Series: Willow Winters
Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
The mirror is still here. I stare into it imagining my love watching me. Maybe with my power growing I do not need to sneak to my father’s scry. Maybe I can will this world to bend to my needs. Maybe…I dream.
With a gentle murmur, I wake, blinking away a sleep and a dream I can't quite remember. Beatrice is there when I wake. She helps me into my blush gown and settles the wreath of roses onto the crown of my head. She dresses me as the queen I am here, and when she is finished, I go out to meet my mother.
She’s still in the garden. I cannot tell if she ever stopped tending to them.
“Mother,” I speak to gain her attention.
My mother looks up, and her face is transformed by her shock. “Persephone.”
She rushes to me, accidentally kicking over the basket in doing so, and I hold out my arms for her embrace. If she is cross with me, it doesn’t show. There is only love between us. There is only warmth. I watch her as she gets closer. This is my mother. There is so much love in her eyes. So much care for me. It has torn her heart out to think I was missing or stolen from her.
Our conversation will not be a confrontation, I decide. It will be a plea. I will ask her for this favor as a daughter asks a mother for a blessing. Although the very thought of it sours my stomach.
Her arms close around me, and she pulls me into a tight hug, her arms shaking. “Persephone,” she whispers into my hair. “You were gone.”
“I was,” I tell her. “But I was fine, Mother. Please. Don’t fear for me when I must go.”
“You must not go,” she utters but doesn’t relent her grasp.
Her arms tighten around me even more. Instead of pulling away, I hold her back just as fiercely. This is what she needs from me. I will give it to her before I ask her for what I need.
And I do need it. I need for the realms to be balanced. I need for Hades to be reassured. I need for all the death and strife to end, and for my life to be…
Mine. I want my days and nights to be the life I desire, and the life I must have been destined to live. As queen of the Underworld and the goddess of life. Both are to be mine, she must understand.
When my mother shifts, I release her. Her hands linger on my upper arms for a moment, then she drops them to her sides. Her gaze looks over me as a mother does.
I offer her a hand again. “Come inside and talk to me, please.”
My mother glances at my hand, then at my face. The sun rises higher above the garden walls, shining its light onto my mother’s hair. Her eyes are red. She looks as if she hasn’t slept, and she is thin, as if she has been forgetting to eat as well.
It is brutal, the guilt that I feel at this moment. Had I told her though, I don’t believe she would have relented. I don’t think her state would be changed.
That is always how my mother has been. When she focuses deeply on her plants and her tending, she puts all of herself into the work. Only this time, she is not focusing deeply on her plants. Not only on her plants rather.
She is focused on me, and where I will go, and if I will be taken from her.
That cannot be the way. I won’t ever be taken again, my leave is my own doing.
“Come.” I hold my hand out again and wait. At first I think there is a chance she’ll refuse to speak with me about this. She may turn to her plants. She may say they need her. That she left them to seek revenge in the mortal realm, and now she must put things right. She may try to delay.
But then my mother lets out a soft sigh, brushes a lock of her hair away from her face, and puts her hand in mine.
“Tell me about the flowers,” I request from her as we leave the garden. “Tell me what is about to bloom.”
My mother obliges easily. If there’s one thing she’ll speak of at any time it is of harvest and florals. She tells me, her tone absent, as we walk the cool halls to my rooms. I draw my mother down to sit on a chaise with me and listen to more about the flowers in the garden beds. The flowers we might plant together. The ones she has already planted and has watered carefully, so that the gardens here will be properly balanced again.