20 4.3

Our relationship had been so much easier when I was seven. She has always loved kids and has always been willing to be a loving mother figure for the offspring of her husband's infidelity. I had been drowning in feelings of abandonment from my Grandfather dying and my mother leaving me, and so it was a perfect match. She was willing to love me, and I needed someone to be the mother I had never had.

My biological mother wasn't very present in my day to day life. She pushed that duty onto her father and tended to wander place to place without me. She blamed her inability to stay still on her half-fey parentage, but I now have come to understand that it was just who she was. Commitment scared her, responsibility annoyed her, and being a parent was simply too much to deal with.

Despite all this, I loved her and she loved me. No matter how far she wandered, she would always come back home with her stories of faraway places and trinkets from her travels. I kept a candle in the window lit for her every night, knowing that she would be back soon with interesting foods, exotic flowers, and even books. But best of all were the stories she brought, fact or fiction, of what she had been up to while she was gone.

She never really talked to me like I was a child; in retrospect, I doubt she knew how. She talked to me like we were old friends catching up on each other's lives after a few years of being distant, and she wasn't afraid to tell me about anything from her romantic conquests to financial troubles and even the occasional grift. Her storytelling abilities were masterful, and I could sit and listen to her talk for hours about anything.

My grandfather was her complete opposite. He was a serious and thoughtful man and had stayed in our little house in the woods since he found my grandmother. He had been a woodcutter, but he dabbled in enough carpentry to make the house and everything in it. We had a small farm to provide us with fruits and vegetables, chickens for meat and eggs, and hunting for most everything else. He taught me everything I needed to know, from how to read to how to climb trees. He had even taught me how to haggle at the monthly market, and eventually, the shopkeepers had to refuse to deal with me. I was just too cute for them to resist.

During the coldest winter in decades, a few months after my seventh birthday, Grandfather got sick and never recovered. I was too young to fully understand what was going on until it was too late. I still remember that day in late spring when he went to bed and never got up, his body cold despite the warmth all around us.

My mother wasn't there, and so I had to track down my grandmother. She was always around, but not always present on this plane, and she didn't know what to do either. In the end, a neighbor had to be brought over to explain what had happened and help give my poor grandfather the proper funeral he deserved.

It took another two weeks before my mother came back, leaving me on my own with just the neighbor coming in and checking in on me. We were well supplied in food, but I felt so alone. I was still processing what happened when she showed up, grabbed my hand, and took me away from the only world I had ever known. She didn't warn me and didn't even tell me to bring a bag of clothes. I ended up at the castle gates with only a letter to my father, the clothes on my back, and the pocket watch that my grandfather had given to me the week before he left me forever. I still miss my book collection, with stories from around the world and the memories of hours spent on my grandfather's lap pouring through them.

It took me a few days before I understood fully what happened, and once I did the knowledge crushed me. I still love my mother, but I haven't found a way to forgive her for what she did. I don't know that I ever will. She left me with strangers when I needed her the most and disappeared from my life without telling me why; no information on how to contact her was offered, no ideas on where she was going, no hope that she was ever coming back. It felt as though I had lost all the family I had ever known when my grandfather died, and I was a shadow of the child I used to be.

If I could have ever had one wish be fulfilled, I would probably ask for my grandfather to have been around for a few more years, at least until I turned old enough to fully care for myself. I missed him far more than I missed my mother; she gave me almost a decade of practice living without her before she left me permanently.

During that dark time, Maria was my light. She was the first proper mother I had ever had, and I was addicted to the feeling of her love. I find it ironic that the only one in this cursed place who was willing to love me was the one woman who should be most offended by the fact that I exist.

My biological father wanted nothing to do with me and was more than willing to throw me to the wolves and laugh while they destroyed me. Maria escorted me to the clear path around them, showing me how to survive the court's madness while enjoying being a child for a while longer. She loved me enough to teach me, and I will never be able to repay her for that.

Everything returned to further ruin shortly after I turned twelve when I was deemed ready to start officially training to be a potential heir to the throne. I hated every moment of it.

At first, I gave it my all. I showed up at every lesson I was scheduled for, did all the work assigned to me, and tried my hardest to learn the material presented. Despite this, I failed. My teachers told my stepmother that I was stubborn, unwilling to work, and unlikely to amount to anything. They left one by one, and I was left with the knowledge that I was a failure to the one person I never wanted to disappoint.

No matter what I did, I was a constant disappointment, and the looks she gave me were filled with reprimand and disappointment. Underneath that, I could see her usual love and kindness, and that hurt even worse.

Eventually, it seemed easier for me to just give up trying altogether and turn myself into an antisocial hermit than put forth effort just to fail her and feel her disappointment with me. We eventually just naturally drew apart; even if I could put our relationship back to the way it was, I couldn't imagine where to start.