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“Stay,” Hawthorn begged. “Please.”
“I’m going to fetch help.”
“No,” he whispered, almost whimpering, “please don’t.”
“I’ll be back,” she rushed. “I promise.”
Afterhisfather’sfuneral,Hawthorn retired to his rooms. The kingdom entered a period of mourning. All revelries and frivolities were cancelled, and a greyness coated the castle. Even the vines seemed muted, sapped of their vibrancy and energy. They shrunk against the walls like wounded tentacles.
The Queen retired to her chambers, and silence reigned in her stead.
For a while, Juliana expected another attack. It would be the perfect opportunity. Everyone was distracted with grief, watching the Queen if they cared, slacking off if they didn’t. No one was watching Hawthorn.
No one except Juliana.
For days, Hawthorn sat by his window and stared at the courtyard, watching the people below. Juliana had no idea what he was thinking of or even if he was thinking at all. In body, he seemed fine. He still dressed and ate and drank and slept. He still bathed and washed and breathed. But much like the vines, his actions had lost their lustre.
Eventually, Juliana realised no one was coming. No assassins would dare attack the grieving queen, and anyone who had condolences to offer had already been and gone.
And therehadbeen some, particularly at the start. Old friends, distant relatives.
Hawthorn had dismissed them all, and they had followed his orders even when Juliana wasn’t sure that’s what he really wanted. He reminded her of a wounded animal, the kind liable to lash out rather than accept help, the kind that would rather try and clean its own wounds and die from it.
On the third day, Juliana was close to losing it. She was used to silence living in the woods, but his silence was intolerably loud.
“Would you like to hit something?” she asked.
Hawthorn stared at her as if he’d quite forgotten she was there. “What?”
“When I’m upset, I like to hit something. Or stab. Maybe lightly maim. I could set up the sparring ring for you—”
“I am not—” Hawthorn clenched his jaw— “upset.”
“Then what are you?”
For a long while, he remained silent. “I have not the words.”
Juliana hesitated. “I lost my mother,” she began. “I didn’t—”
“You didn’tknowyour mother—”
“And you didn’t know your father,” she retorted, more sharply than she meant to. “And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Now, you never will. You cannot mourn what you did not love. So you mourn what might have been, instead.”
Hawthorn stiffened, jaw tightly set. For a long, trembling moment, he did not speak, reminding Juliana of why she rarely tried to offer anyone words of comfort; she was so ill-adept at the task. She wouldn’t blame him if he never spoke again.
“If you had the words, why have you taken so long to speak them?” he asked at last.
“I’ve been searching for them for three days.” She moved closer to him, carefully, the way one might approach a wounded, ravenous dog they were afraid might bite them.I am not afraid of him,she reminded herself. And that, at least, was true. It had been a long time since she had been afraid of him.
But she was afraid of how he felt.
“My mother left me,” she said, hating the sound of her words. “People have offered me dozens of reasons over the years, dozens of assurances that she cared, that I had nothing to do with why she left… none of them have helped. None of them have managed to convince me that she loved me. And I’ll never know. I’ll never know, and I think that hurts worse than losing her.”
She did not remember her mother going. She remembered so little about her at all, only that she was there one day, and not the next. She’d been told she cried for days.
She had no memory of that. Nothing to cling to but a legacy of questions and pain she had no place for.
“I prefer breaking things to feeling them,” she told him, quiet as a mouse. “That’s why I offered.”
