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“If you moan in the night, I’m smothering you in your sleep,” Juliana said, making herself up a bed on the chaise in the corner.
“I’ll do… my best.”
For some strange reason, he tried. He tried to focus on how annoyed she’d be, and ignored the pain lancing through every limb, the sodden sheets, the crackling in his chest. He remembered biting his lip to keep it in until he could taste copper in his mouth.
At some point before dawn, he couldn’t do it any more. He cried out. And again. And again.
Then Jules was there, hand against him, making it worse and better all at the same time.
“Spirits,Hawthorn, your mouth…”
“Sorry,” he murmured, “tried…”
Juliana gave no notion of having understood him. Instead, she was busy wiping the blood from his lips, applying a cold compress to his forehead, force-feeding him the dregs of a potion the healer had brought up earlier. There were no soft words, just lots of remarks about how rubbish he looked and how he was being a baby and mortals got sick all the time.
He curled over into the bedsheets, wishing he could just sink away. In all his life, he had never felt anything like this, like he’d trade anything for relief. He couldn’t even remember his poisoning being this bad—or perhaps he’d just been too out of it to remember.
A soft, calloused hand pressed against his back. “Hawthorn,” Juliana said, “what can I do?”
He was as unused to the question as he was to hearing his name from her lips. She never spoke it, never sounded… likethataround him. It was laced with something he couldn’t name.
And he had no idea how to answer her question.
Faeries got sick so rarely, he had no experience of being so ill before, no notion of what might ease it, or what others said to help.
But mortals…
“What do mortals do when they’re sick?” he asked.
For a moment, Juliana was silent. “Well,thismortal never gets sick. Whenever I feel ill, I stop being ill and be my wonderful self instead—”
“Jules,” he said, half pleading, “please.”
“I… I’m not great with illness,” she admitted, as if she was confessing to some great crime. He supposed, for her, it was. Juliana hated being bad at anything.
“But you’re here,” he said.
“Only because your mother made me.”
“Right.”
A silence, punctuated only by his heavy breathing, passed between them.
“My mother used to sing to me,” she whispered, and he stilled at the mention of her. He wasn’t sure Juliana had mentioned her since that journey through Autumn, almost two years ago. “Entertained me, if I was a bit better. Stories. Songs. Shadows on the wall.”
“Do I… get a song?”
“I’m no singer,” she said, with the same grudging reluctance. “And I have no book to read to you, but…” She sighed, crossing the room, and went to fetch a candle from one of the nightstands. She brought it back to his side, lowered it to the floor, and turned his face roughly to the wall. Her fingers danced in front of the flames, and he watched as the shadows darted and flew across the stone, transformed into birds and dragons and wolves.
A simple trick. Hardly magic. Still beautiful to watch.
And he did watch. He watched until the wax had worn away to a stub, and he too slowly dribbled off into sleep.
He woke in the early hours of the morning feeling like his body had been thrown in a furnace. He wanted to scream, but there wasn’t enough breath in his lungs to. So he writhed instead like an insect in fire.
Juliana’s face appeared above him.
“Hawthorn,Hawthorn! What’s wrong?”
