They met at sunrise, The Lady and The Weaver, where the islands at the top of the world had been rent asunder when the Dragon of Stars had fallen to a mage-lord’s spear. By their reckoning it was two days before Midwinter Dark, and they didn’t have long.

‘Well met,’ said the Weaver, his voice devoid of warmth. He did not move to touch her, but stood with his cloak tight about him, wary and suspicious.

‘Well met,’ said the Lady.

 Her eyes glittered in the cold marble beauty of her face. She wore her malice like a crown. ‘We’ve made a mistake. But despite everything, I did what I thought was right. And I’ve found the first piece in our eventual victory. I said I would.’

The Weaver let a long breath out. ‘Which piece?’

‘This.’ She didn’t gloat, or let any scrap of victorious arrogance show, but held up a thin silver needle.

The weaver looked at it. He too allowed no trace of triumph into his voice. ‘I have not seen that in seven hundred years. I always wondered what you had done with it. Where did you find it?’

‘In his home. Ah! You believed we had left nothing but smoking ruins, when we took him? So did I. But he’d hidden this cunningly. In the well. The years had crumbled the walls and given up this treasure.’

‘I accused you of spending too much time there, as if in mourning,’ he smiled. ‘Now I see your regrets bore fruit, after all.’

She said nothing, but gazed impassively at him, the needle loose in her palm, as if daring him to try to take it.

He did not.

His bowed head was shrouded in black wool as he gazed across the ocean horizon, away from her. He would not look at her. Of her, he’d seen all he wanted to see and it was enough to last him a lifetime. Several lifetimes.

She watched him kneel and scrape up a handful of old dried thorns, and let them scatter from his fingers, down to the shore. ‘You seem afraid, nonetheless. Are you afraid? He will be free, and then…’

‘I told you at the time that I wanted no part of your petty revenge on a man who wished for nothing more than to never see you again. You did nothing because it was right. You did it because of your wounded pride, and your sense of entitlement to a soul which even you should have known you could not own! Who do you think you are? You had it all! You have nothing, now!’

She stamped her foot. ‘I still have his heart, or have you forgotten? Look at me! You will pay! Even now, he breaks free of his bonds and flies this World at every equinox. How long before he is free altogether and can come as a man? And when he does, when he gathers his followers and walks and wields spear and sword and lightning, do you think that he will only come for me, and not for you too?’

‘That is impossible. His bonds were made of starlight. You know this. You made them. He cannot break free.’

She ran her tongue lightly over her lips, her eyes hooded. ‘There are those who may already know…how to free him.’

‘And why would they do that?’

‘There are those among the cursed ones who believe he is their god,’ she snapped.

‘We sowed the seeds well. His name is a byword for evil in these lands. There is nobody alive who would free him. Nobody who would dare unleash such terror. Even the cursed ones would not dare.’

He turned finally, and stood looking at her, a bitter smile playing about his lips. Ragged feathers of peat-brown hair whipped at his stubbled chin as the wind began to rise from the North, sending fine tufts of cotton-grass skittering across the headland and down to the sea. There had once been the light of love for her in his eyes; now there was only a dull spark of resentment.

‘Laiharth, I need not remind you that you could have killed him before. But your perverse and wayward curiosity persuaded you to let him live when he fought you, if you can call it living, in that black prison, because you wanted him to pay forever! And,’ he raised his finger and waggled it sternly in her face, ‘did you never think that one day, there would be others like him? Others who knew how to harness wind and fire, and thorn and stone and wave, and bend the elements of the World to their will? No petty Rune-casters would they be, but mages with power akin to our own!’

She nodded, defiance in her stance. ‘I knew. But I also believed we could deal with them, as they rose. The Havoc Stones are lost now, and we did deal with the mages that came…’

‘But that was when there was one and one only, in any era,’ he interrupted. ‘Now, by my readings of the Runes, there are four. Four at once, and all four without tuition or guidance or anything, indeed, to tell them where they must not go, what they must not do! Who knows what they are capable of, these four? You fool! You should have killed him!’

‘You have miscalculate, fool,’ she corrected him, raising her chin defiantly. ‘There are six mages, though I think that the aura of one evades even me; I cannot make it out. But he’s a boy, a silly young thing, with no real inkling of his own power.’

A malicious smile crept over her lips. ‘He will be no trouble at all, before long.’

He whistled softly at that. ‘Then we can easily deal with them all, if we can but find them one by one and pick them off before they know what they are capable of. But can we?’

‘It is simple enough,’ she shrugged. ‘Seek out havoc, and you will find a mage behind it.’

He paused, running his tongue over thin, salt-crusted lips, searching her face. ‘But if it isn’t that simple after all? If he finds them first? Have you thought of that, in your towering hubris, woman?’

‘I have; we’ll be dead.’

The Lady shivered at a gust of wind, now turned chill despite the promise of sun that day. It cut through the thin silk shawl she wore, for she had not thought beyond her summer palace that morning when she’d heard the Weaver’s call. She hadn’t thought what meeting here truly meant for the body. She’d been warm for too long. Warm, cocooned, coddled. Her lip curled. She’d become complacent. She’d become weak.

She looked at her feet, clothed in soft leather slippers unsuited to such stony ground. Tufted golden grass and tiny harebells lay crushed beneath them, bruised but resilient. Gorse bit with vicious spikes at the delicate lace of her hem. There was no colour here, just the washed-out, muted tones of the Northern coast, all steel skies and buckskin grass that ran to the dull black shingle on the shore. Such a cold, lonely place. She hated it.

Yet she loved it also. She loved the silence and the deathly, barren cold.

She knew that a scant half-day’s ride from where she stood now, was once a low-walled white dwelling; a fisherman’s house, on the shores of a fluid iron sea that echoed with whale-song and glittered with stars. She closed her eyes. She saw him clearly, every time she closed her eyes, just as she saw him now, a dark-haired man with distant amber eyes that saw far more than a lowly fisherman should.

He saw the Worlds, even before she taught him how to use the Runes of the Havoc Stones to travel between them.

And he saw her.

She’d hated that he could. Try as she might, she’d never been able to hide herself completely from him, and had contented herself instead with weaving enchantments around him, so that he loved her, and gave her what she wanted.

‘He’ll never be yours,’ said Arnoth’s soft voice among her silent reverie. ‘He never was. A moment, maybe, here and there, when his heart beat in time with yours. But you could no more tame or own him than you can tame or own the ocean yonder.’

She snapped her eyes open again and laughed to see their blaze force him back a step. ‘I have learned that, my lord, as well you know! But you also know that I won’t be spurned. He owes me for his faithlessness.’

‘As I recall, it wasn’t his faithlessness that got us into this trouble!’ Arnoth didn’t bother to hide his contemptuous amusement. ‘It was yours. There are times, Laiharth, when you should let go. That wild spinner of squalls will never, ever submit to you a second time, and if you persist in making him, you will harm us all. So, I will not stand with you, if you insist on taking another war to his black doors.’

‘It is not war I want!’ she hissed, stepping close to him so that they were almost cheek-to cheek. ‘It is his death! Surely even you, in your complacency, can see what a threat he is to the Worlds! He must die, Arnoth. He must die!’

‘Well, then he must; but I confess, I feel little joy at the thought. To me, he was dead a long time ago. You do nothing but resurrect the pain I felt when I learned of your infidelity.’

‘I did it for us. For the kingdom.’

Arnoth shook his head and raised his hand. ‘Enough. Before I leave, I want to know one thing: who are the mages?’

‘I don’t know their names. But I know what the Runes tell me, and that is, that one is a wild, untamed wielder of fire. He will come your way, one day, perhaps when he is a man. Watch for him, and send me word, when he does.’

Arnoth sighed. ‘As you wish.’

It was time to go. He raised his hand and traced the first Rune in the air above him. It hung for a moment, blazing red-gold in the milky air, then faded. The grasses bent and flattened.

‘I’ll bid you farewell once more, my Queen,’ said Arnoth, and traced another Rune atop the first. A gull screeched and whirled, and dropped in a flurry of snowy feathers as the curves of molten copper blazed, a sigil of death against a morbid sky.

Laiharth made no answer, but stepped back as Arnoth traced the last Rune, and then stepped on the tendrils of light that snaked out from the circle of blackened grass, and then he was gone from view.

She sat then, alone, her mood dull and morose, and stared over the ocean. These islands were the last in a vast sea, with nothing beyond them except waves and sky. She hated it here. Hated it, and yet had spent the happiest months of her life in a place not unlike it, at the smoke-blackened hearth of a common-born man who refused to bow or to call her Queen. He’d been illiterate and ignorant, but oh, he had such talent, and a thirst for knowledge that matched her own voracious need. He’d been more than a match for her. Much more than a match. Where she’d had education and practice, honing her art beyond all the desires of her tutor, the man of salt and storm and simple rough tastes had intuition and insight. The Lord of Waters she’d dubbed him, and the name had stuck, not just in her mind, but in the minds of all men now who knew of him, even as that name had fallen away and another one rose in its place.

Rakshin-corth.

Ghoul.

If she closed her eyes now, she could still feel the softness of his hair against her cheek, smell the smoke and heather in it, taste the sweat and salt on his skin, wrap herself in his heat and passion.

She hated him.

She’d tried to kill him, but he’d refused to die, and he lived as if to spite her, though he was broken and dying when she finally stopped the torture and banished him to the Marwaithyr, the bleak, black land of the Dead.

And from there, he was about to flee. She’d seen the signs, understood the portents, and she knew, without a doubt, that his life was far from over but that hers, if she failed to kill him this time, was resolutely at an end.

She would never admit it, but she was afraid.