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Why, her entire life, was it so much easier to hate than love?
The memories caught up with her departure to Autumn, a hundred painful lessons interspersed with Hawthorn’s. She saw each of the assassination attempts, the awful, wretched poisoning, Hawthorn writhing in bed, body breaking, drenched with sweat.
“Sorry,” he said, when she turned her head away. “I should have warned you about that one.”
I hope your mother killed whoever did that. I hope it hurt.
She witnessed her triumphant return to court, and her painful defeat at the hands of her own father. She watched Hawthorn watching her throughout the tournament, watched the crescent-marks he made in the armrest whenever she was in danger, his face cool and placid throughout.
She watched herself pledge her service to him.
“Oh good, one fine memory,” Hawthorn said, smirking. “One of my favourites, in fact.”
The scene swirled until they were being attacked on the way to Autumn.
“Another good one!”
Juliana frowned. “How is an assassination attempt a good memory?”
The vision landed on an image of the two of them curled up together in the hut. Hawthorn raised an eyebrow, still grinning. “Need I say more?”
She scowled, and he kissed the hand that still held his. She was fairly sure she blushed in response, which only made her scowl more.
Memories blurred together until they were at the Summer Court, and she was watching him fall.No, no, not this again.
“Yours or mine?” Hawthorn asked.
Juliana watched him on the bed, cheeks flushed, wheezing and gasping while she looked on like a piece of flotsam in the path of a shark. “Mine,” she said. “Definitely mine.”
Memory-Juliana watched as his body was encased in ice, and fled from the room—
Straight to Maytree’s chambers.
She didn’t knock, she didn’t wait. She ducked under the guards, fighting them when they tried to stop her.
“Juliana!” Maytree rose from her seat, dismissing the guards with a wave of her hand. “What is the meaning of this—”
“You need to go to him,” she rushed, half crying. “You need to go to him and just be there because I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—”
Maytree didn’t argue. She didn’t say anything at all until they were back in Hawthorn’s chambers, and the mage had broken him out of the ice. She looked down at Hawthorn with a similar expression she’d worn at Aspen’s funeral, and did not move for a long, long time.
Finally, her words came. “I know it cannot be easy to watch—”
“No, you don’t know,” Memory-Juliana insisted, “because you have never even cared about him!”
Present-day Hawthorn jolted at the next action—when his mother struck Memory-Juliana clean across the cheek.
“You’ve watched over him for a few hours and you think it’s tough to watch him?” Maytree hissed, her words venomous. “He is myson.How many centuries do you think I waited for him, only to be told within a few days of his birth I would lose him a few years later? Eighteen years is nothing for a faerie. I thought if I just… if I didn’t watch… it wouldn’t hurt as much. Blink and it would be over…” She squared up to Juliana. “You knownothingof my pain.”
Memory-Juliana watched her leave, but then her eyes drifted back to Hawthorn, pale and still on the sheets. “And you know nothing of his.”
For a moment, the entire valley seemed to still.
Hawthorn turned to her. “You did that for me?”
“I don’t know. I think I did it for me. I was so desperate to get out of there, so angry at the world… I had to put it somewhere.”
“Was I that disgusting?”
