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Where are you?
He thought he might have called for her, but he wasn’t sure. It was so hard to tell. He was always calling for her now, always wanting her beside him. He’s never spoken it, not in so many or so few words, but the truth of it was there.
How long had he felt this way?
Hard to know. Hard to trace a river back to its source. Is it in the mountains or the rain clouds or the air all around you?
He thought it had happened back at the Summer Court, but in his tangled, twisted thoughts, he wondered if it had been earlier, sooner, later,always.He may not have been born feeling this way, but he was borntofeel it—in the way a tree was doomed to know moss and mould and lichen. She’d infected him, diseased him.
And she didn’t even care.
Jules, Jules, come.
Maybe he was the moss, and she the tree—he was the one clinging to her, after all. He was the one that wouldn’t survive without her.
“Hawthorn.” A hand pressed on his cheek, cold and smooth. Not Juliana. His mother. “Hawthorn, stay with us. We have not come so far to lose you now.”
“Jules,” he murmured, the only sound he was capable of.
Everything else escaped him.
Juliana washed the blood from her hands in the servants’ bathroom. She couldn’t bear to use the one she shared with Hawthorn, couldn’t bear to be anywhere near that room. She’d only get in the way. The healers knew what they were doing.
Slowly, the blood trickled down the basin, like it was never there to begin with.
Only, it had been. She could still feel it.
A hand touched her shoulder, hard and firm.
“Juliana.” Dillon’s voice, soft and reassuring. “I heard what happened.”
“Is he dead?”
He shook his head. “Healers are still working on him.”
A strangled sob broke in her throat, and something else dislodged from her heart. The next thing she knew, she was thrown against Dillon’s broad chest, tucked tightly into his arms.
He was strong and sturdy. He smelt of the outdoors, of woodsmoke and metal. He was lovely and wonderful and wrong, so wrong.
She wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else.
But she could not go to him.
“It’s all right,” Dillon told her, stroking her hair. “It’ll be all right.”
Mortals are so breakable,she thought dimly.We would not survive without those lies to glue us together.
Dillon held her until she’d composed herself, pulling enough pieces back to mimic her usual shape. “I’ll be all right now,” she assured him.
“You’re sure?”
She nodded, uncertain as ever, but sure she could keep the mask on.
Better than the one that assassin wore…
She headed back upstairs. The healers were just leaving by the time she arrived. The Queen hovered outside the door, conversing with them in low, hurried voices.
“Thank you,” Maytree breathed, as they turned to leave.
