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Iona.
Juliana knew this was her memory, that somehow they’d not been spared, but she couldn’t quite place when it was.
Her father stepped out of the fog, face dark and grim. Iona paused in her chasing. “Ser Markham!” she cried out. “We weren’t expecting you back until—where’s Ser Cerridwen?”
Markham shook his head. “Gone,” he said.
“Gone?” the colour drained from Iona’s face. “You don’t mean—”
“She left,” he said. “She finally did it. She’s gone to the mortal realm.”
Iona’s hands shook against her apron. Though the vision was a pale, translucent copy, Juliana could still make out the flour on her hands. “No,” the woman replied, voice wavering. “No, she would never—Juliana. How do we—”
Hawthorn’s fingers dug into hers.
“I don’t want to see the next bit,” she whispered.
She barely remembered it, barely remembered the moment she’d been told her mother wasn’t coming home, because she knew the conversation had happened a dozen, a hundred times over. How do you explain such a thing to a child?
“When is Mama coming home?”
“Have you seen Mama today?”
“Where’s Mama?”
“I want my mama! I want her, I want her, I want her!”
And although she had stopped her screaming eventually, Juliana was sure she’d never stopped wanting her to come home.
She paused on the path.
“Hawthorn, if we’re seeing memories—maybe we shouldn’t go in.”
“We’re dreams ourselves, Juliana,” he answered. “What’s the biggest danger? Our physical bodies can’t be lured here.”
Juliana wasn’t so sure in the harmlessness, not when there was so much more she didn’t want him to see.
The next memory was his, some moment of waiting outside his parents’ door to be let in, only they never came. The vision faded before anyone noticed he was there.
Another laugh, another memory of hers, her father teaching her how to hold a sword while Hawthorn watched nearby. She was five years old. Markham swept her up in his broad arms as she practised her first steps, grinning from ear to ear.
He boasted to one of his friends nearby, and then Hawthorn threw mud at her face the minute Markham stepped away.
Adult Hawthorn cringed. “Sorry,” he said. “For that, and… anything else.”
Child Juliana threw her wooden sword at his face. “Same to you.”
They moved through memory after memory, more training, more schooling, more pranks that no longer seemed funny. Hawthorn witnessed her crying over one that left her with blisters on her fingers. She saw him scream in the memory of waking up with his hair tied to the bedpost.
Years, years walked by.
There were good memories, too. Picnics and hikes, night-time strolls, dances.
More of her father being there.
More of his parents not.
I hate that I can’t hate you,she whispered to her father’s ghost.I hate that I know you love me.
