The Warranty

Sif sent for Loki the way you send for a plumber you dislike: because the thing he installed was misbehaving, and he was the only one who knew the fittings.

He came as himself. That was the first thing she noticed, and she distrusted it immediately. When Loki arrived wearing his own face — the long jaw, the careful mouth, no antlers, no borrowed cheekbones, not a raven or a fly or a passing stranger — it usually meant he wanted something read as sincere, which meant the sincerity was the disguise. She'd learned to check his hands the way you check a coin's edge.

"It's the hair," she said, before he was properly through the door.

"I gathered. You don't summon me for the wine."

"Sit. Look at it. Tell me what you did."

He sat. He looked. The gold hair fell past her shoulders exactly as the Sons of Ivaldi had promised it would, catching the hearth-light and giving it back warmer than it came in. It was, he had to admit, some of the finest work anyone had ever bullied out of a dwarf. It grew like real hair. It moved like real hair. It had, over the seasons, entirely stopped being an apology and started being simply her — which was the whole point, and which he was privately proud of, and which he would rather die again than say.

"It looks perfect," he said.

"Watch it at night."

"I'm not going to watch your hair at night, Sif, your husband already wants to open my skull with a paperweight—"

"It braids itself."

He stopped.

"Every night," she said. "I unbind it before I sleep. Loose. Plain. And by morning it's dressed. Not a tangle — a style. Yesterday it was the seven-strand crown I wore to the harvest ninety winters back. This morning it was the plait my mother put in the day she died. I did not ask for it. I did not dream it. I woke and my own head had gone and remembered a thing I spend real effort not remembering, and arranged itself into the grief while I slept." She folded her arms. "You made me hair that won't let go of anything. Fix it."

Loki did not answer at once, which she also distrusted, because Loki not answering at once was rarer than snow in the forge.

"That's not a flaw," he said finally. "That's the material. Dwarf-gold takes an impression and keeps it. Every shape you've ever put it in is still in there. It isn't dreaming your past. It's — inventorying it. It has never learned how to forget a single thing, because I did not think to ask them to build in forgetting. Frankly it didn't occur to me that forgetting was a feature."

"Then teach it."

"I can't."

"You're the god of exactly this. You emptied Balder out of the whole world. You've made me forget where I've left things, on purpose, for a laugh. Make my hair forget one braid."

"I can make you forget," he said. "I can make an army forget which way home is. I can walk into a hall and by the time I leave nobody's certain I was ever there." He turned one of the gold strands over in his fingers, and it was heavier than hair had any right to be, and it did not warm to his touch the way it warmed to hers. "I can unmake almost anything. I have never once managed to unmake something in myself. Ask me to hold a single face for a single hour and I'll fail before the sand runs out. I am the least able creature in the nine worlds to teach anything how to let go." He set the strand down. "You'd have been better off asking Thor. He forgets things constantly."

Sif almost laughed. She caught it in time.

"So it's ruined," she said.

"It's not ruined. It's honest. You gave it a life and it kept the receipts." He leaned back. "The dwarves would call that a feature and charge you extra."

She looked at him with the flat, unsurprised contempt of a woman who has heard him talk his way out of a locked room. "Wonderful. My hair is an archive. Every night I get to be nineteen at a funeral. Thank you, snake, that's very restful."

And here — she would think about this later, and never settle it — his face did something. Not a shift. He held the same face. But behind it, briefly, the machinery slowed, the way a river slows where it deepens.

"It re-braids into the last strong thing," he said slowly. "The impression that's set hardest. That's why it keeps reaching for the grief — the grief is the deepest cut you've got, so it's the easiest groove for the gold to fall into. It's not choosing sorrow. It's rolling downhill to the lowest point. Same as water." He stood. "You can't make it forget the low point. But you can dig a lower one. Give it something newer and harder to hold. Set a fresh impression tonight, strong enough, and by morning it'll fall into that instead."

"Set it with what?"

"With whatever you actually want it to remember instead."

She was quiet.

"Sit down," she said. "In front. Where I can see your hands."

So he knelt, on the wrong side of a woman whose hair he had once cut off for a joke and then spent a season making right, and he took the gold in both hands. He did not know a single braid worth the name — vanity had never required him to, since he could simply become a person with better hair — so he made one up, there on the floor, out of nothing, the way he made up everything: a plait that crossed itself in an order no one had worn because no one had thought of it, tight where it had to hold. And as he worked he told her the whole true story of how he'd cut the first hair off. No flattery. The real, petty reason, which was that she'd been laughing at something Thor said, and Loki had wanted, for one stupid instant, to be the one who could change the room. It was the truest thing he'd said in a year and it came out sounding exactly like one of his lies, and she knew it was true precisely because it was unflattering, and neither of them remarked on this, because to remark on it would break it.

He finished the braid. It held.

"There," he said, standing, brushing gold-dust off his knees. "New low point. It'll fall into that tonight. Ask me again in a week whether it worked. If it didn't, don't send a raven — send Thor, and I'll be somewhere else by the time he arrives."

At the door he paused. Not for effect; she'd have caught effect. He paused because the braid had come out well and he wanted, absurdly, to see it once more. He did not turn around.

In the morning Sif woke with her hair already dressed. She lay still a moment before she dared to feel for it. It was the new braid, the crossed one, the one that had never existed until a liar knelt on her floor and invented it out of thin air and a fact he'd never told anyone. She left it in all day. She told no one where it came from. Let them think it was hers.

Head-canon of [[loki-the-lie-that-tells-the-truth]] — an ordinary repair-day mid-myth, the wronged goddess's kitchen · warm-comic, the trick that comes out true.