Odin leapt out of his seat. ‘Are you all right?’

It was a stupid question and as Loki tried to respond, his body betrayed him again. Little came up this time though — mostly water, and that soon turned into dry heaving. Odin grabbed a napkin from the table and used it to wipe Loki’s face.

‘How long have you felt unwell?’

Loki produced a strangled sound that conveyed nothing of substance, but Thor piped in, ‘Should I get a healer summoned?’

They certainly needed a healer. Odin glanced at the food and the tableware the servants had brought in. Poison was a real possibility. But it probably wasn’t the food. Loki had eaten less than Odin or Thor, yet he was the one sick. The poison could well have been placed onto Loki’s fork or glass. Or it could have been something earlier on — there were many kinds of slow-acting poisons out there.

Odin forced himself to take a deep breath and remember that prince or not, Loki was only a child. A child could vomit for a myriad of reasons, none of which necessitated the existence of a shadowy conspiracy to bring down the House of Odin.

‘Hold on, Thor. Loki?’ Odin still received no adequate response, so he cupped the boy’s chin and gently tilted his head up. Loki didn’t actually look particularly sick, certainly not like a person about to succumb to enemy poison. Nor, really, like a person who had just emptied the contents of their stomach. ‘What’s going on with you? Do you feel ill?’

‘It’s fine now,’ Loki said, speaking so softly Odin struggled to make out his words.

‘But you felt ill before? Why didn’t you say something?’

‘Didn’t want to complain over nothing.’

‘Your health isn’t nothing. Come here, child.’ Odin slid one hand under Loki’s knees, the other around the small of his back and lifted the boy up into the air. Loki immediately wrapped his hands around Odin’s neck and pressed his nose against Odin’s collarbone. ‘Thor, I’m going to take Loki to the Medical Wing. Could you make sure everything is cleaned up while we are gone?’

Thor offered up a sombre promise that he would do as asked, but Loki wriggled in Odin’s arms. ‘I don’t need a hea—’

‘That’s for the healers to decide,’ Odin said.

Loki wasn’t heavy, but his long limbs and knobby joints made for a cumbersome load. His half-hearted protests didn’t ease matters either. Odin was glad to reach the Medical Wing.

Striding into the room, Odin saw only a lone, youthful-looking healer, who was busy restocking the cupboards.

‘Could you fetch the Chief Healer for me?’ Odin asked.

‘The Chief Healer is due back any minute, your majesty,’ she said as she abandoned her work and gestured towards the nearest Med Cradle. When she moved closer, Odin recognised her — Lunda, the healer tasked that day with looking after Thor while everyone else focused on Loki. He hadn’t given it a second thought then, but now he wondered why Eir had given her the task. ‘Is that Prince Loki you have there? Let’s lay him down in the cradle and we’ll proceed from there.’

‘Don’t. I feel fine now!’ Loki scowled when Odin set him down on the cradle’s stiff mattress.

Odin ignored the protestations. ‘He vomited while we were in the middle of dinner.’

Lunda nodded and switched on the scanners connected to the Med Cradle. Almost at once, even before the scanners had fully booted up, her eyebrows drew together. Her fingers flickered frenetically over the console controls as she tried to extract more information from the machine.

‘I need to examine the original injury site,’ she declared

Loki’s breeches had a wide cut and buttoned up on the side with small brass buttons all the way to his mid-thigh. Still, Loki squirmed and moaned about his modesty. Odin caught the boy’s shoulder and held him still so Lunda could do her work; he wasn’t in the mood to tolerate Loki’s brattiness at this moment, not when Lunda’s frown continued to deepen.

She released the splint over Loki’s left thigh and cold dread set into the pit of Odin’s stomach. Loki’s left thigh was swollen and the inches above the knee a mottle of red and purple. He unlaced Loki’s boot and pulled it off, then pushed down the sock too. The skin below the knee was pale with an almost translucent sheen.

‘Is this an infection?’ Odin said. He hardly needed the confirmation really; he had been in many field hospitals in his life. ‘And the blood flow is becoming disrupted, isn’t it? Norns, Loki, there’s no way you didn’t feel something was amiss. Why didn’t you say something?’

As Lunda had promised, Eir had returned. She carried her healer’s kit with her, so Odin surmised she must have been attending to other patients. He offered her a curt nod and refocused on Loki — he wanted an answer from his son.

It took a long moment, but Loki withered under the intensity of Odin’s gaze. ‘It was fine until today. And then I thought it was aching just because of yesterday.’

‘Because instead of being in bed you were wandering the palace last night, is that right?’ Odin replied. ‘Yes, I know about that.’

‘A midnight stroll wouldn’t cause this,’ Eir cut in. She had taken a brief look at the Med Cradle terminal and her expression soured much as Lunda’s had. Pursing her lips, she lightly pressed her fingers against the reddened skin of Loki’s thigh, but pulled back when Loki winced and instead ran her hand across his forehead. ‘Loki, when I last examined you, you said you were nervous. And you were certain your fever had subsided. Were you perhaps not fully honest with me?’

Loki ran his tongue over his lower lip. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘I have to say, darling,’ Eir went on, ‘you look decidedly bright and rosy-cheeked for someone with so nasty an infection and so high a temperature.’

‘Then is can’t be all that bad? Right?’

Eir caught Odin’s eye and shook her head. Not that it mattered. Odin too saw what she saw. Over the years he had watched many men fall victim to infection, he knew what they looked like. He rested his fingers on Loki’s forehead; heat radiated through the skin. Sighing, he reached beyond the realm of flesh and bone. He felt the familiar, intricate layers of concealments spun around Loki — magic so finely woven a casual observer would never distinguish them from the magic Loki held within himself. But on top of these layers of Odin and Frigga’s masterworks rested new spells. They were haphazard and awkwardly assembled, but effective.

Odin stripped them away.

‘Norns be damned,’ he hissed. There was no sign of health about Loki now, his skin was pale and coated with a sheen of sweat. Looking at the boy carefully, Odin had to wonder if he had lost weight too. His face seemed thinner. ‘What’ve you been playing at?’

With his eyes as wide as saucers, Loki tried to sit up.

Both Eir and Lunda nudged him back into a prone position at once. ‘This is no good,’ Eir said. ‘Lunda, can you coax better imagery from the scanner. We need to find the source of this infection.’

Lunda hurried to her task, Eir meanwhile pulled out a felt blanket from a drawer built into the base of the Med Cradle and spread it over Loki, leaving only his infected leg exposed to the air. Odin suppressed a scoff as she ran her hand over his head and in a soft tone promised Loki that all would turn out well.

‘Loki, answer me,’ Odin pressed. ‘Why the concealment spells? And you lied to your healers too, is that so?’

‘I didn’t think it was all that bad. Didn’t want to complain over every little thing,’ Loki replied.

That made absolutely no sense as far as Odin was concerned. If a person believed their illness was a minor issue, there was no reason to hide anything. What was the purpose of concealment magic if not to hide things? And Loki hadn’t stopped at concealment spells either, had he?

‘Thor said he saw food vanish off your plate. You made it disappear, didn’t you?’ Loki’s stiff and obviously reluctant nod sent cold dread coursing through Odin’s veins. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Don’t know. A few days maybe.’

‘And you didn’t think that’ll have consequences?’ Loki started to apologise, but Odin was far from finished. Any sense of calm that he had clung to since bringing Loki to the Medical Wing had evaporated. ‘You were in pain, you haven’t been eating and you’ve been using magic to cover up how sick you look. Any child half your age would know that using magic when you’re ill only prolongs an illness — you are drawing on the very resources your body needs to recover. I thought you had some brains in you, boy, but th-this is… this is quite simple actually. I’m raising an imbecile!’

Loki met his father’s gaze only for a moment. ‘I just wanted…’ He sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No it doesn’t, because at this point you could lose your leg. Or worse. Did you —’

‘Your majesty,’ Lunda called out. ‘I think you ought to have a glance at this.’

‘What is it?’ Odin demanded.

Lunda beckoned him to stand between her and Eir, then spoke in a soft tone, ‘First of all, please calm yourself, your majesty. You’re scaring your son and I suspect he’s scared and upset more than enough right now. Second, have a look at this cross-section of his thigh — there is a fragment of a bilgesnipe spur buried in very close to the bone.’

‘It’s tiny, but it’s enough to set off an infection,’ Eir added. ‘We need to extract it before he deteriorates further.’

Odin glanced back to the Med Cradle. Loki stared up at the ceiling, his eyes bright with unspilled tears and what little colour there had been in his face a minute ago had utterly drained away. Guilt and revulsion churned in the pit of Odin’s stomach. This was his child, his youngest and most sensitive child, and a very ill one at that. Instead of comforting Loki, Odin had berated him.

‘One minute,’ Odin said to Eir then moved back to Loki’s side and crouched by the Med Cradle so he could be closer to Loki’s eye-level. ‘We’ll talk about what happened later, much later. All right? First, the healers are going to get you well again. There’s a fragment of a spur still embedded in your leg; it needs to be taken out.’

‘Fine,’ Loki mumbled.

‘What’s fine?’

Loki clenched his jaw. ‘I’m not a coward. Whatever needs to be done, so be it.’