Page 89 of The Vanishing Throne

Her cavernous eyes meet mine. ‘It’s just you and me,mo nighean. My daughter will never find you now.’

I feel the first cold touch of fear, then her fingers brush my face. Her touch is like a blade driving through my skull. I bite my tongue to keep from crying out.

‘Open your eyes,’she tells me. ‘Look.’

I do as she commands and I realise we’re not in the forest any more, not near the fire. I’m not sitting in a seat made of vines and flowers. We’re in a field surrounded by the dead.

Human bodies lie at our feet, scattered across the dark meadow. Most of them are women. Some have their throats slit, and others lie with their backs to the sky as if they had tried to run. Their blood glistens in the moonlight, the scent of death lingering in the air.

Oh god. I double over. I almost cast up everything in my belly. I couldn’t take a single step and hit grass. ‘What did this?’

The Cailleach betrays no emotion. ‘My son.’

Kiaran.Kiaran did this. ‘Why?’ I can barely speak.

I think of the way Kiaran looks at me when I manage to get through to him, how he looked when he told me he missed me. The way his lips pressed to the scars at my throat—

I killed humans every day. Until I spoke a vow.

He did this. He killed all of these people.

‘Most humans can’t resist the lure of the Wild Hunt,’ the Cailleach explains. ‘Every herd needs to be culled,mo nighean, even human ones. This is my son’s purpose.’

‘This isn’t a purpose,’ I snap. ‘It’s a pointless slaughter.’

The Cailleach looks disappointed at my response. ‘Deathalwaysserves a purpose.’

She moves among the bodies with the grace of water. She leans down and lightly touches the face of a young woman. Before my eyes, the girl’s flesh sinks into her skull. Her bones wither and fade to dust. And from the earth rises a single flower, beautiful and perfect.

‘My sonis the fire that destroys a forest,’ the Cailleach continues. ‘My daughter is the rain that makes it green again. This is the course we tread over and over throughout the ages.’

I want to tell the Cailleach that I don’t think mass slaughter is part of the natural order. That I would never be willing to stand aside while the fae hunted in my city – the way I did when Sorcha killed my mother – because that’s just what they do. Humans don’t exist to be killed whenever the fae desire. Exactly whatpurposedoes that serve?

I swallow all my anger back and ask, ‘Why are you showing me this?’

The Cailleach plucks the flower and crushes it in her fist. It falls like ashes from her fingers. ‘This is where it all began. This Hunt, this field, and these deaths. Kadamach declared the war right here.’

The war? ‘They’re Falconers, then,’ I say flatly.

‘No,’ the Cailleach says. ‘The men of their village all had the Sight. The women who died here couldn’t resist the song of Kadamach’s Hunt.’

That clenches my stomach even more. If these women weren’t Falconers, they would have been helpless. They were justscared humans who got in the way of a Wild Hunt, and Kiaran had slaughtered them like they were nothing. They had no way to defend themselves, no power against him. The men – the Seers – who lie in this field must have died trying to save them.

‘And I suppose the fae didn’t give a damn about them,’ I say bitterly.

She turns her gaze to me, and it’s hard, unforgiving. ‘Plenty ofsìthicheandied on this battlefield alongside your humans.’

Good, I almost say but don’t. ‘And their deaths weren’tpointless, either, I suppose?’ I say, trying to keep my tone even.

‘Don’t bait me, child. This was necessary to secure the future of our kind. Kadamach played his part to perfection.’

I rake my gaze across the land, over the hundreds upon hundreds of dead women and men, and I can’t control my fleeting, awful thoughts.The one that stands out most is the memory of Lonnrach’s words:you should have killed Kadamach when you had the chance.

Kiaran’s past is littered with the dead; his secrets could fill the spaces between galaxies. He lured humans with the same song Lonnrach’s soldiers used to kill those in my city: my family, the people I knew my entire life. And just like those soldiers, he left humans scattered across the land like waste.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘What part?’

‘To live the same tale through the ages,’ she says softly, almost to herself. Then: ‘We are all creatures of war,mo nighean. Kadamach taught you that, did he not? Battle is in our blood.’The Cailleach turns away, the shadows of her veil crawling like snakes on the ground. ‘It’s how our civilization rose. It’s how we became conquerors.’

---