The Hawthorn Crown

The sunrise garden is open to the sky.

You don't understand how, at first. You've come down three hundred steps and more, and yet here is a garden under a real dawn: a round lawn of thick clover and violets, rose-pink light pouring down from a high shaft cut through the hill, hawthorn hedges heavy with blossom, a little stream running clear over white stones.

And in the middle of it, someone is singing.

You know the song before you know the voice. It's the one about the blackbird. Your mother used to sing it while she did dishes. After she died, Peony sang it in the shower every morning for a year, badly, on purpose, until you laughed, because that was the only way either of you could stand to hear it.

You stop walking.

Peony is sitting on the edge of the stream with her bare feet in the water.

Her brown curls are longer. She's wearing a dress the color of moss, and her cheeks are pink, and her arms are tan, and she looks healthier than she ever did working doubles at the coffee shop on Hawthorne. On her head is a crown of woven hawthorn twigs, white blossom and bright green leaves, and she is singing the blackbird song to the sunrise like she owns it.

There are no chains. There is no guard. There is no cage.

"Pea," you say.

It comes out wrong. Barely a word.

She turns. Her face goes through about six things at once, and then she's up and running, splashing out of the stream, and she hits you so hard you both nearly go over.

"You came." She's crying. She's laughing. "You came, you came, I knew you'd come, I knew Gerald would get you eventually."

"You stuffed a notebook in a fern," you say into her hair. "You absolute lunatic."

"It worked!"

You hold her. You hold her so hard you can feel her ribs. She smells like clover and woodsmoke and the vanilla lotion she's used since high school, and the six weeks of not knowing, of calling hospitals and walking trails and lying awake doing math about rivers, all of it comes up your throat at once and you sob into her shoulder like you haven't since the funeral.

She lets you. She holds on. She rubs your back the way you used to rub hers.

"I'm okay," she keeps saying. "I'm okay, Ava. Look at me. I'm okay."

You pull back and look at her. You can't stop looking.

"Are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Did they make you eat anything, did you sign anything, did..."

"No. No. Nobody's hurt me." She cups your face in both hands. "Breathe. You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you list all the disasters in order of likelihood."

You laugh, wet and cracked. She grins.

That's when you see him.

He's standing a few steps behind her, waiting politely, the way people wait at airports when someone else is having a reunion. He's fae, you can tell by the stillness and the faint gold at the tips of his ears, but softer than the courtiers in the hall. Ash-blond hair tied back. Ink on his fingers. A healer's leather satchel slung across his chest. He's handsome in a gentle, unhurried way, like a good book you'd reread.

He's looking at Peony like she hung the moon.

"Pea," you say slowly. "Who's that?"

"Oh!" She grabs your hand and turns, pulling you toward him. "This is Corrin. Corrin Ashlock. He's the court's healer. He's..." She stops, and goes pink, and starts again. "He's mine."

Corrin bows, a real bow, low. "Lady Ava. I've heard so much about you that I feel I should already know your middle name."

"She doesn't use it," Peony says. "She hates it."

"Peony."

"What? You do."

You look between them. Corrin's hand finds Peony's without either of them looking, like it does that all the time, like it lives there.

You're good at your job. Your job is noticing what doesn't fit. A leaf curled the wrong way. A canker in the wrong place. A disease climbing up when it should be moving down.

So you notice.

You notice that Peony's feet are bare and clean and that there's a pair of embroidered slippers waiting by the stream, her slippers, molded to her feet. You notice that the garden hedge has a gap, and through the gap is a small door painted yellow, and on the door is a wreath of dried flowers in the exact style Peony made for your apartment every autumn. You notice a guitar leaning against the hedge. Her guitar. The old Yamaha with the sticker on it. Which means she brought it. Which means she packed.

You notice that nobody is watching her. Nobody is keeping her.

You notice the crown.

"Pea," you say. "Why are you wearing a crown?"

Her smile falters. Just a little.

"It's a handfast crown," Corrin says gently. "It's what a bride wears for the first season after her vows."

The garden goes very quiet.

"Your vows."

Peony squeezes your hand. "Ava..."

"You got married." You hear your own voice from far off. "You got married. Down here. To him."

"Handfasted. It's like married. It's better than married, actually, it's..." She sees your face and stops. "Okay. Yes. I got married."

"While I was calling hospitals."

"I know."

"While a detective was standing in my living room asking if I killed you."

Peony flinches. "She what?"

"Six weeks, Peony." Your voice cracks in half. "I thought you were dead. I thought you were in a river. I thought someone had you in a basement. I drove up here in the middle of the night and married a fairy king on the back of your notebook to get you out of a prison, and you're..." You gesture at the garden, the stream, the slippers, the man. "You're living here."

"I know. I know, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I couldn't tell you, I had to..."

"Had to what? He took you. Didn't he? Tell me he took you."

You're begging. You can hear it. You need it to be that, because if it isn't that, then you don't understand anything about the last six weeks, or the last twenty-five years.

Peony takes a deep breath. She lets go of Corrin's hand and takes both of yours.

Her eyes are wet. But her voice is steady. Steadier than you've ever heard it.

"Nobody took me," she says. "I came on my own. And you didn't come here on your own either."

"What does that mean?"

"I asked him to take you." She doesn't look away. "He said no three times."