Since the days were short, Irene only had a couple of hours of sunlight before she was cast into a world of darkness and felt paranoid at each turn. She remembered exactly the direction she needed to go to get home, but it was still jarring to do it all by herself.
Luckily there weren't any complicated twists and turns and only one bridge to cross before she would find the inn.
For a long time, all Irene heard were hoofbeats and the sound of her breathing as she tried to calm herself down from all she had experienced that day.
Times like that, she wondered if she should have just come clean in the first place about who she was. It was her father's idea to hide herself, but it had complicated things so very much.
