticed - sorry."

"It is not your fault," Freya says, disturbed by the ease with which this girl apologises. Certainly some of it could be Jotun culture, or loneliness, but there is a part of her that wants to reach out to Angrboda, ensure she knows someone cares if she is warm and fed and well. And if she is so alone in the realm, what is it she hides from so diligently? Later. "Now that I can defend myself, I do it quickly. Maybe too quickly." She puts her fist to her chest. "My fault."

"It's all right, there's lots of fighting everywhere," Angrboda says, nodding over her own palm against her breastbone. This conversation, this apology, is between them as people. But also in a way it is realm to realm. Freya of Vanaheim, Angrboda of Jotunheim.

To walk these realms is to walk a multitude of wounds.

"But Farbauti, 'cruel striker', that is what our paintings called you." She links her hands behind her back in a show of what is either carelessness or very great trust. Freya has a good suspicion which and it warms her. "Or, her paintings, I guess."

"Even as she saw my future, Faye sought to protect me," says Kratos. His regard tips toward Angrboda with the inevitability of mountains calving fragments into choppy seas. It's the way he holds himself. "Did you know her?"

"Only in visions," Angrboda says. Everything about her is wistful. "I knew I'd never meet her. But she seemed nice."

"She was and more." His tone gentles. "She would have liked you."

Angrboda smiles up at him. "It's really good to see you again. I know I said that before, but being able to meet people from my visions, get to know them - it helps a lot. And you visit me all the time. You don't have to."

"I know," says Kratos. He puts a careful hand on her shoulder. There is sometimes a shyness about him. "We wish to."

Her eyes are very bright, and she covers two of his fingers with her hand and squeezes - she is so small, small as Atreus who is now gone off on new adventures to new lands. How on earth did Kratos let him go? So small. Freya never could.

Freya wonders if this gentleness how he was with the other child he lost, Calliope, if daughters are easier for him than sons, and pushes the thought away. She has no right to speculate. She is teaching herself with time that she has no right to speculate where Kratos is concerned. He will not kill her, but it is up to her to value his friendship.

"I'd certainly come if he didn't want to, lassie," Mimir says. "He'd give me a good throw through the portal and I would make way with my horns and chin!"

Angrboda giggles. She looks surprised by her own laughter, the way very lonely children are.

Freya will not be outdone by Mimir. Not in this. "That wouldn't be necessary. You're being dramatic. I would be carrying you."

"Oh, so then you might be the one to throw me!"

She raises her eyebrows at him. "Do you want to to be thrown?" It's hard to tell with him at times.

"I'll have you know, your majesty, I'm a very aerodynamic head when it suits me," Mimir huffs.

Angrboda laughs again, her hand tucked through Kratos' elbow, such joyful merriment wreathing her face, and Freya feels some part of herself still frozen by Fimbulwinter thaw.

All these grand schemes, all these realms and difficulties, and still there is profound meaning in amusing a neglected child. Of course there is. Of course.

Wherever they are going, it is a place where bark silvers and leaves yellow and bare rock forms a crumbling footing. Jotunheim doesn't connect inside her the way Vanaheim does, but holds a similar wholeness, a sense of its own hills and valleys. They are near what feels to be cliffsides, places of power and potential, and yet it is an approach to what was.

Freya follows them around a copse, clambers through loose soil and richly-scented decaying leaves, and the sense of what-was and what-is lays over itself like Kratos folding Sif's sewn braids. Once this was simply ground before them, and now it is not. There were paths and homes here, and the land has crumbled upon itself. Mighty roots reach for the sky, en masse, like so many naked limbs. "What happened here?"

"I'm by myself," Angrboda says. "I can't tend everything we used to. There were trees and plants holding up the crevasse here, but I didn't know how to make them stay. So… this happened. And now it's a cliff."

There is a kinship hot and silent and bursting in Freya's throat, and she cannot bring herself to speak past how it feels to be so alone and so responsible for a realm.

"That is not your fault," says Kratos.

"But we're high enough, right?"

Kratos turns to her, and it's true, Freya is the one of them who actually knows anything about her brother's silly boat. She forces the words. "It should be."

"Aye," Mimir chimes. "Plenty of room!"

They settle into Skidbladnir once it unfolds, floating patiently at the edge as if the air is only a river suspended in a time where once there was water here, or will someday be water, and Freya claims a seat beside Angrboda, who is leaning so eagerly over the edge that Freya only feels better for keeping a hand on her back. "Be careful. Don't fall."

"I've never seen Jotunheim this way before," Angrboda tells her as they begin to drift over glimpses of wetlands and sprawling stands of red trees and what looks like the thrown-about contents of someone's wardrobe, jewels overgrown and gold gleaming. "I've been here so long and dreamed about it for so long and there's still something new. It's wonderful."

"You didn't dream of our flight, lassie?"

Angrboda leans out again. "No, I'm getting to like being surprised. I forget how pretty it is when I'm down there."

"Jotunheim is very beautiful," Freya tells her. Angrboda is sun-warm beneath her hand, prone to craning her head this way and that to see better. She is like Atreus when he left and Baldur when he was small and still trusted his mother.

In the very far distance with her strongest eyes there are mountains, and in those mountains - on those mountains -

That, above the lowest layer of clouds, harshly illuminated, is a hand.

"I see why you didn't want to do this alone," Freya says, something terrible and fierce moving in her gut, a cousin to nausea.

"Oh, no, they're not in there," Angrboda says. "But…"

"I have done this," Freya tells her, and it is abrupt and choppy and she has no way of making it be anything else. "In war. I came upon the bodies of my own in this way," jerking her head at the memories.

So many corpses. So much brown drenching sand. So much bone spiking soft ground. So many empty open-mouthed eyes. Freya must focus.

She is needed now. "Look at me. I will tell you what I told my people and myself then. Their souls are no longer here. We need not be afraid that we dishonour them with our grief. We need not be afraid to touch them. Their passing is for the sky and the earth, to help those who still live. Do you understand?"

Angrboda nods, close-mouthed. Her expression is very old and very sad. "You're right. More than I can ever tell you." She puts her hand to Freya's elbow. "I know they aren't there. I know it is to help. This is for me. And Loki. For our future. I know."

Freya peers at her, attempting to catch the threads of meaning. It sounds as if these bodies are somehow purposeful. Mass suicide? A macabre display of final defiance? A misdirection?

"Angrboda," Freya says slowly. She is not asking. She is not the Queen of Asgard in this moment, used to further the machinations of a man who is now dead. But -

There is a line between Angrboda's eyebrows. "I'm not the one to tell you. I'm sorry."

"Lassie," Mimir breaks in, "being a wee disturbed by such a sight is only natural, and we've all our ways of coping with the fact. I think that'd be what her majesty meant, if herself doesn't mind my saying."

"I've dreamed about them for a long time," Angrboda says. "Not the journey, but them. Through other people's eyes." She turns to face those mountains and the glimpses of splayed, draped corpses. "I didn't dream of seeing them myself, but I don't dream about everything. I guess that's a good thing."

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do," Freya tells her. "You can stay in the boat and float alongside while we work."

Angrboda's nod is slow. "I don't know yet. Is that okay?"

"Yes," says Kratos.

"I don't think he'd mind, though," Angrboda says, tucking her chin pensively against a drawn-up knee. "Moving his body, I mean. It's hard to explain. It's a feeling. Like I'm walking into a hall full of people, and there is a place set aside for Loki and me, and next to our places are smaller places, and they're waiting for us to make the table bigger so the small places can get bigger too. They're happy."

Mimir's voice is very soft lilt. "Well, now. That sounds the opposite of minding to me."

Angrboda shakes her head. "It's weird talking about this. And you all listen without me drawing and hiding it first. Good weird."

"You saved us all at Ragnarok with 'giant stuff'," Freya tells her. "There's no reason not to listen."

"I believe her majesty is rather curious what that giant stuff is, mind you," Mimir puts in.

There it is. How Freya didn't break a tooth in Odin's hall with this man constantly running his mouth, she'll never know. "Do I even have to ask who you take me for?"

"Your majesty?" He has the audacity to sound hurt of all things. "I just -"

"Enough," says Kratos.

Silence falls. Freya simmers, and tells herself not to. Mimir is trying to catch her eye and she refuses. Angrboda is shifting awkwardly.

"Small places," says Kratos into the quiet. Softly, with very careful emphasis. "You are sure?"

Angrboda's smile at him is brilliant with more than relief. "Yeah."

The lines around his eyes crinkle deep.

Freya cannot bear to witness his joy at the promise of grandchildren. She can't. She can't, and she faces away, out of the boat, concentrates on tracking their speed and direction, reckoning the distance.

"How much further, your majesty?" It's soft. Mimir at least lets it be known he knows when he fucked up. There was a time in Odin's hall she was grateful someone would tiptoe around her.

Be better, she tells herself. At least: she isn't there. She can act like it. "I don't know how it's reckoned in this realm. At home I'd say long as a wish-fly."

"Would that be anything like a shadowmark in Asgard, your majesty?"

"I think so," Freya concedes. She was never very clear on time in Asgard. Everything was told by a general sense of morning or night, Odin's whims, and little else.

"Wish-fly and shadowmark?" Angrboda asks.

"Ah, yes. Many ways to tell time and many places to tell it in is a bane of the unfortunately well-travelled! Asgard goes by - went by - a shadowclock by Odin's old lodge. The shadow would move from eighth to eighth. No landmarks to reckon by because of the wall, y'see, so I passed on a little something. Though I do think the general idea of shadowclocks at all came from your lands, brother."

"From mine, but did not begin there," says Kratos. "Another land."

"You'll tell me that story sometime, brother. How do you tell time in these parts, lassie?"

He's curious about this but Freya isn't going around comparing him to Odin, is she.

"I asked first," Angrboda has her head tilted, her face expectant. "What is a wish-fly?"

Freya forces herself to relax her jaw. Enough. The bodies - Vanaheim, Sif - her decision - she's on edge. She knows she's on edge. None of this agitation is meant for Angrboda. "A small insect in Vanaheim. It lives a very short life, and must find a mate and breed in that time, or its line dies. They are everywhere in Vanaheim. So we say, 'long as a wish-fly'. to mean not a whole day, but not half of it either." There was a time Freya envied them bitterly.

"And how does Vanaheim reckon a day, your majesty? Where I'm from it's sundown to sundown. Which caused some confusion for me in Asgard at first, I can tell you, brother. Forever getting mixed up about when was which!"

Freya isn't sure how to describe this. She isn't sure she wants to describe it. Especially not to Mimir.

For so long she treasured every scrap of her realm bitterly, fiercely. To speak of it now is difficult. And yet: she was in Vanaheim so recently its soil clings to her toes still. She was just there, and will be again. It is not necessary any longer. She knows so. And Mimir is sorry. He has made that clear. He is sorry.

But convincing herself of his remorse having any meaning is the harder task. "These days, it is when Skoll and Hati have both passed across the sky," she says grudgingly, repeating what Hildisvíni told her when she asked him about the wolves one of the times Kratos was busy requesting alterations at the forge like a tailor's fussiest customer.

It hurt that she had to be told.

"The length of a day was never set like other realms. In our language the speaker indicates which wolf begun their day and which will end it."

"Oh, that must make it very complicated when we call the wolves, then," Mimir says.

Once again Mimir proves himself cleverer than he is wise. "Complicated for Aesir," Freya says. "They will learn." It is a bitterness like a rotting tooth to know she is one of those who have to adjust.

"That sounds like a story to tell, your majesty?"

She smiles at him. "Vanaheim's stories aren't for you." And she doesn't know them anymore, and Mimir is the last person she would ever admit that to.

If a bodiless head could flinch, this one would. Freya is not ashamed of the pleasure she takes from it but neither is she proud. "I know I deserve your opprobrium, your majesty. But is this the time?"

"It isn't. I know." Freya exhales. "Someone else should talk, and we all know it won't be you, Kratos. And not one of your stories."

"Hm," says Kratos.

"He is getting better at them, your majesty!" Mimir says. "Marginally."

"Hrm," says Kratos.

Freya considers Angrboda, but… she knows very well herself how it is to be the one left holding the conversation, steering awkward depths that aren't hers to help or claim. It isn't a good thing to do to the girl. Some other subject -

"Actually, lassie, I asked before - how would you say how long our journey is? In Giant reckoning, I mean."

Well, then.

Angrboda hums to herself, scratching her chin with her thumb. "Giants don't really care about time. Things happen as they happen, in the order they happen. When they happen isn't the important part. It's… ages ago, or sometime from now. Big stuff." She gestures to the far-off mountain and its lonely hand. "This doesn't count as time. It's just going from one place to another place."

"Essentially, if I'm understanding you right, lassie, we get there when we get there?"

She shrugs. "It's not even when. We just will. The distance is three of Idis' footsteps. We'll make it."

Mimir grumbles to himself. "No wonder they were always late! Oh, very friendly, the Giants, and precise where they wanted to be, but the absolute opposite of punctual. It makes vastly more sense now. And I think the days are far longer here as well! No wonder, indeed…"

Freya privately thinks it explains a good deal about how many giants were caught short of taking refuge in Jotunheim. She always thought they would have had plenty of time to escape and bide away the ages; that the ones killed were an aberration, stragglers, the ones who wouldn't have been much use in war anyhow.

But if time was not an urgency to the Giants, if its movement in other realms fluttered past them as flies, it must have been a surprise to be rushed and slaughtered by Thor's hammer. They were warned, but how could the warning have had meaning? No wonder Atreus told her there were no giants left. That his mother was the last in Midgard.

No. It is Thrúd's hammer now. What a legacy that thing holds. Freya carries her sword as hers, claimed their wedding blade for her own. It sealed their union and her future and a cascade of terrible regrets. But it wasn't made to kill Giants. It wasn't used to kill a race and further the ambition of a man who built a realm out of living bones, and Jotunheim is so terribly empty below them. Animals call and birds rustle and trees sway and there are no voices to stir the air but their own.

Mjolnir as a Valkyrie's weapon?... She can't imagine it. Thrúd will have to be so gentle, so careful, and it isn't that she doubts the girl could, but - to perpetually bundle yourself against what you are of your own will so that others will not fear you more than they hear you - Freya knows the cost and exhaustion. It will be such a difficult journey and Thrúd, too, is alone.

So many lonely and burdened successors in this beyond-the-end-of-all-things they're living in. Thrúd and her father's legacy and weapon; Angrboda and her desolate realm; Skjöldr the jarlsson leading his mother's people; and sweet Atreus who has gone off alone to find whatever it he is looking for wherever it may be. Sindri who is now last of the Huldra Brothers. Last of his clan altogether.

She was Queen of the Valkyries, once. Queen of all the realms, whatever that really meant in the end. She will speak to Sigrun and Eir, and see what more can be done to make it known there will be, is, aid for them.

"I don't know what that face means," Freya hears Angrboda murmur. "Is it… good?"

"Her majesty's hard at work, is what that face means, lassie," Mimir says, equally hushed.

As if they aren't all sharing the same small boat. As if there is anything here to cover the sound of their voices. As if she can't hear them. "I'm right here. And yes. I am."

That was the one thing she ever, ever appreciated about Mimir during those fucking negotiations. Brow-beating, more like. Bribery. Cajoling. Her people saw the entire proposal as a kind of encroaching evil, and she didn't disagree with them. She was wary, of course she was.

But there were times between council and warfront when she would collapse cross-legged in a hollow of grasses and vines and set her dirty chin in her bloodied hands and think as intensely and deeply as she could, wrapping herself in a silence equal to the roar in her ears.

It was always Mimir who bothered to stop and peer at her face and back away with a murmured apologies, your majesty that she only half-registered after he'd already left. Everyone else was so used to interrupting her they never bothered to notice they did, Freyr foremost among them.

That's the other half of it. Vanaheim without her brother. Without knowing he's coming back or coming home or he's just off picking his own silly herbs for the experience, sis, it's important! when she knew and he knew he was tumbling a girl in the long soft grasses behind the family temple. Vanaheim, interrupted by that laugh and swaying stride and silly ideas no longer. That fool. Her fool of a brother.

Freya knows herself well enough to know she does not do well alone. Her mind turns on itself as it did for a hundred years. As it continues to do. As it wants to do until there is nothing left of her.

There is so little of her now.

"Freya," says Kratos.

Coming back to herself is a rush of light and soft clouds and approaching peaks, and she shudders, stretches her elbows and works herself free of the fog in her ears. Her mind is one of those places too dangerous to linger. "I'm all right."

"If you're sure," Mimir says.

She glares at him, irritation winding her shoulders tight, and notes that the mountains are much closer now. She's lost time, and now she doesn't know what happened while she was distracted. But she was safe enough to be that distracted because she knows Kratos would let nothing happen to her. Freya cannot bring herself to be grateful for the fact. "I know myself best, Mimir."

"There you are, your majesty! I for one was becoming a mite concerned. I made a joke and you didn't scoff! Quite unusual."

Freya scrubs her knuckles over her eyes. "Is it so impossible I might have thoughts of my own about our situation? My situation?" she snaps.

"Of course not, your majesty." He's very quiet. Nearly soothing. "Even with prophecy and fates and what have you, almost all of Ragnarok was entirely unexpected."

Mimir being kind to her sets her teeth. "I don't mean Ragnarok. Some things seem to be eternal."

"Freya," says Kratos again. "Our promise holds."

Why does he understand her.

It should not help to have a place to flee to as if Vanaheim is an enemy and not her own. It should not help that he calls it a choice.

It helps so, so much. Kratos will keep it for her, as he keeps Sindri's house, as he keeps the cabin in Midgard. Freya has learned he is good at keeping things which are precious to others. "I know. I appreciate it more than you know."

"Mhm," says Kratos.

"Am I missing something?" Angrboda asks.

This is Freya's burden to bear, and thus hers to explain. "I was also made responsible for a realm. I was away for a long time, first by choice and then put in a place I could not leave," her most careful gloss over all that was done to her, "and now that I have chosen to return, it is difficult. I value my realm. I also value my freedom." It sounds so very simple a dilemma when she puts it that way.

Angrboda is studying her. "You couldn't leave?"

"I was bound to Midgard," Freya says with as little hatred as she can manage.

"For ages," Angrboda says thoughtfully, slowly, "I waited for Loki in the Ironwood. It was my part of his story and I thought that was the only thing that could be important about me. So I had to be here. For my people, I thought. And now that he's been here, I can go and write my own stories about myself, but… it's still my responsibility." She shrugs, twisting to lean over the side of the boat again, and once again Freya puts her hand reflexively on her shoulder to steady her. "Stories don't feed the animals or check the rivers or make sure Jalla hasn't got herself stuck in a hill."

"Stories feed the soul and spirit, lassie, the heart and hearth of us all!" Mimir says. "True, they aren't edible as such - not in the usual way of things - but they're important. They should be had to be told as well as dreamed, eh? I'm sure we can think of something to relieve your duties from time to time. I am the smartest man alive."

Angrboda raises her eyebrows at Freya. There is a sceptical tilt to her eyebrows, and sunny mischief to her smile, and Freya has a dizzying whirl of future knowing that oh, Atreus, that sweet boy growing to a man, he will love this girl growing to womanhood, and she him, and the tales spun of their love will span all the realms as Jormungandr once encircled Midgard.

As the tale of her and Odin's… love, once did. But theirs is not to be that.

"So he says," Freya says, the skin of her arms prickling, a crawl through her scalp like a ruffling wind. "But this time he has a point. We cannot trade realms," she says slowly, "and I don't want to, but we do like visiting, Angrboda. Not only you, but the realm. If you could show us your duties so we know them, then in your absences we can look after them for you. If you're willing to trust us that far."

"I wouldn't be gone long," Angrboda says, half-longing, half-protest. "Just what I dream about. To see for myself, like this." She gestures to the mountain range approaching. "It feels important to go places and find new pigments and just, do things."

"It is important," Freya says. She thinks the Norns wouldn't be such cunts if they sniffed more than their own farts and that of the kelpie; but she keeps that thought very private in its bitterness.

"Did you know they have a really nice orange in Nidavellir? But I've never seen it." The longing in her voice is painful, and Angrboda peers into Kratos' face. "You don't mind?"

It is no surprise Angrboda gives Svartalfheim its true name. Brok would like her, Freya thinks, and though she didn't know him well the thought still aches with rightness.

And - that is true. Freya will be occupied in Vanaheim; and Mimir is quite literally attached to Kratos' belt when he is not with Sigrun, and Sigrun herself is very preoccupied these days. Freya is not so much speaking for them as she is offering his service, and that - she wasn't thinking. She remembers the deep fury when he refused to be told to kill for her.

It occurs to her that she has a habit of doing this. Another bad habit to catch and break.

"You will guide us. If I do not remember well, Mimir will," says Kratos with a surety Freya is learning to understand as kindness.

"Aye, that's a promise and a fact, lassie!"

Angrboda grins at them, brighter than the gold she wears, and turns back to the mountain. "They look so peaceful. I thought I was just dreaming it. But they really do, don't they?"

Freya looks toward the mountain again, truly looks at it, those gently curled fingers beckoning to the sky as if ready to cradle all the sun's finery. As if deliberately placed as a guide for Angrboda to go to someday, to find the right cave in the right mountain.

And all around that landmark hand, armour shining among clouds, and leathers of ancient animals dark as good loam. Silvers and bronzes and the shaved heads of Jotun warriors. All the serene dead faces variously upraised, downturned, lingering as if closing their eyes for a moment.

All those corpses. There are so many, and she knows those insignia, knows the patterns of tooling and decoration as ally and enemy both. These were - not kings, Giants didn't hold with the concept of kings, Odin once told her with very great frustration - but paramount, the first among their own.

"Atreus saw this," Freya says, not quite asking. The peak of the highest mountain, wasn't it, and if she raises to her knees, checks the sight-lines -

It's Mimir who answers softly, sadly. "Aye."

"He went to look for Giants, didn't he," Freya says, helpless with recognition. There are so, so many.

"Aye. How could he not? Oh, little brother, such a sight…"

"See," Angrboda says, "I told him you'd understand why he went."

Kratos hums, and the resonance of it draws Freya from wishing to hold Atreus' face in her hands one last time. From dwelling on the sole visible corpse with fabric and hair, dressed as a seeress, perhaps the last they had, the one who saw them all fall. "In my land hope was the most powerful weapon of the gods," says Kratos. "But the one who carries it must also give it. So it is with Atreus."

"Oh, honestly, the way you leave out the important bits when you might be even a little bit embarrassed. It was you who had it and you gave it all back!"

"Not all," says Kratos with unfair unwavering calm. "If I had, I would not have such friends now."

Freya is speechless enough to swallow hard. What does that mean - what is she even meant to say - she thought he would be angry with her.

"Love you too, brother," Mimir says as if he is used to the quietest god she knows also being the most sentimental.

"Mm," says Kratos. Sentimentally.

Unbearable.

"Oh look, we're here. Hello, uncle-in-law! We're going to move you now!" Angrboda sits back on her heels. "I know he isn't there, but it just feels polite. Oh, and uncle-in-law, these are my friends Kratos and Freya and Mimir."

She has not been someone's friend so casually introduced in… so long. So very long. "Hello, Angrboda's uncle-in-law," she says reflexively, then feels silly.

Less so when Angrboda squeezes her hand tightly and leans out too far again. "Do you think we could sit in his hand?"

They've drifted to just beside the curve of massive fingers. Below them the long back, a mountainside in itself, curves strangely as if he were dead before he fell.

"I am quite sure we could, but whether we should is the question here," Mimir says. "Feels a wee bit disrespectful, doesn't it, brother?"

"I do not know your ways," says Kratos to Angrboda.

Freya notes that the Giant whose name she still doesn't know and may never will, had very tidy fingernails. It's an absurd detail. But his nails are trimmed with no dirt beneath, and she wonders who did it, how they did it. If somewhere in this massive empty realm is a nail file the size of a dragon, clippings piled in yellowing lagoons.

"I don't think he'd mind, but maybe after," Angrboda muses, and leans on Kratos to point past him. "See the other one there? There's a gap he can fall into. I think. My dream wasn't so cloudy. And you can push from down there, do you see? That part should be solid."

"Yes," says Kratos, peering down along her outstretched arm. "I will manage. You will direct?" he asks her, asks Freya.

Freya flexes her fingers, feels her magic thrum against the old slow heart-song of this realm. "Yes," she says. "But I don't know how stable the mountain will be."

"You will remain in the boat. I will push, then jump," says Kratos.

Angrboda shows her palms, stained with gold and vivid blue. "I'll catch you!"

"The boat will catch me," says Kratos, sounding the way he does when Freya suspects him of actually having a sense of humour.

"I'm strong," Angrboda says, not quite arguing, but mulish. "I could."

"You do not need to prove yourself," says Kratos. He leans over the edge of the boat, then huffs a nod at something Freya can't see. "Watch for my signal." He jumps over the side into the clouds without further discussion or warning or anything at all.

She blinks at where Kratos just was in the boat. Freya is very strongly reminded of Freyr promising it'll be fine! You'll see! and promptly getting himself into trouble. But Freyr had the decency to scream when he pulled shit like this so she could at least track his direction.

"Oh, one of these days he'll break a leg, that'll show him to stop doing that," Mimir grouses. "'I am not reckless', my treebound left tit!"

Angrboda giggles. "It's not recklessness if he can't die from anything he does to himself," she says, matter-of-fact as if it isn't eerily, terribly, horribly familiar.

She is frozen, and it is not the cold of flying so high.

Mimir is, for a spell, just as quiet as the stunned inside of her mind. "What does that mean, lassie?"

"Oh. You don't know? It might've been a vision thing." She taps her lower lip, leaning out to look below them. "It means something like, if he hit the ground he'd still be alive for us to find. Or if he hit the wrong side of the mountain or something. He's under a lot of curses," far too cheerful for the subject, and she cups her hands over her eyes. "I don't see a signal yet."

Is that why. Is that. Is that why Kratos - because he understood her son so much more than she even ever thought -

Baldur's dying relief loops in her head. That look again and again.

Cursed, Freya thinks hollowly. The letters inked scarlet into Baldur's back, the faded red of Kratos' tattoo.

How does Kratos call her friend? How?

"Freya? Are you okay?"

She jolts and pulls her hand away from her throat. Even now she feels as an exact guide the shape of his thumb, the weakness he always had in his third finger on his right hand after he cut his hand on her eating-knife. It was her knife. He was in her lap and he reached for it and she was distracted by something Odin said to her, and the guilt when he wailed and bled and threw himself back against her, face tilted up in such a pained bawl -

The guilt, and the Norns, and -

"Your majesty," Mimir says, terribly kind.

"I," she starts, and shakes herself. Angrboda has asked for their help, not for Freya to collapse before the task is even half-done, and she draws a deep breath. "No signal yet, you said?"

"I don't see it," Angrboda reports. "But I heard you have really good eyes."

"That her majesty does, lassie!" Mimir sounds relieved to have something to talk about. "Infamous during the war for never missing a shot!"

It used to be she was proud of her image as a warrior who never made a mistake. Grievously proud. All her old mistakes clog sour as old blood in her throat.

Freya is too sore at heart to speak, and she watches below instead. There is a part of her which finds it very easy to stop thinking of the body as a body but more like a natural formation, a carving weather-worn. There is another part of her that is bothered by the personhood of the corpse: their neatly cropped beard, their lashes the length of Odin's hall, the rumpled hem of their sleeve. Not a fighter.

And on the side of the mountain, moving from corpse to rock and back again, glimmers of flame, a small moving figure descending to the shoulder. Kratos. "I see him," Freya says, and readies herself.

That which she did with Thamur was desperation. Ragged and poorly aimed. The magic shapes itself differently to her hands now that she is clearheaded and not fighting Odin's geas. It is reluctant; it does not want to touch this corpse, and yet when forced it cleaves to the structure of its body as if made for it. Waiting within it, within her. "Which way, Angrboda?"

"That way," Angrboda says, Skidbladnir drifting agreeably as she points again and they float down past the curved fingers, past the bicep encircled in a chased silver band decorated with wolves. "Do you need a different angle?"

Freya squints, relaxes, squints again. It's difficult in the fog, but she sees where Angrboda intends for the body to land; a curving valley, possibly formed of some other corpse's askew legs, that will accommodate a shoulder and most of the corpse's back. Given enough force and direction he will land clear of the mountain entirely. "No. I see it."

There is the bright flare of one of Kratos' blades, shining fire slicing through fog, and Freya gathers herself against the slow drifting pulse of Jotunheim, winds herself within this remnant of one of its favoured children, and bids it to, with all gentleness, lay itself down in the cradle Angrboda has chosen.

Her request is gentle. Her magic has never been gentle and never will be. She calls upon it, lifts bones as if they are feathers and slips hooks beneath skin as if it is still-living flesh, and against her magic the force of Kratos' strength is a kind of bruising imperative to move. A god's command.

The mountain shakes and rumbles and the body begins to move. Slowly at first, arm slipping down the cliff-face. It slows as it reaches zenith, a slight sway as if it might fall back after all, and Freya pushes her magic at its uncertain caught balance and tells it here, go here.

It is not a graceful fall. Some unseen metal on its chest screeches so loudly her eyes wobble in their sockets and her jaw aches, scree following as its shirt snags and pulls free in a spray of avalanche.

Angrboda is shouting. "Jump! You have to jump!"

The corpse slides further and faster, falling beneath its own weight, dragging half the mountain with it, and Freya has a moment of realising Kratos is not in the boat, of realising this is not going to end well, that there is no choice.

It is not a moment long enough to find Kratos in this breaking mountain. It is a moment long enough to catch Angrboda still-shouting against her chest and grip Mimir's screaming head in her fist and brace her back against what feels to be the fall of the sun, so overwhelming the rumble, so dark it becomes behind her shut eyes.

For a time all the world is plumes of dust, thunderous rockslides and stinging pebbles, groans of leather on stone that sound eerily alive as other corpses shift on their mountainous graves. For a time she wonders if they will survive this, if Skidbladnir will come through this intact, if they are at good enough distance that nothing will hit them. If Kratos will survive.

Angrboda is breathing unevenly against her arm as if she is speaking. Mimir is spitting and yelling. Freya's hearing is muffled and she cannot pick out their words.

Slowly, the filter of her lids begins to show through yellow. Slowly she can no longer hear thunder-that-is-not. Slowly she convinces herself to unclasp her hands, to straighten and look around at what they have wrought.

The mountain has split nearly in half, and in that gap is a cave network beautiful and magnificent as any Freya has ever seen. Luminescence shines at the mouths and blue and white stone riven the broken faces, glittering green as sunlight on rippling seas.

A worthy birthplace for the children of giants.

Skidbladnir is full of broken rocks, pebbles for the most part, piled around them and at the prow, and Freya grits her teeth as sharp edges dig into her shins. She can't see much below but murk and rock, made worse by more lines of that dazzling stone strewn everywhere and distracting her eyes. "Kratos?" Angrboda calls. "Can you hear us?"

She will not panic. If she is to trust a curse, so be it - she has done that before, has she not? She will trust one again.

From within one of those deep mouths hewn fresh, a glimmer of flame, and Freya sits back on her heels careless of points and edges as Kratos appears, blade held aloft as a torch. There is a sinking in her gut, an urgency in her palms. Part of her wishes to take aim and shoot him with her biggest, most powerful sigil and blast him backwards. Part of her wishes to lie down as if these rocks are comfortable and gasp for a very long time.

"He's okay," Angrboda says with no small relief.

"Think my body shat itself," Mimir cries. "Think I bloody felt it dribbling down my leg!"

Freya is not sure what she is feeling. She is not sure it is relief. Skidbladnir glides gently toward those faces, and they are broad, magnificent things, gold and red and silver caught within the details of those weaving glittering lines. A mountain's worth of jewels.

The abundant wealth of Jotunheim. Freya always heard of the Giants' riches, but to see for herself in its raw form…

Angrboda cups her hands around her mouth; the caves throw back her voice in rippling echoes. "Kratos! Are you okay?"

Kratos lowers his blade as they approach. "Is this the mountain your vision saw?"

"Exactly like it!" Angrboda exults, and she throws herself across at him, taking his hands. "You did it!"

"Are you quite fucking sure you're well, brother?" Mimir still sounds panicked, and Freya realises she hasn't turned him to face Kratos, that he has no idea what she's seeing. She doesn't have Kratos' knack of knowing when to lift him into landscape and conversation.

Freya hastily turns him around so he can get a good look.

Mimir makes a wrenching sound. "You're bloody batfuck, you know that?"

"Brother. Calm yourself," says Kratos. He seems not to know what to do with Angrboda's hands on his. "You are not hurt?"

"We're okay," Angrboda says. "Freya protected us."

He meets her eyes then, and there is something complicated and grateful in his face that she could wish to understand someday. But she does, doesn't she? She protected Angrboda and by protecting her, the children she speaks of. Atreus' children. His grandchildren. She would look like that too, if someone - "Of course," she tells him. The sight of him well and whole has made her a little dizzy. "Of course I did."

"Yes," says Kratos as if he never had a doubt, this - this arrogant bastard, and he pulls his hands free and kneels, shifting rocks. "It is not damaged?"

"It's a good boat," Angrboda says, patting Skidbladnir's side. "If you fold it up, maybe?"

"Yes," says Kratos again, and Freya takes his hand to get out of the boat, Mimir still clutched in her fist. She stands for a moment - she is blocking the boat, and she shouldn't, she is holding onto him, and she shouldn't, but that moment when she thought maybe and all she knew was desolation -

"So, do you all want to go back to my treehouse?" Angrboda breaks in. "I don't think it's safe to go see my cave yet, it's a lot further in."

"That's an excellent idea, lassie," Mimir says. "I for one could use some old-fashioned adventures after all that. Irritating creatures attacking from behind, chests to punch…"

Angrboda shrugs. "I don't know about chests in the Ironwood. I think Loki found most of them already."

"Oh, I wouldn't underestimate brother's nose for treasure," Mimir says, sounding much better. "You have no idea the places we go and yet it's always the same. Completely off the wrong path, utterly without reason for any interest whatsoever, and lo and behold, what does he find? A chest!"

Angrboda pries Mimir's ropes from her fingers. "Maybe we can find one?"

"Don't go far," Freya calls reflexively.

"Do not wander," says Kratos at the same time.

They stare at each other, and it is Mimir who laughs first. "The habits of parenthood, wouldn't you say, lassie?"

"I'll be careful," she says, looking between them with a face Freya doesn't understand. Kind, perhaps. "Mimir, how much do you know about rock?"

"Oh, well, that depends on the state of the rock, and its particular shiny qualities, I'd say…"

Freya watches them go a little deeper until Angrboda's tunic is a faint blue shadow among glitter and what may be mushrooms or slime, but either way glowing a similarly deep blue. Is that where the pigment comes from, for the bright splashes Angrboda so favours?

Kratos is still holding onto her, and she him. She still wants to fire him into the back of the mountain. Through it. Into another mountain, and perhaps through that one too. She wants -

"You did well," says Kratos, as if what he thinks of her magic has ever been the point of anything.

Something in her shakes, and she has had enough. "Do not let us lose you!" she barks. She feels like Fenrir, larger than herself, claws and piercing beak and the urge to rip Kratos in two, to scratch out his eyes and chew his tongue and peck his liver. "Do not."

He meets her eyes with that firmness he carries about himself. "I frightened you."

"I didn't mean me," Freya snaps, lying wildly and also not lying now that her thoughts are racing. "Think how Angrboda would have felt! And if she had to explain to Atreus how she got you killed. Do you think I want to go back to Vanaheim without you?"

"I am not dead. Or hurt," says Kratos. He ducks his head a very little to hold her gaze. There is something about the way he carries himself near her that has always made her feel very tall. "If I were, the fault would be mine. Not yours."

She stares back at him and tries to gather herself. Tries. She feels as threads tangling round her fingers. Freya can't - how would it not be her fault - it was her magic. Again. Her chest aches. "Don't make me watch you die too, Kratos. Don't." Freya doesn't bother to pretend she is not giving an order. His resilience was easier to deal with when she hated him and wanted him dead.

His hand comes to her shoulder, the other gripping her forearm. His eyes are very yellow and very deep. His skin is the heat of a living flame beneath her palm. "I will not," says Kratos.

She just watched him drop half a mountain on himself and she still wants to believe him. Does that make him the fool, or her?