By dawn, the palace had remembered how to look ceremonial about departures.
The Bifrost courtyard always did. It was one of the few places in Asgard where private feeling and public function had been forced to share architecture so long they had stopped pretending not to know each other. The great carved span opened toward the bridge in a long curve of white-gold stone, banners shifting high above in the cold early light, the air carrying the mineral bite of the falls and the fainter sharper scent of polished metal from the guard posts along the outer line.
The city beyond had not fully woken yet.
That made it worse.
Erikar preferred departures when the realm was already loud enough to hide inside. Morning gave too much shape to things. Servants crossing lower terraces before the first bells. Stable hands guiding horses under blue-grey sky. The first faint smoke from the lower quarter rising in straight thin lines before the wind chose what to do with it. A kingdom not yet armored into the day.
He stood at the edge of the courtyard steps with a light travel case in one hand and no escort visible around him except the two Bifrost guards whose presence belonged more to the bridge than to him. The diplomatic packet Odin had provided the night before sat inside the case untouched beyond the outer summary sheet. Midgardian factions. Trade influence. Internal instability. Carefully useful and almost certainly less important than the fact of the assignment itself.
The object Loki had left rested in the hidden inner pocket of his travel coat.
He had considered, before sleeping and again before dawn, leaving it behind.
He had not.
That decision now moved under everything else, quiet enough to pass for habit if one did not look at it too directly.
A wind from the bridge struck across the courtyard and found the opening at his throat. Cold enough to clarify. Good.
He had arrived early on purpose.
Partly because lateness, even ceremonial lateness, would have invited comments from the guards and some lesser palace officer whose understanding of punctuality had become his only surviving contribution to statecraft. Partly because he wanted one uninterrupted minute in the courtyard before the family came and turned departure into meaning.
He almost got it.
Footsteps crossed the upper stone behind him with all the restraint Thor ever managed before sunrise, which meant just enough noise to announce he had not intended stealth and did not regret the failure of it.
"Tell me you have not been standing here alone trying to become tragic."
Erikar did not turn immediately.
"I have been standing here alone trying to leave."
"Yes," Thor said, coming up beside him. "That is what I said."
Erikar looked over.
Thor had not bothered with formal court layers. Good. He wore travel leathers under a fur-trimmed mantle thrown on too quickly to sit properly across one shoulder, hair still half-damp from whatever rushed attempt he had made to look less recently awake than he clearly was. He carried no cup, which in itself suggested virtue at this hour. He also carried no weapon larger than the side blade at his hip, which suggested Frigga had either intervened or lost a battle she had known better than to start.
Thor looked down at the travel case. Then at him. Then beyond him toward the bridge with the expression of a man offended by the concept of measured departure.
"You truly are going to Midgard."
"That was the assignment."
"It remains a poor one."
"That sounds dangerously like criticism of royal judgment."
"It is criticism of timing," Thor said, then glanced at him sidelong. "Which is a more survivable hobby."
The line landed because it was true.
Erikar rested the travel case beside the lower step and looked out over the Bifrost. The bridge gleamed under the pale morning light, gold and impossible, stretching toward the observatory like something permanence had built when it briefly mistook itself for art.
Thor followed his gaze.
For a while neither spoke.
It was not the easy silence from the western parapet. This one had a departure in it and both knew it.
At length Thor said, "How long."
"As long as the matter requires."
Thor made a face. "You sound like Father."
"Then I have already failed the realm."
That won a brief laugh from him. Brief enough that the cold took it quickly.
Thor folded his arms and looked down into the waking city below the terraces. "I dislike this."
"Because it is Midgard."
"No." He paused. "Because it is neat."
Interesting.
Erikar waited.
Thor's jaw shifted once, not with anger. With the effort of saying a thing before it arranged itself into a joke to avoid the cost of being spoken plainly.
"We return from campaign. You begin digging through old records. Father summons you. The next day you are sent off-realm on a diplomatic assignment no one thought urgent until exactly now." His eyes moved to Erikar's face. "I am not so bright I fail to notice sequence."
No. He was not.
Erikar looked back toward the bridge rather than answer too quickly and therefore badly.
Thor saw that, of course.
"I am not asking for the part you cannot tell me," he said.
That reached him harder than the question would have.
Thor continued before he could answer.
"I am asking whether I should be angry now or later."
For one moment the morning seemed to narrow around the two of them.
Not because anyone else in the courtyard had arrived yet. Because this was the true gift Thor sometimes offered when everything less important had already burned away: the refusal to make a man choose between honesty and dignity if both could be spared a little.
Erikar said, "Later."
Thor studied him a long beat. Then nodded once.
"Good. I would prefer to enjoy my outrage with better information."
"I had assumed you enjoyed it on principle."
"I enjoy many things on principle. This one deserves structure."
They stood in silence again.
The wind moved harder now, pulling at the edge of Thor's mantle and the lower banners over the outer wall. Somewhere behind them the first bell of full morning sounded across the palace quarter.
Thor looked toward the sound and then back to him.
"When you get there."
"Yes."
"Do not decide too quickly that being the quietest person in the room means you are the one in control of it."
Erikar turned his head slightly.
Thor's expression had changed. Less brotherly amusement now. More campaign-face. The one few in court saw often enough to understand that his intelligence lived in motion, in instinct, in the exact speed with which warmth became war when a thing mattered.
"Midgard is smaller," Thor said. "That does not mean it is simple."
"I know."
"Yes." Thor's mouth tightened faintly. "I know you know. I am saying it anyway."
That, more than the line itself, told him what shape of worry this was.
Not the realm. The leaving.
The thing under all farewells where advice became a form of contact prolonged by one extra step because brothers built for battle often disliked the nakedness of saying be careful and chose instead to make care sound tactical.
Erikar said, "I will remember."
Thor looked unconvinced but accepted the sentence as close enough to victory for this hour.
Then he glanced toward the upper archway leading into the private wing and his expression shifted again.
"The others are coming."
Erikar did not need to turn to know who had reached the arch first. The air in the courtyard altered before the movement did.
Frigga came down the steps with one attendant half a pace behind and no need of any courtly frame to make the morning gather around her properly. Pale winter-blue over cream, heavier outer shawl against the dawn cold, hands bare. Her gaze found him before Thor, before the bridge, before anything else, and whatever she had brought down from the private wing with her remained behind her eyes so carefully that only someone who had spent a lifetime being looked at by them would have recognized the cost of it.
Odin followed several steps later.
Not at her shoulder. Not close enough for the courtyard to read them as a single front. Far enough to preserve the distinction between queenly parting and kingly witness, near enough that no one with sense would mistake the distance for detachment.
Interesting, though not surprising.
Frigga reached them first.
Thor straightened at once. Reflex, affection, and old childhood habit all in one motion. Erikar bent his head only a fraction, enough to honor the room without making the moment ceremonial.
"My mother."
"My sons."
Her voice was warm and level and not remotely the voice of a woman whose sleep had survived this morning intact.
Thor, seeing what he saw and making of it what he could, bent and kissed her brow before stepping back.
"I came to make certain he does not leave wearing that expression."
Frigga looked from Thor to Erikar with the faintest movement at one corner of her mouth. "And did you succeed."
"No. But I wounded his patience, which felt productive."
"Then your labor has not been wasted."
Thor looked vindicated and very nearly pleased enough to become obnoxious about it.
Erikar said, "You encouraged him."
"I raised him. Encouragement became inevitable."
Behind them, Odin had reached the lower step line and stopped there.
Not intruding.
Not absent.
Watching.
That, too, mattered.
Frigga's gaze touched the travel case at Erikar's side and then lifted back to his face. "You have everything."
It was not a question.
"Yes."
A beat passed.
Not because she doubted the answer. Because both of them heard the line under it and had no interest in letting the courtyard take more from it than necessary.
Thor, to his credit, heard that too.
He shifted half a step away, toward the parapet edge, not leaving them alone because the courtyard would not have permitted that fiction but loosening his place in the shape of the scene enough that some of its weight could settle where it belonged.
Frigga reached for Erikar's hands.
He gave them to her without thought.
That, more than anything said so far, was the thing.
Not the touch itself. That was old between them. Familiar enough to live below language. But the duration of it. The fact that she did not simply take his hands and release them after a word or blessing or some softened maternal correction about the weather on Midgard and the rudeness of kings who sent sons away without better warning.
She held them.
One breath. Two. Three.
Longer than necessary.
Long enough that the courtyard noticed nothing because no one in the courtyard except the family understood the measure by which necessary was being judged.
Long enough that he counted without wanting to and wished, suddenly and with unreasonable force, that he could stop noticing time in rooms like this.
Frigga's hands were warm despite the morning cold.
Her eyes did not leave his face.
"Write when you can," she said.
Simple. Clean. Publicly harmless.
He heard the rest in the pressure of her fingers before she loosened them.
"I will."
Frigga's gaze sharpened by one hidden degree, enough to say that promise would be remembered and audited by someone whose authority did not require throne rooms.
Then she released his hands.
Only then did Odin step forward.
The movement altered the whole courtyard at once. Even the Bifrost guards at the far line straightened without meaning to. Servants in the upper arch lowered their eyes. The old invisible machinery of rank, so often forgotten until a king remembered to wear it fully, arranged itself around the moment.
Odin looked at Erikar and then, briefly, at the travel case beside him.
"The bridge stands ready."
Not goodbye.
Of course not.
Erikar met his father's gaze. "So I see."
Odin's eye rested on him a moment longer than required by the sentence.
There was no softness in his face now, but neither was there coldness. Only that measured impossible thing Odin always carried when king and father were both present and neither intended to yield the room to the other.
"You know the terms of the assignment."
"Yes."
"You represent Asgard."
There. The public line. Correct. Polished. Entirely suitable for the guards and attendants and any witness who would later turn this departure into story.
Erikar said, "I know."
Odin's gaze did not move.
For one instant, just one, Erikar thought his father might say something else. Something private enough to live beneath the official surface and therefore cut more deeply for having to survive unseen.
He did not.
Instead Odin inclined his head once, not dismissing. Not blessing. Something narrower and stranger between the two.
Then he stepped back.
Again that distance. Again that choice to witness rather than approach the line Frigga had crossed without effort by taking his hands.
Thor said, too lightly, "Well. This has become unbearable, which means if I stay much longer I will be forced into sincerity and no one wants that before breakfast."
Frigga looked at him. "No one."
Thor ignored her with the ease of a son who had long ago decided maternal truth could be borne best through selective insolence. He clasped Erikar's forearm once, hard and fast.
"Return with all your unnecessary internal complexity intact."
"That is a difficult assignment."
"It is the only kind you seem to value."
Thor stepped back before the line could become anything more vulnerable than it already was.
"Also," he added, "if Midgard proves disappointing, do not tell Loki first. He will become impossible."
"He already is."
"Yes, but distance improves his confidence."
At that, Frigga's attention flickered briefly toward the upper archway.
Empty.
Loki had not come.
Of course he had not.
That absence entered the courtyard with more shape than another brother's presence would have. No lazy smile. No farewell too layered to trust. No last-minute needling to prove he understood the geometry of departure better than everyone else. Simply not there.
Erikar noticed Frigga notice that.
Interesting.
Thor noticed too and snorted softly under his breath. "Coward."
Frigga said nothing.
Odin said, "Enough."
Not harshly. The word still ended the moment all the same.
The Bifrost guards moved to their stations.
The great mechanism beneath the bridge began to wake, not loudly, but with the deep resonant shift of old power remembering its work. Light gathered first in the runes nearest the courtyard mouth, pale blue-white under gold stone. The air changed. Sharper. Thinner. Charged enough that the skin at the wrists felt it before the eyes fully named it.
There was no more to say that the courtyard could survive hearing.
Erikar picked up the travel case.
He looked first to Thor. Then to Frigga. Then to Odin.
No speeches. Good.
He turned toward the bridge.
The first steps onto the Bifrost always felt less like walking than entering a decision made by older things.
Light moved under the stone in lines and living geometry, rising brighter with each pace toward the observatory. The city fell away to either side, white and gold beneath morning sky, the falls like a wound of light at the world-edge.
At the midpoint he stopped.
Not for long. Only long enough to turn once and look back.
The courtyard framed them cleanly.
Thor stood slightly forward from where he had been, one hand resting on the stone parapet, bright even in stillness. Frigga at the center, both hands clasped now before her as though stopping them from reaching after what had already left. Odin a measured distance away, dark against the pale stone, watching without gesture.
The shape of it struck harder seen from here.
The brief brotherly clasp. The mother's hands held too long. The father's distance saying what proximity could not safely afford.
Farewell without a name.
Erikar held the image one breath longer than was useful and then turned back to the bridge.
The light rose.
The air thinned to something stranger than wind.
Heimdall waited at the far end, still as judgment and older than most men's courage. The observatory behind him caught the first true gold of morning and turned it into something harder.
Erikar reached the final arc of the bridge and the keeper of the Bifrost inclined his head once.
"My prince."
"Heimdall."
For a moment neither moved.
Then Heimdall's gaze went to the case in Erikar's hand, the travel coat, the visible absence of escort, and the hidden things no one in the realms ever entirely kept from him whether they wanted to or not.
"You go alone."
"Not entirely."
Heimdall's eyes rested on him in a way that made the answer sound less certain than it had.
"The realms are seldom kind to men sent at exactly the right time."
There.
A different voice. The same shape.
Erikar looked at the keeper and asked, "Do you know why."
Heimdall's face did not change.
"Yes."
The word landed with all the same dangerous simplicity it had held in Frigga's study.
Erikar almost laughed.
Not from amusement. From the increasingly absurd architecture of his life.
"And."
Heimdall looked past him, perhaps toward the courtyard, perhaps through it, perhaps at some line no one else in creation had eyes enough to keep track of without cost.
Then back again.
"The road below is loud," he said. "That does not make it empty."
Not an answer. Not enough of one. But unlike Odin's redirections or Frigga's mercies, Heimdall's silences never pretended to be anything else.
Erikar said, "I am beginning to dislike being spoken to in rooms built for half-truths."
A flicker, almost imperceptible, touched the keeper's expression. Not amusement. Something older and nearer respect.
"Then ask better when you return."
The line sat between them.
Heimdall turned toward the heart of the observatory and lifted the great sword.
Light gathered at once.
The Bifrost awakened fully beneath his hands, blue-white power rising in a long impossible column around gold stone and sky and the space where worlds had once believed themselves separate.
Erikar stood within the first edge of it, travel case in one hand, Midgard below and ahead and whatever had moved him toward it now beyond the point of argument.
He did not look back again.
The light took him.
End of Chapter 17