Chapter 76: The People on the Road

Thor turned before anyone else moved.

She had spent weeks learning when to wait. There had been tables to sit at, objections to hear, people whose knowledge mattered more than the strength in her arm. She had accepted all of it because the people behind the doors would be the ones to suffer if she mistook impatience for courage.

Now the doors were open.

The people who had opened them did not know.

She crossed the chapel with a measured stride, passing a woman whose hand still rested against the warm bench as though she could hold the Keeper’s voice there.

“Elyan.”

He had stayed at Greykeep. Thor knew that. She said his name anyway, with the same certainty she used when she called for her hammer across a battlefield.

The air brightened beside the doorway.

Elyan appeared with mud on his boots and a question already forming on his face.

“The shelter,” Thor said. “Find Hesketh.”

“What do I tell him?”

She looked back at the niche. Aurelia stood beside the carved woman, and the lantern reached toward the open chapel doors.

“That the prison doors are open. Someone must tell Marta Quill.”

Elyan vanished before she finished.

Thor remained by the entrance, one hand against the doorframe. Beyond it, Westmere’s lamps burned in the night. Nothing in the street had changed visibly. A little wind moved along the stones, carrying the smell of smoke from a nearby chimney.

Three hundred miles away, a child stood with her hand on a door she was afraid to touch.

Behind Thor, Edric rose.

He spoke quietly, telling people the night was not over. They could return home and keep their lamps burning, or remain if they preferred. Hilde would keep the chapel open.

“All night,” Hilde confirmed, keys gathered in her hand.

Some people rose. Most stayed.

Thor understood both choices. There were children asleep in houses, fires that needed tending, windows where a light would go out unless someone returned to it. The people leaving were not turning away.

Vaust knelt behind the niche.

He laid his hand against the wall without knocking.

“Tell us what happens,” he said. “Whatever you can.”

The Keeper asked whether he was certain.

“Yes.”

Thor turned fully toward the room.

She had requested reports from scouts throughout her life. Positions. Numbers. Terrain. Whether a road could take wagons after rain. She had learned to listen for what a messenger had actually seen and distinguish it from what fear supplied between the facts.

She had never waited for a report like this.

The Keeper began with a name.

Dorran.

The guard who had sat down on the floor had served in the east wing for two years. He carried meals. In all that time he had not looked at the faces behind the doors.

“Now he is looking,” the Keeper said.

Thor’s jaw tightened.

Two years of hands extending through openings. Bowls accepted and returned. Voices that could have become familiar if he had permitted them to belong to people.

She wanted to despise him without qualification.

Then the Keeper told them Lirien had stepped into the corridor.

One step.

She stood beside the lamp, holding her hand toward its warmth.

Thor looked at the chapel’s own lamp. Its flame leaned and recovered in a small draft. She imagined a child discovering that the light she had known only beneath a door existed higher up too, that it had a shape she could stand beside.

“The other guard?” she asked.

He had gone for the wing captain.

“How far?”

The captain slept beyond the courtyard, in a guardhouse reached through one of Othellos’s doors.

Long enough, the Keeper said.

Thor did not ask long enough for what. She knew an answer stretched beyond certainty would not help them.

She waited.

At Greykeep, Lexander heard the change in the passage before anyone spoke to him.

It was not shouting. The castle had become good at urgency that did not spread panic. Footsteps quickened. A door opened, then another. Somewhere farther away, a voice gave a short answer and immediately began another question.

Io looked up from the chair beside the nursery window.

“Thor?”

“I’ll find out.”

He stepped into the passage and waited for someone who actually knew what was happening. That restraint cost him more than leaving the room had. There were times when being king meant people answered the question they thought he wanted answered before they had found the facts.

The Castellan’s movements through the household were already taking shape around them. People were being woken. Arrangements were being made elsewhere.

Lexander returned to the nursery rather than add his own demands to work underway.

Io stood when he entered.

“Something has changed,” he said. “I don’t have the whole of it yet.”

She glanced toward the children.

All four slept. Seraphina had turned onto her side with one hand beneath her cheek. Ignatius’s blanket had slipped from his shoulder. Io drew it back into place, then checked Carol and Garrick with the same practiced attention.

Their lamps remained steady.

Lexander looked at Lirien’s name.

He remembered Thor’s promise to return. It had not been a promise to come straight back from Westmere regardless of what happened there. He knew his sister too well to mistake it for one.

“Stay with them,” Io said.

He looked at her.

“I’ll see what’s needed nearby. If anyone comes with news, one of us should be here.”

He nodded.

It was a sensible arrangement. He disliked how grateful he was to have one.

Io paused at the door.

“Don’t decide everything has gone wrong because you can’t see it.”

He let out a breath.

“Was I doing that?”

“You were preparing to.”

She left before he could defend himself.

Lexander sat beside the window. He listened to the children breathing and to the different rhythm of the castle beyond their door.

For now, his place was here.

He made himself remain in it.

Halemar had reached his doorway.

Thor heard his name and straightened. The Keeper described him looking at Lirien, then at Dorran on the floor.

He wanted to know whether this was another test.

Vaust closed his eyes.

Thor watched his hand against the stone. She had seen strong people betrayed by their own bodies, and she had seen frightened people taught to distrust every kindness offered to them. Halemar’s question belonged to that second cruelty.

“What did the guard say?” Vaust asked.

Dorran did not know. He had tried to shut the doors. They would not shut. He did not understand what was happening.

He was frightened.

“Good,” Thor said.

Several people turned toward her.

“He’s thinking,” she explained. “For once, he has something in front of him that an order doesn’t answer.”

She hoped that was true. Fear could make people violent as easily as thoughtful. She knew that too. But Dorran had sat down instead of reaching for a weapon, and Lirien remained beside the lamp.

For the moment, it was enough.

Elyan returned at the half hour.

He came through the doorway quickly, crossed to the platform, and told them Hesketh had gone up the road.

“On foot,” he said. “Oren went with him.”

Thor pictured the climb in the dark.

“He knew something had happened. The water had been warm for an hour. I told him about the doors, and he took the lantern off its hook.”

“To the bakery?” Uriah asked.

“The east well. He said three hours, but Marta starts her ovens at four.”

“And Dunstan?”

“Harnessing the mules.”

Thor looked at Uriah.

He was already looking at her.

“The quarry,” she said.

Understanding came at once. If the captives left the basin, they would come down the western road. If Othellos sent people after them, the pursuit would use the same road.

There was work she knew how to do there.

Evelyn stood before either of them asked.

She told Uriah to go, then crossed to him and held his face between her hands.

Thor looked away, giving them what privacy a crowded chapel allowed. She heard the condition clearly enough: hold the road, remain on this side, do not go through Othellos’s doors.

Uriah agreed.

Adriana stayed seated with Roderic sleeping against her. Her voice carried without being raised. Anyone following the escaping people would need to learn that the road belonged to those walking on it.

Thor looked toward the carved lantern once more.

Then she went to the gate.

The party gathered quickly.

Eliza came from Greykeep after the Castellan woke her. Melody appeared ready to travel and wasted no time asking whether someone thought she should. Rhenna had six scouts with her. Varne left the chapel with the determination of a man who had already learned what waiting could cost a sister.

At the northern relay station, Merek stood beside Fenrir.

Caldris stood behind them with an expression that told Thor an argument had been underway before they arrived and had not ended to his satisfaction.

“You can’t run that distance,” he told Merek. “Not after so little practice.”

“I can run.”

Merek looked at Uriah rather than at Caldris.

Thor remembered him on the floor after his first partial change, laughing and shaking. She had been pleased to tell Uriah about his hands. Now he stood before them proposing to carry that fragile achievement into darkness and rough country.

Her first instinct was to agree with Caldris.

Then Merek spoke about the road.

People would be coming down it frightened. Some would be unable to walk well. Some would see a threat in every shadow. He knew the road, and he knew what it was to need help upon it.

Harlon had taught him to find people in the dark.

Fenrir turned his great head toward Uriah.

“He’s right. I’m coming too.”

Thor studied Merek’s face. He was afraid. He made no attempt to hide it. There was also a steadiness she had not seen when he first began to recover, something belonging to a man who had found a task that mattered more to him than proving he was recovered.

She did not promise Caldris that nothing would happen to him. No one in that group could make such a promise about anyone.

She checked her saddle instead.

Melody led them across the hills, leaving the main road to those who needed it. The scouts knew the country from weeks of watching. They passed broken walls, patches of gorse, dark water that flashed briefly beneath the horses’ feet.

Elyan flew ahead, returned, and went forward again.

Thor kept part of her attention on the terrain and part on the people around her. Riding fast in the dark allowed little room for pride. One loose stone under a hoof could injure a horse and slow everyone behind it.

Merek ran beside them as a man.

Fenrir matched his pace without effort.

Past the second stream, Thor heard the change begin.

She looked back.

Merek’s shoulders shifted. His stride broke for a moment, then continued. His back altered beneath his clothing, his weight moving forward as though the ground itself had drawn him closer.

He did not stop.

Thor slowed just enough to see him crest the next rise.

Gray fur. A long jaw. Four feet finding the stones with uncertain speed.

His eyes caught the faint light.

He looked terrified.

He kept running.

When loose rock slipped under him, Fenrir leaned against his shoulder. The smaller wolf recovered, found his pace, and continued beside the great one.

Thor faced forward again.

There would be time later to speak of courage, if Merek wanted it spoken of. For now he needed them to reach the road.

The quarry mouth opened out of the darkness below the basin.

Thor reined in when Uriah did. Warmth had reached them through the ground, subtle enough that she might have missed it if she had not spent the night waiting for that particular presence.

The Keeper’s voice came faintly through the stone.

Marta Quill was in the courtyard.

Thor settled her horse and listened.

She would remember afterward how little she could see. Rough ground. Pale fragments of rock. The shape of Melody nearby. Steam rising from a horse’s breath and disappearing before it reached the height of her face.

Everything happening above them arrived as a voice.

Hesketh had reached the bakery at half past three. Marta was already there. The lanterns had seemed different to her after the workers said Lirien’s name, and she had been unable to sleep.

Hesketh told her why.

Marta took down the two honey loaves she had prepared for the morning cart. She wrapped them, put on her red scarf, and left the bakery.

Others had gathered by the east well. Eight masons. Three bakers. Two water carriers. Lys’s cousin among the workers who had felt that something changed beneath their feet.

Thor listened to the numbers without turning them into a fighting strength.

Tools in belts were not weapons by intention. The people at the well had not assembled for an assault. They had woken troubled and come to the place where their working day usually began.

Marta told them a little girl stood in a corridor, uncertain whether she was allowed to leave.

They had lit their lanterns for her.

They had said her name.

They could not leave their guest waiting in the hall.

Thor bent her head slightly, listening harder as the Keeper’s voice thinned across the distance.

Marta walked toward the inner gate. The others followed.

It was one of Othellos’s doors.

Thor felt Uriah become still beside her.

The gate admitted supplies. Bread, water, oil. It had admitted the same people countless times because they came in the forms and for the purposes its maker recognized.

Marta put her hand against it.

She brought bread.

It opened.

Thor let out the breath she had been holding.

Inside, the courtyard recognized the people who had kept it. They had filled its troughs and tended its lights. Whatever Othellos believed about ownership, the welcome belonged to them.

“And the wing?” Thor asked.

Marta was crossing toward it.

The captain had arrived.

He stood with a drawn sword between the courtyard and the open rooms.

Two other guards stood nearby. The Keeper described the captain’s gray coat and the silver at his throat, the way he faced people who had always obeyed him and expected obedience to resume if he insisted upon it firmly enough.

He ordered Marta back to her ovens.

She told him she had brought bread.

The wing was closed, he said.

Its doors were open, she answered.

Thor’s hand moved toward her hammer.

It was an instinct without use. The captain stood miles away. No speed in her arm could reach him through the account arriving beneath her horse’s hooves.

Marta walked past him.

The Keeper paused.

Thor stopped breathing.

“He raised his sword.”

Beside her, someone made a small movement in the saddle.

A mason stepped in front of Marta.

Odric. Forty-one of the courtyard’s carved lanterns had been his work. He stood beneath the lifted sword without speaking.

Thor felt the familiar narrowing of her attention that came before violence. Distances. Angles. What could be reached. What could be broken.

None of it could help him.

“The captain?” she asked.

Still holding the sword up.

Unable to bring it down.

The oldest law of hospitality held within the shelter. A host could not strike a guest. A guest could not strike a host.

Thor looked toward the unseen basin.

“He isn’t the host.”

“No,” the Keeper said.

He never had been. The people who brought the bread had kept the place.

For a moment Thor thought of every fortress she had entered where the lord took credit for its strength while never learning who repaired its roof or fed its people. She had known the injustice of it. She had not expected to hear of a sword stopped by the distinction.

Marta continued down the corridor.

Faces appeared at the doors. Halemar gripping the frame. The counting woman, lips moving. A man with ink-stained fingers. A boy beside his father.

Pell Ardent.

Thor closed her eyes briefly.

Garrick’s name. Ignatius’s choice beside it. Two slips touching beneath one lamp.

Marta reached the corridor light.

Lirien stood beside it in bare feet.

The girl turned at the sound of footsteps. She looked at the red scarf, then at the bundle.

She smelled the bread.

Thor opened her eyes.

She had faced enemies who could tear apart stone. She had waited for attacks she could see coming and attacks she could only feel in the air. None of that prepared her for listening to a child recognize something good before she dared believe it was meant for her.

Marta knelt.

She unwrapped the loaves.

She explained that Lirien was a guest. Someone had expected her. Someone had kept the lamps for her. She could leave whenever she wished.

Then she offered her hand.

Lirien looked at the floor.

“Can I?”

The Keeper’s answer reached them after she had given it to the girl.

Yes.

Lirien took Marta’s hand.

The courtyard lanterns warmed together.

Thor felt only a faint echo through the quarry stone, but the Keeper described the change as if summer had entered a cold room.

Halemar stepped out.

The counting woman followed. She paused beside the lamp, counted twelve, and stopped.

Pell and his father came into the corridor. The man with ink-stained fingers. The others, one after another, passing the captain who still held his sword above a mason’s head.

Twelve guests.

Not the seven they had first been able to identify. Not a number on a page to be revised later when information improved. Twelve people moving out of rooms that had held them.

Dorran rose behind them.

He walked with his hands open.

When the captain looked at him, the guard said he had brought their meals for two years without asking their names.

Then he kept walking.

Thor remembered wanting to despise him without qualification. She still wanted an accounting for those two years. But an accounting did not require him to remain where he could do more harm, and walking after the people he had helped imprison was a choice he had not made before.

The masons found the way through the gate.

Morning bread carts went in. Empty carts came out.

The gate knew the forms.

So the guests left in the carts.

Marta held Lirien on the first seat. Halemar lay on flour sacks in another, carried there by Odric and a second mason. The counting woman walked beside a cart with her hand against it.

Nobody stopped them.

Thor watched the first gray suggestion of morning touch the broken ridge above the quarry.

Then the Keeper’s voice changed.

Othellos was awake.

The captain had reached him through one of his doors. He knew the wing was empty. He knew who had emptied it.

“How many riders?” Thor asked.

“Thirty.”

“The western road?”

“Yes.”

Thor turned her horse.

“Then we hold the western road.”

The narrow cut lay a quarter mile above the quarry.

Broken rock rose on either side, leaving little room for two carts to pass. Thor had no intention of allowing the pursuit to reach the people below it. The terrain gave them a place to stand and a clear direction in which everyone else could continue.

They reached it as the first cart came over the rise.

A red scarf.

Two horses walking carefully downhill.

A child so small that Thor saw the loaf in her hands before she properly understood the shape beneath the flour sack.

For weeks Lirien had been a name, then a preference, then a hand against a door described through stone. Now she was a little girl sitting on a woman’s lap in a moving cart.

Thor dismounted.

“Keep going,” she called. “Through the cut. All the way down to the shelter.”

Marta looked at her, then at Uriah beside her.

His glove was off. The Crown shone against his palm.

Recognition changed Marta’s face, but she kept the horses moving.

She told Lirien people had come to hold the road.

The child looked at Thor.

Thor had been looked at by frightened children before. She kept her hammer low, her stance steady, and did not make the mistake of offering a great reassuring smile to someone who did not know whether her face was safe.

Lirien’s gaze moved to Melody, then to the two wolves.

Merek trembled beside Fenrir but held his ground.

Finally the girl looked at Uriah.

“Are you the floor?”

Thor felt something catch behind her ribs.

“No,” Uriah answered after a moment. “But I know her.”

Lirien considered that.

Then she offered him her half-loaf.

“For holding the road.”

He took it.

The cart continued downhill.

Thor watched it long enough to see the girl turn back toward Marta. Then she faced the climb again.

More carts passed. Halemar stared at the sky from his flour sacks. The counting woman walked without moving her lips. Pell rode on his father’s shoulders.

Thor marked them without calling out their names. They did not need another stranger demonstrating knowledge of them. They needed the road clear beneath their feet.

Dorran came behind the last cart.

He stopped beside Uriah, looked at the Crown, and then up toward the riders appearing against the sky.

They would want him most of all, he said.

Uriah told him to keep walking.

Thor kept her eyes on the riders while Dorran went past.

Then the workers stopped.

Odric turned at the top of the cut.

The others turned with him. Masons in dusty coats. Bakers with flour still on their clothes. Water carriers. Hesketh holding the blue lantern he had taken from the shelter. Oren nearby.

They stood across the road.

Thor stared.

“Behind us.”

Odric shook his head.

“We’re the hosts.”

“This isn’t the courtyard.”

He looked toward the carts disappearing below them.

“A host doesn’t let someone follow his guests out the door to drag them back.”

Thor took one step toward him, then stopped.

The riders were close enough now that an argument would leave everyone less prepared. She looked across the line, judging the gaps between people, the ground beneath their feet, where she could move if the horses came on.

She would not let the workers’ courage make them expendable.

Thirty riders rounded the last switchback.

Gray coats. Silver at their throats. At the front, the captain carried the sword he had been unable to lower inside the shelter.

He saw Odric.

Then Thor and Uriah behind him.

Then the wolves.

He reined in.

“Move.”

Odric remained still.

The captain recognized Uriah. His voice sharpened around the name Grey and the accusation that he had taken the god.

Uriah did not answer.

“Tell them to move, or I’ll ride through them.”

Thor lifted Mjölnir slightly.

She could see the riders behind the captain now, faces emerging from the dawn. Some stared at the workers. Others looked at her hammer or Fenrir. Fear held them in different ways, tightening one mouth, making another man blink too often, setting a third to shifting his reins from hand to hand.

They were accustomed to frightening people whose names they did not need to learn.

Now some of those people stood in the road.

Uriah said he would not order them aside.

They were not his to command.

The captain raised his sword.

Thor set her feet.

Warmth came through the stone.

The blade stopped above the captain’s shoulder.

His horse shifted beneath him. Other horses moved uneasily, feeling what their riders could not yet explain.

The Keeper spoke through the road.

It belonged to the people walking on it.

Thor kept her hammer ready. She listened without assuming that a voice, however old, relieved her of the responsibility to stand where she was.

The Keeper addressed every rider.

They had all traveled once. They had entered the basin seeking work, shelter, somewhere to belong. Every one of them had a name.

She knew those names.

Their mothers’ names too. The roads they had come along. Which of them hummed when nervous. Which still had a lamp waiting at home.

The captain’s sword shook.

They could travel the road, the Keeper told them. But if they used it to drag guests back into a house that was never theirs, they would do so knowing she knew them.

And would remember.

Thor watched the faces behind the captain.

She had heard gods threaten destruction. She knew what people looked like when they calculated whether they might survive it.

This was different.

A rider near the back lowered his eyes.

Another stopped shifting the reins.

The silence lasted.

Then a young man with a carefully tended mustache dismounted.

He walked past the other horses until he stood near the captain.

He looked at Odric.

His mother kept a lamp, he said. In the third cottage past the well. Every night.

Thor heard Uriah draw a small breath beside her.

The young man’s brother had left two months earlier. A receiving officer who counted everything twice.

Sallow.

Thor understood before the man finished speaking.

Their mother said his brother had gone somewhere better. He had not believed her.

He looked at his own feet on the road.

Now he thought she might be right.

He unfastened his sword belt.

Thor watched his hands carefully. There was no shame in that vigilance. The people behind her still needed protection, and trust would have to begin with what he actually did.

He laid the sword in the road.

Then he walked past Odric.

Past Hesketh’s lantern.

Past Thor.

She moved just enough to leave him room.

Eleven more followed.

Not together. There was no command to obey, and each decision required its own small struggle. A man dismounted, looked toward the captain, then away. Another laid down a spear. Someone removed a silver chain and left it beside the weapons.

Thor counted them.

She did not mean to. Numbers remained part of keeping people safe. But with each person who passed her, the count became less like estimating an enemy’s strength and more like making certain nobody had been left behind.

Twelve.

The captain looked at the road for a long time.

Thor remained ready.

Then he turned his horse.

Seventeen riders followed him back up the climb.

She watched until the bend hid the last of them.

Only then did she lower Mjölnir.

Her arm ached from holding the weight so still. She had not struck once.

Beside her, Uriah still held Lirien’s bread.

Thor looked at it, then at his face, and almost laughed. The sound never quite formed. There was too much else moving through her for laughter to find a clear way out.

Merek sank onto his haunches.

His body began to change.

Thor turned toward him, ready to help and uncertain what help would mean. Fenrir stayed close while the gray fur withdrew and the long shape shortened painfully into a man kneeling with both palms against the stone.

Merek shook from head to foot.

His gaze remained fixed downhill.

“Twelve,” he said.

“Twelve,” Uriah answered.

“And twelve more,” Thor said.

She looked toward the people who had laid down their weapons. Then at Dorran’s receding shape, and the workers whose empty places Othellos would discover in the morning.

“And Dorran. And this entire line.”

Odric turned toward her.

Thor shook her head slowly.

“He’ll have to bake his own bread.”

The weapons remained in the road.

Odric asked what they should do with them. Uriah said to leave them as a reminder of where the road went.

Thor might once have objected to leaving serviceable steel uncollected. This morning she understood what he meant.

Odric knelt beside the nearest sword and drew the chisel from his belt.

The first small strike rang clearly in the morning air.

Thor watched him work. Forty-one lanterns in a courtyard he did not own. Now another, cut into a road he had chosen to stand upon.

He did not need instructions about which way it should face.

Toward the traveler.

When he finished, they went down together.

Merek walked on two legs with Fenrir beside him, leaning when he needed to. Nobody commented. The scouts watched the slopes. Melody kept the group moving without hurrying those who had already spent what strength they possessed.

Hesketh carried the blue lantern though daylight had reached the valley.

Thor walked rather than mount again. Her horse followed easily, glad of the change in pace. The road that had looked like a place to fight a short time before now held flour-dusted coats, tired shoulders, tools, and the ordinary uneven conversation of people beginning to believe they had survived something.

She thought of Lexander.

He would be waiting at Greykeep, trying to distinguish silence from bad news. Io would have work for him if he became unbearable. The thought warmed her, then made her impatient to tell them what had happened.

Lirien was out.

Pell and his father were out.

There was more to explain, and the work was not finished. They still needed to bring people safely onward, learn who required care, discover names that had not yet reached Mary’s table.

But those first facts could be spoken without qualification.

Thor let herself carry them down the hill.

The carts stood beside the shelter.

Blankets had appeared from Maud’s supplies. Dunstan handed out water. Oren worked at a fire with the fierce concentration of someone determined that this particular task would go correctly.

Thor stopped near the edge of the gathering and looked.

Halemar lay where he could see the sky without lifting his head. Someone adjusted a blanket around his feet. Pell remained close to his father. The woman who had counted sat without moving her lips.

The men who had laid down their weapons had not merged comfortably into the others. Thor had not expected them to. Choices made on a road would need to be lived afterward, among people who had reasons to distrust them.

For now they had put their weapons down.

For now nobody was being sent back.

She looked for the red scarf.

Marta sat beside the trough. Lirien leaned over the water with both elbows on the stone, studying her reflection. Her bread was finished.

Uriah went toward her.

Thor remained a few paces away, close enough to hear without placing another stranger directly in the child’s path.

Lirien asked whether the Keeper was in the water.

Sometimes, Uriah told her.

The girl leaned closer.

“Thank you for telling me it was for me.”

Thor felt the warmth reach her through the ground.

The Keeper answered softly, using Lirien’s name.

“You’re welcome.”

The little girl sat back and considered what she had heard.

“She sounds tired.”

“She’s been up all night,” Uriah said. “Waiting for you.”

Lirien accepted that with a small nod.

Then she yawned.

Marta put an arm around her before she finished. The child leaned against the baker’s side as though her body had made a decision her thoughts had not yet caught up with.

Her eyes closed.

Thor watched Marta lower her chin toward the roughly cut hair. No ceremony marked the moment. Nobody asked the child to understand what she had survived or what her leaving had changed.

Someone went to find another blanket.

Lirien was asleep before it arrived.

Thor turned toward the road to make certain it remained clear.

Behind her, the fire caught.