The Vanishing Throne (36 page)

I glance at the Cailleach. Her expression has hardened, eyes sunken into her skeletal face. Whatever Aithinne is about to do is the source of her mother's rage.

My daughter, Aithinne, should never have created the Falconers
.

A wave of uncertainty passes through the group. The woman who tried speaking before suddenly finds her voice, hoarse, barely audible. “This is a trick.”

I expect Aithinne to respond as harshly as she did before. But instead, I see a flicker in her gaze, a weakness in that hardened armor. She grieves, too. “No tricks. No deceit. I want you to take from him what he stole from you.” Then, a whisper. One I just barely catch: “What he stole from
me
.”

“What does she mean?” I ask the Cailleach. I don't want to ask, but I need to know. “What he stole?”

The Cailleach leans on her staff; it freezes the ground all the way to my bare toes. “She grieves the loss of her subjects. Those my son killed. My daughter was born too soft. Calling on humans to fight on her side in a war . . .” She curls her lip in disgust. “I would have killed her for it myself if I could.”

Her
subjects
? The pieces start to connect: I fit together stories and everything I know about Kiaran and Aithinne. Everything I learned about the fae.

Two kingdoms of light and dark, each with one monarch, and the faeries of each kingdom served a single purpose: The dark kingdom brought death, and the light kingdom brought creation.

My heartbeat pounds in my ears. The women around the fire are standing, but I can't focus on what they're saying. All I can think about is Kiaran sitting on the rocky beach after the battle with the
mortair
.

Why were you searching for the crystal?

I was Unseelie, Kam. What do you think? I wanted it to kill the Seelie queen
.

“Aithinne is the Seelie Queen,” I whisper. “Isn't she?” Then I say the words I didn't want to, the part of the story I hope isn't true but I know with everything in me that it is. “And Kiaran is the Unseelie King.”

“Aye,” the Cailleach says quietly.

I think back to all those times I tried to piece together Kiaran's past and I tried every combination possible—each more awful than the last—but I couldn't imagine this, not this.

My affection for Kiaran has blinded me. Even with the glimpses I saw of Kadamach, I could never truly comprehend the awful things he did because a part of me didn't want to. I didn't want to think of the thousands upon thousands of people he was responsible for slaughtering. Because the Unseelie King wasn't like the other fae. He lived and breathed death. He would burn the world to ash.

You'll always be Kiaran to me
.

Kadamach. His name is Kadamach, and he's the Unseelie King.

Now I understand why so many hesitate when the Cailleach offers them the truth. Truth is never as pretty as a
lie. It's never as appealing. It's a sword to the gut, the thing that reminds us that some people aren't who we thought they are.

Truth forces us to confront the ugliest parts of the people we love. The monstrous parts.

I drop my gaze. “I've had enough.”

The Cailleach is unmoved, her face back to its beautiful form. Now that I see it again, I realize how very much she looks like her children. The same dark hair and flawless features and bottomless eyes.

“You accepted my offer,” she says, her staff thumping against the ground. The snow falls around us. A cold wind slices across my neck and I shiver. “I'm not finished yet.”

“Why do you care if I know the truth?” I say bitterly. “You want me to stay dead. You're only showing me these memories to keep me here.”

The Cailleach's beautiful face sinks into a skull, only for a blink. She is an ocean of secrets, a faery as old as death itself. And yet . . . and yet there is something almost vulnerable about how frail she becomes sometimes, how she looks at me.

“That is only half true,
mo nighean
,” she says, her voice trembling as a human's does in their advanced age, in the twilight hours before death. “I told you: I took from you, too. Since I cannot offer you life, I offer you this. It's all I have left to give.”

“You took—”

We're interrupted by a scream of agony. There's a woman kneeling by the fire, Aithinne's hands pressed to either side
of her head. They're both bleeding, Aithinne from her hands, the woman from the cuts on her face. The falcon has gone.

Aithinne's expression is one of complete concentration, her eyes tightly shut. She looked like that when she healed me.
God, how that hurt
. The woman screams again and I'm shocked when light seems to emanate from beneath her skin.

“What's she doing?” I say. The other women look equally anxious, distrustful, but they remain in their places, in their semicircle around the flames.

“This is how you earned your ability to kill my kind,” the Cailleach says, sounding tired. She leans on the staff as if she can barely stand on her own. “You have my daughter's blood in you, her powers.
My
blood.”

So they're not my powers. The Falconers were created because Aithinne couldn't bear to kill her own brother. We were created for their war.

“Then I'm part Seelie. Not human, after all,” I say bitterly.

“Human enough,” the Cailleach snaps.

I watch Aithinne step away from the woman. Over and over, the future Falconers kneel before her; again and again they give the same agonizing scream. Not one of them declines. Not one of them decides to leave, or shrinks back in fear. This is who they are to become: warriors. Pain is simply the first part of the battle.

I think of Aithinne's words as the last woman stands.
In the end, we are all the stag
.

A single screech sounds from the forest, then a dozen more. I step back sharply as falcons emerge from the trees,
their wings fanning the fire. Each bird has black-and-white stripes that run from the very tips of their wings across their feathered bodies. They dive for the women, each falcon claiming one. Their claws sink into the women's tender skin, drawing blood as they perch on their shoulders, calmed now. The women gasp in pain, but no one screams.

They each have a falcon, connected to them by blood. They've earned their titles.
Seabhagair
. Falconer.

The last falcon flies to Aithinne and resumes its position on her shoulder. But her hands are shaking and her nose is bleeding, dripping over her lips and down the pale column of her neck. She no longer holds herself with the same confidence and power, with that spine-straight-shoulders-back stance. Her skin has lost some of its effervescent luster; not much, but still noticeable.

“It weakened her,” I say softly.

The Cailleach looks at me again and her face is old, wrinkled, her skin pale and dull. Her white hair is no longer shining; it's stringy, thin. “As the last Falconer, you hold all of the powers she lost this night. When you die it is restored to her. She will be whole again.”

Unless someone steals it first, I realize.
You have something I want
, Lonnrach told me that night of the battle. I have Aithinne's blood inside me.
The Cailleach's
blood—old magic.

If Lonnrach succeeds in finding the crystal and taking my power, he'll use it to kill Kiaran and Aithinne.

Without a monarch, the
Sìth-bhrùth
will wither. Someone must take her place
.

And you think you're worthy
.

No, but I will be
.

Something must show on my face, because the Cailleach says, “Now you see why I can't let you live.” She turns away from me, away from the bonfire, and begins down the road again, her frail body so thin beneath the shadows. “Come,
mo nighean
. I have one last thing to show you.”

W
E ARE
in the
Sìth-bhrùth
, at the loch Kiaran once brought me to. Where I first saw Sorcha and tried to kill her. The place looks so different than when I saw it last; lush, fertile. It's still nighttime here, the stars above moving in intricate patterns of swirls and streaks of light across the sky. The trees—so high around us—are full of leaves a vivid green; when I saw them last, they had been skeletal, dead. I look closely and see the colors in the bark, the blues and greens and reds like an opalescent gemstone.

A figure flickers at the corner of my eye. Aithinne. She walks across the water, and it's as though she wanders through space, between the expanse of stars. She looks even more human than she did when we left the bonfire. More like the Aithinne I know.

She glances around, as if she's waiting for someone. A meeting? Kiaran once told me that this place was considered
neutral ground, the only location where the Seelie and Unseelie could meet without conflict.

When Aithinne reaches the rocks along the banks of the loch, she stares straight ahead, and I realize there's someone in the trees, a shadowed figure.

“You sent for me, Kadamach,” she says softly. I note the hesitancy in her voice, the uncertainty. I wonder how long it's been since they've spoken. “Let me see you.”

I suck in a sharp breath as Kiaran slips out of the trees, tall and beautiful, dressed all in black. His dark hair is pulled back from his face, his skin immaculate and glowing. His eyes—they're not like his at all.

Not Kiaran.
Kadamach
.

I thought I'd seen glimpses of Kadamach before, when Kiaran's gaze would simply become empty. Brutally so, as if he had buried all those new emotions because things hurt less if you don't feel.

Kadamach isn't like that. His eyes aren't just empty; they're desolate and dark, like a cold bite of winter wind that strips away every ounce of warmth from your body. There's nothing there.
Nothing
.

I almost tell the Cailleach to take us out of there. I don't want to see whatever revelation this is, another awful truth that will eat away at me from the inside. Now I know why Kiaran and Aithinne left their pasts behind, why they keep their secrets. Each one is worse than the last.

I don't have an admirable past, Kam. I never led you to believe I did
.

Knowing some of the things Kiaran did isn't the same as seeing it.

That's when I notice Kiaran is carrying a young woman. He cradles her body against him, her blood splattered dark against the pale skin of his hands. She's bleeding so heavily that it drips onto the rocks at his feet.
Drip drip drip drip
.

Aithinne's attention is on the blood-splattered rocks, on his hands. I note her intake of breath, uneven, shallow. “You've brought me another gift, then,” she whispers.

I swallow hard, feeling sick.

“I don't share your enthusiasm for slaughter, Kadamach,” Aithinne says. Her hands are in fists; they betray her feelings. How very much she cares. “You should have had the
sluagh
deliver this one for you like all the others.”

“This isn't like that,” he says. His voice washes over me like a river in winter. I could drown in the cold of it. “Not this time.”

Kiaran kneels and places the woman on the rocks. Her face is turned toward me, her eyes closed. She's not beautiful in the way that Catherine is. But she's striking; her features are strong and fine. Her hair is long, a blond so pale it's almost white, and tucked into a long plait that rests across the rocks. The color of her hair contrasts with her tan skin. Scars dot her cheeks, her chin, her eyebrows. Even in death, she looks like a warrior.

I recognize a hint of emotion in Kiaran's hardened gaze, like the first drops of rain in a vast desert: longing. He strokes
a finger across the woman's cheek, leaving behind a blossom of blood there.

God, this is her.
Her
. The Falconer he fell in love with.

I didn't love her nearly enough
.

Aithinne looks at him, shock evident in her beautiful features. “Kadamach?”

He snatches his hand from the woman's face, as if it burns. “Bring her back,” he says sharply.

I shut my eyes briefly, remembering his words to me. Kiaran had to watch her die, and then had to watch me die. Just like this.

Aithinne blanches. “No. Don't ask that of me.”

Kiaran stands and his anger is dark, vicious. Shadows crawl from the ground, thick and heavy and hungry. It's become so cold that a thin layer of ice covers the loch. Frost forms along the trunks of the trees around us and along the damp pebbles at my feet.

“You created their kind.” His voice is a savage whisper. “You sent them to slaughter my subjects because you couldn't do it yourself. I may have started the war between us, Aithinne”—his voice drops to a rumbling growl—“but
you owe me this
.”

Her head snaps up, eyes blazing. “I owe you nothing. You're not the only one who lost those under your protection.
You
drew first blood, Kadamach.”

Kiaran looks down at the woman's body, his anger dissipating. “And how dearly I've paid for it.”

Something softens in Aithinne. As if she hasn't seen this side of him before—or has, but not for a long time.

I can sense the history between them, the years before their war. Were they a family once? Before all of this? Kiaran was willing to be imprisoned for eternity to save Aithinne. They share such a long past. I wonder how it ever healed.

“I've never asked you for anything,” he says quietly. “Never. Bring her back. Bring your damn Falconer back.”