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“I’m not sure even you have that power, my sweet enemy.” His gasping worsened, sounding hard and painful. “But this is what I would have chosen. Your arms, your face…”
“Hawthorn,” she whispered, mind spinning, “You’re not allowed to die, remember? And your heart isn’t failing.What’s mine is yours.”She took his hand, placing it over her breast. The last, desperate thing she could think of. A mortal heart, freely given. “You have my heart. Take it.”
Hawthorn’s eyes widened, realising what she was suggesting. “No…”
“Hawthorn—”
“You’ll die.”
She squeezed his fingers. “Trust me. Death shall have no dominion over Juliana Ardencourt.”
Tears rimmed Hawthorn’s eyes, but his hand pressed against her chest. “If this is another lie of yours, I’ll hate you for as long as I love you.”
Juliana hardly knew whether she was lying or not. All she knew was that she couldn’t watch him die, and that she couldn’t imagine herself quitting a world with him still in it.
More than the pendants connected them. Something else tighter than thread and tougher than wire had threaded between them long ago and would not let go.
Yours, mine, always.
Hawthorn’s fingers radiated light. Warm, at first, followed by a hard, sharp pain crackled over her chest, like being speared with fire. She let out a gasp, and then, terrified he’d stop, that this might be it, that it was all over, she seized his face and kissed him.
The room trembled, the vines shook. Air gathered around them. Juliana ignored it all, ignored the room, ignored the dense, hard pain spreading through her limbs. She focused on the press of his lips, the silken feeling of his hair between her fingers, anything that kept her tethered to him, that tempered fear.
Take it, take it, it’s yours!
Elements swirled about them in a mad, frantic haze. Juliana was conscious of things knitting and unknitting, like she could see the very fabric of Faerie, a thousand, a million golden threads that bound everything together. Light speared through her, a line connecting between the two of them, blinding and brilliant, a blistering, beautiful agony that made her feel like she was unravelling into fragments and atoms before gathering again, whole, and new, and different.
And still her.
Stillhis.
Slowly, gradually, the wind rescinded. The pain dissipated, every cut shutting, every bruise melting away. The wound in her shoulder sealed. A light feathered against her bones, tracing every muscle until she felt weightless enough to float.
And yet she was still tethered to the ground, to the weight against her lips still, to the arms around her.
She inched back and opened her eyes.
Hawthorn stared back at her. “You’re still here.”
Juliana wanted to smile, but she wasn’t sure she could. Her whole body seemed devoid of feeling, hardly hers apart from the parts he was touching. But she wanted to smile. She wanted to smile and laugh and cry.
“Yes,” she said, “and so are you.”
Slowly,gingerly,Hawthornclimbedto his feet, sticking close to Juliana. Ladrien stood slumped in the doorway still, expression livid.
“Beyond words?” Hawthorn said, arching an eyebrow. “Juliana often has that effect on me too. In a vastly different way, I imagine.” There was no joy in his voice. It was as flat and cold as when he used to torment her as children, worse even, as a kind of power trembled underneath it that she had never heard before. “I do recall there were some words about surrendering to immediate judgement should the curse be broken. Do you remember?”
Ladrien’s jaw tightened. “I remember.”
“Excellent. I hereby strip you of your title, Ladrien of the Unseelie, and all magic you have accumulated. You are to be banished to the northern mountains of Winter. You will raise no armies, hurt no mortals. You will not transform. You will not set foot outside of your prison for one hundred years… after which point I may just kill you. But death is a gift you have yet to earn, given to others far more deserving.”
Ladrien stared at him, his eyes stone. “A hundred years is nothing to me,” he snarled.
“Perhaps, but I do rather like the poetic justice of it. You ought to be glad of my mercy; you’ll be able to see if your predictions come true. You might get a delightful, ‘I told you so’ at the end of your imprisonment. You get to see whatweare able to accomplish in that time.”
“You have doomed your own realm.”
Hawthorn shrugged. “Not really for you to decide, is it?” He surveyed Ladrien carefully for a moment. “I suppose I should offer you the same courtesy you gave me—a loophole, a way out. Let it be known that if you ever learn to love someone, and earn their love in return, your sentence will end. Only your sentence. You will have earned nothing more. Do you hear?”
