Seol na Cinniúna, the Loom, had at one point existed outside of time, but something had brought it to the here and now. Cú Dubh didn't know why it happened, but that never really mattered. All that mattered was the next mission for the Weaver, and the secret one he kept to himself.

  He walked the long corridor to the Weaver's chamber. The walls were thread and light, geometries that folded when he looked at them directly. He had stopped trying to understand the architecture years ago. The Loom was not built for minds like his. It tolerated him the way a body tolerates a transplant.

  The Weaver hung at the center of the chamber.

  A woman made of metal, suspended from the ceiling by cables that might have been veins. Her eyes were open, but they rarely moved. He wondered if she actually saw anything with them. Her mouth moved without breath.

  He hated her. As far as he could tell, he always had. He hated her for so long he had forgotten the reason why.

  "A branch exists."

  The voice came from her mouth but also from the walls, the floor, the humming threads that webbed the chamber. The Heart pulsed in its containment field next to her. Cú Dubh did not know what the Heart really was, but he knew it was what gave the Weaver life. It was what sustained him as well.

  "A branch," he repeated. He knew her work, but she had never pruned in his time working with her.

  "The artifact's activation created a splinter." A pause. It seemed like calculation, not hesitation. "Curious that it was not flagged upon its genesis. No matter. There is no tertiary splinter, which means the Knot has not been used in that timeline yet."

  "You want me to retrieve it."

  "The Knot is one objective. There is another." The cables above her hummed, and the threads along the walls pulsed with dim light. Something in her voice had changed. Tighter. Eager. "The branch exists because someone changed a fixed point. A death that was meant to happen did not."

  Cú Dubh waited.

  "The Arbiter lives."

  For a moment, he didn't understand. The Arbiter had been dead for fourteen years. A boy named Oisín, son of a fisherman near Ballinacor. Cú Dubh had spent a decade searching for a replacement. Someone of the same bloodline, the same resonance, anything that might satisfy the Loom's hunger for a key. He had found nothing. The mother had passed in childbirth. The father had vanished shortly after the boy's death, walked into the sea, or wandered off to die. No one knew, or if they did, they held their tongue under torture.

  A dead end in every direction.

  "In the branch timeline," the Weaver said, "he did not die. He lives, and he does not know what he is."

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  The threads along the walls pulsed brighter. Her eyes moved, tracking something he couldn't see. There was a hunger in her now, naked and sharp. He had never seen her like this. In fifteen years of service, she had been cold, mechanical, inevitable. Now she was starving.

  It almost made him smile. Hunger was always a weakness.

  "The boy and the Knot," he said. "Both in the branch."

  "Yes."

  "Where is he?"

  "I am not omniscient, Hound. I only know when a new timeline branches and why. He was the son of a fisherman from a village near Ballinacor. I can only assume he has continued to live out his days there."

  "And the Knot?"

  "The witch should still have it. The one who runs the orphanage on the western isle." The Weaver's voice sharpened. "It was taken from the pattern. It is not hers to keep."

  The orphanage. He knew the place. Had visited it a year ago on another mission. A shabby building full of children and one old woman who smelled of herbs and secrets.

  "How do I cross?"

  "The Heart opens the path. My Sister-self sleeps in the branch, as I was before you woke me. Her Loom dormant, and her Heart waiting." The cables above her hummed. "Wake her using the console only. Do not interact with anything else you may see. She will open the path home."

  "And if your Sister doesn't like having her timeline pruned?"

  The Weaver's head tilted. A mechanical motion, precise and wrong. "She is me. Her purpose and mine are one and the same. Without the Arbiter, neither of us can hold back what stirs in the deep."

  She didn't say the name. She never did, but Cú Dubh had heard enough over the years to know there was something out there that even the Weaver feared. Something the Loom was built to contain. Something that had been growing hungrier in the long years without an Arbiter at the helm.

  “Transportation?”

  "Not my concern. You are my Hound, go hunt."

  She was watching him. The way she always did when she used that word. Looking for the flinch, the flash of teeth, the crack she could pry open later.

  The Weaver held many secrets. Cú Dubh held only one.

  He smiled and gave her nothing.

  She looked back at the Heart, and a mechanical device descended from the ceiling on metal arms. It was positioned behind the Heart and shot what looked like light into it. A rift appeared on the other side. A dark room beyond, same as the one Cú Dubh was standing in.

  Timeline-B.

  "I'll bring you the Knot, and the boy."

  He stepped through before she could say anything else.

  The rift closed behind him, and he was alone in darkness.

  It was the same room, just cold and empty. He could cross to the console and wake this world's Weaver, but he chose not to. Let her sleep.

  Another version of the Heart stood in its containment field. Same metal, same triangular knots shimmering behind the field. It was his key to returning to his timeline, but not before his grisly work was done.

  He turned toward the exit and had to sidestep a large white table that wasn't there in his timeline. The surface gleamed faintly in the Heart's light, smooth and waiting. The Arbiter’s table sat waiting.

  The longing hit him the moment he left the chamber. The Heart was what had kept him alive since the transfiguration, since his body stopped being his and became the Loom's instrument. Every time he stepped away from the Loom, he felt the tether stretch. Every time he stayed too long, the Heart reminded him what he owed.

  A leash.

  He hated it, even as he loved the warmth it gave him when he returned. The Weaver would not tug on it while he was here, but she had pulled him home many times.

  The Heart in the room behind him was apparently not a substitute. They were two separate entities, and Cú Dubh only owed his life to one.

  It would take him a day, maybe two, to travel to the orphanage. Past the veil that hid the Otherwhile, back to the Drowned Isles.

  And after that, he would hunt a boy.