The Royal Chambers — Minutes Earlier
The Queen's chambers went quiet after Odin left, and the dust came down slowly over the ruin of the golden doors.
Frigga lowered her sword. She took a long breath and smoothed the front of her singed robes with her free hand, and for a moment the warrior queen went out of her entirely, and what was left behind was a woman standing in the middle of her own home looking sadly at what had been done to it.
It was a disaster.
She stepped over a chunk of shattered marble and made her way further into the room. Her eyes went first to a pile of smoking, shredded silk in the corner, and it took her a moment to recognise it as the Myrkalfar tapestry, which had been woven by master artisans three centuries ago and was now a heap of burning rags. She frowned at it. That was going to be difficult to replace.
She turned her head and took in the rest of the damage. The vanity mirror out of Alfheim, a gift on her wedding day, was scattered across the floor in a thousand glittering pieces that would never be anything else again. The carved wooden loom she used for her weaving had been reduced to splinters. The reading chairs, which she had enchanted herself and had been fond of for six hundred years, were crushed past mending.
It would take an army of palace craftsmen the better part of a month to make the room presentable again, and she had already begun composing the list of which ones she would send for.
She took another step toward the ruined vanity.
That was when the air behind her changed.
It was not a sound. It was a drop in the temperature, and with it came the smell of burning rot and old ash. The heavy veil of dark magic Malekith had left behind in the room was parting, and something was coming out of the shadows in the far corner where it had been standing all along.
Algrim the Kursed crossed thirty feet of open marble without making any sound at all, and drove a magma-lit fist at the centre of Frigga's back. It was a killing blow, thrown at a woman who had her back turned, and it was aimed to break her spine before she knew he was in the room with her.
Frigga did not even bother to turn around.
She simply flicked her wrist backward, and the golden sword blurred through the air behind her and caught the molten fist flat on the blade. The impact rang out like a struck bell and shook what was left of the windows in their frames.
The Queen of Asgard did not give a single inch of ground.
She turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder, with the beast stopped dead against her parry.
"You took your time," Frigga said. Her voice was cold and perfectly composed. "I have been waiting for you to make your move ever since you crept in behind your master."
Behind the bone-white mask, the burning eyes widened in shock.
Frigga pushed back against the fist, and the weight of it came off her, and Algrim was forced to take a heavy stumbling step away. She turned to face him properly and rested the tip of her glowing blade on the ruined carpet.
"Patient," she observed. "You did not come out to help your lord when he was losing. You stood in the dark and waited for the perfect opportunity."
Algrim let out a low grinding rumble that went through the floorboards and up through her feet. The molten light burned in the cracks of his skin. He was a creature of instinct now, most of what he had been burned out of him in the making, but there was still enough left in there to understand that the Queen had seen him from the beginning.
He did not waste any breath on words.
He charged.
He came at her with the momentum of a falling mountain, crossing half of the room in a single stride.
Frigga did not try to block his path. She knew better than to trade strength with a Kursed. She stepped aside and left an illusion of herself standing exactly where she had been.
Algrim's fist smashed the golden phantom into sparks. He spun around with a roar, and Frigga was already behind him, and she drove her glowing blade hard across his arm.
The magical steel sparked and barely scored his burning skin.
Physically, the beast was vastly stronger than her. But Frigga had centuries of combat experience. She danced backward as Algrim swung a fist the size of an anvil. The blow missed her by inches and took a pillar out of the room entirely, and the ceiling above it sagged and held.
Frigga answered with a volley of concussive spells. Golden light hammered into him and drove him back a step, and she followed it with binding ropes of hard light that wrapped tight around his legs.
Algrim flexed once and snapped them like dry twigs. He tore a block of stone out of the ruined wall and threw it at her hard enough to kill.
Frigga flicked her wrist, and the boulder came apart into a shower of soft flower petals a foot in front of her face, and drifted down around her shoulders.
It was a grinding, ugly fight. Algrim had raw and apocalyptic strength. Frigga had the magical superiority. She moved through his attacks like water and struck back with pinpoint accuracy.
But the fight was not one-sided, because Frigga had a fatal disadvantage. She was tethered to the spot.
She could not use the room to maneuver. She had to stay between the monster and the glowing golden column where Jane Foster stood trembling. Every time she moved, she had to move in a way that did not open a path to the mortal.
Algrim was a monster, but he was not a fool. He understood quickly that he was not going to beat the Queen of Asgard in a fair duel. Her illusions were too good. Her workings were too strong. He had taken magical strikes that would have killed anything else standing, and she was not even breathing hard.
And she had fought his lord to a standstill right before him.
But he also remembered his orders. He had not been sent here to win a duel of honour. He had been sent here to take the mortal woman and be gone before the son of Odin and his warriors finished with the streets below.
So he stopped trying to reach past her.
Algrim roared and brought both fists down into the marble.
It buckled violently under him. A shockwave tore outward through the stone and ripped the foundation of the room up in a wave, and Frigga had to plant her feet and throw up a heavy curved shield of golden light to turn the flying debris away from the column at her back.
For one second, she could not see him through the thick dust.
That was the opening Algrim needed.
He used the dust and the flying stone as cover and ignored her entirely. He went straight through the outer edge of her shield, took a searing burn across his shoulder for it, and lunged past her for the golden barrier.
He drove both fists into the light. The runic shield cracked. Jane inside it, trembled in fear. He hit it a second time and the cage came apart, and he reached in with one enormous hand and took the mortal by the throat.
He lifted her into the air.
And the terrified woman in his grip came apart into a cloud of pale green butterflies.
Algrim stared at his empty hand. The butterflies went up around his horned mask and drifted away toward the high ceiling, and the alcove behind him was empty, and had been empty for some time.
"Did you truly believe I would leave her standing there?" Frigga said from across the room. "She was gone the moment my husband came through that wall. You were too busy watching him. Everyone was watching him."
Algrim turned slowly. The molten light in his face burned brighter.
His target was gone. He had been fooled. He had failed his king.
"Then I take you instead," the monster rumbled.
He came at her with everything he had left, and Frigga did not move aside. She planted her feet, gathered every part of what she was, and threw both hands forward.
A wave of golden force caught the Kursed square in the chest and took him off his feet, and he went backward the length of the chamber and out through the shattered wall into the wide stone corridor beyond it, and the ornate railing went with him.
Frigga lowered her hands. Her breathing had not changed. She stepped toward the breach to seal it and shut the beast outside.
—
Out in the dark corridor, Algrim pushed himself up out of the rubble. He was Kursed. Magic alone did not break him.
He was gathering himself to charge right back through the wall when he suddenly stopped.
Blindly charging had not worked. Nothing he had thrown at her had worked, and nothing he threw at her next was going to work either.
But he did not need a fair duel. He needed to win, by any road at all.
He needed something else.
Then he heard it, close by, behind him. Someone breathing hard in the dark.
Algrim turned his burning head. He looked past the broken stone, and there was a figure crouched down behind a fallen pillar, small and still and trying very hard not to be found.
Algrim reached into the shadows.
A slow smile cracked the molten skin of his face.