then; there were fish in the lakes and rivers and the wide sea, and birds in the wider sky. And in the sky as well there flew the Wild Hunt, and in the forests and the valleys and across rivers and up the mountain slopes there walked the Paraiko in the young years of the world, naming what they saw.
“By day the Paraiko walked and the Hunt were at rest, but at night, when the moon rose, Owein and the seven kings and the child who rode Iselen, palest of the shadow horses, mounted up into the starry sky, and they hunted the beasts of woods and open spaces until dawn, filling the night with the wild terrible beauty of their cries and their hunting horns.”
“Why?” Brendel could not forebear to ask. “Do you know why, forest one? Do you know why the Weaver spun their killing into the Tapestry?”
“Who shall know the design on the Loom?” Flidais said soberly. “But this much I had from Cernan of the Beasts: the Hunt was placed in the Tapestry to be wild in the truest sense, to lay down an uncontrolled thread for the freedom of the Children who came after. And so did the Weaver lay a constraint upon himself, that not even he, shuttling at the Loom of Worlds, may preordain and shape exactly what is to be. We who came after, the andain who are the children of gods, the lios alfar, the Dwarves, and all the races of men, we have such choices as we have, some freedom to shape our own destinies, because of that wild thread of Owein and the Hunt slipping across the Loom, warp and then weft, in turn and at times. They are there, Cernan told me one night long ago, precisely to be wild, to cut across the Weaver’s measured will. To be random, and so enable us to be.”
He stopped, because the green eyes of Guinevere had turned back to him from the sea, and there was that within them which stilled his tongue.
“Was that Cernan’s word?” she asked. “Random?”
He thought back carefully, for the look on her face demanded care, and it had been a very long time ago. “It was,” he said at length, understanding that it mattered, but not why. “He said it exactly so, Lady. The Weaver wove the Hunt and set them free on the Loom, that we, in our turn, might have a freedom of our own because of them. Good and evil, Light and Dark, they are in all the worlds of the Tapestry because Owein and the kings are here, following the child on Iselen, threading across the sky.”
She had turned fully away from the sea to face him now. He could not read her eyes; he had never been able to read her eyes. She said, “And so, because of the Hunt, Rakoth was made possible.”
It was not a question. She had seen through to the deepest, bitterest part of the story. He answered withwhat Cernan and Ceinwen had said to him, the only thing that could be said. “He is the price we pay.”
After a pause, and a little more loudly because of the wind, he added, “He is not in the Tapestry. Because of the randomness of the Hunt, the Loom itself was no longer sacrosanct; it was no longer all. So Maugrim was able to come from outside of it, from outside of time and the walls of Night that bind all the rest of us, even the gods, and enter into Fionavar and so into all the worlds. He is here but he is not part of the Tapestry; he has never done anything that would bind him into it and so he cannot die, even if everything on the Loom should unravel and all our threads be lost.”
This part Brendel had known, though never before how it had come to pass. Sick at heart, he looked at the woman sitting beside them, and as he gazed, he read a thought in her. He was not wiser than Flidais, nor had he even known her so long, but he had tuned his soul to her service since the night she’d been stolen from his care, and he said, “Jennifer, if all this is true, if the Weaver put a check on his own shaping of our destinies, it would follow—surely it would follow—that the Warrior’s doom is not irrevocable.”
It was her own burgeoning thought, a hint, a kernel