From the moment she stepped over her father and stepmother's corpses, her memory was a hazy, evanescent thing. She remembered peeling off her gown, filling bags with the pearls and gems from it. She remembered soothing Toby, whose eye was still swollen. She remembered searching for anything edible in the house, and then anything valuable.

The problem was that she couldn't remember what order everything went in, or how many days she stayed in the cottage-not that she cared to. It could have been three days, but it just as easily could have been three hours. She didn't speak the whole time, aside from shushing Toby. And when the smell of a fire reached her nose, she burned dried lavender in her own brazier to try and drown out the smell.

When she left the home of her childhood, it was with her baby brother, a queen's ransom, and a shattered psyche. A cat and a dog followed where she went; the toad hopped off into the forest at some point. Sarah didn't remember when.

It hurt when she tried to.

She wandered from town to town with Toby, exchanging a pearl here, a sliver of her silver headdress there. All through them she heard whispers of an evil warlock who had cast spells over the townsfolk. And not long after those whispers would come the ones asking where he went, hopeful that he'd never come back. Sarah kept her eyes to the ground and her lips pressed shut.

There were some, she could tell, who wanted to chide the young girl with a babe on her hip, so clearly running from something. She heard those whispers too, and paid them no mind. They tended to stop when they saw the touch of magic shimmering in Toby's eyes, and the haunted look in her own.

She let them draw their own conclusions, and didn't mind the quiet pity they'd take on her or when they helped her slip away in the dead of the night.

Town after town melded together until she wasn't quite sure where she'd come from or where she'd go. Sarah only recognized that they were very, very far from the forest where the castle once stood-or at least, far enough that she started to feel comfortable. One day, not long after that, she came to the sudden realization that Toby had aged. He was walking by himself and talking passably, and mercy upon mercies, he did not seem to remember the castle. He loved Agnes the cat and Ambrosias the dog, but could not remember when Agnes held him in her arms, or Ambrosias carried a rider.

It was probably for the best.

Sarah reached into her riches and bought a small plot of land with a small, abandoned home on it. The previous tenant's family had been driven out after he died in the war, and Sarah tried not to think of all the ghosts that could live in the walls. She tried asking where they went, but her new neighbors told her not to pry–it was better not to know.

When the first soldiers started coming back from the front, Sarah saw herself in their trauma. She knew what it was like to get swallowed up by a memory so real she had to fight her way out. She knew the dreams that could stalk the nighttime.

Her empathetic ear earned her three proposals. The first was to a man fifteen years her senior, and while she suspected his offer was mostly from pity-the people in the village still thought her a tragically unwed mother because of the war, one way or another-it still made her feel ill. She turned him down as kindly as possible, and then did not leave her home for a week, too enshrouded in memories to be amongst others.

The second came from a soldier, freshly returned. He recognized the look in her eyes, and when he talked of the terrors he had witnessed, she did not shy away. She had her own, of course, even if she would not share them. He offered her what he thought was comfort and security, but she thought different. It wasn't that she particularly disliked him, either; he was someone she considered a friend. She told him this, and that she could not marry someone she did not love. She left out that she was no longer sure she could love, not in any way a husband would want.

The third, and final proposal, Sarah actually considered for a time. This one, too, came from a soldier making their way home. They joined the army as a man, and lived as a man, but confided in Sarah before she went to dress the soldier's wounds that they had not been born a man. Sarah understood secrets that cut to the very core of a person. She had her own, after all.

And if it hadn't been for the fact that she thought only so many secrets could live under one roof, she might have accepted. Hanne left after they recovered, and Sarah was sad, in her way, to see them go. Perhaps she could have been content with Hanne, but they were gone. Sarah dwelled enough in the past as it was, and would not allow herself to wonder what might have been.

For a time, the trickle of wounded slowed, and news from the war front came almost to a halt. It felt as if the entire country was holding its breath, waiting to see if the tenuous peace would last. Sarah waited as well, nervous for the day Toby grew old enough to be conscripted.

For a time, things were good.

And then they got worse.