I opened the castle door and rushed ahead of my mother as we came back from our summer home in the mountains, if I got to my rooms and changed out of my riding clothes and threw on some of the common clothes I kept at the bottom of my clothes chest, I could make it into the forest without my Stepmother wanting to know where I was going. I had been going into the forest at the back of castle lands for most of my life. It had been mine and my mother’s hide out, but ever since she had died and my father remarried I had been forbidden to go near it. I went any ways. I got to the stairs out of the back of the castle just as my stepmother yells my name. But it’s too late; I’m out of the door and down the stairs and over the scraggly meadow to the thick pine forest with a soft brown and mottled green carpet of needles.