She still dreamt of them. The great god of the spinning orb beneath her boots had passed around its lover in the sky more times after her ill-fated marriage than it had before. Sometimes, while lost in thought as the brisk wind blew her hair back out of her face and she dug her thighs in to not lose her grip on Maeve's bridle, this notion gave her pause. The first fifteen years of her life had passed slowly, bloated with new experiences, with the passions of youth and the musings of her heart filling every possible moment. There was pleasure, and pain, but every ounce of it was excitement with just the ridiculousness of simply being alive. She lived those fifteen years spoiled in the joy of the innocent. Then there was the year in between. That was what she thought of it as, when she was just passing the thought through her mind like any other piece of information. There existed the years of innocence, and then there were the years of recovery. The years after had sped along at a clip like the fastest <ship>. It had been sixteen years, although it felt more like five. But the year in between was an entire lifetime. The year in between. If she focused too much on it she felt as if she were looking too closely at an oil painting: from a proper distance it made sense, there was a background and characters and a theme and color scheme. But up close it was all swirls of colors and pinpricks of intensity and nothing made any sense but the raw gaping wound of emotions. But those girls: those girls she could still picture. Mabel, who was her first maid. She was a year younger than her and she had been struck at first with how similar they were. Same thick hair dark like a raven's underfeathers, same stubborn streak, same height. Mabel was her respite during the learning stages of her new home and role, but slowly she began to fade in and out with the other servant girls until she only saw her briefly. It was only in hindsight did she realize how the other girl had changed before she disappeared completely. She did notice, at least somewhat, before Mabel was lost to her. She had come in and changed out the bathing water and gathered the dirty laundry in too-thin arms and made to skitter out again like a frightened rabbit. the short stool had been left too close to the door though, and she tripped over it and dropped all the clothes. Sighrid had woken groggily to her collecting the clothes and although the world was hazy (the world was always hazy, there at the end) she slid out of bed to give the younger girl a hand. Mabel had jumped at the sight of her, and Sighrid had barely caught a glimpse of her red rimmed eyes sunk deep into her face before she had run out of the room faster than she looked capable of. She stared after her, wondering when Mabel had started to look so sickly, when the room swayed beneath her feet and she took herself back to bed. Sighrid knew, somewhere deep under her self-loathing, that her youth was to blame for her not noticing how the others in the moorland estate were falling apart. She was fifteen, barely more than a child herself, and also somewhat coddled for her father's status. She knew only smidges about life outside of her own Hold and the neighboring ones, and even just living in a different place was so all encompassing that she spent all her spare time just trying to figure out her place. And all the rest of the time, she spent attempting to unravel the stranger dressed in her best friend's clothes that she was now married to. There was barely time to heal from her own wounds, let alone see the wounds of others. But she did remember their faces, in the darkest parts of slumber that haunted her. Seline, pale and thin with freckles and mousy hair. Brigitte, the sturdier country girl who worked in the kitchen. Saar, who had eyes like the stormiest sei. Marate. Plum. Lillien. Isa. Several others that had no name but the same dead, scared glint to their eyes. These were the girls that didn't get out. She used to wake violently into a scream and mental alacrity. He had hurt those girls. He had them first, concurrently, after he was done with her. All of them were tortured. But she was too blind to see, too innocent to realize the harm going on under her nose, too completely sure that her love was enough to keep evil at bay. That would be the point that she would break down completely, and sob mindlessly into her pillow, praying that no one else would hear. Slowly the tears dried up, and the feelings dulled. And eventually, although it still hurt, it turned so fast to being numb that she barely reacted. But their faces she never forgot. Sometimes she thought of them as she plunged headlong into a skirmish, her blade deadly and her eyes fierce. She took on her foes as if she were avenging those girls: as if she could somehow bring justice to the inanity of it all. But in the end, as she wiped the blood from her sword and the sweat from her face, they were still dead, she was still broken, and justice was nothing but a word written in swirling letters on a crumbling parchment at her feet. The idea of justice in such atrocities was as laughable as the idea that she could turn a demon into anything but, with only her love. And she already knew that to be a doomed endeavor. She still dreamt of those girls, but when she woke she choked on her own bitterness until they faded into the numbness of her heart.
