voice was cold, cold as night waters in early spring, and there was danger in it.
“Eilathen, it is the Dreamer. I have need. Forgo your wrath and hear me. It is long since we stood here, you and I.”
“Long for you, Ysanne. You have grown old. Soon the worms will gather you.” The reedy pleasure in the voice could be heard. “But I do not age in my green halls, and time turns not for me, save when the bannion fire troubles the deep.” And Eilathen held out the hand upon which the red ring burned.
“I would not send down the fire without a cause, and tonight marks your release from guardianship. Do this last thing for me and you are free of my call.”
A slight stir of wind; the trees were sighing again.
“On your oath?” Eilathen moved closer to the shore. He seemed to grow, towering above the Seer, water rippling down his shoulders and thighs, the long wet hair pulled back from his face.
“On my oath,” Ysanne replied. “I bound you against my own desire. The wild magic is meant to be free. Only because my need was great were you given to the flowerfire. On my oath, you are free tonight.”
“And the task?” Eilathen’s voice was colder than ever, more alien. He shimmered before them with a green dark power.
“This,” said Ysanne, and pointed to Kimberly. The stab of Eilathen’s eyes was like ice cutting into her. Kim saw, sensed, somehow knew the fathomless halls whence Ysanne had summoned him—the shaped corridors of seastone and twined seaweed, the perfect silence of his deep home. She held the gaze as best she could, held it until it was Eilathen who turned away.
“Now I know,” he said to the Seer. “Now I understand.” And a thread that might have been respect had woven its way into his voice.
“But she does not,” said Ysanne. “So spin for her, Eilathen. Spin the Tapestry, that she may learn what she is, and what has been, and release you of the burden that you bear.”
Eilathen glittered high above them both. His voice was a splintering of ice. “And this is the last?”
“This is the last,” Ysanne replied.
He did not hear the note of loss in her voice. Sadness was alien to him, not of his world or his being. He smiled at her words and tossed his hair back, the taste, the glide, the long green dive of freedom already running through him.
“Look then!” he cried. “Look you to know—and know your last of Eilathen!” And crossing his arms upon his breast, so that the ring on his finger burned like a heart afire, he began to spin again. But somehow, as Kim watched, his eyes were locked on hers all the time, even as he whirled, so fast that the lake water began to foam beneath him, and his cold, cold eyes and the bright pain of the red ring he wore were all she knew in the world.
And then he was inside her, deeper than any lover had ever gone, more completely, and Kimberly was given the Tapestry.
She saw the shaping of the worlds, Fionavar at first, then all the others—her own in a fleeting glimpse—following it into time. The gods she saw, and knew their names, and she touched but could not hold, for no mortal can, the purpose and the pattern of the Weaver at the Loom.
And as she was whirled away from that bright vision, she came abruptly face to face with the oldest Dark in his stronghold of Starkadh. In his eyes she felt herself shrivel, felt the thread fray on the Loom; she knew evil for what it was. The live coals of his eyes scorched into her, and the talons of his hands seemed to score her flesh, and within her heart she was forced to sound the uttermost depths of his hate, and she knew him for Rakoth the Unraveller, Rakoth Maugrim, whom the gods themselves feared, he who would rend the Tapestry and lay his own malignant shadow on all of time to come. And flinching away from the vastness of his power, she endured an endless passage of despair.
Ysanne, ashen and helpless, heard her cry out then, a cry torn from the ruin of innocence, and the Seer wept by the shore of her lake. But through it all Eilathen spun, faster than hope or despair, colder than night, the stone over his heart blazing as he whirled like an unleashed wind