Then she shuffled back into the darkness of her cave and was lost to sight.
The messengers returned to Asgard and told the gods what they had seen, and that they had failed in their mission, for there was one creature that did not weep for Balder and did not want him to return: an old giantess in a cave on a mountain.
And by then they had also realized who old Thokk reminded them of: she had moved and talked much like Loki, the son of Laufey.
“I expect it was really Loki in disguise,” said Thor. “Of course it was Loki. It’s always Loki.”
Thor hefted his hammer, Mjollnir, and gathered a group of the gods to go looking for Loki, to take their revenge, but the crafty troublemaker was nowhere to be seen. He was hiding, far from Asgard, hugging himself in glee at his own cleverness and waiting for the fuss to die away.
THE LAST DAYS OF LOKI
I
Balder was dead, and the gods were still mourning his loss. They were sad, and the gray rains fell unceasingly, and there was no joy in the land.
Loki, when he returned from one of his journeys to distant parts, was unrepentant.
It was the time of autumn feast in Aegir’s hall, where the gods and elves were gathered to drink the sea giant’s fresh-brewed ale, brewed in the cauldron Thor had brought back from the land of the giants so long ago.
Loki was there. He drank too much of Aegir’s ale, drank himself beyond joy and laughter and trickery and into a brooding darkness. When Loki heard the gods praise Aegir’s servant, Fimafeng, for his swiftness and diligence, he sprang up from the table and stabbed Fimafeng with his knife, killing him instantly.
The horrified gods drove Loki out of the feast hall, into the darkness.
Time passed. The feasting continued, but now it was subdued.
There was a commotion at the doorway, and when the gods and goddesses turned to find out what was happening, they saw that Loki had returned. He stood in the entry to the hall staring at them, with a sardonic smile on his face.
“You are not welcome here,” said the gods.
Loki ignored them. He walked up to where Odin was sitting. “All-father. You and I mixed our blood long, long ago, did we not?”
Odin nodded. “We did.”
Loki smiled even more widely. “Did you not swear back then, great Odin, that you would drink at a banqueting table only if Loki, your sworn blood brother, drank with you?”
Odin’s good gray eye stared into Loki’s green eyes, and it was Odin who looked away.
“Let the wolf’s father feast with us,” said Odin gruffly, and he made his son Vidar move over to make room for Loki to sit down beside him.
Loki grinned with malice and delight. He called for more of Aegir’s ale and gulped it down.
One by one that night Loki insulted the gods and the goddesses. He told the gods that they were cowards, told the goddesses that they were gullible and unchaste. Each insult was woven with just enough truth to make it wound. He told them that they were fools, reminded them of things they thought were safely forgotten. He sneered and jeered and raised old scandals, and would not stop making everyone there miserable until Thor arrived at the feast.
Thor ended the conversation very simply: he threatened to use Mjollnir to shut Loki’s evil mouth for good and send him to Hel, all the way to the hall of the dead.
Loki left the feast then, but before he swaggered out, he turned to Aegir. “You brewed fine ale,” said Loki to the sea giant. “But there will never be another autumn feast here. Flames will take this hall; your skin will be burned from your back by the fire. Everything you love will be taken from you. This I swear.”
And he walked away from the gods of Asgard, into the dark.
II
Loki sobered up the next morning and thought about what he had done the night before. He felt no shame, for shame was not Loki’s way, but he knew that he had pushed the gods too far.
Loki had a home on a mountain near the sea, and decided to wait there until the gods had forgotten him. He had a house on the top of the mountain with four doors, one on each side, allowing him to see danger coming toward him from any direction.
During the day Loki would transform himself into a salmon, and he would hide in the pool at the bottom of Franang’s Falls, a high waterfall that tumbled down the mountainside. A stream connected the pool to a little river, and the river led directly to the sea.
Loki liked plans and counterplans. As a salmon he was fairly safe, he knew. The gods themselves could not catch salmon as they swam.
But then he began to doubt himself. He wondered, Could there be a way of catching a fish in the deep waters of the pool beneath the waterfall?
How would he, the craftiest of all, the most cunning planner, catch a salmon?
Loki took a ball of nettle yarn, and he began to knot and weave it into a fishing net, the first such net ever to be made. Yes, he thought. If I used this net, I could catch a salmon.
Now, he thought, to work out a counterplan: what will I do if the gods weave a net like this one?
He examined the net he had made.
Salmon can jump, he thought. They can swim upstream, even travel up waterfalls. I could jump over the net.
Something drew his attention. He peered out from first one door and then another. He was startled: the gods were coming up the mountainside, and they had almost reached his house.
Loki flung the net into the fire and watched it burn with satisfaction. Then he stepped into Franang’s Falls. In the shape of a silver salmon, Loki was swept over the waterfall, and he vanished into the depths of the deep pool at the base of the mountain.
The Aesir reached Loki’s house on the mountain. They waited by each door, cutting off Loki’s escape, if he was still inside.
Kvasir, wisest of the gods, walked in through the first door. Once he had been dead, and mead had been brewed from his blood, but now he was alive once more. He could tell from the fire and from the half-drunk cup of wine beside it that Loki had been there only moments before he arrived.
There was no clue to where Loki could have gone, though. Kvasir scanned the sky. Then he looked down at the floor and at the fireplace.
“He’s gone, the sniveling little weasel,” said Thor, coming in through another of the four doors. “He could have transformed himself into anything. We’ll never find him.”
“Do not be so hasty,” said Kvasir. “Look.”
“It’s only ashes,” said Thor.
“But look at the pattern of it,” said Kvasir. He bent down, touched the ash on the floor beside the fire, sniffed it, then touched it to his tongue. “It is the ash of a cord that has been thrown into the fire and burned. Cord just like that ball of nettle twine in the corner.”