In the ruin of her own chambers, with a mortal woman sealed behind her in a column of light, the Queen of Asgard split.
One queen became three.
They stepped apart in mid-stride, identical, walking three different arcs across the floor, and all three of them already casting.
Malekith answered by ceasing to be solid.
Between one heartbeat and the next he came apart into a thick black mist. Frigga's first working, a net of golden light wide enough to catch a charging warhorse, swept harmlessly through the empty air where he had just been standing. The mist poured back together behind the middle queen. He was already swinging his blade, and cut her in half. She burst into drifting golden threads.
But with his blade fully committed, the true Frigga's counterstroke took him across the back like a whip of solid light. The impact threw him the entire length of the room and into the far wall.
The wall broke.
He came out of the rubble already dissolving into smoke. But where the light had struck him, the black mist was visibly thinner. Torn. Slower to gather.
He can be hit, Frigga thought. I need only be on time.
That became the rhythm of the fight.
—
Malekith was everywhere in the room, and nowhere long enough to pin down. He melted into shadow in one corner and stepped out of the dark in another, crossing forty feet without ever once touching the floor between. When her magic reached him as mist, most of it went straight through. When it caught him solid, he took the magic apart. He ran two pale fingers down the length of a golden snare until the spell fell open like an unpicked seam.
That was his craft. The old elven craft. The same patient work that had held the Aether open as a liquid for five thousand years.
He did not try to block her workings. He read them, and undid them.
But he could not read her.
Three queens became five, and five became three, and none of them was ever where his senses insisted she must be. Her blade came out of the sleeve of a queen he had already dismissed as an illusion and opened a smoking line straight across his ribs. Her light-lance caught him half-formed between mist and flesh and hurled him through the ruined loom.
And twice more, when he thought he had bought himself the opening for it, he broke off his attack on the queen and went straight for the column.
The first time he came at it as mist, and the golden light threw him back the way a hot stove throws back a careless hand.
The second time he came at it solid, with the shadow-blade in both hands, and he put a crack in the surface the width of a hair before Frigga's lance took him off his feet and halfway across the chamber.
The crack closed while he was still getting up.
Inside the light, Jane could only stand and watch. Every single time Malekith turned his attention toward her, she saw the Queen of Asgard step smoothly into the space between them without ever appearing to hurry at all.
Malekith finally stopped trying to reach the column. There was no reaching it while the Queen stood between him and his prize. So, she would have to stop standing.
That should have been a simple matter for the elven king. It was not.
Frigga had taken every exchange since the doors came down. But she could not quite finish him, and she knew exactly why.
The killing stroke kept arriving late.
Not by much. Just by half a beat. Her illusions were flawless and her defence was flawless, because those were the parts of her craft she had never stopped living inside. A queen misdirects a court every day of her life. A mother guards her family without ceasing.
But the final, lethal stroke. The cold thrust that turns a won exchange into a dead enemy. She had not needed it in centuries. Peace had been long, and golden, and wonderful, and it had quietly stolen her timing.
A few hundred years ago, she would have taken his pale head in the very first minute.
And yet here he was. Torn and smoking and still breathing, slipping her finishers by a hair. Again, and again, and again.
The whole business was, she decided, deeply insulting.
"You are stronger than they told me." Malekith spoke from three places at once. There was dark blood at his ribs that his craft had not yet closed. "And slower."
"And yet the slow sword keeps finding you." Frigga's voice came clearly from directly behind him.
He turned. She was not there either.
"I would have enjoyed a very long fight with you." He said it to the room, unhurried, the way a man notes the hour. "But it is not what I came for. Let us finish."
Then he tried the cruellest thing he carried. A curse flung across the whole width of the chamber. It was a rolling grey wave meant to turn living flesh to stone, far too broad to dodge and far too fast to outrun.
Frigga simply raised one graceful hand, and the dark magic broke uselessly against her like water on a cliff.
She caught the entire dark working, turned it inside out, and threw it right back at him.
For one glorious moment, the last king of the Dark Elves stood in the wreckage of a queen's bedchamber and watched grey stone crawl up his own arm from wrist to elbow.
He tore the curse out by the roots with a snarl and shook the marble off like dried mud.
Then he looked at her. Truly looked.
Whatever he arrived at, he kept to himself.
—
Jane had stopped breathing somewhere around the third exchange and had not started again. She had watched Thor fight. She had watched the warriors of Asgard fight. This was not that. This was two people who had been doing this since before her species learned to farm, and neither of them had raised their voice once.
They're not even breathing hard. The thought arrived with a horrible clarity. Ten minutes, and they're not even breathing hard.
It was somehow worse than the fighting.
Then, the rhythm of the battle suddenly changed.
Malekith stopped playing.
Frigga felt the aggressive shift instantly. The black mist did not dart or weave. It came at her from six directions at once. Two of her golden projections went out like blown candles under the sheer pressure. The shadow-sword found her true blade and pressed heavily against it. He kept pressing, and he did not stop pressing.
He had solved the only problem that mattered. He did not need to outright beat her, and he absolutely did not have the time to try. He only had to hold her in place. Blade locked heavily to blade, in one spot, for exactly as long as it took to reach his goal.
He was fully extended. Every sense he owned was aimed forward, past the straining queen, at a column of golden light and the small mortal woman standing inside it.
Nothing at all pointed behind him.
Which was when the stone wall at his back exploded.