Page 29 of The Vanishing Throne

‘I tried to kill my first faery here, just after Sorcha murdered my mother,’ I tell Aithinne. ‘I nearly died.’

Aithinne crouches in the water next to me, so at ease despite the cold. It’s as if she doesn’t even notice how the water runs over her boots and dampens her trousers. Her gaze is like Kiaran’s, so startling and intense.

This close, I notice a scar on her forehead just beneath her hairline. Long and thin, the mark is so faded it’s barely noticeable. I wonder what might have caused it.

‘Where I come from,’ Aithinne says, resting her hand on the rock just over the bloodstain, ‘the first hunt is considered a trial. We call itlà na cruaidh-chuis, the day of hardship. Before we come into our powers, everydaoine sìthmust go into the forest and kill a stag without a weapon, without our strength and speed, our mind connected to the animal.’

I’m beginning to realise how much Kiaran never told me about the fae. ‘I never knew that.’

Aithinne’s smile is quick, fleeting. ‘No human does,’ she says. ‘During my own hunt, I saw through the stag’s eyes. A quickly turning world, limited in colour but bursting with life. We ran together. We drank from a stream. For that day, I was a wild creature, untamed. But there came the moment I had to take its life.’

She closes her eyes, remembering. ‘I had my hands around its neck and felt everything it did – the press of my fingers, its struggle to breathe. I’ll never forget when it sank its teeth into my shoulder, somehow managing to break the skin. I had never seen my own blood before.’

Aithinne stops and I wonder if she’ll continue. I’m holding my breath. ‘What happened?’

‘I understood the true purpose of the trial, my first hunt.’ She raises her eyes to mine. ‘It teaches us what it means to be hunter and prey. To make the choice to kill or be killed.’ With a firm grip on her shirt, Aithinne pulls the fabric down to bare her shoulder – the scar there, teeth marks pressed into her flawless skin. ‘Now we both carry that lesson with us, don’t we, Falconer?’

She pushes to her feet and I follow her down the river a way. ‘Do some fae fail the trial?’

Aithinne walks with her hands in her pockets. Now that her injuries from themortairhave healed, she moves across the rocks with graceful speed and agility. ‘Aye. Others pass and only come out worse.’ She glances at me. ‘Manysìthicheanfear death, and yet they consider mortality to be a weakness. One that ought to be reserved for humans and the creatures of this realm alone. They learn the wrong lesson.’

‘What’s the right lesson, then?’ I ask, curious now.

‘In the end, we are all the stag,’ she says simply.

We continue downstream. My injuries slow me down, but Aithinne is patient. Bothof us are quiet for the longest time. It seems like hours go by. The winter sun is low on the horizon, shining its last vestiges of light through the skeletal branches.

We still don’t speak. Our journey is filled with the roar of water falling over rocks, the soft rain pattering against stone and bare trees. Kiaran and I used to walk like this, lost in our thoughts, content with the silence.

Aithinne’s presence is so different from his, less intense. Her eyes rove over the landscape as if she’s memorizing every rock and tree and branch, as if she hungers to see more.

I’ve never seen anyone so entranced. Her step has a lightness that Kiaran’s never did. Sometimes a small smile plays on her lips as if something has delighted her. Her fingertips brush the branches as we stride by, lingering on the trunks of the trees.

After all that time Aithinne spent in the mounds surrounded by dirt, it must be wonderful for her to walk above ground again. I’m surprised that beingtrapped with enemy fae hasn’t affected her the way it has me. That she could offer to take my memories as if the burden of them meant nothing at all.

There is nothing you went through that I haven’t already endured. Lonnrach had two thousand years to break me and he never could.

‘How do you bear what Lonnrach did to you?’ I whisper. It takes me a second to realise I’ve spoken aloud and I wince.

Aithinne heard me. She falters in the middle of a jump and loses her footing on a rock, splashing into the cold river water. In the last lingering bit of sunlight, I see her stricken expression, the way she curls her hands into fists at her sides so tightly that her knuckles are white.

‘Aithinne?’ When she doesn’t answer, I try to apologize. What’swrongwith me? ‘I’m sorry. I should never have—’

‘Don’t,’ she snaps. Her shuddered breath slices through the air between us. I watch her struggle with the memory, not knowing what to do.WishingI knew what to do. ‘Don’t come near me.’

Drip. Drip.Oh god, blood from her closed fists hits the rocks by her feet.Drip. Drip.

I grasp her arms. The blood drips onto the rocks so fast now, streaming through herhands. ‘Aithinne.’

Aithinne stares at me. ‘I’m fine.’ Her expression has gone cold, emotionless, and shut off. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she says mechanically, as if she’s repeated it every day of her life.It doesn’t hurt, I remember her whispering on the trail. Her mantra.

I stare at her dumbly for a moment, then take her hands and pry her fingers open. I can’t help flinching at the sight. Her palm is marred with half-moon marks, dug so deep that the flesh is peeling away. Blood pools there, so dark against her pale skin.

As I watch, the skin begins to heal, leaving nothing but blood behind. ‘It always heals,’ she tells me in that awful dead voice. ‘See? It always heals.’

I don’t say anything. I can’t. I know from experience the lies we tell to comfort ourselves, to comfort others, so others neverrealise how broken we really are.

My scars are all on the outside; what I went through is bared for the world to see. Aithinne’s scars are so well hidden that she fooled me.

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