"...well," Findekáno says, "among our people that'd be an atrocity to mention alongside Alqualondë and Losgar, though I'm not sure how yours feel about kidnapping infant children. But it sounds like she's going to have a very hard time pulling it off and you also needn't ever see her again until you're more powerful than she is."

"I don't even know how powerful she is. She couldn't be a sorcerer, oh, no, not her, so instead she has this ridiculous mystery high-powered magic that she had to sacrifice an eye and unspecified less anatomical accessories to get because that's special and doesn't count and I was always way too curious about it and nobody would tell me anything. But I can certainly be prohibitively inconvenient to manage like that. Ugh, no wonder she didn't just declare in Thor's favor, she fully intended I inherit a throne and just didn't have one on hand yet..."

"She doesn't seem to have understood you very well, if she thought you'd be pleased if she conquered a country and put you in charge of it."

"Funnily enough I might have been delighted, but not in any way she can have been hoping for. I mean, if someone hands me the leverage to end a millennia-long war and then command a planetful of people, what do you think I'd do, run away and become a bard? I'm not as confident as I imagine she must have been that the frost giants would take to me just because I can apparently turn blue under some circumstances - and why am I so short, I'm even shorter than Thor is - but if that part went smoothly..."

He smiles. "Okay. Uh, maybe there's a different kind of Maia you need to fight after which you'll be Melian's height? How tall are frost giants?"

She laughs. "About twice as tall as you are. I assume there's a range. Actually, for all I know I'm just female frost giant height, they don't send women to war and I've never met one in a peaceful circumstance. Which leads me to further question Odin's judgment, if there were farther to go."

"Your people only send women to war, and frost giants only send men? That's - interesting."

"Well, I didn't actually question any of my opponents about their genders, maybe I just can't tell them apart, maybe they're a six-sexed species, we don't have much data on them except how to kill them. Conventional wisdom is that their soldiers are men and this is of course one of the many reasons they're abhorrent and all need to die." Loki shakes her head. "If she'd gotten a slightly different baby frost giant personality to stomp all over for a few hundred years I'd be contemplating suicide about now! How did she delude herself - that badly -"

"Being a frost giant is something most Asgardians would find upsetting? Over and beyond realizing they were kidnapped as an infant at all?"

"Yes! I - I don't even have a comparison to make, the obvious go-to is orcs but you've always acknowledged the kinship - the only reason Asgard hasn't gone total war and made a serious bid to render them extinct is that's hard to do with the low-tech aesthetic when you can't set foot on their planet without freezing - people tell each other that Asgardians are too honorable to resort to the strategies that would do it, not that there'd be anything to miss if they were all gone -"

"Oh dear."

"...Odin may or may not have been interpreting large parts of my personality as lingering species partiality."

Thank you.

At least you already didn't like her much.

Yes. But I can't quite decide if I think Frigg knew. It would certainly have been very inconvenient not to tell him, but it's just barely possible -

Asgardians can deceive their partner about a pregnancy?

Sure. No fea, no decisionmaking around conception itself, just safeguards she could take and pretend not to if she wanted him to think I was his. Theirs. The inconvenient part would be that she'd then have to either fake the pregnancy without being absolutely assured of turning up with a baby at the end of it, or she'd have to have hidden me somewhere for the duration. It'd be easier to make him go along with it than to convince some random person to hold a baby for her for that long and not ask any questions or spread any rumors.

Understanding. And if he was involved, then you have to do the feelings-recalculation about someone you actually did trust and love. Eru, Loki, I'm sorry.

Hardly your fault. Pause. I wonder if I have cool ice powers. That would be a nice consolation prize.

Not my fault, but I know the feeling. How do you test for cool ice powers?

No idea. I never used any such thing by accident, so either they're the sort of thing one has to know one has or they were suppressed by whatever is making me so short.

Well. We can throw you at more Balrogs, if that might result in other powers manifesting.

Oh? Do you have a bunch of them penned up somewhere?

He laughs. If we had a way to pen them up, we'd be halfway through the problem. I bet Maitimo knows where to find them, if you're really tempted.