Loki X Reader || Girl With The Gold Earring

3 | Becoming A Thief

When the head housekeeper comes to check on Y/N the next morning, Y/N makes a show of barking a few hacking coughs and dabbing at her---actually dry---nose with a hankie.

Alfdis tuts pittingly and sentences her to another day of bed rest.

Y/N does her best to look disappointed, but, whilst throwing another false cough into her elbow, a smile tweeks her lip for the first time in a while.

She'd been planning all night.

Spent hours running through imaginary scenarios, tweaking them slightly, then running through them again. Her plans have plans; subgroups of excuses, backups and contingencies.

It's difficult holding them all in her head; each mental note a marble threatening to slip through her fingers.

Y/N had thought about noting them down, and even gotten half way through tearing out a page of her sketchbook—but stopped herself for fear of someone finding the parchment.

Dropping the sketchbook back into the draw, Y/N let's her shoulders fall onto her pillow and tries to etch her scheme onto her memory instead:

One of the main problems will be explaining where she's going.

Arne will wonder why she's missing so many evenings at the Tipsy Dragon, and will no doubt come looking for her.

Aasta will notice her cake sales have marginally declined, and worry in that motherly way of hers.

And, of course, Y/N has her job as a maid.

She needs to string a sentence together that will excuse her from social outings, soothe Aasta's maternal instincts, and tug the few withered heartstrings Alfdis has left.

Something that will excuse her for—

For how long?

The trip will be several weeks on horseback, Y/N knows that for certain.

Upon beginning her career as a maid---when she'd travelled from her childhood home to Asgard's epicentre---it had taken four days of swaying side to side in a cart before Y/N even got a glimpse at The Palace's rising golden spires.

Y/N doesn't know how far away the Asgardian-Vanirian border is, but she suspects it's significantly farther than her parent's squat little cottage in the countryside.

And then there's the matter of...doing what Y/N has to do once she reaches her destination. That could take anywhere from hours to days, seeing as she can't develop a plan for that until she gets there and can access the situation.

Returning home will be another few weeks.

If she can return home.

Who knows what will happen. Y/N might have to go somewhere no one will find her and never return—which would actually make explaining where she's going a lot easier because she wouldn't have to do it. She'd just disappear from the servants quarters, and, eventually, disappear from people's memories.

Another problem will be finding her way. She's never strayed further than a day from The Palace since she's moved here, and maps just look like wobbly lines to her untrained eyes.

However, she figures that if she can just get her hands on a compass and keep the little arrow pointed squarely at the S, she'll stumble onto the Vanir's doorstep eventually.

Finally on Y/N's main list of concerns is currency, although, for one of the first times in her life, that is one of the easiest problems to solve.

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