The Wolflord himself had been away, engaged in tasks of his own devising. It had been he, with the knowledge that came with being one of the andain, son of a god, and with the subtlety that was his own, who had conceived and led the attack on the Paraiko in Khath Meigol.

If attack it could be called. The Giants by their very nature had no access to anger or violence. No response to war, save the single inviolate fact that shedding their blood brought down any curse the injured Giant chose to invoke. That was the true, the literal concept of the bloodcurse; it had nothing to do with the superstitions about roaming, fanged ghosts haunting Khath Meigol.

Or so the Wolflord had continually reminded himself in the days he spent there while the Paraiko were penned like helpless sheep in their caves by the svarts and urgach, breathing the clever, killing smoke of the fires he’d ordered to be made.

He had only lasted a few days, but the true reason was his own secret. He had tried to convince himself of what he had told those he left behind—that his departure was dictated by the demands of war—but he had lived too long and too searchingly to really deceive himself.

The truth was that the Paraiko unsettled him deeply in some subconscious way his mind could not grasp. In some fashion they lay in his path, huge obstacles to his one unending desire—which was for annihilation, utter and absolute. How they could oppose him he knew not, for pacifism was woven into their very nature, but nonetheless they disturbed him and rendered him uneasy as did no one else in Fionavar or any other world, with the single exception of his father.

So, since he could not kill Cernan of the Beasts, he set about destroying the Paraiko in their mountain caves. When the fires were burning properly and the svarts and urgach made relentlessly aware of the need not to shed blood—as if they had to be reminded, for even the stupid svarts lived in abject terror of the bloodcurse—Galadan had withdrawn from the bitter cold of the mountains and the incessant chanting that came from the caves.

He had been in east Gwynir when the snow had, shockingly, melted. Immediately he had begun massing his wolves among the evergreens, waiting for the word of attack. He had just garnered tidings of his contingent slaughtered in Leinanwood by the High King when Avaia herself had swooped, glorious and malevolent, to hiss that an army had issued forth across the Valgrind Bridge, heading for Celidon.

At speed he had taken his wolves down the eastern edge of the Plain. He had crossed Adein near the Edryn Gap, unseen, unanticipated, and then, timing it flawlessly, had arrived at the battlefield to fall on the exposed right flank of the Dalrei. He hadn’t expected the lios to be there, but that was only a source of joy, a deepening of delight: they were going to slaughter them all.

They would have, had the Wild Hunt not suddenly flashed in the heavens above. Alone among the army of the Dark he knew who Owein was. Alone, he grasped a hint of what had happened. And alone, he comprehended something of what lay beneath the cry that stopped the killing. Alone in that army he knew whose voice it was.

He was, after all, her brother’s son.

There had been a great deal to assimilate, and a very immediate danger as well. And through all the pandemonium a thought, inchoate, little more than a straining toward a possibility, was striving to take shape in his mind. Then, above and beyond all this, as if it had not been enough and more than enough, there came an intuition he had learned to trust, a vibration within the part of him that was a god, Cernan’s son.

As the cold rage of battle passed, and then the chaos of flight, Galadan became increasingly aware that something was happening in the forest realm.

There was suddenly a very great deal to consider. He needed solitude. He always needed that—as being nearest to his long desire—but now his mind craved it as much as his soul. So he had detached himself from the army, unseen in the dawn shadows, and he was riding alone when the morning sunlight found him.

Shortly after sunrise he stopped, surveying the Plain. He found it deeply pleasing to his heart. Except for the cloud of dust, settling now, far to the north, there was no sign of life beyond the insentient grass he did not care about. It was almost as if the goal for which he had striven for past a thousand years had come.

Almost. He smiled thinly. Irony was nearly at the center of his soul and would not let him dream for very long. The striving had been too lengthy, too deeply ingrained, for dreams to ever be remotely adequate.

He could remember the very instant his designs had taken shape, when he had first aligned himself with the Unraveller—the moment when Lisen of the Wood had sent word running through Pendaran that she had merged her fate and given her love to Amairgen Whitebranch, the mortal.

He had been in the Great Wood that morning, ready to celebrate with all the other powers of Pendaran her slaying of the man for his presumption in the sacred grove.

It had turned out otherwise. Everything had.

He had gone into Starkadh, once and once only, for in that place he, who was mightiest by far of the andain and arrogant with that strength, had been forced to humble himself before an obliterating magnitude of power. He had not even been able to mask his own mind from Maugrim, who had laughed.

He was made to realize that he was entirely understood and, notwithstanding that, had been accepted, with amusement, as lieutenant by the Dark. Even though Rakoth knew precisely what his own purposes were and how they differed from Maugrim’s own, it hadn’t seemed to matter.

Their designs marched together a very long way, Galadan had told himself, and though he was not—no one was—remotely an equal to the Unraveller, he might yet, ere the very end, find a way to obliterate the world Maugrim would rule.

He had served Rakoth well. Had commanded the army that cut Conary off by Sennett Strand so long ago. He had killed Conary himself, in his wolf shape, and he would have won that battle, and so the war, had Revor of the Plain not come, somehow, impossibly soon, through the mists of Daniloth to turn the tide of battle north to Starkadh itself, where it ended. He himself, badly wounded, had hardly escaped with his life from Colan’s avenging sword.

They had thought he’d died, he knew. He almost had. In an icy cave north of the Ungarch River he had lain, bitterly cold, nursed only by his wolves. For a very long time he’d huddled there, damping his power, his aura, as low as he could, while the armies of the Light held parley before the Mountain and Ginserat made the wardstones and then shaped, with aid of the Dwarves, the chain that bound Rakoth beneath Rangat.

Through all the long waiting years he had continued to serve, having made his choice and set his own course. He it was who had found Avaia, half dead herself. The swan had been hiding in the frigid realm of Fordaetha, Queen of Rük, whose icy touch was instant death to a spirit less strong than one of the andain. With his own hands he had nursed the swan back to health in the court of that cold Queen. Fordaetha had wanted to couple with him. It had pleased him to refuse her.

His, too, had been the stratagem, subtle and infinitely slow, whereby the water spirit of Llewenmere, innocent and fair, had been lured into surrendering her most handsome swans. He had given her a reason that sufficed: his earnest desire, in the identity he had dissembled with, to bring swans north to Celyn Lake, on the borders of devastated Andarien. And she had released her guardianship and had, all unsuspecting, let him take them away.

He had only needed some of them: the males. North, indeed, they had been carried, but far past Celyn into the glacier-riven mountains beyond Ungarch, where they had been bred to Avaia. Then, when they had died, she, who could not die unless slain, had coupled with her children, and had continued doing so, year after year, to bring forth the brood that had stained the skies on the evening just past.