CHAPTER THIRTY
Cedar fought instinct that told him to run, far from
the flames, from the mob, from the matic that rumbled over the
ground toward Mae Lindson’s house.
But where there was a
matic, Mr. Shard LeFel would not be far behind, and neither would
Mr. Shunt.
Cedar intended to put
a final end to that monster.
He paused in the
stand of trees, watching the mob. There were too many people, too
many guns, too many torches, between him and the matic. He growled,
low and unheard over the heat of the fire, the heat of the men
shouting. The tuning fork against his chest rang out with a single
sour note even though he stood perfectly still. The Strange who had
taken Elbert was near. Near enough to kill.
Inside that matic was
his foe, his enemy, his prey. Two beating hearts waiting to be
ripped free of the sinew that held them, two spines to break, two
skulls to crush. Mr. Shunt, and Mr. Shard LeFel.
Cedar crept low and
growled softly again. The mob swarmed closer to the house, yelling.
His ears pricked up. Faintly over the yelling of the crowd, he
heard the back door slam shut.
Mae. Mae trying to
run free. Mae trying to escape. His heart beat faster as the
thoughts of a man overrode the beast’s need to kill. Mae had been
in that house. He’d told her to stay until he returned. They would
trap her. Kill her.
A blaze of flame shot
up the side of the house, wood catching fire beneath torches and
quickly turning into an inferno.
Cedar Hunt rushed
silently through the cover of underbrush, the cover of shadow, the
tuning fork screaming a bitter song.
Mae couldn’t die. He
couldn’t let her die. Couldn’t bear her death. He ran a wide berth
to get behind the house to the door he had heard slam. The wind
heaved with smoke, fouling Cedar’s sense of smell.
She couldn’t survive
that fire. He’d told her to stay. She would be burned
alive.
Wolf instinct yelled:
Run. Every nerve pumped hot with panic,
powering his muscles to bunch and push. Faster.
Faster.
Cedar pressed his
ears down against his head and bared his teeth as he ran across the
field. The wound in his side split open, poured with new pain.
Almost there. Almost there to save Mae.
The heat from the
fire grew stronger and stronger with every step he took. The light
ruined his vision.
He leaped through the
open back door and into a blistering hell.
Fire roared, chewing
away the walls, snapping the wooden whimsies, burning them to ash,
destroying the chairs, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, with
white-hot liquid heat. Cedar crouched, eyes slit, and pushed into
the living room. Searching for Mae.
Smoke burned his
eyes; embers singed his fur. His skin charred. He could not find
her. Could not find Mae.
There might be a nook
or corner where she hid, but there was too much fire. He could not
endure.
Run, run, run, the beast howled.
And Cedar Hunt could
not hold against that instinct any longer.
He ran from the
house. Out into the night. Ran until his lungs filled with air
instead of smoke. Ran until the cool winds cleaned his eyes and
soothed his flesh.
He had to believe Mae
had found her way out. He had to believe she had left the house
earlier in the day; had to believe she had tired of waiting for him
and gone hunting. Had to believe that the door slamming was just a
trick of the wind.
But he didn’t. Not in
these lands where nightmares spread roots and sucked away all hope,
all life.
The mob broke up,
chose which men would stay and see to it that the house burned to
the ground. Just then the matic suddenly huffed louder, and rumbled
away from the gathering, out into the field.
Cedar knew where the
matic would go. Back to the rail.
And that was where he
would kill.
Cedar Hunt raised his
voice, sorrow and anger howling against the night sky.
He took a step, and
the pain from the wound in his side bloomed hot through him. It was
bleeding again, bleeding still, worse than it had been. He didn’t
care. There was no time to stop. No time to feel pain. He ran,
first just a lope, then a ground-eating run. To the rail. To
death.
Mae Lindson couldn’t
get to the shotgun on the ground next to her and charge it in time
to shoot Mr. Shunt. Rose Small didn’t look so much frightened in
Mr. Shunt’s grip as just angry. That Rose was keeping her head
about her was one thing good to their advantage. Unfortunately, Mae
couldn’t think of many more.
“Your end is come,
Shard LeFel,” Alun Madder said, his voice low, but commanding. “We
have played this game to its finish. And just as you were banished
to walk this land, you will die in this mortal land. Enough of your
hollow threats. If we had the mind to, we’d shoot you
now.”
“And lose the
Holder?” Shard LeFel smiled. “How would the order of the king’s
guard reward you when they find that you have let a weapon of that
magnitude slip through your fingers?”
“You underestimate
the guard’s resources,” Alun Madder said. “We’ll find the Holder,
whether or not you’re breathing.”
“Or you’ll find
pieces of it.”
Alun’s head jerked
up.
Shard LeFel smiled.
“If you kill me, the Holder will explode like glass under a hammer.
And every piece will be loose in the land. Even one fragment of the
Holder will destroy cities, kill hundreds, thousands, in most
unusual and painful ways.” He smiled again. “You will not shoot me.
But I have no such qualms about this girl. Mr. Shunt, make her
bleed.”
Mr. Shunt raised the
knife to her face.
“No!” Mae stepped
forward. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll come with you. Let Rose
go.”
“Mrs. Lindson,” Alun
said, his voice tight, his eyes on Shard LeFel. “Don’t do what this
dog says. We’ll find a way to save Miss Small.”
“Not before he has
that monster cut her apart,” Mae said. “No, I’m going with
him.”
Alun Madder took a
step forward and extended his hand to her. They shook and he said,
“I only wish you’d take a minute when you need it the most. Think
things through.”
“I have thought this
through,” she said.
“Then that might just
save us all. Good luck to you.” Alun Madder searched her face,
finding, she knew, her determination. Mr. LeFel might know she was
a witch. But he most certainly did not know she was a witch like no
other. Vows and curses came to her as easy as drawing a breath. And
Mae didn’t need any weapon greater than that.
Alun stepped away and
Mae realized he had pressed a pocket watch into her palm. It was
warm, as if an ember lay coiled within it. No, not an ember—glim.
She had seen glim once, from a man who tried to sell just a drop of
it to her when she and Jeb were traveling out this way. She would
know the feel of it anywhere.
She had no idea how a
pocketful of glim would do her any good, though it was said the
glim could give strength to anything it was set upon. She tucked
the watch away in her coat, and turned back to face Mr. Shard
LeFel.
“Let Rose Small go.”
Mae took a few good-faith steps toward the matic, then stopped,
waiting.
Mr. Shard LeFel
worked the levers in the monstrous metal beast. “Yes, of course.
Let us make good on our promise, Mr. Shunt. Let the girl
go.”
Mr. Shunt pushed Rose
so hard she flew several feet before landing on the
ground.
And just as quickly,
Mr. Shunt suddenly appeared in front of Mae.
She sucked in a gasp.
Before she could exhale, he had cut the straps of her satchels and
packs. They dropped in a thump to the ground. He wrapped at least
two arms around her, another clutched to the brim of his
hat.
And then the world
became a blur. Ground sped by, the side of the matic pulled up
beneath her as Mr. Shunt scaled it nimbly as a spider climbing a
wall.
Once over the edge of
the cab, Mae was shoved, facedown, and pressed into the leather
cushions behind Shard LeFel’s throne. Mr. Shunt pressed his knee in
her back with a punishing weight.
She couldn’t move if
she wanted to. Steam pounded the air and jolted the matic into
action.
Facedown with Mr.
Shunt’s wide, hard hand clamped against the back of her head and
his knee digging at her spine, Mae could still tell the matic moved
faster than anything she’d ever known, faster than trains or
ships.
And she had no idea
where they were taking her.
Rose Small hurt from
her bonnet to her boots. More than feeling bruised and scraped, she
was angry. She pushed up and staggered to her feet, but it was too
late. The matic thundered off over the field faster than a
racehorse on Sunday.
“Stop!” she yelled,
which did absolutely no good.
“They can’t hear
you,” Alun Madder mused. “All those gears and steam deafen.” He
tapped at one ear for good measure.
Rose turned on the
Madder brothers. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had so much anger
boiling up inside of her, she thought she’d about go insane from
the noise of it. “You should have stopped him! How can you just let
that, that Shard LeFel take Mae? He’s going to kill
her!”
Bryn Madder was down
in the collapsed tunnel, handing up packs, gear, and a crate or
two. Alun and Cadoc took each load from him, spreading the barrels
and crates out, then digging in their packs. They were paying no
attention to her.
“You promised me
you’d help me save Mae,” Rose said. “Help me get her out of town
and out of harm’s way. Have you always been liars, Mr. Madder, or
were you saving it all up for today?”
Alun Madder, who was
crouched next to a pack, sniffed and looked her way, his arms
resting along his knees, his weight balanced on the toes of his
boots. “We’re so much as liars as we’ve always been, I
suppose.”
He turned back to the
pack, digging away, just as his brothers were digging through
crates and boxes. “However,” he said, “if Mr. LeFel had wanted to
kill Mrs. Lindson, he would have simply had Shunt cut her heart
out. He is more than happy to do such things.” He pushed that pack
aside, stood up to pry the lid off a crate, and began
digging.
The brothers were
spreading out a collection of metal and gears and plates of wood
and copper and glass. They scattered them on the ground like a
strange puzzle or game, occasionally glancing up at the sky as if
gauging the distance, the stars, or the wind that pushed
them.
“So we sit here and
wait until he tires of her company and then kills her?” Rose looked
around. “And build a . . . a barn? No. I’m going after
him.”
“Ah!” Alun said, and
his brothers stopped rummaging through their packs to look over at
him. “Here it is.” He pulled out his pipe, dusted the dirt off it,
and clamped it in his teeth with a satisfied grunt.
Rose made a
frustrated sound. The brothers had gone completely mad. Fine, then.
She would save Mae on her own.
She picked up Mae’s
tinkered shotgun and started walking. Got about a dozen steps away
before Alun called out.
“By the way, Miss
Small. We’ll need that locket of yours,” he said.
She turned, hands on
her hips. And nearly lost her grip on the gun when she saw what the
brothers had built.
In the short stomp
she’d taken, they’d assembled the pieces of wood and metal into a
perfectly square basket of some sort, large enough for six people
to stand within it. Rising up at each corner was a lattice and
attached to that were ropes. Spread out behind the basket was what
looked like a huge blanket, white in the moonlight, and fine enough
that the slight wind rippled the material.
Bryn Madder knelt
beside the basket, using a ratchet to tighten a bolt on a fan or
small windmill blade attached to the side of the basket. Cadoc
Madder finished straightening the material over the ground and
walked toward the basket, one finger up as if testing the air, a
tuning fork pressed to his ear.
“What is that?” she
asked.
Alun Madder held a
lit wick to the bowl of his pipe, puffed several times, then
exhaled smoke. “Just a little gadget we made.”
“What does it
do?”
“It takes us faster
than feet can travel.”
“How?”
“Steam and wind.” He
frowned over at the basket, where Bryn was feeding coal into a
firebox set up high in the middle of it. He had sparked and turned
the tinder uncommonly quickly into flame and poured water from his
canteen into a small keg set atop the tinderbox. “Mostly,” Alun
added.
He grinned, clamping
his teeth on his pipe. “Let’s have the locket, girl.”
“No.”
Alun’s bushy eyebrows
shot up. “No?”
“You heard
me.”
“Means something to
you, does it?”
“More than to
you.”
He gave her a
considering gaze. “Well, then, let’s have you use it. Come on.
Time’s a-wasting.”
Cadoc Madder stopped
pacing and was now pointing the tuning fork northwest like a
compass needle. “The rail,” he breathed. “They’re headed to the
rail.”
“Nice of them to make
it easy,” Alun said. “Just a hop and a skip.” He shrugged on his
backpack, then pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of a crate and
attached it by tubes and lines to his backpack before climbing into
the basket.
Bryn Madder finished
tinkering with the two windmillblade contraptions on either side of
the basket. He pulled a squatbodied blunderbuss and a sledgehammer
out of his pack before getting into the basket next to Alun.
“Coming with us, Miss Small?” he asked.
“Where?” she asked.
“How?”
“The rail,
apparently,” Alun Madder said around the stem of his pipe. “And as
for the how, you’re looking at it.”
Rose glanced over her
shoulder toward the way the matic had left. She couldn’t catch it
on foot. And even though the Madders were clearly not in their
right minds, she wasn’t sure what choice she had other than to run
to town and get a horse. And she had no time for that
either.
She gathered up her
skirt and tucked the hem of it through her belt beneath the heavy
coat she wore.
Alun Madder raised
one eyebrow but didn’t say anything as to her impropriety, and she
wouldn’t have cared if he did. Hitching up her skirt gave her a
better stride, and the long coat hung nearly halfway to her boot
tops, but was split front and back so she could run if needed. Even
so, there was a good palm width of her stocking in clear view that
would have scandalized her mother if she’d seen it. Rose climbed
over the edge of the basket, where the heat from the boiler made it
almost unbearably hot.
“Stand behind me,
girl,” Alun Madder said.
Rose stood beside him
instead.
Alun laughed. “Well,
then. Are you coming, brother Cadoc?”
Cadoc Madder took in
a breath as if to say something, but instead drew a two-bladed ax
out from his pack. He nodded thoughtfully, and lifted up the edge
of the cloth on the ground, standing to one side to reveal a
hole.
“What?” Rose started,
but then she didn’t need to finish.
Bryn pulled a hose
that was coiled at the side of the burner and tossed it to Cadoc,
who turned, caught the hose, and clamped it down tight to the hole
in the fabric.
Bryn Madder worked
the valves, and a blast of hot steam roared into the
fabric.
Cadoc Madder waited
until the fabric started taking on a round shape before he stepped
into the basket with them. From the shape of it, Rose suspected
there was a second fabric inside the first, filling with steam.
Cadoc hauled on the ropes and pulleys and helped lift the
fabric—the balloon—into the sky above the basket, then fastened a
tube that was already wet with condensation down onto a drip hole
in the water reserve.
Wonder caught at
Rose’s heart. “A balloon? We’re going to fly?”
“No better way to
travel,” Alun said. “Be to it, Bryn. Quick, now. We wouldn’t want
to miss the party.”
Bryn adjusted levers
and turned valves on the burner, which clicked and rattled and
shook in a most distressing manner. “If you’d step to me a moment,
Miss Small,” he said. “With your locket?”
Rose did so, and
pulled the locket out from beneath her blouse, but did not take it
off from over her head. She held it out on the chain for him. “I
don’t see as how this can help.”
Bryn gently caught
the gilded robin’s egg with his clean fingertips. He pulled a chain
out of his pocket, on the end of which was a collection of thin
watchmaker’s tools. He chose one tool and inserted it into a tiny
hole at the base of the locket. The locket spun open like a flower
blooming.
Delicate gears and
spindles within it twisted and rolled, revealing a small glass vial
couched in the center of the locket. The vial glowed a soft green
light, but Rose could not tell if it was filled with liquid or gas
or something else altogether.
“What is it?” She
could not look away from the locket, and did not want
to.
“Glim,” Alun Madder
said quietly. “And all we’ll need is a drop or two, to set this
ship in the air.”
“Glim?” She could
hardly believe it. She’d been wearing a fortune around her neck,
and never once suspected it. “How can it help?”
“Not much glim can’t
help,” Alun said.
Bryn nodded once,
asking permission to pull the vial out from the tiny latches that
held it in place.
“Yes,” Rose
said.
“Want an engine to
run faster, add glim,” Alun continued. “Want a fire to burn hotter,
a coal to last longer, a wound to heal better, add
glim.”
“Does it really come
from the sky?” Rose asked, watching Bryn break the wax seal on the
vial with his thumbnail.
“Harvested by
specially equipped airships,” Alun said. “Not that the scientific
minds can agree upon what, exactly, glim is made of, nor why
exactly it works the way it does.”
“Wait,” Rose said,
finally looking away from the glow in Bryn Madder’s hand. “You
don’t know how it works?”
“Sometimes a man
doesn’t need to know how a thing works so long as he knows that it
does work.”
Bryn opened a small
gearbox on the side of the burner, and tapped out exactly one drop
of glim. The drop floated down into the gears.
The basket lurched
and a whirring racket started up. Rose grabbed hold of the railing,
her breath frozen in her chest as the balloon above them snapped
taut and round.
And then the world
seemed to take a step away.
The sturdy basket
made it feel like she was standing on solid ground, but when she
looked over the edge, the ground was growing farther and farther
away. They were lifting up, soft as a sigh, now at about midheight
of the trees, and still rising.
They were
flying!
“Put this back in the
locket.” Alun took the vial from Bryn and handed it to her. She
looked it over as carefully as she could in the moonlight. He, or
maybe Bryn, had remelted the wax on the mouth of the vial,
effectively sealing it. Rose placed the vial back in the locket. It
snicked into place and then the locket spun closed all on its own,
though she figured there was a spring set to trigger it to lock
again. She tucked the locket back inside her dress.
When she looked up
again, the bottom of the basket was above even the tallest trees.
She grinned and put one hand over her mouth to hold back on a whoop
of joy. She was flying!
Bryn Madder took hold
of the levers, and with the assistance of the fans on each side of
the craft, and some clever saillike rudders that Cadoc and Alun
manipulated on the sides of the balloon, they were able to steer
the craft off over the trees and the hills and the creeks, to the
rail.
Rose had imagined
this moment for years. How the trees and mountains and town would
look. She had always known it would be beautiful. Breathtaking. But
even so, she had underestimated the thrill of being above all the
living world, had underestimated how small and pretty and quiltlike
the earth rolled out beneath the moonlight. And she could not
believe how far to the horizon she could see.
The boiler rattled so
hard, it shook the basket. The whole craft lurched to one side, and
Rose had to brace her feet not to go sliding across the
floor.
“Whoa, now,” Alun
said. “Easy on us, brother Bryn.”
They were beginning
to descend, quickly, the ground growing larger and the
black-shadowed tops of trees coming much, much closer.
“How much longer?”
Alun asked, trying to correct their angle through the trees with
the sails. Branches scraped the bottom of the basket, and a flurry
of crows took off squawking.
“Almost out of
steam,” Bryn called over the boiler’s thunderous
noise.
Evergreen branches
whipped against the sides of the basket and snagged up the lines
tethering the balloon.
“Too many blasted
trees!” Alun yanked on a sail line, dislodging a limb, and Bryn
worked a lever to angle the fans and push the balloon out of the
tree’s reach. But they were still falling too fast, branches
slapping, cracking, catching at the aircraft, grazing over the
delicate balloon fabric.
“Give us a sign,
brother Cadoc,” Alun said.
The unmistakable rasp
of material tearing sent a cold wave of fear down Rose’s spine. The
balloon was broken. They weren’t going to land. They were going to
crash.
“There!” Cadoc
pointed to a clearing not far from the rail. They were just a ways,
maybe half a mile, down from the building end of the
track.
“Down,” Alun yelled.
“Put ’er down, quick, Bryn!”
The boiler stopped
rattling, completely burned dry of water. Wind rushed by, cold and
wet from the steam gouting out of the balloon above
them.
Alun and Cadoc heaved
on the lines, opening pockets in the fabric, trying to push the
balloon toward the clearing.
They sped down. Fast
and faster.
Rose clutched the
rail of the basket and watched, transfixed, as the skeletal giants
of moonlit trees slapped at them with silvery fingers.
The fans whirred like
hornet hives as Bryn put all the steam, and likely all the glim
that was left, into them. “Brace for it!” he yelled.
Rose sucked in a deep
breath and said a prayer.
The basket rammed
into something solid, then just as quick was whipped the other way.
Rose lost hold of the edge of the basket and fell as the entire
craft tipped. She caught a glimpse of sky, trees, basket, the wind
rushing past her, and then was caught by strong hands around her
waist.
“Hold on!” Alun
yelled.
Rose, half in and
half out of the basket, facedown to the ground, couldn’t hold on to
anything, but Alun Madder’s hands were a vise around her ribs. The
basket tumbled, bounced, and then even Alun Madder’s strong hands
couldn’t keep ahold of her.
Rose spilled free of
the basket and hit the ground so hard, all the air was knocked out
of her lungs. It took her a full minute to get air back in her
chest and wits back in her head. And when she did, she realized two
things.
One, she was on the
ground. Scuffed, bruised, and mussed, but by most parts whole and
undamaged.
And two, the Madder
brothers were all laughing their fool heads off.
She pushed up to
sitting, and tried to get her bearings.
Somehow, they kept
the basket from breaking apart. Somehow they brought the basket
down, close enough, and, more important, slow enough, that when the
basket finally struck the earth, they hadn’t all perished falling
out of the thing.
The balloon, however,
was caught up in the tree branches, and torn open like a child’s
wayward kite.
“Fine a landing as
ever, brother Bryn,” Alun, who sat no more than a few feet away
from Rose, said.
“Thank you, brother
Alun.” Bryn chuckled and heaved up to his feet. He swayed a little,
then seemed to get his footing and stomped over to the tipped
basket. He twisted a valve, and threw open the burner grate. There
was not a coal, not a stitch of fuel, left. “Well, she won’t burn
the forest down.”
“Looks like a one-way
ticket,” Cadoc said from where he was sprawled on the ground,
staring up at the tattered balloon in the tree above him
thoughtfully. “Pity. I do like air rides.”
“We’ll make you
another balloon, Cadoc,” Alun said. “And you can try your hand at
flying it.” He slapped at his shoulders and trousers, then stood.
“Miss Small, are you in one piece?”
Rose took a deep
breath to steady herself. She felt jostled and rattled as if she’d
ridden a day in a horse-drawn carriage, as if every inch of the
space they had traveled had rumbled beneath her as they passed over
it. But that had been flight. Her first. And she had loved
it.
She stood. “I’m fine
enough, thank you, Mr. Madder.”
“Good,” he said,
“that’s good. Thought I might have lost you there at the end, what
with you jumping ship.”
“I assure you, I did
not jump,” Rose said.
The brothers all
laughed again, and went about reclaiming their weapons and
supplies.
Rose wanted to know
how they had built the ship, wanted to know what the balloon and
sails were made of and how the tubes and hoses and steam and glim
had powered it, but there was no time.
The thump of steam
exhausting a stack rolled through the air from up the track and a
long hiss followed. The matic that Shard LeFel rode was somewhere
up the rail ahead of them and coming closer, like as not headed to
LeFel’s railcars.
“Bring your weapons,
lady and gents,” Alun said, jumping free of the basket. “It’s time
we see to the end of Mr. Shard LeFel.”
They gathered their
gear, and Alun pressed a modified Winchester rifle into Rose’s
hands. “As a thank-you. For the use of the glim,” he
said.
She nodded and turned
to one side to sight the gun.
“You’ll want these.”
Bryn pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket—well, more like
modified goggles, thin brass out to the edges and wide round
lenses, clear, set in permanently, with a tiny brass loupe over the
right-hand corner of each lens. A spray of other colored lenses
fanned off on one side.
Rose put the goggles
on her forehead. “I don’t know that I understand this gun,” she
said as they strode up the track. “Or these glasses.”
“Each lens is for a
different distance,” Bryn said. “There’s a small tube there by your
left ear.”
Rose reached up and
touched the side of the goggle.
“There’s a
retractable clamp on the barrel. Connect the two, and the brass
loupe will show you your target.”
Rose slid the goggles
over her eyes and connected the tubes. Nothing seemed to
happen.
“It’s powered by
pumping in a round,” Bryn said.
Rose stopped, and
Bryn stopped with her, though Alun and Cadoc kept walking, their
boots crunching in the gravel, their heads turned up to watch the
moon more than their feet.
Bryn handed her a box
of bullets from his pocket, and she loaded a single shell. The
lever load snapped the bullet into place and the brass loupe on the
goggles shifted to the lowest corner.
She raised the rifle
to her shoulder and looked out along it. The brass loupe shifted
smoothly like oil on water to show her exactly where her bullet
would strike: rock, tree, leaf.
“Isn’t that
glimsweet?” Rose said. She lowered the gun and pulled the goggles
back up to her forehead.
“Thank
you.”
“Wouldn’t want you
injured in this fight, Miss Small. You’re a right special woman to
survive traveling twixt-wise as we just did.”
“Survive?” Rose
asked, surprised. “Think that would have killed us?”
“There’s not anything
in this world without risk,” he said. “Especially untested
devices.”
Rose shook her head.
“I’m sure I agree with you there, Mr. Madder.” She hefted the gun.
“But I enjoyed every second of it.”
A crashing squeal of
metal on metal ground into the night behind them, coming up the
tracks as if something huge was being dragged. If LeFel’s matic was
coming from ahead of them, Rose had no idea what sort of thing was
coming up from behind.
“Don’t dally,” Alun
yelled back to them, jumping to one side of the track, and still
jogging while he navigated a way through the bushes. “Sounds like
the fun’s just beginning.”
Bryn turned and
jogged to catch up with his brothers, and after a moment’s
hesitation, and a moment’s prayer, Rose did the same.