It's hard to remember yourself amid all of the busy work at college. Getting in, getting into the place I remember far easier than my first days. Before college, before anything, I lived in a manor with a stable full of horses and a hall full of servants. I was waited on hand and foot, taught manners and propriety, and never allowed to play free like a commoner’s daughter.

I was born into a reasonably wealthy family that had started falling on hard times by the time of my tenth birthday. My father died when I was 5, so young that I couldn't have known him well.

My mother didn't fall into deep loneliness after his passing – she laid off all of the servants, sold the estate, and renounced the title. The fall of House Ysmgor was the best thing to ever happen to her. Possibilities unfolded and dreams felt within reach. The sale gave her a comfortable cushion to rely on, safety that only slightly betrayed the roughspun ideals of the life she wanted to lead. Her dream, her impossible dream, was to become a witch.

The manor, I hardly remembered. My clearest recollection of it, one that would come to me often in my fever, was that of its black pointy steeples becoming small and disappearing over the glistening grassy hills. I was 11, and my mother had just sold the last of Lord Ysmgor’s fortune, that folly mansion. She took me along and rode for freedom, a horseback journey to the town of Andior – good ten mile trek from the front lawn of my childhood home.

Our steeds, I came to know well. Regent and Fell, both young and both a mottled white. They were our last reminders of the moneyed life, animals of mediocre breeding whose reins would be given to guests for a round of polo. Under our care they became more than their masters ever expected of them. Companions, friends, steadfast steeds. At some points, minor tests of character: An acquaintance who could tell Regent from Fell cared enough about the witches to learn the animals' quirks.

We rode for a while, both of us inexperienced jockeys. The saddles weren't comfortable, the horses smelled, we smelled, and worst of all we grew thirsty.

For all her thrifty ambitions and witchy goals, Mom was still, at that point, a noble. She hadn't ever taken a trip by horseback of this (admittedly humble) scale, and so she packed too few supplies, and provided only two waterskins between the both of us.

That was my mother, in the early days of our journey. Mom... What to say of my mom? Others called her eccentric or odd. My relatives thought, at first in private and later out loud, that in her grief she had gone mad. I spent the most time with her, and I felt nothing of the sort. She was determined, pragmatic, on a mission to excise all stuffy formality from her life that made miserable her husband’s last years. Most of all, she was determined to give back to the world for all of the fortune it had awarded her.

Beyond even that was her greatest ambition, one she shared with me often. Mom never wanted me to feel confined by my place in the world. She had worked hard for the freedom to reach for the stars, the trees, or whatever else pleased her fancy. She wanted me to have it always, from my childhood well into old age.

And she had feeling. Feeling, empathy for all the people around her. She was no enchanted marble statue, of course she still got angry and sad and all those other things, but her attitude to life was to lead with understanding and kindness. Judgement could come later - and with great fervour! - but seldom needed to.

So when it grew cooler than we had prepared for on that spring afternoon, when we were hungry and thirsty and sore from the poorly-fitted saddles, when our instinct to sneeze from the then-unfamiliar stink of horse grew to an irritation of the mucosa - of course her daughter started complaining.

And of course, Mom didn't put me down. She commiserated! She yelled to the sky about our dry eyes and our sweaty armpits, she cursed the makers of our fine ladies' couture, she tore off the long sleeves of her expensive black dress and playfully tugged at mine. She howled like a wolf, and I, sick of crying and complaining, howled with her.

We were getting to Andior, and we were getting there the easy way, but we screamed and cried and yelled at the world because our upbringing prepared us for none of the realities of easy travel.

And then we got there. Far from the splendour one would expect from an Elvish name, Andior was a hamlet that couldn't have been home to more than a hundred souls.

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We stayed at a hostel. Mom gave the keeper twenty gold pieces and asked him what he'd do with the money over evening drinks - hers, a bergamot tea; his, a seemingly bottomless glass of beer. The man was a gruff giant at first but quickly grew red-faced and friendly as his drink emptied.

His name was Geoff, and he told us about a childhood spent on the streets of Andior, and about Artie, the hostel’s last keeper who ran an informal orphanage out of the attic of the house. Artie was Geoff’s adopted father, and it was his wish that he would inherit his small inn and orphanage. What he’d do with the money? Fix up the house, and make it a nice home for the unfortunate children of Andior.

Geoff’s voice rose to an enthusiastic volume as he had more drink and talked of happy memories, so much so that a boy of perhaps 10 years came down the steps to complain about all of the racket we were making. Geoff made a gentle promise to quiet down and gave him a glass of milk to sleep easier. After he left, Geoff’s tone grew gentler, hushed. He told us about Jory, who called the attic his home and Geoff his father.

He was left behind in the hostel’s cheapest room, the progeny or travelling companion of an old couple. They only stayed a day, and yelled at each other often. He was a year into his ownership then, eager to please all travellers, and so busy people-pleasing even the meanest sojourners that he didn’t even notice the crone and geezer’s infant child.

They stuffed him into a pack strapped to the woman’s shoulders, doing no favours for her spine. When they left, that pack was exactly where he found the boy – in a corner between the bed, underneath a candlestick holder. The room was in ill repair, so those fixtures were scarcely more than a sharpened dowel jutting out of the wall.

The housekeeper, at that time it was usually Geoff as Artie had grown infirm, would light all the candles and trim their wicks. Then, the keeper would impale the candlestick on the dowels one-by-one. They had no money for magelight, and no time to fashion fancier holders. The price of hard wax puddles beneath the lights was one they were comfortable paying.

Geoff found baby Jory crying and wailing. The hot wax dripped onto the pack’s top leather flap, and eventually found its way onto Jory. By luck or fate, it spared his eyes, but left scars and pits on his right cheek and forehead. Geoff wiped his face as best he could, threw out his old and filthy clothes, tucked him into the softest bed they had, and that evening he talked for a while with Artie.

The old man told Geoff that he had to raise the boy. Young Geoff, unmarried, ambitious, hopeful, in turn yelled at his father. He said that he could not raise a child, not alone. And that he wouldn’t sacrifice his life to be a homesteader for life. Artie couldn’t talk him down. His voice was ragged and quiet, his breathing hard and pained. Most of all, he knew a losing battle when he saw one, and did not offer any argument, simply repeating: “You must. The kindness the world has shown you, give it back.”

Geoff walked out into the woods that night, unable to keep talking. A lesser man might have drunk himself into a stupor, or hit his father, or thrown the boy out. Geoff, though, drank only when he was happy, loved his father through thick and thin, and well, wasn’t so heartless as to leave a baby in the care of whoever found him in the village of Andior. He came back after an hour or two, well past midnight. Jory was crying and Artie was cutting an old sheet into strips, singing and humming to the baby, fashioning a diaper.

Geoff took a knife into his hands, found a sufficiently bedraggled sheet, and joined his father in the work. The father and son stayed up late and made only five diapers by the end of their labours, silent but for a lullaby Artie sang, that Geoff eventually picked up. Jory calmed eventually, and they fed him a hastily-cooked potato and carrot stew. Finally, they both sat down by the big hearth and Artie spoke to Geoff.

“Geoffrey. I am Arthur Fredrick Sexton, and you are my son. For fifteen years I raised you, and for six you cared for me. I am old. I will pass onto the next life soon, perhaps in a year, perhaps in five. For as long as I live, I want you to help me care for this boy. If you think that you can raise him no more after I pass, and you want to live your life a childless young man, I understand. Give him to the Charters, or the Mages, to the witch in Coolhowl Forest or to the Lord and Lady up the hill. Take him with you on your journeys and leave him with a caring guardian.

Geoff thought for a while. He stood up from the hearth and took the swaddled, sleeping infant in his arms. He rocked the baby gently, and eventually came to a decision.

He asked his father, “What shall we name him?”

Artie thought, but not for long. He replied, “A witch should name him, when he comes of age. For now, his name’ll be Jory.”

My mother asked whether Geoff had been to a witch’s for Jory yet. He said that he didn’t know how to find the nearby witch of Coolhowl Forest, and that Jory’s thirteenth birthday (celebrated on the day he was found, for they didn’t know his actual birthday) was still a year away. She spoke no more of witches, and when I turned to ask, she gave me a rare and unambiguous steely glance.

We turned in for the night, exhausted and sweaty. I remember well my mother’s words to me that night, repeated often on other occasions:

“Sleep well. There will be harder days ahead.”