Page 89 of The Falconer

My breath is squeezed from my lungs, leaving an awful ache in my chest. I turn away from him. My vision blurs and I’m horrified to realise that my eyes are filled with tears. It’s been so long. I’d forgotten how much they burn.

‘Why would you do that?’ I ask. My voice is surprisingly calm.

‘I warned you about the consequences of trying to prevent a Seer’s vision from coming to pass,’ he says quietly. ‘This is but one of mine.’

Don’t cry, I tell myself as he grasps my shoulders and turns me to face him.Don’t cry. Too late. His body goes still, eyes searching mine. ‘Tears, Kam?’ he breathes. ‘Whatever for?’

I don’t acknowledge his words. I can’t. ‘You knew Sorcha is the one I’ve been searching for all this time.’

‘Aye, I did.’

An awful thought crosses my mind, one that immediately dries my eyes. My fingers curl into fists. ‘So did you let my mother die?’

He looks away from me then. ‘By the time I tracked Sorcha to Edinburgh, she had already found your mother.’ His fingers tighten on my shoulders, a seemingly involuntary motion. ‘I had just enough time to tell her the truth about who she was. I advised her to leave the city, but she wouldn’t abandon you. So I gave her the thistle and she put it on you that night. She wanted me to saveyou.’

I can barely remember my mother’s words when she wove the thistle into my hair. I was so excited, only half-listening. She described how it matched my eyes. She warned me never to take it off, in a sudden sombre tone that might have unnerved me if I’d bothered to pay any attention at all.

I pull out of his grasp. ‘Save me? Is that what you think you did,Kadamach?’

Kiaran’s face hardens. ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not? That’s your name, isn’t it?’

He surprises me by resting a hand flat on my cheek. His fingers are warm, inviting. The connection between us is so intense that I might have been tempted to lean into that touch, but his gaze stops me. His eyes burn bright, uncanny and overwhelming.

‘Shall I tell you about the one who answered to that name?’

His lilting accent is back. This is a voice born to compel, born to command. It is beautiful and ugly, terrifying and comforting, a million dichotomies I can only begin to describe. It’s meant to remind me that beneath skin and bone he is a powerful, inhuman creature who could kill me with little difficulty. I almost forgot again.

I can’t speak or move, can’t look away. His fingertips trace along my collarbone, but his touch is cold now, growing ever more frigid. The hair raises along my arms.

‘Kadamach lived for destruction,’ Kiaran says. ‘He would have ripped the soul from your body and devoured it. And that would have brought him rapture.’ A flicker of fear ignites inside me as his lips brush my cheek. ‘Names hold power, Kam,’ he says. ‘Don’t use that one unless you’d like to see first-hand what it was once capable of.’

I don’t step away, despite how much I want to. ‘But you still cared for someone,’ I say. ‘A Falconer, like Sorcha said. Even Kadamach was capable of love.’

Kiaran flinches, a slight motion, barely noticeable, but it tells me how acutely he still feels the pain of her death. ‘Don’t make the mistake of believing you know that part of my past. If you think it humanises me, you’re a sentimental fool.’ He straightens and steps away from me, the trail of his cold touch still burning across my skin. ‘It’s time we found the seal.’

Before I can answer, he opens my bedchamber door and disappears down the hall.

Chapter 29

When I round the front of my house, I’m surprised to see my ornithopter parked in the middle of Charlotte Square again. ‘You brought it back from Dalkeith,’ I say to Kiaran. ‘How on earth did you figure out how to fly it?

‘I watched you yesterday.’ Kiaran reaches into the front seat and pulls out my lightning pistol and holster. ‘I thought you might want this.’

Gratefully, I take it from him and secure the holster around my hips before seating myself at the helm. ‘So let me see if I have this right. We’re looking for a two-thousand-year-old seal that’s completely hidden from faeries—’

‘Sìthichean.’

‘Faeries. We have no idea what it looks like, how big it is, or even where it is—’

‘It’s in what is now the Queen’s Park,’ he interrupts again. ‘The last battle took place there and it’s directly above the prison.’

‘So we have the general location, which happens to be approximately three miles in circumference? Brilliant. That’s just brilliant.’

I start the machine. The massive wings deploy and flap, and we’re soon airborne. I breathe in the rainy air and turn the ornithopter towards the south end of the city.

‘You should be able to sense the device once we’re close enough,’ Kiaran says. ‘When they activated it, the Falconers charged it with their power to ward off anysìthicheanwho happen upon it.’

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