Queen Mab by Kate Danley Page B

ladies giggled at his exuberance, but Mab felt something quite different stir within her heart.  Perhaps it was jealousy, perhaps envy, but it was indeed a longing so deep that it made the mighty oceans seem like shallow rivers.  He was a creature of two worlds, not just friend to these two Houses estranged, but a dancer of both light and dark, a human who had tasted both worlds and found them equally delicious.  A man with terrible pain and terrible happiness.  He had eaten his fill until the hunger in his soul had been sated, and now he brought both together as a whole.
    She ripped herself away, knowing that to reach out to him once more would be his doom.  As she stepped out of the ballroom and into the night air, the fireflies within her dress lit, bathing her in a soft, otherworldly light.  The flagstones gave way to a tended garden with topiaries, fountains, and tall hedges made for hiding. 
    The gentle laugh of cavorting lovers stopped her in her tracks.  Mab looked and saw Juliet was no longer at the side of Paris.  Instead, she watched as Romeo and Juliet, palm to palm, stared into one another's eyes until their lips spoke the words that their breath could not.
    Mab sent out her will, forcing Juliet's nurse to call, to stop this fate before it began.  But then these two lovers' lips parted, and Mab recognized that moment of holy stillness.  She had known it with Mercutio, and the span of her thousands of years told her that it was divine.
    There must be another way, she thought, lifting the vial of Capulet's kindness from the chain around her neck.
    She looked upon it, warm and glowing in her hand.  The sound of Juliet being called once more back into the party drifted across the garden.
    It suddenly seemed so foolish to waste a drop of such a gift on a mortal, Mab thought.  They had enough to spare and jealously kept it close or heedlessly gave it away.
    She turned to gaze upon Mercutio inside, his eyes smiling in the lamplight as he laughed at the witticisms of one who did not deserve his attention.  Mab missed him, missed the lessons of his gentle, careless ways.  She did not even know until now that she was and always would be his pupil, learning the sweetest lessons of the world from the dreams they shared, of the instruction she found navigating the heart.
    It suddenly seemed quite strange that she would think such a wager, which would have her even consider turning such a man into her champion, was sound.  Why had she staked this gift of kindness so hardly won upon a peace with Faunus?  Peace with or without him was none of her desire.
    No.
    It was of Faunus's desire.  As it always had been, ever since he tricked her from her sacred bull and stole that night of dreams from her.  Always Faunus.  Always his wants.  Always his schemes.
    She would not play his game.  Clarity ringing through her mind.  Unstoppered, she lifted the vial to her lips.  In a single draught, she swallowed down the sweet taste.
    It was richer than the richest nectar she had ever eaten in the forest of forgetting.  It warmed her as it traveled down her body, filling her with a glow within and without.  She looked upon the world as if after all those centuries, she had never gazed upon it before.  She looked upon the ballroom, upon the mortals dancing there, so delicate, so frail, untended and unwatched by one with power.  She felt a need build up inside of her, to wrap them in her arms and tuck them off to bed.  To fill their minds with the most beautiful dreams imaginable so that the drudgery of living would be easier day by day.
    She watched as Romeo left the party, yearning to call him back.  His face was stricken first by some words of Benvolio, and then of Lord Capulet, who soon stumbled off to bed and called the revelry to an end.  As the confused party goers made their way to the door, Mab hastily followed, trying to give chase to Romeo as he headed into the darkness.  The kindness she had stolen