Frigga had her sword up and the magical working half-built that would finish the beast the moment it came back through the wall.
Then she saw what it was carrying.
Frigga went rigid. The glowing sword in her hand trembled.
Algrim held Loki out in front of him at arm's length, the way a man holds up a lantern. The former prince's fine leather was torn open across the chest. Blood ran down his face from somewhere in his hair. His feet were a foot off the ground and going nowhere.
He looked at his mother, and there was nothing in his green eyes but the plain terror of a man who was about to die and had no clever way out of it.
"The Aether." Algrim's voice went through the floorboards. "Tell me where it is, witch."
Frigga said nothing.
"Tell me, or I break his neck."
And Loki, hanging helplessly in the air with a hand around his throat, understood the whole shape of the situation all at once.
He had come up here simply because he was worried about her. He had climbed six floors of a burning palace on legs that could barely carry him, for no reason but that. He had known he could not help. He had told himself it did not matter, that he only wanted to see her, that his uselessness was harmless.
It was not harmless.
He had walked into the one room in Asgard where his mother could not lose, and he had handed the enemy the only thing in the Nine Realms that could make her.
He got his fingers desperately around the beast's thumb and pulled. Nothing moved. He stopped trying.
"Mother," he managed. It came out as almost nothing. "Don't—"
"Loki." Her voice did not shake. "Be quiet, my son. This will be over shortly."
Then she looked at the thing holding him, and something went out of her face that had never been in it in his lifetime.
"Put my son down."
"The Aether." Algrim's grip tightened, and Loki made a strangled sound that was not a word. "Now."
Frigga did not negotiate. She did not consider it for so much as a single heartbeat.
She threw her free hand forward, and a needle of golden force went through the room and struck the beast's wrist, and the gauntlet on it went white hot in an instant.
Algrim roared in agony. His hand snapped open.
Loki hit the marble and stayed there, hauling air into his burning lungs in great tearing gulps.
And before the Kursed could get his feet back under him, the Queen of Asgard stopped holding anything back.
Golden fire came off her in waves and broke over him. Blades of hard light opened his molten skin in a dozen places. She drove him back across the ruined chamber a step at a time and did not give him one moment in which to do anything but survive her, and she did it in silence, which was somehow the worst part of it.
Loki got himself behind a fallen slab of masonry, coughing violently, one hand still clutching his bruised throat.
From there, he watched.
He watched his mother fight the creature. He saw her robes singe. He saw her take a heavy blow to the shoulder that made her wince in pain. She had stopped defending herself properly. Every angle she chose, every step she gave up, all of it was arranged around protecting one specific corner of the room.
And he was in it.
He felt unimaginably small. He felt completely useless. He was a god of Asgard, a conqueror of worlds, a master of magic. And now he was reduced to a shivering hostage cowering behind a rock while his mother bled for his own stupid mistakes.
Do something.
Loki reached for his magic.
The seal sat where it had sat for a year. Smooth. Total. Signed by a mortal wizard on a summer afternoon.
You wanted me to learn something. He threw it at the absent wizard with everything he had. I am learning it. I am learning it right now, watching her bleed for me. Is this the lesson? Take it back and give me one minute of what is mine—
Nothing answered.
Of course nothing answered. The lock did not open for rage. He had spent the whole first month proving that.
He did not stop. He desperately wanted his magic back. He needed it back right now to save her. Not be a burden. He screamed for it in the emptiness of his mind, but nothing answered. There was only the cold, hard reality of his own pathetic frailty.
Then the backhand came, and she did not slip it.
She could have. He knew she could have, because he had watched her slip forty of them in the last two minutes. But slipping this one would have opened the line to his corner, so she took it across the ribs instead. She went down hard into the broken floor and came up with blood at her mouth and her blade already moving.
"Mother—"
"Stay down, Loki."
He stayed down.
He knelt behind a rock, prince of nothing, breakable and bound, and watched his mother buy his life an injury at a time, and something in his chest ground against the ice over and over like a man beating on a frozen lake with his bare, bloody hands.
Then the Kursed stopped trying to hit her.
He turned on the room instead.
He drove his fists into the load-bearing pillars, and the ancient stone cracked and gave way. He went through the ceiling supports next. The vaulted roof groaned above them, and chunks of marble and gold began to come down in pieces across the whole chamber.
Then Algrim tore a slab out of the falling ceiling and threw it at the corner where Loki was hiding.
Loki looked up and saw it coming, and put his arms over his head, which he knew perfectly well was useless.
He was going to die on a floor, under a rock, because he had climbed six flights of stairs to look at his mother.
A blur of gold moved right in front of him.
Frigga came across the room and threw a shield over her son. The slab burst apart against it, and the sheer weight of the impact drove her down onto one knee.
The dome held.
It was exactly the opening Algrim had created.
With the Queen anchored to the floor and both hands committed to maintaining the shield, the Kursed came. He crossed the wreckage in a single bound with his fists up for the killing stroke.
Frigga dropped the shield, rose gracefully, and met him. Her sword came up and caught his right arm, and the blow stopped four inches from her son's face.
But this had been Algrim's true plan all along.
With her blade locked against his right arm, Algrim stepped inside her guard.
A jagged blade of black necrotic light shot suddenly out of his left gauntlet.
He drove it into her chest.
The golden sword clattered uselessly to the marble floor.