Loki learns to become a bird.

She can be only one sort of bird, a swift, bad at takeoff from the ground but tireless and quick in the air - and who needs to take off from the ground when the transformation leaves one six feet in the air from a standing start? It would be nearly as hard to add another creature to this spell's arsenal as it was to manage the swift in the first place. She is satisfied with the bird for now; she slips out of the palace and flies, invisible, for hours, and lets Thor tease her about the assignations that must have kept her up late and left her tired in the morning.

(She sometimes has assignations too, but fewer with the first blush of hormonal need worn away. Sometimes Sigyn, sometimes whoever else. Mostly: flying.)

A few months after she has begun to spend time as a bird (and picked up the idea of teleportation, which will be desperately difficult but not, she thinks, outside her reach) there is a parade. They have these every few decades, on the bicentennial or centennial anniversaries of things. The queen, the king, the princesses, a lot of neatly marching warriors, decorative performers with competent dance steps and pleasing voices and desperately incompetent illusions, all winding around in a slow trek around the capital city to be looked at and wave.

It is somehow even duller to sit in a parade and wave and smile when she could be being a bird.

But she can't, not really, so she sits, smiles, tries to remember without checking her notes what this is the twenty-seventh centennial of exactly, waves her hand at the crowd.

And then there's a crackling burst of light and Frigg, the king, her father, has collapsed from their vehicle to the street.

The smoking staff of power aimed at them is just barely visible in the distance among the crowd. Thor has already seized her hammer; Thor will handle that -

Loki leaps after her father, to duck another blast, to see the extent of the injury. "HEALER!" she cries. "IS THERE A HEALER?"