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bookishwenchA Friend in Need
Sif was missing. Her usual haunts were empty, each somehow more forlorn than the last as Loki searched in vain. Obviously, something had happened, and he had a good idea what. If he was right, he didn’t blame her for vanishing. He fully intended to do the same when his parents inevitably started marching potential marriage partners past him.
Eventually he found her, but not until hours had passed, even with magic. It was the most blazing hot part of the day in full summer, and she was sitting beneath the shade of an oak at the edge of one of the countless pristine lakes that dotted Asgard. She was facing away from him, but he could tell from her slumped posture that she was miserable.
“If you jump in, I’m not pulling you out,” he said. “It’s too hot to think of doing anything as tiring as swimming.”
She didn’t even flinch.
“I heard you coming,” she said, her voice sounding tired. “I’m not going back.”
“I didn’t say you should,” he said, sitting beside her.
“I take it you’ve heard what my parents were up to,” she said, turning her head to look at him.
Her eyes were red, as was her nose, but she seemed more angry than sad.
“And I take it you weren’t charmed by your proposed husband,” Loki said.
“Don’t even joke about it!” she said, staring back out at the shimmer of heat floating above the water. “Do you know who they picked?”
“Who?”
“Henrik!”
Loki paused, sifting through his brain for any familiarity, then repeated, “Who?”
“Exactly!”
“No, really, who is he?”
“Do you know Olav, the cloth merchant with the shop on the main street?
“I suppose,” Loki said. “Why?”
“Henrik is his son,” Sif said, picking up a rock and tossing it into the lake where it landed with a vicious plop.
“I see. So it’s a wealthy family?”
“I don’t care if they have a whole dragon’s hoard! Do you know what that idiot said to me?”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t anything about how much he desired a warrior as a wife.”
She snorted.
“The man literally told me that in spite of my ‘poor kitchen skills and ridiculously doomed choice to fight alongside real men,’” she said, drawing quotation marks in the air around his words, “he would be willing to marry me for my beauty alone, provided, of course that I put aside my sword and apply myself to baking bread and producing a houseful of brats.”
“And you didn’t jump at the chance?” Loki said, raising an eyebrow. “I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you.”
She rolled her eyes at him, then sagged back into the posture he’d first seen her in.
“I don’t know if I can win this fight,” she muttered, throwing another rock in the lake. “They’re determined to marry me off and make a so-called normal lady of me.”
“I’d say it would be fun to watch them try,” Loki said, “but as it’s you, I’m not finding the prospect nearly as hilarious as I usually would.”
In truth, he was more than a little concerned. Her parents’ choice would have been a good, solid match had she been an ordinary girl, but Sif was a lady of the court. The idea that their first instinct had been to pair her with someone in the merchant class suggested they were either desperate from receiving few other offers or believed that no one on her own level would want to wed her. If dear Henrik was a disappointment, the other candidates that would inevitably come forward were bound to be worse.
Of course, he preferred the thought of her choosing no one at all, though why he felt that wasn’t something he wanted to dwell upon.
“Do you have a plan?” he asked.
“I thought of running away, but that wouldn’t help since the whole point is I want to be a warrior, and it’s not like I can do that anonymously,” she said.
“Would you consider being a mercenary for another realm?” Loki asked.
Sif tipped her head, considering.
“No,” she finally said. “If I did that, I might be called upon to fight against my own home. I want to fight for Asgard, never against it.”
Loki nodded, conceding she wasn’t the sort to betray her ideals to attain her dreams. He didn’t really have ideals, so that wasn’t an issue for him.
“So leaving is out of the question,” he said, silently relieved. “It appears you’re stuck here, Lady Sif.”
“If even you can’t come up with a solution, it seems so,” she said, looking down into the water.
Loki could actually see the moment she had an idea. Her back slowly straightened, and she seemed transfixed by something in the distance.
“What?” he said warily. The last time she’d come up with a plan, they had ended up stuck in the top of a tree for nine hours while fifteen wild boars repeatedly charged the trunk.
“Henrik said the only reason he was willing to overlook my faults was that I’m beautiful,” she said. “What if I weren’t?”
“But you are,” Loki said, then cursed himself for saying that part out loud.
Sif didn’t seem to care about his declaration, though, as she was waving at him to be quiet.
“Right, so what makes me beautiful?”
“I don’t know!” Loki said, feeling somehow attacked. “Quit fishing for compliments!”
“I’m not! I really don’t know.”
“Well, you’re… tall?” Loki said. “Sort of willowy?”
“Yes, I suppose, but I can’t change my height.”
He glanced at her figure and looked away immediately, deciding not to state the obvious and instead declaring, “You have lovely . . . eyes.”
“As much as I loathe the idea of marriage, I’m not plucking out my own eyes,” she said.
“Really, then, how desperate can you be?” he said.
“Desperate enough!”
She was, and it was beginning to do more than concern him. He was getting downright frightened that she might do something truly rash. Then, suddenly, the obvious solution presented itself. He reached out and grabbed the golden braid that ran down her back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Your hair,” he said. “It’s stunning. It’s like looking at sunlight made solid.”
He was beginning to be aware that his catalog of her assets was starting to sound like very bad poetry.
A slow smile spread across her face.
“Now that’s something I can fix,” she said, and he saw her eyes practically dancing. “I can cut off the lot of it!”
Women of Asgard prized their hair above all their other beauties. It was a radical idea, completely shocking, but it might work.
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“Yes, of course!” she said, then stopped. “But maybe it won’t be enough. Even short, it will still be gold.”
“I could turn it another color, if you like,” Loki said.
“You can?” she said, sounding pleased. “Then let’s make it the opposite. Could you make it black, like yours?”
“I could,” he said, feeling a twinge of regret already. “You do realize when your parents see you, they’re going to have a fit?”
“I suppose, but the damage will already be done,” she said. “What could they do? Glue it back on? But do you think it will work?”
“I don’t know, but we can try,” he said. “Do you have a knife or something?”
She dug through the pockets of her trousers, producing a few coins, a lump of sugar undoubtedly destined for her favorite horse in the stables, string, some lint, and nothing else.
“There’s a hole,” she said, her face falling. “I had a pocketknife in there yesterday, but it must have fallen out.”
Loki considered for a moment, then made a quick movement with his hand and drew a dagger out of thin air.
“How did you do that?” she asked, looking impressed.
“Something I’ve been working on,” he said, basking in the compliment. “I think that’s the first time it’s gone right.”
They both looked at the knife, and Sif stroked her braid fondly for a moment, then steeled herself, throwing it over her shoulder turning her back to him.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s your dagger. You do it.”
“No. I’m not going to take the blame on this if it goes wrong,” he said. “You do it.”
She looked back over her shoulder at him, and he saw pleading in her eyes as she asked in a breaking voice, “Please?”
“Damn,” he said quietly. “Fine. But you’re sure? There’s no going back on this.”
“I know,” she said, then straightened her shoulders again and looked ahead at the lake. “Yes. I’m sure. Do it.”
Loki had absolutely no idea what he was doing. It seemed like he might hurt her if he pulled hard enough to cut right through the braid, and he didn’t want that. Gently, he picked up the end of her hair and undid the tie. He figured undoing a braid was probably no different than unwinding a coil of rope, and he awkwardly stroked his fingers through it, realizing it was the only time he would ever have the chance to touch Sif’s golden hair. In a few minutes, he had unworked it completely, and it hung long enough to reach the ground while she was sitting. He bent close enough to smell it, a scent that was a mix of flowers and horses.
He picked up his dagger and grabbed a single piece about the thickness of his thumb, then started to saw through it. He’d done a great deal of mischief in his life, enough to be considered a troublemaker or worse by most of Asgard, but when he succeeded in cutting the first lock, he felt he’d committed a true sin.
“How short are you cutting it?” she asked, her hand coming up to feel it.
“Short,” he said. “Mind your hands. You don’t want to lose a finger. You’d have trouble gripping a sword.”
He tried to work quickly, cutting each lock and tossing it to the ground in turn, but she had a good deal more hair than he’d thought, not just in length but in volume. Rather than keeping it all one length, he tried to shingle it close, rather like the haircuts of some of the men of Asgard. It was surprisingly curly, though, and tufts kept popping up in odd directions.
“Turn around,” he said.
She did, and he cut the last bits around her face, her eyes following his progress, then he surveyed the outcome of his work.
“Well?”
“It’s… short.”
She looked down at the hair on the ground that had previously been attached to her head and turned a little green, and not one of his favorite shades.
“Good,” she said, though she didn’t sound completely certain about that. “Now can you make it black?”
He tried to remember the exact spell. He’d come across it randomly a few months ago and used it on Thor’s horse’s mane. He let the magic build in his fingertips for a moment, then gently ran them through what remained of her hair. At once, the gold began to dim, becoming darker and darker until it was the color of ink.
“There,” he said. “Done.”
Her hands went up to her hair again, but it was too short for her to pull it forward and see it. Instead, she turned to look at her reflection in the lake. She didn’t move for quite a while, and after a minute Loki sat beside her, peering into the water as well.
“I don’t really recognize myself,” she said, staring at the stranger in the water.
“It’s still you,” he said, not sure what else to say.
Their reflections rippled in the light wind, and he thought that the two of them looked like a pair now, as though there was a connection between them.
“Thank you,” she said, sitting back and brushing strands of gold from her shirt before looking at him again. “I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to help me.”
He snorted. Her hair was lopsided and uneven, completely a wreck, and she was thanking him for it.
“I don’t know if it will have the desired effect,” he said. “Somehow, you look just as beautiful. Well, to me anyway, but then I’m no one.”
“You’re not no one,” she said, frowning. “Stop that. Anyway, I suppose I should go home and face the inevitable.”
“Good luck,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”
She looked apprehensive, but Sif had never run from any kind of a fight, and she took off through the woods at a quick pace, leaving Loki by the lakeshore. He reminded himself to sharpen his dagger later and then made it vanish. Before he stood up, he looked at the hair remaining on the ground. While he supposed the birds could probably build fabulous nests with it, he also knew enough about magic to realize it was dangerous to leave hair just lying about. He gathered it together and was about to throw it into the lake when he stopped and took out one long tress. He tucked it into his pocket before tossing the rest of Sif’s hair into the water.
Sif never told him exactly what happened at her parents’ home that evening, but the prospective husbands did indeed disappear. Whether it really was because of her hair or because her parents had finally realized that she would never consent to live an ordinary life and stopped trying, he didn’t know. Regardless, she would have the chance to fulfill her own dreams, and if he’d played a part in it, he was glad.
