The dungeons of Asgard were golden too, in their own way. Clean light, immaculate stone floors, endless rows of cells faced with humming magical barriers, everything bright and pitiless as noon.
The place came alive as the new stock was marched in.
It was the same every time. The old prisoners came up to the shimmering walls to watch the new ones go past, and jeered, and rattled what could be rattled. It was the only entertainment the place offered.
Loki lay on his bench with a book open on his knee.
He had a fine cell. Furniture, and light, and a rug, and books brought down twice a week by a servant who could not meet his eyes. Frigga's doing, all of it. He had never once thanked her for any of it, and never once refused it either.
"Odin continues to bring me new friends," he said softly, turning a page. "How thoughtful."
Nobody laughed. The guards had heard the same joke every single time.
The chained line went past his cell without paying him any attention at all, which stung more than the jeering ever had.
The masked one came last, and Loki finally glanced up from his book.
It was not the mask, although the mask was a piece of theatre he privately approved of. It was the walk. Loki had spent a lifetime studying the difference between men who had been caught and men who had arrived, and he had never once seen the second kind in chains.
The masked head turned as it passed. Loki looked into two dark slots in bone-white plate and got nothing back at all.
Then the guards moved him along and put him in a cell at the far end, and he stood in the middle of it with his hands at his sides and did not sit down.
"Well," said Loki, to nobody. "You are ghastly."
He had gone back to his book when the air in the cell changed, and he knew instantly, without looking up, exactly who had come.
"The books I sent. Do they interest you?"
He did not turn around.
"Is that how I am to spend eternity? Reading?"
"I have done everything in my power to make you comfortable."
"Have you." He closed the book on one finger. "Then give me my magic back. That is all I ask. Not the throne. I find I no longer want the throne, which should tell you something about the state of me."
He stood up, finally, and turned to face her.
"A full year in this fragile body. It gets cold. Did you know that? Of course you didn't. It gets cold, and it gets tired at the wrong hours, and every morning there is a little less of me than there was the day before. Nobody warned me that is was what mortality is. A slow leak in everything."
"And still," Frigga said softly, "it was mercy."
"Mercy."
"You brought an army to a world that had done you no harm, and on the top of it you went after Arthur's family." Frigga's voice did not rise. "He was owed your life, Loki. He chose to take your magic instead."
Something went across Loki's face, and whatever correction was behind it, he did not make it.
"Then he should have taken my life."
It came out of him raw, and he hated it the instant it was out. He turned away and made himself go quiet.
"At least that has an ending."
"Then blame me." She said it simply. "He would have ended you that day. He stopped because I had asked him to. If your weakness has an author, she is standing right here."
Loki said nothing. He found he could not.
"And it is not a sentence without a door," Frigga went on. "You know the binding can be undone. Arthur built it the way your father built the working on Thor's hammer. It will open itself, in its own time, when the condition is met. You have only to understand the lesson it was made to teach you."
Loki sneered and paced away from the barrier.
"Oh, the great lesson. I understand it perfectly." He spread his hands. "I am to find some mortal woman, fall hopelessly in love, and die in a picturesque fashion saving her and a village full of people whose names I will not trouble to learn. I am to become worthy."
He turned back around, his eyes blazing.
"Shall I begin at once? Send me up to Midgard. There is very little to work with down here."
Frigga was quiet for a moment, and something in her face said she regretted the comparison she had drawn.
"Is that what you understood it to mean?"
Loki stopped pacing.
"You have told me all your life that you were the clever one. Since you were six years old you have told me you were quicker than your brother, and that it was not close." She held his eyes. "And I have never once argued with you, Loki. Because it has always been true."
He waited, because there was obviously more, and because he already knew he was not going to like it.
"Your brother worked his lesson out in three days."
It went directly into his chest, cutting deeper than anything she had said all evening.
"No magic. No hammer. No wise counsel, and nobody in the Nine Realms helping him." Her voice stayed gentle, which made it worse. "Three days. You have had a year, and you have not yet found the right question. Let alone the answer."
"Then tell me the question."
"If I tell you, the lock can never open." She smiled at him, and there was grief all through it. "That is the cruelty of this kind of lock. And its mercy. Nobody can hand you the key. Not I, not Odin, not the man who made it. You will find it alone, or you will not find it."
"Then I will rot here."
"Perhaps."
She reached out, and her hand passed an inch above his cheek, close enough that he could pretend.
"But I sat with the man who forged that lock, and he told me he believes you will open it." Her hand fell away. "He is not a man who believes things carelessly."
Loki's mouth twisted.
"And why should the mage believe anything at all about me?"
"He did not say." Frigga stepped back, and the light of her began to soften at the edges. "But I know why I do."
Then she was gone, and the projection dissolved into mist, and the cell was very quiet again.
For the first time since his capture, the silver-tongued God of Mischief had nothing left to say.
He sat back down with the book and did not read it.
Around him the dungeon settled toward its long artificial night. The jeering wore itself out. The arrivals learned the shapes of their cells, and found the bench, and lay down on it, because there was nothing else to do and a year is a very long time when you are counting it.
All of them but one.
At the far end of the row, in a cell like all the others, the prisoner in the horned mask stood exactly where the guards had left him. He had not touched the bench. He had not touched the walls. He had not made a single sound.
He was extremely good at waiting in the dark.