Marmalade's Love Potion

Chapter 23 - Reunion - Part 2

Despite the season, the garden air was warm and humid, heated by the glow of amber stones set along the pebbled trail. Even so, Penelope shivered with apprehension as she followed her family towards a distant corner of the gardens.

At last, they crossed a threshold into a circle of weeping rose trees, secluded from view of the ballroom terraces. Around them, the night was quiet but for the distant strum of music and the chorus of insects. Clarity began to dance between the trunks, spinning beneath bloom-laden boughs and stopping to occasionally inhale the scent of flowers.

Penelope and her parents stood looking at one another for long, silent moments. At last, her father spoke, gazing at her with heartrending affection. "Fates, how we've missed you."

Penelope's breath hitched at the warmth, the love, in his voice. She longed to stride forward and lose herself to his embrace.

Yet beneath the longing, twisting below the surface of her elation, was an agonising confusion and sense of betrayal. She could feel the brutal embers of rage in her throat, scorching through all feelings of safety, family, home.

Penelope gritted her teeth against it, desperate to bask in her parents' love, in the pride and acceptance she had craved since the day she was sent to the woods. To allow herself, for just this one moment, to believe they truly loved her. Fighting for air, she dashed at fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.

"You truly missed me?" she whispered.

"Of course we missed you, starlight." Her father's eyes shone with tears as he moved forward to cup her face in gentle hands. "Every day, every moment, since you've been away. How we've longed for this, to see you again..."

"I don't understand..." Penelope drew further back, reluctantly pulling away from her father's grasp to look between her parents. Clarity settled on a nearby bench, her face morose.

"You knew where I was this whole time." Penelope spoke the words slowly, uncertainly, suddenly questioning her every truth. "If you missed me so much, if you loved me so much, where have you been? Why did you send me away at all?"

"Starling..." her mother breathed, face lined with weary sorrow. "We didn't want to send you away. Truly, it was the very last thing we would have ever wanted..."

"I don't understand," Penelope repeated, feeling increasingly confused, desperate. "If you didn't want to... then why?"

Penelope thought back to a conversation with a witch on a boat under the stars.

Do you not think that perhaps your Seer Queen saw something which prompted her to send you to the Faewood?

"What did you See?" Penelope asked, half dreading the answer. "That night of the ritual, the one I..." Penelope swallowed against the rising flush of shame and guilt. "The one I ruined? When I ran away... You Saw something... What was it?"

Penelope's voice was a quiet rasp as she stared anxiously up at her mother, her father, waiting for judgement, some long-awaited admonishment, for her failure that night.

That ritual was the reason she had been sent away, she felt the truth of it in her marrow, and she burned to understand why.

"Oh, darling heart, you never ruined anything."

"What?" Penelope gasped. "But... I thought... I thought you sent me away because I messed it all up. I couldn't keep still, or quiet, or... or do the one thing you had asked of me—"

"Treasure," her father cut in. "You did nothing wrong. We never sent you away as punishment—"

Penelope's nerves felt frayed. Something terrible and vicious erupted in her then, words spearing upwards from buried, bleeding depths.