The Queen’s Garden was the quietest place in the Nine Realms.

Arthur stepped through the wards and let the noise of the training grounds fade behind him. Frigga sat at the stone table beneath the silver-barked trees, pouring tea into two porcelain cups, as though she had known the exact minute he would arrive. She probably had.

"You took your time," she said, without looking up.

"Pietro challenged Fandral to a race."

"Brave boy." She set the teapot down. "How badly did he lose?"

"He won."

Frigga looked up, and for a moment the Queen of Asgard wore an expression very few people had ever seen on her. Open surprise.

"He won," she repeated. "Against Fandral."

"It was not close. Fandral had not even finished taking his first step when Pietro shouted his victory from the finish line." Arthur took the seat across from her. "A hidden talent woke in him recently. Speed. The kind that breaks the sound barrier when he stands up too quickly."

Frigga laughed, bright and real. "I cannot wait to see it for myself. Fandral’s face alone must have been worth the trip."

They drank their tea. Alien birds sang their three-note songs in the silver trees. It was, for a few minutes, an entirely ordinary morning between friends.

Then Frigga set her cup down with a soft click, and the weather of the conversation changed without her changing her posture at all.

"You feel different," she said.

Arthur did not bother to play coy. "I am different."

"Show me."

Arthur set his teacup down and let the restraint slip.

His bright blue eyes shifted to twilight grey, and the quality of the garden changed with them. The flowers did not wilt. The light did not dim. But the birdsong stopped, and the air went still in the particular way it goes still in old churches and older graveyards, and the space between one heartbeat and the next stretched a fraction longer than it should have.

He pulled it back in. The garden breathed again.

Frigga’s breath caught. Quietly. But it caught.

"The second tier," she said. "Authority. When?"

Just before the recent events on Midgard. I faced one of Thanos’s generals. Karrok. When he realized he was losing, he triggered a suicide protocol. He burned the whole of his remaining lifespan in a single act and flooded his body with death energy. Raw. Concentrated." Arthur looked away, toward the silver trees. "It was not enough to beat me. But when I unmade him... the massive energy trapped inside him had nowhere left to go."

He met her eyes. "So it went into me. It sat in my chest for days, waiting. When I finally processed it, the sheer volume forced the door open."

Frigga was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had cooled into something more careful.

"A general of Thanos. Wielding death energy. Burning his own thread as fuel." She turned her cup slowly on its saucer. "Then the Mad Titan deals in the same force you carry. And his loyal servants are taught its use."

"You know of him."

"Asgard has watched the dark between the realms for a long time. He is one of the larger shadows in it." Her mouth tightened, and she did not elaborate, which from Frigga meant there was a great deal more she was choosing not to say.

Then she looked at him, and what was in her face was not the cool of a queen weighing intelligence. It was fear. Deep and unmistakable, and she was not a woman who frightened easily.

"And you simply absorbed it," she said softly. "Arthur. You are moving too fast."

"I am in complete control."

"That is exactly what she said."

The words landed in the quiet garden like a stone in still water.

Frigga rose from the table and walked a few steps along the flowerbeds, her hands folded, her composure intact in the way composure is intact when it is being held together deliberately.

"Hela walked this path easily too. In the beginning. She gathered authority with effortless speed, and everyone around her mistook the ease for mastery." She turned back to him. "When I gave you my research, I thought I was handing you a path. Strength, in time, without the diversions that destroyed the others. I did not think you would walk it this fast. Power gathered this quickly does not anchor. It isolates. It convinces you, one quiet day at a time, that you stand above the rules of the living. And by the time you notice, the part of you that would have noticed is gone."

"Maybe." Arthur held her worried gaze without flinching. "But in my mortal eyes, it has not been fast at all. You measure time in ages, my lady. For me, even two years is a very long time. And I have spent decades building the discipline to hold power without letting it hold me."

"Time is not the protection you think it is, Arthur. Hela had centuries to adjust and it consumed her anyway."

"I know." He said it gently, because she was not wrong and he would not pretend she was.

He rose and crossed to where she had stopped, and gestured, lightly, toward the distant training grounds, where the faint sound of Pietro complaining carried on the wind.

"Hela gathered death to conquer nine realms. She fought for dominion, and she had no one to share any of it with. I am not gathering this power for a throne." He paused. "I have a wife I love dearly. I have children for whom I would do anything. Eileen. Elena. Tristan. Wanda, Pietro, Winky. They are the ground I am tied to. It does not let me drift. The moment this power begins to take more than it gives, I stop. The next tier is not the point. They are the point. As long as I have them, death will never, ever consume me. I will not let it."

Frigga searched his eyes. She was looking for the familiar, blinding certainty that had destroyed her stepdaughter. The cold, detached superiority of a being who had forgotten what it meant to bleed.

She found none of it. Only the fierce, unshakable devotion of a father and a husband.

Frigga exhaled slowly, and her shoulders finally dropped.

"That," she said softly, "is the only answer that would have reassured me. Not your control. Not your discipline. The weight you carry home every night." Her mouth curved, faint and tired. "Hela had a father who handed her a list of names and called it purpose. You have a family that would notice if you stopped coming to dinner. I have spent two thousand years believing that was the difference between carrying this thing and being eaten by it. It is good to hear it from the one person walking the road."

"Then stop worrying about me," Arthur smiled gently. "And think about the present."

"Loki," she said softly, her eyes dropping.

They returned to the table, and Arthur waited until she was seated before he spoke.

"There’s something you should know. About the Scepter Thanos gave him." He kept his voice level. "It carried a stone of immense power. It gave Loki the means and the confidence to do Thanos’s bidding. But it had a quieter function. It had been whispering to him since the day Thanos placed it in his hands. Not commanding. Nothing so crude. Amplifying. Every grudge turned up. Every impulse toward restraint turned down. He carried it for months."

Frigga had gone very still.

"You are telling me my son was not in his own mind."

"I’m telling you the board was tilted. The choices were his. The anger was his, and it was real, and it was there long before Thanos found him. But it had a hand on its back the whole time, pushing. The moment I severed the Scepter’s enchantment, I watched something dim in his eyes. A noise he had lived inside so long he thought it was himself." Arthur paused. "The Stone did not invent anything. It only fed what was already there. A second son trying to prove he could be the conquering prince he thought his father valued. Loki took his playbook from a very old edition of Odin. The Stone just made sure he could never put it down."

For a long moment Frigga said nothing at all. Then she let out a slow breath, and her eyes were bright, and she looked away at the flowers until they were not.

"I knew," she said. "Not the mechanism. But I knew."

That was all. She pressed her hands flat against her lap, and Arthur let the silence hold.

"Thank you for telling me this."

"You would have seen it yourself, in time. I only saved you the wait." He shrugged. "Looking for the thing under the thing. Occupational habit."

Frigga smiled. Then the smile turned wry, and Arthur braced, because he knew the look of a queen about to raise a delicate subject through the diplomatic side door.

"He is very angry about the binding, you know," she said. "He has stopped trying to break it, which for Loki is nearly acceptance. But he speaks of it the way other men speak of an insult. A cage of golden runes, he calls it. Barbaric. Beneath the dignity of a prince."

Arthur smiled. "He would say that. He’s wearing something of Odin’s design."

Frigga raised an eyebrow.

"I copied the Allfather’s homework," Arthur said. "The enchantment he placed on Thor when he banished him to Midgard. I studied its architecture in the Archives and rebuilt it on a foundation of my own magic. The shape of it is pure Odin. If Loki finds the cage insulting, he can take it up at family dinner."

Frigga laughed despite herself. "The details will only anger him more."

"Then we keep it between us. And the binding will not harm him. Not now, not ever. It takes nothing from him but access, and it is not a sentence without end." Arthur held her gaze. "There is a key woven through it. The same kind Odin wove for Thor. When Loki truly learns what it means to be mortal, when he understands in his bones what the people he terrorized feel every day of their lives, the seal will know. And it will unravel on its own. No one has to free him. He frees himself, or no one does."

"And you are confident he will learn?"

"I am."

"Why?" The question was not a challenge. It was a mother asking for something to hold on to.

"Two reasons. The first is that there is good in him. No one feels rejection that deeply without a heart underneath capable of love." He paused. "The second reason is you."

Frigga blinked.

"He shut out Thor. He shut out Odin. He never managed to shut out you," Arthur said simply. "Of everything Loki has pretended not to care about, you are the one lie he has never been able to tell properly." He smiled. "He will change. For you."

Frigga looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached over, pressed his hand once, and let it go.

"Thank you."

She rose from the table and smoothed her gown, and when she turned back to him, something had shifted in her face. The warmth was still there. But something older and heavier had surfaced beneath it.

"Speaking of complicated family matters," she said. "My husband wishes to see you."

Arthur raised an eyebrow. "Really. In all my years coming here, I can count our conversations on one hand. I assumed that suited him."

"It did," Frigga agreed. "And now he wishes to see you. Alone. In the Vault."

"About what?"

"He did not say."