Page 77 of The Vanishing Throne

I blink back tears and walk the streets of my imagined Edinburgh. It’s so cold and empty that I begin to regret coming. I could never be one of those people Catherine described, who go behind their doors for one last glimpse of the placesthey loved before they die. There’s too much pain here, too closely entwined with my guilt.

I begin to notice how false it feels, how limited my imagination is. How the farther out from the city centre I walk, the more my memory of the place begins to blur, and so do the buildings.

As I reach Holyrood, the tenements glimmer as if under water, eventually composing themselves into what Ithinkthey looked like. All I recall are tall structures, but not the features, not the things that made each one unique. Now they begin to mirror each other. A long row of buildings that lookexactlythe same. I try to change them, to test my memory and recall the nights I ran through these streets on a hunt, but can’t. The bricks and stone and mortar simply rearrange themselves into more of the same.

I lose the illusion. I let it all go and picture the buildings as they were when I came back from theSìth-bhrùth. The walls collapse into ruined brick and rubble, completely taken over with moss and ivy.

It’s a reminder, a message I have to accept.This is what you’ve already left behind. There’s nothing else.

I shut my eyes. My fault. All my fault. All I had to do was reactivate the seal and all of this would still be here. It would all be as it was.

When I open my eyes, I’m in the Queen’s Park. The grass is the same pale amber it turns every winter. The muddy trail that leads up to Arthur’s Seat is just ahead, the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel beside me. I breathe in the scent of the park, and the smell is exactly the way it was that night: fire and ash and rain.

Around me, the battle is frozen, a perfectly formed picture of my memory. The fae soldiers have me surrounded. Each of them is stopped in action exactly as they were when they tried to break through the shield of light that surrounded me from the seal.

At my feet is the seal, how it looked during the battle. I drop to my knees and press my fingertips to the outer edge, to the parts of the clock-face, to the pieces of the compass – then to the symbols Kiaran had medraw. The gears glow with a tawny sheen,tick tick tickingin a pleasant hum.

‘Aileana.’

I look over my shoulder to see Gavin there; I hadn’t even heard him come down the path. He wears the same clothes hedid when he went out riding, mud-covered with faint stains of blood.

I can’t help it; my gaze immediately goes to his scars, those new features on a face I have memorized over the years. Now I have to leave him again.

‘What do you want, Galloway?’

His attention is on the battle all around me and the ruined city in the distance. I watch as he studies the ruined tenements. He stiffens as he scans the battle and takes in the way each soldier is stuck in a fighting stance to attack me.

The girl whose gift is chaos.

‘Why are you out here?’ he asks. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’

I focus on the seal again. It doesn’t seem as beautiful as it once was, perhaps because it’s simply a product of my memory, not the uncanny fae invention that was so magnificent that I ached to create it.

‘Do what?’ I ask flatly.

‘Surround yourself with this.’ Gavin flings a hand to the view of the city. ‘Bloody hell. Your room I can understand, but the entire damn city?’

‘I imagined it because it’s all I can think about.’ I suppress my irritation, my anger. ‘How did you even know where to find me?’

‘Easy,’ Gavin snaps. ‘I followed the trails of guilt. Which looked like entire streets of destroyed buildings.’

‘You came through my door. You followed me here,’ I remind him. ‘Why?’

Gavin sits next to me in the cold grass. He’s quiet for so long. I watch his chest as he breathes, the slow inhale and exhale there. Finally, he says, ‘I needed to explain myself. Why I said those things to you before I rode off.’

I put up a hand. ‘You really don’t need to. I understand.’

‘No, you don’t understand,’ he says tightly. I see how conflicted he is, as if he’s debating telling me. ‘I’ve spent the last threeyears convincing myself that this was all your fault.’ Finally his eyes meet mine. ‘I blamed you for it. Every day.’

I go still. The ache in my chest returns. ‘Did you?’ I speak calmly, so calmly, in a voice that doesn’t match how I feel at all.

I’ve become skilled at making it seem as though emotions don’t affect me, that I don’t feel any more. But in this place, the weather doesn’t lie. I can’t pretend well enough for it to remain unaffected by the turmoil inside me. The clouds darken, heavy and black.

Gavin’s attention doesn’t waver from me. ‘You weren’t here to deal with the aftermath,’ he says. ‘You didn’t see them slaughter everyone we knew, and you weren’t there when we lived in ruined buildings that smelled of death. We used to pack up every morning to move again in the hope that they wouldn’t find us. And I blamed you. I blamed you every damn day. We needed you, andyou weren’t there.’

I can’t breathe. I’m afraid that if I do, I won’t be able to control my tears. My eyes burn with them. The clouds open and it begins to rain, fat droplets that roll off my hair and into my eyes.I don’t even feel the cold. I’m empty. ‘Gavin—’

‘Don’t. Let me finish.’ The anger seems to extinguish inside him. ‘When I saw you outside the city and you hadn’t aged a day, I realised …Christ.’ Gavin’s breathing is hoarse, his body trembling from the cold I can’t control. ‘You’re just one person, and I blamed you for not saving the world.’

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