Page 4 of The Vanishing Throne

How could all that have happened in such a short time? I press my fingers to the injury just above my ear. It’s still wet. Desperately, I feel for the small cut Lonnrach left when he pressed his blade to my throat back on the battlefield. Inflamed, still stinging. No healing has begun.

‘This is a trick,’ I say. It has to be.The fae couldn’t have destroyed Edinburgh that quickly. ‘My injuries are still fresh.’

Lonnrach doesn’t move, not even to kneel next to me. ‘You’re in theSìth-bhrùth,’ he says simply.

I shut my eyes.Oh god. I forgot the simplest rule of all:Time passes more quickly in the human realm. I could have spent mere hours in the fae realm and weeks would have gone by there. Days here could amount to months.

‘How long have I been here?’ I whisper, hating the horror in my voice. Hating how I’ve shown Lonnrach that small bit of weakness. ‘On the outside. How long?’

‘I don’t understand your human time.’ He sounds so nonchalant, uncaring. ‘Days. Weeks. Months. Years. They mean little to me. All I care about is finding the object hidden in your realm. And you’re going to help me with it, willingly or no.’

I can’t get the images of destruction out of my head. I created that. I helped. What would Derrick and Gavin have thought of me in the end? Catherine? They must have thought I’d died or abandoned them. That I stopped fighting.

Fresh tears sear my cheeks as I look up at Lonnrach. ‘So you destroyed everything in your search. You sacrificed my realm to save yours.’

Lonnrach’s expression doesn’t change. ‘You say that as if I had a choice. You would have slaughtered us all to savethem. Your humans.’ Now he kneels. His face so close to mine. ‘You would kill to protect your own. We both would. We’re the same, you and I.’

Kiaran’s whisper resounds from deep in my mind.I made you the same as me.

A night creature. A devil. A monster who deals in death and destruction.We’re the same, you and I.

Then so be it.My gaze locks with Lonnrachs and I see a flash of vulnerability there – fear. Good. Heshouldbe afraid of me. ‘I hope your kingdom rots. I’ll burn it to the ground myself.’

Lonnrach’s face goes hard, angry. ‘More threats. I could leave you right here, for as long as I wanted. Maybe I’ll shove you in a watertight box and throw you into the sea below until I need you. A thousand years could pass on the outside and you’ll still be as youthful as the day I took you. You’re atmymercy.’

The sea below.So that’s what’s down there at the bottom of the cliffs. That’s why it sounds like it breathes; it’s the waves hitting rock, scraping stone against the base of the escarpment.

Before I can reply, Lonnrach isalready back on his own platform, a leap that’s at least twenty feet – one I could never hope to attempt. He looks back at me. ‘You have no choice, Falconer. If this place burns, you’ll die with us.’

Chapter 2

I think of a thousand potential ways of escaping. I try to use my own weight to push the platform closer to the cliffs. I leap up and my feet hit the onyx soil so hard that it sends a jolt through my body, but the platform never so much as budges.

Instead it floats steadily through the ravineas if it were a flowing river instead of empty space. The castle and the other buildings are the same distance they were before; never closer or farther.

Minutes or hours pass, but I can never tell which. Now I know why Lonnrach dismisses the concept of time; it doesn’t exist here. The light always stays the same: a grey, foggy haze to the atmosphere much like what I’m used to back home. The heavy rain clouds never move, even as the platform flows down the empty space and the landscape changes.

I never see another faery; not even a shadow of a figure in one of the majestic buildings floating in the fissure. This place is barren, empty. If I screamed, no one would hear me.

This must be Lonnrach’s strategy: Isolate me, make me defenceless, use me, and then kill me.

As my platform keeps moving, I search for some means of escape – anything. But the ravine is a ceaseless thing, constantly shifting and yet never ending. Ipass an ever-evolving scenery of mountains and forests, all in the same bleak monochrome. I float through fields of glass flowers and forests of black metal trees that are so dark and thick I can see no light beyond them.

It’s as if the landscape were a charcoal drawing. The cliffs on either side of me are etched in dark, aggressive strokes, the rock jutting out roughly on either side.

The land was whole, and now it’s cracked right down the middle.

As time passes, I notice that every so often stone breaks off the jagged crags and tumbles down into the ravine below. This place is breaking apart bit by bit and falling to dust.

Just like Edinburgh. All those buildings reduced to rubble on the street. Gone. Just like—

I close my eyes hard and pull my knees into my chest, sitting down on the biting rocks. I try to block it all out, the images. My memories. My feelings.

Far below my platform, the sea breathes. I listen to the calminhale exhale inhale exhaleof water against earth and pretend I’m somewhere backthere. Scotland. The human realm. I pretend that there’s still a place worth saving. That the people I love survived.

I pretend I’m not the only one left.

When I wake, the breath of distant ocean waves is gone and everything is quiet The cold winter breeze has stilled.

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