The Cogwheel Hearth: The Brass Tapster

The Hearth sang.

Not the usual low murmur that threaded through the workshop walls, the almost-silent vibration Wren Ashworth had learned to sleep through the way other children slept through rain on slate. This was different. This was loud enough to rattle the copper warming-pans hanging from their pegs above her cot, loud enough to send Cogsby's old maintenance tray sliding off the shelf above the cold-stove with a clatter that would have woken her if the singing itself had not.

Wren sat up, blanket pooling around her waist, and pressed her palm flat against the wall. The brickwork thrummed beneath her fingers like a second heartbeat had been grafted onto the building's chest.

"Cogsby?" she called, her voice rough with sleep. "Is that you?"

No answer. Cogsby did not answer anymore, not the way he had when she was small and he had rattled off inventory counts at her bedside like a bedtime story. The automaton had been fading for years, losing words the way old pipes lose water, his voice-box crackling into static on the long vowels. Ma Peg said it was a mercy when he finally went quiet. Wren had not agreed then and did not agree now.

The singing climbed. A spiral of notes, bright and brassy, rang through the flue that connected the upstairs sleeping loft to the main hearth-stones below. Wren threw off the blanket, shoved her feet into the cold leather boots she kept by the cot, and padded down the narrow stairs in the dark.

The workshop waited in the grey half-light before dawn, all shadow and the faint amber glow that the banked coals never quite surrendered. The cold-stove stood where it always stood against the eastern wall. The tool-board hung where Ma Peg had hung it twenty years ago. The smell of old iron filings and wood-shavings filled the air, familiar enough that Wren's lungs relaxed before her mind did.

But the Hearth was wrong.

The great iron doors of the central fire-chamber gaped open a finger's width, and through that gap poured a light that was not the dull red of banked coal but something cleaner, something that shifted between gold and white as she watched. Wren had grown up staring into the belly of this thing. She knew its moods. She knew its sulks and its slow mornings and the way it sometimes held its heat like a miser holding coins. She had never seen it do this.

She crossed the flagstones in six quick steps and pressed her eye to the gap.

The fire-chamber had grown a second tier.

That was the only way to describe it. Where the night before there had been a single ring of warming-runes set into the fire-bricks, now there were two, the inner ring rising in a stepped spiral that climbed the chamber's back wall like a small staircase made of copper and brass. The new runes pulsed in sequence, each one lighting as the previous dimmed, a wave of soft luminescence traveling the circle over and over.

And standing at the center of the chamber, beside the main grate where the coals slept, was a figure Wren did not recognize at first. Then she did, and her breath caught.

Cogsby.

He had not changed. That was the strange part. His brass plating still bore the dents and scratches of thirty years of workshop service, his left shoulder-hinge still sagged where the pin had worn loose in his grandfather's day, and his face-plate still bore the painted-on eyebrows that had been cheerful once and were now merely eccentric. The same shape. The same tired copper.

But he wore a top hat.

It sat on his dome at a slightly rakish angle, tall and black and glossy, the kind of hat that belonged on a magician or a music-hall performer or a very serious waiter. Beneath his usual arm-bracket he held a small silver tray. Upon the tray sat a single brass cup, polished to a mirror shine.

Wren pushed the iron doors open and stepped into the fire-chamber.

"Cogsby?"

The automaton turned his head with the slow precision that Wren knew so well, the tiny clockwork click of his neck-gear audible even over the Hearth's singing. His eye-lenses refocused with a soft whirr.

"Ah," he said.

His voice was wrong. His voice was right. Both things at once. The static had cleared, the broken consonants had smoothed themselves into shape, and what emerged was the rolling, careful diction of an automaton who had been built for hospitality rather than workshop service. He spoke the way a wine-cellar keeper might speak. He spoke the way a man who had spent decades remembering how to be polite might speak.

"Ah," he said again, more certain now. "The young mistress. You are awake."

"I am," Wren said. "Cogsby, what happened to you?"

"To me, young mistress?" He looked down at himself with a kind of theatrical puzzlement, as though noticing for the first time that he had a torso. "I have been... installed. Yes. That is the correct word, I think. The Hearth has installed me."

"Installed you where?"

"In my station." He gestured with the silver tray. The motion was elegant in a way Cogsby had never managed before. "I am to be the Tapster of the Hearth."

"The what?"

"The Tapster." He said the word with great care, as though tasting it. "The one who serves. The one who knows what each guest prefers, and who sees that they receive it." A pause, and his eye-lenses dimmed briefly. "The Hearth has informed me that I am, at present, the only function it has been able to manifest at this tier. I am to be its public face. Its hospitality. I am, in a sense, its... apology."

"For what?"

"For the cold," Cogsby said simply. "The Hearth wishes me to convey its regret that the second tier is not yet warm. It is, regrettably, decorative only at present. But it hopes that the offering of refreshment will, in some small measure, compensate."

Wren stared at him. The Hearth's singing had softened now, settling into a low background hum that made the fire-bricks vibrate gently against her boot soles. Cogsby stood in his top hat, with his silver tray, and waited with the patient poise of a butler who had nowhere else to be.

"Cogsby," Wren said carefully, "have you been drinking?"

"I do not drink, young mistress. I am an automaton. Although," he added, and his voice-box produced a sound that might have been a chuckle in another model, "I have on occasion been poured out. There is a difference."

"That wasn't funny."

"It was not intended to be. I was attempting a light jest. The Hearth has informed me that I am to be charming. I am trying to find the appropriate register."

Wren reached out and touched the brim of his top hat. The fabric was real, impossibly real, a soft felt that yielded beneath her fingertip. She tugged it off his dome and turned it in her hands.

"Where did this come from?"

"I do not know, young mistress. It was here when I came back to myself. Along with the tray. Along with the cup." He paused. "Along with the very strong sense that I should know what every visitor to this establishment prefers to drink, and that I should not rest until I had ascertained it."

"Ma Peg only drinks tea."

"Indeed. Strong, with too much honey, and a sliver of lemon when the cold weather comes." He said it without hesitation, his voice carrying the quiet certainty of a man reciting gospel. "I have known this for thirty-one years. I had forgotten that I knew it. The Hearth has reminded me."

Wren set the hat back on his dome at the angle it had been. Cogsby tilted his head, considering her, and the clockwork in his jaw produced three small clicks before he spoke again.

"There will be others," he said. "Other guests. The Hearth is opening. You can feel it, young mistress. I can feel it too. It is like..." Another pause, longer this time, his eye-lenses flickering through several shades of amber as he searched for the word. "It is like being wound again, after a long time of running down."

His voice caught on the last syllable, a crackle of static rushing through the polished vowels, and Wren saw his right hand tremble once before steadying.

"Careful," she said softly. "Don't strain the voice-box."

"The voice-box is not strained, young mistress. It is simply..." He considered. "It is simply surprised to be used."

plaque above the bar slid open with a sound like a slow exhalation, and a second key descended into Wren's waiting palm. This one was heavier than the first, its shank etched with looping script she could not yet read. The brass caught the lamplight and threw a warm coin of reflection onto the ceiling.

"Two keys," she said. "Ma Peg is one. Who is the other?"

Cogsby clicked twice, softly, the way a clock might clear its throat. "The Hearth knows its guests, young mistress. It has always known them. The question is whether we are permitted to know what the Hearth knows."

The second key was cold where the first had been warm, and when Wren turned it over, she saw a line of text running along its belly, fine as a spider's thread. She had to squint, but the words resolved slowly, each one appearing in sequence as if a tiny hand were writing them from within the metal.

SIR PERCIVAL ASHFORD. WARDEN, OUTER CHAMBERS.

"Cogsby."

"Yes, young mistress."

"Sir Percival. Does he drink anything?"

A long pause. Three slow clicks, then four faster ones. "If I may be permitted to remember..." Cogsby's eye-lenses dimmed to a sullen amber, and she could hear the faint grind of something deep in his chest being consulted, a drawer pulled open in a forgotten office. "Brandy. He drinks brandy. The kind that comes in a round bottle with a black seal, and he prefers it after six in the evening, when he believes no one is watching him drink it." Another pause, longer, the clockwork in his jaw working hard. "He likes one cube of sugar. Not two. Two is ostentatious. One is a gentleman."

Wren set Sir Percival's key beside Ma Peg's on the bar and looked at them both. Two small brass shapes, catching the light, holding names. She turned to the service hatch behind the bar, where the bell had risen. Beneath a hinged panel sat a row of levers, each one no longer than her thumb, and beside each lever a tiny dial marked with symbols she had never seen in any hearthwright manual.

"Cogsby, what are these?"

"The comfort protocols, young mistress. Or the preference calibrations. Or the..." He struggled. "Ma Peg had a word. I am sorry. It has gone from me."

"Try."

"Hospitality. That was the word. Hospitality."

The word settled into the room the way a good fire settles into a hearth, quietly, taking up residence. Wren laid her finger against the nearest lever. It yielded a fraction, and a small click sounded somewhere behind the wall. The panel above the bar, where the bell had risen, slid upward another inch. Behind it was a shallow alcove lined with velvet, and inside the alcove sat a single glass, faceted, already beaded with a thin mist of cold.

"The Hearth anticipates," Cogsby said. "It has prepared the drink. We need only tell it how the guest prefers to be received."

Wren's hand hovered over the dial. The symbols swam in the lamplight, and she realized, with a small thrill of recognition, that they were not symbols at all. They were tiny stamped letters, pressed so fine into the brass that they looked like marks left by a careful insect.

Soft. Sweet. Strong. Bitter. Still. Bright.

"Cogsby. If I turn this to Soft, what does the Hearth do?"

"I do not know the mechanism, young mistress. I know only what I have observed." He tilted his head, considering. "When Ma Peg was tired, after long days at the workshop, she would set the lever before I poured. The fire in the grate would ease. The room would cool by one degree. The cup in her hand would warm by one degree. And she would, before the first sip, close her eyes for the length of one breath."

He paused, and his eye-lenses brightened.

"I had not remembered that. I had not remembered any of it."

Wren turned the dial one notch, from the unmarked center toward Soft. Somewhere in the wall, something sighed. The mist on the glass thinned. The air around the bar lost a fraction of its edge, the way a held breath loses its tension when finally released. She could smell, suddenly, a thread of honey, though no honey was anywhere in the room.

"Set the lever back, young mistress. The dial must return to center before the guest arrives, or the comfort will overshoot, and Sir Percival will be irritated by a room that presumes too much."

She set it back. The thread of honey faded, but slowly, as if reluctant to leave.

"This is what the Hat is for," she said. "Isn't it. The Hat. You wear it, and the Hearth tells you what each person wants."

"The Hat is the receiver, young mistress. The Hat listens to the Hearth. The dials are the reply."

Emberjack's voice came then, warm and faint, from somewhere near the coals in the grate.

"Wren. The small one with the long ears. The tall one with the silver buckles. The one whose boots are too loud. They are all already written into the Hearth, every one. You only have to find the right key."

She turned, but there was nothing in the grate she could see, only a low pulse of orange between the iron dogs. She spoke to the coals anyway, because she had learned, over the years, that speaking to the coals was often the only way to be heard.

"How do I find the right key, Jack?"

"You read the names, silly. The names are the first part. The numbers are the second part. And the third part is the part you do for them yourself, the part where you choose what they need before they know they need it."

"There are numbers?"

"There are always numbers. Every Hearth has numbers. The numbers are the Hearth's memory of who has come and gone. Ma Peg was the third guest on the night your father brought you in. Did she ever tell you that?"

Wren's hand stopped on the dial. She had not known that. She had been four years old, and the only story she remembered was the one Cogsby had told her at seven, the one about a small girl who had fallen asleep by a furnace and woken up a hearthwright's apprentice.

"Ma Peg said I was delivered by the wind."

"The wind had help," Emberjack said, and the coals settled lower, and the small voice faded to a sound like a kettle that has just begun to think about boiling.

She turned back to the alcove. Sir Percival's glass sat in its velvet nest, waiting. Beside the alcove was a smaller plate, and on the plate was a folded card, cream-colored, edged in a thin gilt line. She lifted it carefully. The card was printed in a small, precise script, the kind of script that comes from a hand that has never been hurried.

GUEST PROFILE: SIR PERCIVAL ASHFORD PROTOCOL: BRANDY, ONE CUBE, AFTER SIX. TEMPERATURE: WARM, NOT HOT. MUSIC: NONE. LIGHT: WARM, LOW. PARTICULARITIES: REQUIRES CONFIRMATION OF IMPORTANCE BEFORE PROCEEDING. ADDRESS AS SIR. NEVER ASK AFTER HIS HEALTH WITHOUT FIRST COMMENTING ON THE WEATHER. NEVER SIT BEFORE HE DOES. NEVER LEAVE THE ROOM BEFORE HE DOES.

Wren read the card twice. Then she laughed, a short, startled sound that bounced off the brass and made Cogsby click in surprise.

"He has particularities."

"All guests have particularities, young mistress. That is the whole purpose of the protocols. A Hearth without particularities is a barn with a fire in it. The Hearth remembers what each soul wishes to forget about itself."

She laid the card on the bar and reached for Ma Peg's key. The brass was warm in her palm, as it had been before, and the script along its belly had not changed. She set it against the panel that bore her mentor's name, and a third alcove opened, smaller than Sir Percival's, holding a clay cup already darkened by years of use.

GUEST PROFILE: MARGARET PEG PROTOCOL: TEA, STRONG, HONEY, LEMON IN COLD WEATHER. TEMPERATURE: VERY HOT. MUSIC: LOW. LIGHT: WARM, MEDIUM. PARTICULARITIES: WILL REFUSE ASSISTANCE THREE TIMES BEFORE ACCEPTING IT. WILL COMPLAIN ABOUT HER KNEES BEFORE ACCEPTING ANYTHING ELSE. WILL TURN THE CUP HANDLE TO THE LEFT BEFORE SHE DRINKS.

"Cogsby."

"Yes, young mistress."

"Did you know about this? About the handle to the left?"

"I... did. I do." His voice slowed, each word arriving with the careful weight of a coin placed on a counter. "I had not thought of it for many years. She taught me, when I was still new. She said a cup should always be turned so the seam faces away from the thumb, and the handle to the left, because she was left-handed, and the seam cut her when it caught the skin between the fingers."

The clockwork in his jaw caught once, hard, a sound like a small bone breaking inside his chest. Wren looked at him, and saw that his eye-lenses had gone dim again, the amber turned almost to rust.

"Cogsby."

"Forgive me, young mistress. I am attending. I am attending as well as I can."

"You are attending better than you know." She reached across the bar and laid her hand, briefly, on the back of his brass wrist. The metal was cool, faintly humming with whatever small current still moved through him. "We have work to do. The Hearth is opening. We must be ready."

"Ready, young mistress."

"There are other keys. Other guests will come."

"There will be other guests. The Hearth has remembered them. It has been remembering them all the long time I was forgetting."

She looked down at the two keys, Ma Peg's and Sir Percival's, and saw now that the alcove behind the bar held room for more. Six niches, velvet-lined, six places where a drink could wait, and behind each niche a card she had not yet turned over. Six guests, then. At least six.

"Jack," she said, to the grate. "How many names are written into the Hearth?"

A long pause. The coals shifted. Then the small voice, almost too faint to catch.

"Six who are expected tonight, and three who are expected before the snow, and one who is expected never, and one who has not yet been born."

"Never?"

"The Hearth remembers some who will not come. It keeps their profiles anyway. It cannot help itself."

Wren laid her hand on the bar. The wood was warm under her palm, warmer than the air could account for, and she felt, just for a moment, the small steady pulse of something vast and patient, breathing beneath the floor of the old tavern, beneath the foundations, beneath the city itself.

Six tonight. Three more before the snow.

She pulled the card for the third niche and began to read.

The clock in the kitchen struck two with a sound like a small brass hammer on the lip of a copper bowl, and the Hearth's glow, which had held steady all evening through smoke and scandal and the arrival of a Warden, dimmed itself to a slow, sleeping amber. Wren sat at the scarred pine table with her hands flat on either side of a mug of tea gone cold three hours ago. Before her lay three cards face-down, and in her apron pocket three more pressed their corners into her hip like patient teeth.

The smell came first.

Thyme. Onion slow-cooked until it had lost its sharpness and become sweet. The faint mineral warmth of bone broth that had been left to simmer until the marrow itself had softened. She lifted her head before she understood why, and there on the table, set down soundlessly, sat a bowl of stew.

Emberjack crouched at the far edge of the pine, his small bare feet tucked beneath him, his palms flat on the wood. He was watching her with the solemn concentration of a child who has set a long-considered gift before someone and is waiting, breath held, to see if the gift will be understood. The faint orange shimmer that haloed him at all hours was dimmer now, banked like coals at the close of a long day, and in it the kitchen shadows seemed to lean toward him rather than away.

He did not speak.

Wren looked down at the bowl. It was the blue-and-white one with the chipped rim, the one Ma Peg had always reserved for guests who needed warming more than feeding. The broth was the deep rust-brown of river water after autumn rain, and in it floated cubes of carrot and pale parsnip and a single bay leaf turning slowly on the surface like a small green boat in a slow harbor. A curl of steam rose from the center, and at its heart the heat pulsed, almost visibly, in time with the Hearth's breathing below them.

She was suddenly, sharply hungry.

"You didn't have to," she said. Her voice came out rougher than she meant, the words catching at the edges.

Emberjack tilted his head the way a small bird considers a question too large for it.

"You came back," he said, as if this settled the matter.

Wren picked up the spoon that lay beside the bowl. It was tarnished silver, with a handle worn smooth by decades of hands she had never known. She scooped, and the broth ran from the lip of the spoon in a thin, fragrant line, and she tasted salt and thyme and something beneath both that she could not name, something that tasted the way the inside of the workshop had always smelled to her on winter mornings, like the memory of a fire someone had thought to tend before she woke.

She ate in silence for a moment. Emberjack did not move. He watched her eat the way he watched the coals, with a patience that was not quite patience, more a kind of attentive stillness that had its own quiet appetite.

"It's good," she said at last.

"It's what the Hearth wanted to give you."

"The Hearth cooks now?"

"The Hearth has always cooked. You have only just begun to notice."

She almost smiled. Almost. The spoon paused halfway to her mouth, and she looked past him, to the kitchen doorway, where the lamp hung on its hook and threw a long, low circle of yellow onto the flagged floor. Beyond the doorway, the workshop was quiet. Cogsby had clicked off his running commentary an hour ago when Wren had asked him to, and he had retired, she hoped, to his alcove beside the great boiler, though with Cogsby one could never be certain. He might be counting rivets in the rafters, or humming to the smaller servitors, or simply standing very still in the dark, conserving the small current that still moved through him like a second, mechanical kind of breath.

From somewhere far below, the Hearth made its long, slow sound. Not a roar. A settling. The sound a great beast makes when it at last allows itself to sleep.

"You should sleep too," Emberjack said, softer now.

"In a bit."

"The cards will wait."

"I know."

"You have read three of six. The others will be there in the morning. They have been there for years. They are patient."

Wren set the spoon down. She laid her hand flat on the table, palm down, beside the bowl, and felt the faint pulse of warmth that lived in the old wood. She had eaten at this table

The warmth of the soup settled into her chest, and Wren found her eyes growing heavy. The cards lay in their neat stack at the far end of the table, three face-down beside the three she had already read. Emberjack sat cross-legged on the opposite bench, his ember-orange eyes dimmer now, the light in him banking down like coals at the end of a long burn.

"I didn't know," she said quietly, "that the Hearth could choose what to cook."

"It doesn't choose. It responds."

"That's the same thing."

"It is not."

She let that pass. There would be time in the morning to argue the difference. For now, the kitchen held them in its long, lamp-lit quiet, and the smell of the broth still hung in the air, and somewhere beneath the floorboards the Hearth breathed its slow, settling breath.

She thought of the third card. She had laid it out an hour ago, after Emberjack had coaxed her back inside with a whispered promise that the soup would taste of what she needed. The card had shown a doorway drawn in red ink, half-open, with something small and dark waiting on the threshold. Ma Peg's handwriting beneath it, small and cramped: When the door opens, do not look at what stands in it. Look at what stands behind you.

She hadn't understood it then. She understood it less now, with the warmth of the broth in her belly and the long day behind her.

"Emberjack."

"Yes."

"The door in the card. What stands behind me?"

He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was smaller than usual, the crackle in it banked low.

"I don't know. The cards don't tell me. They tell you."

"They're Ma Peg's."

"They were. Now they are yours."

She looked at him then, really looked, and saw how tired he was. The light in his eyes flickered like a candle near the end of its wick. He had spent the day burning bright for her, holding the connection between her and the Hearth steady while she read, while she listened, while she tried to make sense of what Ma Peg had left behind in those six small rectangles of painted card. He was a child, in his way, and children burned out faster than older flames.

"Go back," she said. "Down to the Hearth. Be still if you can."

He considered this. "I can do that."

He unfolded himself from the bench, his small bare feet making no sound on the flagged floor. He paused beside her chair and laid one warm hand on her shoulder, a touch like a held coal, brief and deliberate.

"The fourth card," he said, "is the one you will need tomorrow."

"I know."

"No. You don't. But you will."

He was gone between one blink and the next, the way he always was, slipping back into the warm dark that ran beneath the city like a second river of heat and memory. The air where he had stood held the faint smell of woodsmoke and wood-ash for a moment, and then that too faded.

Wren sat alone in the kitchen.

She did not move for a long time. The lamp guttered once, twice, then steadied. The soup cooled in its bowl. Outside, somewhere far above, the wind turned against the city, and the great weather-vane on the Guild's tower began to groan on its rusted pin. She heard it distantly, the way one hears the sea from a hilltop, more a presence than a sound.

Then she reached across the table and drew the stack of unread cards toward her. Three of them. She did not turn them over. She only laid her hand flat on the top card, palm down, and felt, very faintly, the pulse of something in the painted paper. Not warmth. Not quite. Something more like attention. The feeling of being watched by something older than watching, something that had been waiting in these cards for years, patient as peat, patient as the slow settling of a great fire.

Ma Peg had known. Ma Peg had always known. And she had left the cards for Wren, and the cards had waited, and now at last Wren had come to them.

"Tomorrow," she said aloud, to the kitchen, to the lamp, to the slow breathing of the Hearth below. "Tomorrow I'll read the fourth."

She gathered the cards carefully, squared the edges, slid them back into the pocket of her apron where they rode against her hip with the comfortable weight of an old tool. She stood. She carried the bowl to the basin and set it in the cold water there, and she wiped her hands on the cloth that hung from its hook, and she turned out the lamp.

The dark that came was not complete. From beneath the kitchen door, from the cracks around the workshop's old frames, from the seams in the floorboards themselves, there rose a faint orange glow, the color of banked coals, the color of a fire that means to last the night. The Hearth was still awake, in its slow way. The Hearth was keeping watch.

Wren crossed the dark kitchen. She felt her way along the wall to the narrow stair that led up to her loft above the workshop. The stair creaked under her boots in the familiar places, the third step and the seventh, and she climbed with one hand on the rail and the other pressed flat against the cards in her pocket, feeling the pulse of them against her palm.

Her loft was small and cold and smelled of lamp oil and old wool. She did not light the lamp. She did not need to. She undressed in the dark and pulled on the long flannel nightshift that hung from a peg behind the door, and she climbed into the narrow bed, and she pulled the wool blankets up to her chin, and she lay on her back with her eyes open, watching the faint orange glow that came up through the floorboards and made a slow, shifting pattern on the low beams of the ceiling.

Somewhere far below, the Hearth settled again. The long sound rose through stone and timber and plaster and reached her at last as a vibration more felt than heard, a kind of purr, a kind of promise.

She thought of the door in the third card. Half-open. Something small and dark on the threshold. And Ma Peg's cramped handwriting: When the door opens, do not look at what stands in it. Look at what stands behind you.

Behind her, in the workshop, Cogsby clicked softly to himself in his alcove. Counting. Humming. Keeping his small mechanical vigil through the long cold hours. She had told him once, years ago, that he did not have to watch over her while she slept. He had considered this for a long moment, his optical plates whirring down and up, and had said, in his careful, accented way: But then who will count the rivets, Miss Wren?

She had not had an answer then. She did not have one now.

She closed her eyes. The cards pulsed once against her hip, a single throb of attention, and then went still.

Tomorrow there would be work to do. There would be the fourth card to read, and the question it would ask, and the answer she would have to find somewhere in the failing cogs and the old blueprints and the slow, settling breath of the Hearth itself. There would be Cogsby to coax through his morning diagnostics, and Nix to meet at the agreed corner with whatever new piece of cipher she had pried loose from her father's stolen ledger, and Bramble to argue with about the peat-fires and the western wards and the long, slow dying of the moss.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight there was only the loft, and the blankets, and the faint orange glow on the ceiling beams, and the slow sound of the Hearth below, and the cards against her hip, patient as embers, waiting for the morning.

She slept.