When Cassandra awoke, she did not know where she was.
She lay perfectly still for several seconds, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling above her before scanning the rest of her surroundings.
The room was small and plainly furnished. A narrow window allowed sunlight inside. The blanket covering her was coarse against her skin, and beneath her, the mattress was thin and uneven, nothing like the soft bed in her chamber at the palace.
She frowned.
Then her memory returned, and the face of the young woman who had helped her flashed through her mind.
Cassandra slowly pushed herself upright.
Her body still felt weak, but the terrible fatigue that had plagued her since the carriage journey had lessened considerably. She was more or less back to her old self.
She looked toward the door.
No one had come to check on her since she woke and she had no idea how long she had been lying there.
For a moment, she considered calling for someone, but the thought immediately made her uneasy. She did not know this house. She did not know who else lived here, or whether the men who had pursued her had somehow discovered where she was.
She needed to know where exactly she was.
Cassandra swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood without issue. Quietly, she crept across the small room and opened the door as carefully as she could.
Muted voices drifted toward her. They were coming from somewhere nearby.
Cassandra stepped out of the bedroom fully and had barely walked more than a handful of steps before she stopped.
The feminine voices were subdued, as though the speakers were deliberately trying not to wake someone. The someone being her. They were most likely also trying not to be too loud so she wouldn’t overhear.
Her feet moved before she registered the action, taking her closer to the source of sounds until she could make out what they were saying.
Then she heard a voice she vaguely recognized. It belonged to the woman that found her when she was hiding.
"I am telling you, Mama, they were chasing her."
Cassandra froze.
She edged toward the corner of the doorway and peered around it.
The young woman stood beside the small table, speaking anxiously to an older woman. The resemblance between them was unmistakable.
Her mother.
Miriam’s hands were clasped tightly before her, and there was something almost frantic in her expression.
"I saw them myself. There were men following her through the village. She was terrified, Mama. She could barely walk straight."
Cassandra watched the older woman closely, waiting to hear her response.
The woman looked tired. Not merely physically tired, but worn down in a way that suggested years of hardship had settled deep into her bones.
"That does not tell us why they were following her, or anything else noteworthy for that matter." the older woman finally said.
"It tells us enough."
"No, Miriam. It tells us that a frightened young woman was running for her life from several men. Nothing more."
Miriam shook her head, her gaze insistent.
"What if it was the same thing that happened to Jamie?" The older woman’s expression tightened, body stiffening.
Cassandra’s attention was piqued.
"It’s very probable if you just think about it." Miriam continued. "What if strange men came for him too? What if he never left at all?"
The older woman lowered her eyes as she heaved a tired sigh. For a moment, she said nothing.
"Miriam," the woman said at last, gently rather than harshly, "you cannot know that."
"But I know Jamie."
"So do I."
"He would not simply disappear," Miriam insisted, trying to force her mother to see reason, begging her with her eyes not to give up on her brother and growing more frustrated with every second her mother resisted.
The older woman looked at her daughter then, and Cassandra saw the pain in her eyes. It was the look of a person who had lost every shred of hope, a mother who had grieved a terrible loss until she could grieve no more. It was the look of someone who had already made peace with her situation, no longer possessing the strength to fight it any longer.
It was not the look of a mother who had stopped caring.
People disappeared from villages like this, and rarely nothing was ever done about it.
It was not necessarily because the Crown did not care about its people. There were hundreds of such places scattered far from the great cities and the circles of power. This village was little more than a dot on the map, unimpressive to look at and isolated from most of the kingdom.
There was a local magistrate and constable responsible for keeping order in the surrounding area, but their attention was divided among several settlements, and a poor village like this rarely commanded much of it.
A missing boy might be searched for a few days before the matter quietly faded into the background, eventually becoming little more than another unresolved case among many.
And boys did tend to leave on their own as well.
When they reached their early teens, many discovered that there was little future waiting for them in the village where they were born. There were few opportunities for work, little money to be made, and almost nothing in the monotony to distinguish one year from the next.
Some informed their family before they left to seek employment elsewhere. Others slipped away without telling anyone where they were going, convinced that whatever waited beyond the village had to be better than what they had known there.
That was what made disappearances so difficult to understand.
A boy who had been taken against his will could be mistaken for a boy who had simply chosen to leave.
And a family could spend years wondering which had happened to their child.
Martha had no proof that Jamie had been taken. But neither did she have proof that he had left.
That uncertainty had become its own kind of torment.