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She waited for yet another reaction, but Juliana refused to give it. “What do you want?” she asked instead.
“Revenge,” said the witch.
Juliana’s blood ran cold.
“Or perhaps… satisfaction. They often collide but aren’t always one in the same.”
Juliana had no idea what to say to that. Mabel didn’t appear to be in a mood to elaborate, either, instead loading up one of the golden plates with a very large slice of cake and cream. She sat down to eat it, licking her lips.
“Don’t worry yourself too much,” the old woman said. “I’ve no desire to cause any harm to you or him. I actually quite like you both.”
“That is not as comforting as it ought to be.”
Mabel shrugged. “Suit yourself, but I mean what I say.”
Juliana bit her lip. “I woke Hawthorn,” she said. “It didn’t quite work—he was dying—but I did wake him from the curse. And then I shared my heart with him, but I didn’t die. Do you know why?”
Mabel smiled. “For the same reason those pendants tied you in ways we didn’t expect. Because you werealreadytied. How could you die when his heart still beat? He’d already given it to you, I expect.”
Juliana couldn’t disagree, but neither could she find her voice.
“But enough of that. Enjoy tonight. Your mother-in-law wishes to speak to you.”
Juliana turned, and found Maytree coming towards her. She swivelled back briefly to Mabel, but she’d vanished into thin air.
“Who were you talking to?” Maytree asked.
“Some old witch, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Juliana answered, glancing briefly at the cake to ensure a piece was missing and that she hadn’t imagined the entire conversation.
“Hawthorn has been filling me in on the entire story. It seems I have missed quite a bit.”
Juliana watched Hawthorn dancing, with a strange lightness to his face she’d never noticed before. “I think we all have.”
Maytree looked down, only slightly, before regaining her queenly composure. “I was wrong to keep my distance from him,” she admitted.
“I know why you did.”
“But I also know you never approved.” Her gaze shrank again. “Your mother was a great help to me when I first had him. She understood motherhood in ways I think that Faeries cannot… the fear. The way that even something you’ve wanted for so long can feel… not as you expected. She never expected me to perform.”
“You were close to her, weren’t you?”
“I loved her,” said Maytree simply. “Which is why—”
“You let her go.”
Maytree bowed her head. “Hawthorn told me what your father—”
“Your Majesty, with all due respect, I am in no mood to talk about that. Not today.”
The Queen nodded. “I understand.” She placed a hand against her cheek, gazing into her eyes with a look Juliana barely remembered from the snippet of childhood she had spent with Cerridwen. “I gave you your truesight, you know,” she whispered. “I was honoured when your mother asked me. Most knights wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so… but that was her. And us, back then.”
Juliana wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she turned the conversation back to a much more comfortable topic. “Why did you assign me to be Hawthorn’s guard? Was it just because of the boon, or—”
“Your father raised a good point, I must admit,” Maytree explained. “But I like to think I would have agreed to it without the boon. Hawthorn was always trying to escape from his previous ones, whereas you… for whatever reason, he gravitated towards you. Maybe for the wrong ones, when he was younger, but you’d always been able to handle him. And for all that you’d never seemed to care for him, you reported Lucinda when you didn’t have to. You’d looked out for him at the expense of yourself. A true knight, even then. Perhaps, I thought, you could be something like a friend.”
She paused for a moment, glancing over the festivities, her smiling son, Juliana’s gown.
“I can’t say I plannedthis, though…”
