Page 87 of The Vanishing Throne

I hold back my tears.Focus. I drag myself onward, forcing myself into a run. I breathe in air that’s suddenly cold– painfully so – as I make my way through the trees. I concentrate my thoughts on the people who are alive and need me to come back. I won’t fail them again.

As if sensing my resistance, the voices grow louder, an endless cacophony. Tree branches catch and try to hold me. And I realise that they aren’t branches after all – they’re hands.

Cold fingers close around my arms, hard enough to bruise. Their touch is so frigid that it burns. I bite back a scream as I struggle to pull myself out of their grip, but they hold tightly, so tightly. My breath is quick as I shove and push my way through the blackness. I have to keep going.

They scream my name. They beg me to help them. They scratch me and make me bleed. More hands seize me, unrelenting, but I shove through.

Suddenly, they’re gone. The voices, the frozen hands, the darkness. I am standing in front of a fire in the middle of the woods. I collapse in front of its warmth, my breath coming fast.

Just as quickly, I realise:This shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t—

‘Found you,’ a voice whispers from behind me.

I whirl. A figure stands in the trees, a heavy cloak obscuring any features – but I am sure from her frail, tiny body that she’s a woman. Her hair is long, white as bone, and fine as spider webs. Its strands catch in the starlight and glitter like quartz. Despite the darkness, her eyes glisten and she watches me the way one might observe an insect in a jar.

Finally, she steps into the firelight, and cold dread fills me. Her features are so difficult to distinguish; one moment she is a young woman, almost childlike, with a fullness to her cheeks and a flush to her skin. The next, she is old, skeletal, and frail. The cloak around her isn’t fabric at all, but shadows, thick and dark and curling at the edges.

Every momentthe woman’s face changes, old, then young, then even younger. She doesn’t speak, just studies me with a recondite gaze.

It’s her face that makes me back away. I recognise her.

She’s the one from my nightmare.

My back presses to the trunk of a tree, and I can’t help but look around us, half-expecting to find laughing crows with blood-dripping beaks. ‘You were in my dream,’ I say. ‘Who are you?’I speak with care, with the knowledge that, at any moment, she might attack and I have two options: fight or run.

‘You’ve read the old stories, Aileana Moira Rossalyn Kameron,’ she says, stepping farther out of the shadows.. ‘You know my names, just as I know all of yours.’

Any surprise I would have had at hearing my forenames – ones I haven’t heard in the longest time, that sheshouldn’tknow – is eclipsed by the sudden fear at the sight of her staff. My pulse speeds up and I can’t take my eyes off it, how the grass beneath the ancient wood withers and frosts over as she draws closer.

No one has seen the Cailleach for thousands of years.

This is her. I know it from the stories. I feel it in my bones.

‘You’re the Cailleach,’ I whisper.

The thin lips of her bony face curl into a smile, one both warm and frightening. ‘Aye,mo nighean.’

I stay still, unsure. The Cailleach is the oldest faery, the most powerful of them all. Some consider her a goddess, but I know that’s merely how ancient humans approached the immortal fae: as deities to be appeased.

She was once the sole queen of the Seelie and Unseelie courts. They say she left the human and faery worlds she created to reside in this realm – the place between life and death.

The Cailleach has so many identities; she could strike joy in people just as easily as she could inspire fear. I read storiesas a child that claimed she shaped the mountains and rivers with her hammer and brought winter with her staff. In a warm mood, she would give humans fertile land, a water source, and all the things necessary to live. In a fit of rage, she’d destroy everything and kill everyone in her path.

I shut my eyes briefly. The Cailleach must want me dead. She wouldn’t have given me that message in my dream if she didn’t. I must have been on the brink of death from the faery venom for her to invade my dreams like that.

‘What do you want with me?’ I ask. My voice doesn’t waver. I refuse to appear weak, even to the Cailleach.

I’m certain she hears the unasked question at the end:Are you here to destroy me?The Cailleach has only two purposes: help or destruction, never anything in between.

The temperature around me drops, the way it does when Kiaran becomes angry. Only the Cailleach’s power makes it more intense, a choking cold that makes me hunch over and hug myself for warmth. My fingers grow numb and my skin burns. My vision dances with stars and I hear the deafening boom of thunder in the distance.

The Cailleach leans down and grasps my chin, her fingernails biting into my skin. With my hazy vision, I meet her eyes, cold and endlessly black. There is no humanity in that gaze, no compassion.

‘I’m here to make sure that this time you don’t make it back,’ she tells me, in a voice that ices my spine.

After this, you’re on borrowed time, Falconer. I’ll see you again soon.

She pretended to be my mother. She invaded my mind. The thought of it turns my skin hot with rage. I narrow my gaze and fight against her control. Deliberately, I straighten. I let the cold wash over me.I won’t let you control me.

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