When Penelope’s breathing had settled, Marmalade drew them both to their feet and draped her cloak around Penelope’s bare shoulders.

“Come with me,” the witch commanded. Her voice was calm, yet brooked no argument.

With sluggish movements, Penelope brushed the last of the moss to the forest floor, kicked the thorns from her boots, and tugged the cloak tight around her. Together they turned from the shadowy paths of the Darkwood, emerging into the dawn rising through the Faewood’s boughs.

Here, the deep well of the forest’s misery shallowed into a more gentle melancholy. One that accepted the ache of loss and tilled its soil with the hope of new life.

They walked in loops and spirals. They did not speak, yet Marmalade’s hand smoothed constant circles across Penelope’s back.

As they wandered, Penelope allowed the woods to soothe her distress. Give it to the earth and the trees, the wind seemed to murmur. They know what to do with it. Let it all fall away. Flowers of silver and midnight blue sprang beneath Penelope’s steps as she walked, and each breath came easier than the last.

They came to rest in a small clearing by a pond that sparkled in the rising light.

Penelope watched in a hollow sort of daze as Marmalade withdrew a copper kettle and small stone cups from the belt around her waist. The witch set a small ring of warming stones on the forest floor and began boiling water drawn from the clear pond.

Penelope could still feel tendrils of the Darkwood reaching for her, yet it felt dim and distant. As though Penelope had washed ashore after a storm that had dragged her through the teeth of shoals.

She became aware of every bruising ache in her body, feeling leaden with exhaustion. Penelope watched Marmot scamper about the tree roots, scavenging for rocks. He avoided Penelope, darting beyond the circle of her reach with furtive glances in her direction. He moved with a subtle limp, and she felt another lance of guilt.

She shuddered as the echoes of wrath still burned in her bones, rubbing at her arms to temper the feeling. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She hated that she had caused Marmot such pain and fear.

“How did you find me?” Penelope asked, when she could no longer bear the silence.

“Mmmm. The forest offered me a trail to follow, and I had the feeling I should take it.” The witch gave an enigmatic smile and perched herself on a nearby rock. “I’m glad I did.”

Penelope sank down beside her, at a loss for what to say.

“I’m glad, too,” she said after a moment filled with the chirp of insects and the witch’s humming.

Penelope watched the water come to boil through the growing din of a headache, massaging her temples. She could still feel the curl of vines around her wrist, shackles that had felt like freedom.

“You’re in pain?” Marmalade asked in concern, pressing her palm to Penelope’s forehead. Penelope nodded, relishing Marmalade's cool hand against her feverish skin.

“My head hurts...”

A glimmer of light caught Penelope’s eye. She looked up in time to see a small, scraggly plant unfurl at the base of a nearby tree.

“Oh,” Penelope laughed, her breath shaky as she moved to crouch by the plant. Its brambled stems were laden with small golden-yellow flowers. “Feverthistle.”

Marmalade knelt in the snow as Penelope gathered several leaves and budding flowers.

“How fascinating,” the witch murmured as she inspected the stems. “The Faewood has a way of providing exactly what we need, just as we need it.”

Marmalade tossed some of the feverthistle into the kettle, filling the clearing with an earthy herbal fragrance.

They sat quietly, shoulder to shoulder, as they sipped the tea. Penelope’s aches began to ease, her thoughts gaining greater clarity than recent weeks of restless nights had allowed.

Penelope felt as though she should offer something to say, an explanation, a question, but the words were beyond reach.

“You aren’t the first to hear the cry of the Darkwood. Nor the first to succumb,” Marmalade said when their cups were almost empty, as though reading Penelope’s thoughts.

For a moment, a feral light glinted in the depths of Marmalade’s eyes, the points of her teeth gleaming that much sharper in the icy winter light. Penelope blinked and the moment passed.

“It calls to those who will most understand its pain, who will share in it. If we’re not careful, if we lose hold of ourselves to its grief, it is all too easy to drown in it.”

Penelope was burning to ask the witch how she knew this, but held herself back. The question on her tongue felt too raw.

Instead she voiced a different thought.

“You knew. About Steph.”

Marmalade quirked her lip into a half smile. “It wasn’t my place to share his secrets.”

Penelope swallowed hard, frowning.

“And it is not my place to speak for him now, as to why he kept them from you.”

Penelope nodded slowly. “I don’t know who to trust... I don’t think I even trust myself,” she whispered, mostly to herself.

The witch nodded in thought, refilling their cups.

“You have been at the mercy of powers much larger than yourself. Recently, yes, but also for far longer. Perhaps your whole life. You long to trust in those powers and their intentions, yet you have fewer and fewer reasons to.”

Penelope jerked her head in a nod. She felt unsteady. The orbit of her ideals unanchored from her guiding stars.

“I’ve tried... so hard. So hard. To be what everyone wants me to be, while also trying to be honest... to be true.”

“An impossible task, I should think.”

Penelope huffed a rueful laugh. “Now, I’m trying to be truer to myself, to walk my own path, but I’m no longer sure where I want that to lead. And I feel so...” Penelope didn’t quite know how to express in words how it felt to have her own harshest truths, her deepest pain, so easily twisted into something predatory. The allure to shift into something vicious and primal, tearing away her poise like dead skin, made her feel more akin to prey.

“Standing there, in those shadows... I’ve never felt so angry. Or maybe, I’ve always felt that angry and just swallowed it down and down... How do I be true to that? I’m terrified of being made into someone who hurts others. Who wants to hurt others. Especially ones who don’t deserve it...” Penelope’s voice fell to a whisper as she glanced at Marmot, who was sniffing at a tree root covered in small daisies.

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“But then again, how do I protect the ones I care about, protect my home, if I have no power?”

The witch watched the play of light over water for long moments before speaking. “There are all kinds of power in this world. Violence is one kind. Sometimes a necessary one. Healing is another. Knowledge... integrity... community. There is power in choosing a path to walk, and power in turning away from the roads paved at your feet by others’ hands.”

Marmalade swilled her cup. “Your power, Penelope, lies in understanding. You see the truths of this forest, seek them without even realising it, and she responds to you as I’ve seen few others. You have cultivated a kinship with the most wild and creative of powers in this realm. That you don’t seek to exploit this kinship at the expense of the forest is the reason these woods trust you so. I feel her magic reach for you. I feel your presence each time you enter the forest, and have always done, for the forest blooms when you walk her paths. You have grown with her, and she with you. That is a power like no others have been entrusted with. Not even myself, not to the same extent.”

Penelope wiped at tears that had begun to spill silently down her cheeks.

“The Faewood and her darker heart are complex. Dangerous. To many a brazen wanderer she has proved deadly. Yet for you, she unfurls miracles, simply for the asking. There is power in that also.”

As Penelope considered these words the ferns within the clearing began to rustle, a chorus, a caress. The trees around her shivered, sending shards of shining ice to the ground. Penelope smiled and tightened the curl of her fingers around her teacup, wincing as her knuckles stung.

Penelope examined the torn skin of her palms and the calloused pads of her fingers. She bore the faint wounds of needle pricks and fine cuts from the accidental kiss of scissor blades.

“Here,” Marmalade whispered, holding out a small crystal phial filled with a glimmering berry-pink smoke. “It will soothe your hands.”

Accepting the potion, Penelope held it up to the morning light. Tipping it from side to side, she watched the smoke swirl and pool, sometimes mist, sometimes liquid.

It was just like the potions she had used in Marmalade’s bathing pool, and the dozens of bottles stacked in the witch’s sitting room cabinet. With a flash of new clarity, Penelope recalled the swirling green storm of the potion that had arrived with her invitation to the Dark Moon Ball.

That potion had been so different in colour and motion to the one in her grasp; Grimwood’s potion had seemed to writhe with an innate sort of violence. Yet, the two were so similar in the strange liquid vapour of their substance.

And so very similar to the swirling mass of lights she had seen torn asunder in the Darkwood.

“Marmalade,” Penelope breathed, horror dawning as her suspicions settled. “What exactly are these? Your potions? They... they look like...”

“Spirits,” Marmalade confirmed with a nod.

Penelope sucked in a breath and closed her fist around the glass, obscuring the contents from view. She felt nausea churning in her stomach.

“Spirits,” Marmalade continued, a firm edge to her voice, even as she continued speaking quietly, “gathered with the consent of the forest. From fruits and flowers. From trees, and fallen feathers. From storms and tides and river stones.”

Penelope stared at the witch as she held up a flower gathered from the feverthistle.

“Spirits are the essence, the substance, of life. Of magic. Watch...” Marmalade closed her eyes, cradling the flower in the palm of her hand. She began to hum.

As Penelope watched, a thin butterscotch mist emerged from the petals. The flower began to dry, its petals curling inwards, the vibrant yellow of its hue dimming to a ghostly grey.

Marmalade curled the mist about her finger, twisting it into a floating globe of liquid light. She allowed the husk of the flower head to fall to the snow by her feet.

Reaching her finger forward, slowly and carefully, Marmalade lowered the light into Penelope’s cooling mug of tea.

“It’s truly not so much different from steeping the flower in hot water. Just a little more direct. More pure and potent. And yet the plant itself...” Marmalade nodded to the feverthistle where it swayed in the morning breeze, “remains intact. Unharmed.”

Penelope watched the light swirl and dissipate within the water, her heart beating hard as the substance dissolved to the faintest glimmer.

“That potion in your hand uses spirits from various kinds of berries, the leaves of silken nettle, and sap from a mushroom that only grows every other spring.”

Penelope removed the stopper with a hesitant pop and tipped a small amount into her palm. Passing the phial and its stopper to Marmalade, she worked the solution into her skin. It was cool and tingled across her knuckles. Penelope watched wide-eyed as the smaller cuts closed and dry skin became smooth and soft. Her skin smelled of strawberries and the watery scent of new leaves.

“Spirits are the animating force of life and in partnership, in communion, with our intent, they can achieve the most remarkable things.”

Penelope gazed at Marmalade’s face as the witch spoke, her eyes glittering with conviction as she stoppered the phial and tucked it into her waist pouch.

“Grimwood... they have been taking spirits from the Darkwood to make potions,” Penelope said, recalling the swirl of violent images the Darkwood had shown her, the memory of shattering glass and a tree frozen by its contents. “And weapons...”

“Grimwood seeks dominion over these woods and the magics she has to offer. In doing so, they make the forest an enemy.” Marmalade hummed a breath. “The Darkwood does not part willingly with her ghosts... and she forgives having her own spirits used against her not at all.”

Marmalade plucked a wilted flower from Penelope’s curls, spinning its stem between her fingers.

“All life consumes other life to survive. It is the harsh nature of this world. But it is also a relationship. One of give and take. Reciprocity. Otherwise the balance tilts into destruction. The people of this world have been taking for far too long.”

Marmalade spoke this last part quietly, her breath a sad sigh. The sound of it seemed to carry through the trees, meeting a rustling breeze that swept her words through the clearing and to the winds beyond.

Marmot appeared then, peering over Marmalade’s knee. Slowly, Penelope set her teacup down on the ground, sliding it towards the small creature in offering. Marmot skittered forward to sniff, and then lap, at the liquid which shone still with the barest hints of butterscotch light.

With a wheeze of approval Marmot pressed his wet muzzle to Penelope’s newly healed hand. She gave a dry sob of relief and scratched under his chin.

“I’ll never hurt you like that again, Marmot. I promise.”

Marmot tilted his head in regard, then climbed up into her lap. Penelope cradled the small creature with a grin.

Penelope’s mind spun as she leaned back on her arms to look at the fading stars. Communion...

Perhaps, if she could show the power of partnership with the Faewood, instead of subjugation... If she could find a way to make Grimwood listen... If she could persuade the support of her family... perhaps she could show a different way to share in the power of the forest she has come to love without burning it to ashes.

Though her heart still hurt and sorrow coursed in her blood, something within her settled and stilled as she came to this resolution. Penelope smiled at the winter sky.

They spoke of smaller woes for a while, Penelope telling Marmalade of her nightmare, and the upcoming humiliation of attending the Dark Moon Ball in a garish, crudely chiselled wagon. “Sister Rosin loves it so much, I don’t know how to tell her we’ll be the laughing stock of the realms when we arrive in it.”

Penelope sighed, thinking of thorns and sharpened teeth and a splintered voice that called for war.

“Though, I suppose there are worse impressions to make...”

Marmalade smirked, a wild gleam in her eye.

Penelope helped pack away the tea things as they prepared to leave. As they stood, Marmalade wrapped her arms around the princess in a tight hug. Penelope melted into the embrace, resting her cheek on the witch’s shoulder as snow dusted their hair.

After long moments, Marmalade stepped back, digging out another phial from her pouch. This one was smaller and filled with a pale lavender mist.

The witch brushed a gentle thumb across the skin of Penelope’s cheek, just shy of the shadows below her eyes that marked her weariness.

“This will help you sleep and protect your dreams.”

Penelope accepted it with gratitude. With a chaste kiss to Penelope’s lips, Marmalade melted back into the shadows of the forest and was gone without another word, leaving behind no trace but the faint scent of apricots and pastry.

Penelope made her way back to the cottage, feeling more hopeful than she had in weeks.

As she crossed the threshold of the kitchen once more, still wrapped in Marmalade’s soft winter cloak, Penelope listened to the sounds of the Sisters waking upstairs.

She scrunched up the note she had left for them, intent on keeping her misguided pilgrimage to the Darkwood a complete secret, and paused by her workroom on the way to find new clothes.

There, sitting on a shelf high above the bench, was a small box Penelope had not touched since the days after her return from Grimwood. Feeling drawn to it, Penelope reached up to retrieve the small box of polished bark, clearing a space on her workbench before setting it down on the wood.

Lifting the lid, Penelope grinned. Inside lay dozens of delicate flowers still vibrant with life and piles of small, shining river stones, all collected from her night in the forest.

The Faewood has a way of providing exactly what we need, just as we need it.

Penelope knew exactly how to finish her dress.