The Ember and the Oath: March to The Black Bridge

Mud sucked at the boots of the column as they filed out of Hollowfen's eastern gate. Pale morning mist clung to the hedgerows, reluctant to lift, and the air held the wet iron tang of last night's fires still smoldering in the thatch. Reyna Vask walked two paces ahead of her mixed force, the captured map oiled and creased in her left hand, its corner pressed against her thumb to keep it flat in the wind. Behind her, the regular crunch of Velmaran boots kept time with the softer footfalls of Thornveil irregulars, men and women who had learned to move through brush without breaking a twig.

She did not look back. Looking back was a habit she had trained out of herself on longer marches than this one, back when she had commanded more soldiers than she now cared to count. The column had formed up at first light under Captain Drey's watchful eye, the Velmarans in their slate-blue cloaks, the Thornveilers in patched leather and russet wool, and Reyna had walked the length of the line without speaking. There was nothing to say. They knew the road as far as the ridgeline. Beyond it, the country changed, and the map took over.

"Sable Korth with the rear guard," she called over her shoulder, her voice roughened by cold air. "Stay within sight of Lieutenant Dell's file."

From somewhere behind the irregulars, a young voice answered, "Aye, Captain." The title still came too easily to the girl's mouth, a habit Reyna had not yet corrected. Sable walked where Reyna pointed, and asked her questions in a low, intent tone when the camp was quiet. So far, that had been enough.

The road climbed. Old oaks leaned over it, their branches still bare, and the ruts from winter carts had hardened into ridges that caught the tread of every boot. A crow lifted from a high limb and flapped away inland, its silhouette black against the pewter sky. Corporal Mennick, trailing the second squad of Velmarans, muttered something about birds and omens, and the soldier beside him snorted and told him to shut his mouth and watch his footing.

Half an hour from Hollowfen, the column crested a low rise and the country opened before them. The valley floor below was a patchwork of brown fields stitched with stone walls, and at its far end a river ran silver and slow. Beyond the river, the ground rose again into dark, undulating forest, and somewhere in that forest, the map said, the Black Bridge waited.

Reyna folded the map into her belt pouch and slowed until Lieutenant Yara Dell came level with her. The young officer marched with her chin tucked and her eyes fixed forward, hands resting easy on the saber at her hip. She had drawn the short assignment of guiding the Thornveilers, and she wore the duty like a coat she had not yet broken in.

"You've ridden this stretch," Reyna said.

"Twice." Dell's answer came clipped and precise. "Once in autumn, once in winter. The river fords at Mill Hask are passable if the rains have held off. Beyond that, the forest track is sound as far as the bridge approach."

"Approach?"

"The last quarter mile." Dell glanced sideways at her, measuring. "It's a killing ground, if anyone cared to defend it."

Reyna grunted. "Anyone does care. That's why we're not using the ford."

The column swung left off the road onto a sheep path that ran along the ridge. The mud here was thinner, threaded with bleached grass and the droppings of winter cattle. Scout Falle, who had been ranging ahead since they left Hollowfen, appeared at the edge of a thicket and fell in beside Reyna with the loose-limbed ease of a girl raised among shepherds.

"Crows ahead," Falle said, her voice bright and clear under its soft lilting turn. "Six of them, feeding on something in the gully. Nothing else moving. No smoke from the treeline."

"Good." Reyna watched her for a moment, then said, "Stay ahead. I want your eyes on that bridge approach before midday."

Falle nodded and slipped away through the bracken without a sound, her russet cloak swallowed by the undergrowth before she had taken ten paces.

Behind them, the column stretched out along the ridge like a dark seam against the brown grass. Sable Korth walked at the rear with the patience of someone who had learned to wait. The child Lenne stayed close to her side, hood drawn up against the wind, one small hand tucked into the crook of Sable's arm. Vashta Korth marched in the center of the Thornveil file, her back straight, her lips moving in some private litany, and Quartermaster Olthran flanked her with a quartermaster's caution, his eyes on every irregular who passed.

Reyna saw all of it and let none of it slow her.

The sun broke through the mist an hour later, pale and watery, and the column dropped off the ridge onto a track that wound between two hills. Here the wind died, and the air grew colder, carrying the damp green smell of moss and the faint sweetness of rotting wood. The track dipped toward a stream, and the soldiers spread out to find their footing on the slick stones of the ford.

"Hold the line," Dell called from her position, her voice carrying clean and cool across the water. "Keep your spacing. Don't bunch at the far bank."

The Velmarans crossed in good order, three abreast, their cloaks hiked to the knee. The Thornveilers came after, lighter on their feet, some of them shedding boots to wade barefoot through the shallows. Lenne balked at the water's edge, and Sable bent and lifted her without ceremony, carrying her across on her hip as if she had done it a thousand times before.

Reyna crossed last, the water numbing her boots, and stood on the far bank watching the column reassemble. The forest waited ahead, the trees standing close together in dark ranks, their trunks gray and wet. Between them, the track vanished into green-brown shadow.

Mennick appeared at her elbow, his face ruddy above his slate cloak, his breath steaming.

"Captain."

"Corporal."

"Thought you should know." He jerked his chin toward Vashta Korth, who had halted at the edge of the trees and was staring into the gloom with an expression Reyna could not read. "The priestess has been praying since Hollowfen. Hasn't stopped, far as I can tell. The men are noticing."

"Let them notice."

"That's not what I mean." Mennick lowered his voice, though there was no one close enough to overhear. "Means she's expecting something. Praying like that, she knows what's ahead better than your map does."

Reyna looked at the old corporal, at his weathered face and his honest, suspicious eyes. He had served Drey for years, and he had the veteran's gift for seeing what officers preferred to ignore.

"Then she can share it with me," Reyna said, "when she's ready to speak it aloud."

She moved forward to where Vashta Korth stood at the treeline. The priestess turned at her approach, and the cold fire in her eyes briefly met Reyna's gaze. The moment passed, and Vashta inclined her head, a gesture so slight it could have been mistaken for the wind stirring her dark hair.

"The wood remembers us," Vashta said, her deep contralto carrying through the cold air like a struck bell. "It will remember what we bring into it."

"I bring soldiers," Reyna said. "Whatever the wood remembers, it remembers them last."

Vashta's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "We shall see."

She turned and walked into the trees without waiting for the column to close up, her robes whispering against the undergrowth. Olthran hurried after her, his hand resting on the hilt of his short sword, his eyes darting into the shadows on either side.

Reyna watched her go, then raised her hand and signaled the column forward. The Velmarans moved into the forest in files of two, their boots finding the narrow track with the caution of men entering hostile ground. The Thornveilers followed, quieter, slipping between the trunks like animals returning to their own territory.

The trees closed over them. The sky shrank to a pale ribbon far above, and the wind fell away entirely, leaving the air heavy and still. Reyna could hear her own breathing, and beneath it, the creak of leather, the soft clink of buckles, and once, very faintly, a sound like a child humming.

She did not look back. She had not looked back since Hollowfen, and she would not look back until she had the bridge in sight. The map in her belt pouch felt heavier than the paper it was drawn on, as if the route itself carried weight, and the weight pressed against her hip with every step.

Ahead, out of sight but never out of mind, the Black Bridge waited.

They marched for two days through the Thornveil, and on the morning of the second day the trees thinned and the sound of water came up from a long valley like a held breath finally released.

Reyna Vask heard the river before she saw it. The roar of it filled the gap between the hills, a low steady thunder that never paused, and when she crested the last rise and looked down the long slope to the bridge, the wind off the water hit her face with the smell of wet stone and cold green weed.

The Black Bridge was not a bridge at all, not in the ordinary sense. It was a causeway of piled basalt blocks, ancient and black, thrown across the Sundering where the river split around a midstream rock called the Widow's Tooth. On the far bank rose the fortress of the same name, a square keep of grey stone with murder holes cut into the curtain wall and a single gate that faced the bridge like a closed mouth. On the near bank, where Reyna stood, the ground had been cleared for two hundred paces in every direction. Anyone approaching could be seen from the walls. Anyone with hostile intent could be shot from the walls.

She had seen worse fortifications fall. She had seen better ones hold. The bridge itself was the question. If she crossed with her full column, she would be strung out across the open causeway for the better part of ten minutes, with no cover and no retreat. If she did not cross, the war came south on the river road and met her in the open field, where her numbers meant less and her purpose meant nothing.

She sent a runner back to Vashta with word that the bridge was in sight, and watched the high priestess's hood rise from the dark line of the trees like the head of something patient.

"You have sent word before," Vashta said, arriving at Reyna's shoulder without sound. "I am pleased that you still believe in words."

"I believe in them when I must," Reyna said. "The garrison commander is Captain Drey. I knew his sergeant once, at a wedding in the lowlands, years ago. The sergeant is dead now, but Drey may remember the name of the man who sang at the feast."

Vashta did not ask the name. She did not need to. The Ember's burning was a fire that lit every name that had ever touched it, and the singer had been one of those.

"Go," Vashta said. "We will wait."

Reyna raised her hand and brought her banner forward. It was a square of undyed linen on a stripped ash pole, no sigil, no device. A white flag. The oldest language any soldier knew. She walked down the slope with two attendants, a horn blower and a torch bearer, and when she reached the cleared ground at the bridge's head she planted the pole in the earth and stood beside it with her hands open at her sides.

The gates of the fortress did not open.

A minute passed. Two. The river roared. Reyna could feel the eyes on her from the walls, the slight shift of a crossbowman's aim, the quiet weight of men who had been ordered to watch and were watching well. The wind tugged at her cloak and the white flag snapped and cracked.

At the end of the third minute a voice came down from the parapet, amplified by a speaking trumpet of beaten tin.

"Who comes to the Black Bridge, and on what business?"

Reyna looked up. The man at the parapet was broad and grey, with a beard cut close and a steel cap that had been polished until it caught the sun. Captain Drey, if she read the insignia correctly. She did not raise her own voice. The river was loud enough.

"Reyna Vask, sworn to the Ember of Korth, on the business of the Ember's passage. I would speak with the captain of the bridge under safe conduct."

Silence. Then a murmur on the walls, the sound of men consulting. The speaking trumpet came up again.

"You will be received under safe conduct, Reyna Vask, by the gate, with two attendants only and no arms above the belt. Captain Drey will hear you in the outer ward. Your company will remain where they are until the captain has heard you."

"That is agreed," Reyna said.

She sent her attendants back to the tree line and walked the last hundred paces to the gate alone. The bridge stones were rough under her boots, and the river ran black beneath the gaps between them, swift and cold and deep. A plank had been laid across the moat. She crossed it without looking down, because looking down was for men who had not crossed worse.

The gate opened before she reached it, just enough for a single file, and two soldiers in black leather stepped out to flank her. They did not search her. They did not speak. They walked her through a vaulted passage and into the outer ward, a cobbled square ringed with stores and stables, and at its centre, on a camp stool beneath a canvas awning, sat Captain Drey.

He rose when she entered, slowly, the way old soldiers rise, with the discipline still in the joints and the pain in the knees. He was shorter than she had expected. His beard was whiter than she had expected. His eyes were exactly as she had expected, pale and patient and very tired.

"Reyna Vask," he said. His voice was the gravel and command of a man who had given orders through sieges. "You are older than the woman I remember from Sergeant Hallan's wedding."

"I am the only one who came back from it, captain. That will age a person."

He regarded her for a long moment, then gestured to a second stool across from his own. "Sit. My lieutenant will bring us something hot. It has been a poor morning for tea and a poorer one for sleep."

She sat. Lieutenant Yara Dell appeared from a doorway with a pot and two tin cups, set them on the folding table between the stools, and withdrew three precise paces. Reyna noted the lieutenant's age, young, the colour of her cheeks, the exact set of her jaw. She noted too the way the lieutenant's eyes lingered on her own face, not on her clothes or her belt, but on her face, as if reading the answer to a question there.

"Speak freely," Drey said. "I will hear what you have come to say, and then I will tell you what I cannot do."

Reyna wrapped her hands around the cup and let the heat settle into her palms. The tea was bitter, smoked, the kind brewed by men who were used to long watches and shorter rations.

"Captain," she said. "I have in the wood behind me a column of ninety-three souls. Sixty are Velmaran regulars under my hand. The rest are camp followers, Thornveilers, and the household of House Korth. Among them is the Ember, an infant of four months, carried by her sister Vashta, the eldest of the house. We are moving the child to the Shrine of the Long Night, beyond the Wend, where the Ember's lineage has kept its vigil for nine generations. The war has made the road through the lowlands impassable. The river road remains, and the river road passes your bridge."

Drey sipped his tea. "It does."

"I ask passage for the column, and safe conduct through your jurisdiction. I will pay for the bread we eat and the water we draw. I will not quarter my soldiers inside your walls. I will camp them on the near bank, under your watch, and march them across at dawn of the day we agree."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I will camp on the near bank until you say yes, or until the war arrives and makes the question moot. I will not attack your walls. I will not starve them. I will not insult your flag. I have no quarrel with the Black Bridge, captain, and I will not begin one in the shadow of a child."

Drey set his cup down. "You have a quarrel with someone. Everyone who stands before me with a child in the wood has a quarrel with someone."

"I have a quarrel with the Crown of Velmara, who has declared the Ember of Korth an outlaw relic and sworn to extinguish her line. I have a quarrel with the regent, who has offered a thousand silver marks for the head of the eldest of House Korth, dead or breathing. I have no quarrel with the Black Bridge, and I will pay you the thousand marks myself, in coin or in service, if that is what stands between us and the crossing."

Drey's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It was the shape a smile makes on a man who has heard too many bargains and accepted too few.

"You have counted my price before I named it," he said. "That is either a courtesy or an insult. I have not decided which."

"It is a soldier's habit, captain. We count what we can carry."

"And if I tell you that the price is not silver, and not service, but passage itself? That the bridge is closed by order of the garrison council, and that the council is not of my making?"

"Then I will hear the terms of the council, captain, and we will see if any of them can be honoured."

Drey leaned back on his stool. The canvas awning shifted in the wind, and for a moment the shadow of it moved across his face like a shutter drawn and opened. He looked, Reyna thought, like a man who had been asked to choose between two fires and had spent fifteen years learning to stand exactly between them.

"My council is made up of four officers and the elected reeve of the bridge town," he said. "The reeve is a merchant, and his vote is the price of bread. He will vote for whoever fills his granary. Lieutenant Dell, whom you see behind you, is ambitious and correct, and she votes as the Crown wishes, because the Crown is the road to her promotion. My corporal, Mennick, votes with me, because Mennick has voted with me since before the last war. My sergeant, Pol, is dead. His replacement is a man named Heth, who was appointed by the regent's man in the lowlands, and who votes as he is told. We are three and two, Reyna Vask, and you have come to ask me to break a tie I cannot break."

"I have come to ask you to weigh a child against a vote, captain. I have come to ask you to remember that you were once a man who sang at a wedding, and that the man you sang beside had a name, and that the name is not a thousand silver marks."

Drey was quiet for a long time. The river roared. Lieutenant Dell's jaw did not move.

"There is a third way," Drey said at last. "It is not a way I would choose. It is a way the council may accept, because it puts the weight of the choice on a man whose oath is not to the bridge."

He turned his head and spoke to the doorway.

"Corporal Mennick."

A moment later, and a man stepped out of the shadow of the stores. He was thick through the chest and short through the legs, with a beard like a wire brush and a face that had been broken and reset more than once. He carried a short spear in his left hand and a tin cup in his right, and he set the cup on the table without being asked and sat down on the ground at Drey's feet as if the ground were a chair reserved for him.

"Mennick," Drey said, "this is Reyna Vask. She wants the bridge."

"Aye," Mennick said. His voice was gravel and a working man's vowels, fast and blunt. "I heard her from the gate. She wants it bad. She wants it for a baby. I heard that too."

"The council will not give it to her. The regent's man, Heth, will vote no, and Dell will vote no, and the reeve will vote no unless we fill his granary, which we cannot do on the day. The vote is lost."

"Aye."

"There is a custom of the bridge, Mennick. Older than the garrison. Older than the keep."

Mennick looked up at his captain. There was a stillness in his face that had not been there a moment before, the stillness of a man who has heard the shape of what is coming and is deciding whether to flinch from it.

"The toll of the river," Mennick said.

"Yes."

"There has not been a toll of the river in my life, captain."

"There has not been a need of one in my life, Mennick. There is a need now. I am not ordering it. I am asking you, as one soldier to another, whether you will stand for the bridge in the old way, and let the river judge."

Mennick was quiet for a long moment. Then he lifted his cup, sipped, and set it down.

"What are the terms?"

Drey turned back to Reyna. "The toll of the river is a trial by combat between the petitioner and a champion of the garrison. Single blade, to first blood or to yielding, in the sight of the river and the bridge. If you win, the council is bound by the old law to grant your petition. If you lose, the bridge is closed to you for a year and a day, and no petition may be brought again in that time. The champion is chosen by the garrison from among its sworn soldiers. The champion may decline only if he is already named for another toll, which no man in this garrison is."

"And if the champion falls?"

"Then the garrison names another, and the toll continues until one side yields or cannot rise. There is no other end."

Reyna set her cup down. Her hands were steady. They had been steady at Hollowfen, too. She had thought, in the years since, that steadiness was a kind of peace. She was beginning to understand that it was only a kind of muscle.

"Who is your champion, captain?"

Drey looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the ground, at Mennick's boots, at the river beyond the gate.

"I am," he said. "There is no one else I can ask. Mennick is too old. Dell is too young. Heth is a politician, and will not bleed for a vote. If I ask a man under my command to do what I will not do myself, I am no longer fit to ask anything of any man under my command."

Mennick made a small sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a curse. "You could have told me before I sat down, captain. My knees are not what they were."

"Your knees are not required, Mennick. Your witness is."

"Aye," Mennick said again. He rose, stiffly, and took his cup with him. "I'll fetch the blades."

The river roared. The white flag cracked on the near bank. Reyna looked at the captain of the Black Bridge, and the captain looked back, and neither of them smiled, because there was nothing in either face that could be called a smile.

"Captain," Reyna said, "I will accept the toll of the river."

"So I thought," Drey said. "We will fight at sunset, in the inner ward, before the gate. The river will hear us. The bridge will judge."

They came up the river path in the blue hour before sunset, the sky the color of a bruise healing. Sable Korth heard them before she saw them, boots on wet stone, the clink of harness, the breath of a horse that had been pushed hard. Then the shape of them resolved against the far bank, two figures and a lean mare, and she felt the ward on her wrist throb in answer to something it had been waiting for.

She was standing at the parapet above the inner ward. Below her, the ground had been cleared of the morning's drill, the gravel raked smooth, the watch fires lit in their iron cradles. Lieutenant Yara Dell stood at the ward's edge with her arms folded, watching a quartermaster's mate measure the distance between the two stone markers with a knotted rope. Twenty paces. The measure was the same as it had been in her grandfather's time, and his before him. Some tolls did not change with the seasons.

Sable turned her wrist against the parapet's edge. The ember on it, no larger than a child's tooth, pulsed once, twice, and went still. The child Lenne stood a few feet behind her, swinging her feet against the stone, humming a tune that had no words. Sable had not asked her to stop humming. She did not have the heart, and the tune was small and brave in the way that small brave things sometimes held a room together.

"They're early," Sable said.

Dell glanced up, her face composed, her eyes doing the work her mouth would not. "Drey likes ceremony. The enemy likes daylight. Both, it seems, are losing their grip on the day."

"It isn't daylight they like. It's a deadline."

"Then we give them the deadline," Dell said, "and we make them pay for it." She turned back to the rope. "Twelve paces between the marks, quartermaster. The captain's reach is longer than that."

"Twelve paces, lieutenant. As it was writ."

Sable let the conversation pass through her. She was thinking of her brother, which was not unusual, and of the way he had smiled at her across the long table in the summer house at Urdel, the year the river had run so high it had eaten half the orchard. He had been twenty-three. She had been nineteen. He had been in love, though not with anyone in the room, and the smile had been a private one, a smile for the secret of it. She had not known then that the secret was her, that he had been smiling at the fact of her existence, at the small unlooked-for mercy of a sister who had somehow survived the cradle sickness that had taken the others.

She had not known he would die for her, or nearly, or that his dying would not be the worst of it.

The ward gate opened. Captain Drey came through it on foot, in his brigandine, the steel plates oiled to a soft shine, his sword at his side and a long knife in his belt. Behind him, Corporal Mennick carried a wooden case that Sable recognized, the kind that held dueling blades, the kind her mother had kept in a glass-fronted cabinet in the long gallery. The case was scarred. The case was old. Sable suspected it had been carried to more than one such evening.

Drey looked up at the parapet. He did not salute. He did not nod. He only looked, the way a man looks at a thing he has decided to endure, and Sable looked back, and the look was a kind of agreement.

"My lady," he said.

"Captain."

"The challenger is within the gate. We will receive her at the bell."

"I'll be there."

"You don't have to be."

"I know."

He accepted that with the faintest motion of his head, the way he accepted weather, and turned back to the ward. Mennick set the case down on the trestle that had been set out for it and undid the brass clasps with the ease of long practice. The blades inside were laid in oilcloth, two of them, both longswords, both of a make that Sable did not recognize. The pommels were worked in a pattern she had seen before, in a book, in a chapter on the river tolls. They were the bridge's own. They had been waiting for this.

Sable went down the stair. Lenne followed her, small and quiet, holding the hem of Sable's coat in one fist. The child did not speak. The child had not spoken since the morning, since the river had first spoken its name across the water, and Sable had begun to suspect that the silence was not grief but a kind of attention, the way a person falls silent in the presence of something they do not want to miss.

The inner ward smelled of wet stone and lamp oil. The sky was the color of old pewter, the first star pricking through in the east, and the river beyond the gate was loud with the sound of itself, as it always was, as it would be after the wardens and the tolls and the small brave songs of children had all been forgotten.

Reyna Vask was waiting at the near mark. She had taken off her coat. The shirt beneath was a soldier's shirt, linen, the collar dark with road dust. Her hair was pulled back. Her hands, at her sides, were very still. She looked at Sable, and the look was a long one, the kind a person gives when they are measuring the distance between two things that have to become the same distance.

"Lady Korth," Reyna said.

"Wanderer."

"Have you eaten?"

"No."

"Neither have I. It seemed improper."

"It is," Sable said. "It always is."

She stepped to the far mark. The gravel was cold under her boots. Mennick, at the trestle, lifted the first blade and offered it to her across his two hands, the way a sacrament is offered, and she took it, and the weight of it was familiar in the way that old griefs are familiar, in the way that the first breath after a long illness is familiar.

Drey took the second blade. He rolled his shoulders once, the way a man does when he means to use them, and set his feet.

Dell, at the edge of the ward, said, "First to yield or unable to rise. The river will hear. The bridge will judge. On my mark."

The bell rang.

Sable did not know, afterward, how long it lasted. She knew that it was longer than she had expected, and shorter than she had feared, and that at some point in the middle of it, when the blades had locked and she had felt the strength in Reyna's wrists and known, with a small cold certainty, that she was not going to win, she had stopped wanting to win. She had begun, instead, to want to last, to make the lasting a thing that was worth the watching, and the wanting had changed the way she moved, had loosened something in her shoulders that had been locked since the summer house, since the long table, since the smile.

Reyna was good. Reyna was very good. She fought the way a river fights, with a continuous pressure, a long rolling weight, and Sable gave ground, and gave it again, and the gravel crunched under her boots, and the ward smelled of sweat and lamp oil, and somewhere a child was humming, very softly, the tune without words.

She went down once. Her knee struck the gravel, and the pain was bright, and she came back up, and the blade in her hand was still there, and Reyna waited for her, which was the cruelest thing, and the kindest.

"Why," Reyna said, between breaths, "are you smiling."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm remembering a man who smiled at a table. He would have liked this."

"Most men like being liked."

"He wasn't most men."

Reyna's blade came down, and Sable caught it, and the ward spun, and then Sable was on the ground again, and this time she did not get up, because the gravel had said so, in its small bright voice, and because her body had said so, and because the river, beyond the gate, had said so, with a long slow sound that was not triumph and was not grief but was, she thought, the sound a thing makes when it has seen enough.

Drey stepped back. He lowered his blade. He did not speak.

Reyna stood over her, breathing hard, the point of her sword toward the gravel, and the look on her face was not triumph either. It was the look of a person who has paid a toll and is only now counting the change.

"Lady Korth," Reyna said. "The river has judged. I will take the bridge."

Sable lay on the gravel. The sky was dark now, the stars out, the first of them bright enough to be named. The child Lenne had stopped humming. The child was standing at the edge of the ward, the hem of her coat in one fist, the other hand at her side, and the look on the child's face was the look of a person who is trying to decide whether to be afraid.

Sable closed her eyes. She thought of her brother. She thought of the summer house. She thought of the smile.

"Then take it," she said. "And be kind to the child."