This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part VIII, Part VII, Part VI, Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…
Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa, the Lady of the Mountain, was a typhoon of power completely defined by, and paradoxically in turn defined the true meaning of femineity. Not the soft, weaker sex that feigned distress and played coy games behind folded hands in Court, no, she was everything that women were in the long history of the Earth. That being primarily in the appropriate management of men, the co-opting of leadership opinion, and shaping of world events. Nothing that would be as what men proclaimed to be as a ‘woman’s place.’
‘A woman’s place’ was but a worldview of sad men that was solely defined by the pathetic men that believed it, and they were the ones that made their worldview real for the rest of the civilized world. The women had to be kept in check, in their place, behind the chair, off to the side, in the bedroom, working the kitchens, or minding the children, that was the natural order of things. They were weaker, softer, and more emotional than the men, so of course, that had to be the natural order.
Might made right.
Yet, most men would acknowledge that women held some form of power, even if it was not the open power that men flaunted without care and with unexcused privilege. Woman had power. But it was a silent one. A reserved one. It managed quietly at the neck. The head could not turn without a neck. Men were loudly arrogant about their power, real or imagined, swinging it about like their sexual member, proud of themselves for nothing that warranted pride.
Both in might and pride, the Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was nearly a man by both measures. She was unrepentant and brash, wholly herself and willing to swing her power wherever she felt it was necessary or needed. She had many roles across Wales, Scotland, England, and further abroad in places like France, Austria, and Italy. Her locus was within Mount Wyddfa, and was always bound to it, but she flung herself where ever the winds of her soul bid her to go. In the great houses of the European powers she was the Lady Snowdon, and she was a force to not be taken lightly or who’s counsel was to be discounted.
Lady Snowdon was a brazen force of fyccin nature personified. And by consequence, she was greater than any man. And so far, every man that Liz had encountered in the presence of Lady Snowdon knew exactly what the Lady represented.
Terror.
After watching her teacher at work, Liz was certain that the imps of hell would refer to the Lady as their Queen. The Lady Snowdon did not suffer fools, which included Liz. In becoming her pupil, Liz’s world had opened up like a lightning torn sky that had unleashed the floods of the Old Testament. The heavens, the earth, and things behind and beneath them were slowly unveiled through the tumultuous, and often painful, instruction.
Trauma is a powerful rogue wave. Like a rogue wave, it often appears to come from nowhere, a fist of a swell that towers over the oblivious ones that preceded it and the meek ones to follow. It crashes against the beach, the wall, the cliff with a fury that the land is not capable of withstanding. Caves collapses, arches fall into the ocean, and entire beaches get swallowed by the tumult. Trauma is the same.
The death of a loved one. The diagnosis that no one expected. The fall of a powerful trusted leader. Trauma comes in many forms.
For Liz, trauma was watching her beloved cousin die in childbirth. Watching her bleed to death right in front of her, while everyone rushed to help a situation that could not be real. And in it, Liz was taken by the rogue wave. It picked it her up, buried her head beneath the foam and froth, and dared her to occasionally take a breath in order to survive the tumbling wash. Liz felt her head break the surface every so often, and she would gasp for a breath of normalcy, for routine, for the comfort of the life that came before, and she would realize that the air was poisoned by the very wave she was carried by. It was nothing but salty spray and bitter remnants of a life destroyed.
Her madness of being lost within her trauma set her up for something either terrible or something profound.
Liz had a touch of madness in all of her learning with the Lady. It was if she was a tiny whirlwind of her own creation that spiraled in the wake of the great storm that Lady Snowdon created. The Lady perhaps witnessed that in the dark, on the edge of a dying fire all that time ago… a young woman that was spiraling in her trauma. Not downwards towards destruction, but instead something much more rare, a thing that was spinning upwards in power, ferocity, and impact. Liz’s madness was ever nearby as Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa invested of herself into Liz, keeping lockstep with Liz’s ardent stride towards learning the ways of the deeper universe.
Liz discovered that reality was but an angry scab that settled on the fervent energies that lay below, churning and interlacing in the deeps of all of creation. Most humans were content camping idly on the mantle of reality, but there were a few that were either born of that chaos, or yearned to reach for it, to seek it out. Liz learned just how far her reach could go. And it turned out the madness was necessary component to keep her world in order with that reach. And because of that… the overwhelming regret that the Lady Snowdon had promised at that same fireside never seemed to arrive.
Liz’s teacher was just as shocked as Liz was. Regrets are often borne of trauma, and instead of discovering them, she released them. The trauma started to fall away in bits and pieces and the rogue wave retreated sullenly back to the sea from which it arose.
Liz discovered power. She fell in love with it. And in turn Liz became a lover to magic, as a nun gives themselves to the Church. Had the Lady Snowdon foreseen this? Could she have known what she was going to create through the process?
Liz had always wondered. And to her fault, she had never asked. By the time she discovered all the questions she had never had the time for, her teacher’s own time had given out. Whether by cruel circumstance, a choice of God, or the proverbial luck running dry, one witch carried on while the other had been destroyed, sacrificing all she was to save the mad girl she had found by the fire on a cold Welsh moor.
Ironically, the aforementioned regret did eventually arrive in some form. But it was not a profound wave of destruction, but the slow etch of a river on a mountain, more of a widening scar than a traumatic wound.
All of this had occurred before the one two punch of the Great Famine and the Great Mortality descended upon Europe with fury. Both of which gave Liz a reason to believe that she had been born at the highest point in Mankind’s history. When the Famine arrived in Northern Europe, she was already a solid 100 years old. Being 130-ish when the Great Mortality arrived, (she would be about 500 years old before it was called the Black Death,) she felt she had made all the right choices.
Any additional Regrets were few, and most were men.
She settled in Cardiff after the fall of King Ne Peris in 1315. Very few understood that the Great Famine was not caused by a shift in the planet’s tilt or by a variation in sun exposure or a change in atmospheric composition… It was because one of the major kingdoms of Fairie, under the auspices of Fairie King Ne Peris, had been completely eradicated by a great human host. An army of ten thousand men had vanished into the forest in France, and when they successfully executed their revenge and slaughtered the Fair Folk on their own lands, the stupid short sighted humans found themselves unable to come back home. Every portal between the realms snapped shut, and the reverberation on the natural world was cataclysmic. Every plant, every animal, every living thing felt the implosion of that connection, and the world would feel its effects for hundreds of years.
After that, human beings swept the world like a virus, exploding in numbers with their advances in technology, and in revolt, the other beings of the world tried to fight back. They fought with famine. They fought with disease. They fought with monsters. They ended up hiring people like Liz.
Work, work, work all the time.
But word would get out that a certain King had hired a certain person for that kind of work, and then the other opposing King would hire their own person for that kind of work. An arms race of a sort, long before there were superpowers and nuclear weapons, there were the other forces one could bring to bear to keep enemies at bay.
That is exactly how Ysabella “Elizabeth” de Montfort, now the Lady Snowdon, met Anton de Lionne for the first time. Unfortunately, Liz remembered the day down to the minute details.
It was spring. Versailles was in full bloom, and the rampages of the late winter had finally worn off. However it was France, and it was a royal palace, so of course the place smelt like shit. Liz was in a far corner of the gardens pretending to listen to some pompous ass that had some provincial holding that apparently had other courtiers lifting their skirts.
Liz desperately wanted to turn the vile little man into a toad and leave him in the fountains. If that were to occur though, others in attendance would probably intuit that Liz was a witch. And not just some random witch, but one of immense power, because they would all be turned into toads as well. Then Liz would use the pompous ass’s cane and see how the Scottish sport of golf played out on the palace grounds. She was daydreaming splendidly about hitting green and black toads as far as she could imagine, painting statues and walls alike in viscous remains of high velocity amphibians, when a strange blond gentleman took her by surprise.
He knew her name and his command of French was exquisite.
“Pardon the interruption, my lady. I have it in on good authority that you are the exceptionally famous Lady Snowdon? Your family line is something of a legend to my own. Not to be presumptuous, of course.”
Liz narrowed her eyes shrewdly, glad that she had aged down the last few years, appearing to be in her mid-twenties and not a day of her four hundred years. She could use the inexperience of her apparent youth to gain advantage with a handsome, as she sniffed, well-smelling… strapping young man.
Her interest was piqued to say the least. And at worst, she was immensely glad for the interruption. Anything to save her from the astoundingly boring country nobles pretending to flout about in fancy dress. She was the Lady Snowdon for god’s sake, she had more class in a single fingertip.
“One should not leave an introduction one-sided?” Liz nodded politely, dipping the edge of her unfurled umbrella in acknowledgement. “If one were to do such a terrible thing, wouldn’t I be at a terrible disadvantage with such an impolite introduction?”
The gentleman doffed his hat and bowed at the waist, a tightly flourished hand flair at his right knee as he dipped downwards in a formal bow. He had been well trained. Liz was still enjoying how clean he smelled, it was a rare delight to her senses.
“If such a disadvantage existed for the Lady Snowdon, which I sincerely doubt, why wouldn’t one take advantage of it? It is said she withers strong men down to their bones, and shatters all conceptions that would normally have any other person evicted from Court and wasting away in a pit somewhere. But I hear it said that the Lady Snowdon continues her consequence free reign. I would dare to maintain such advantage if it was to be had.” He smirked with only the corner of his mouth, tilting the edge of his full lip upwards devilishly.
Liz felt certain parts of herself start to warm up. She did not appreciate how her animal brain was reacting to the handsome man with the silver tongue. She walked down a path of the garden, and the gentleman followed a half pace behind.
“But alas, dear sir,” Liz curtsied formally in response, stepping away from the currents of conversation that carried on amongst the previous group. “I would say you are being presumptuous, counter to your previous assertion. I am indeed the Lady Snowdon, as my mother was before me, and while I have more titles than most men currently sweating in these gardens, I would think it would be any of their interest to not leave me wondering whom I conversing with.”
His smirk lowered as he worked through the veiled insult. Then as if a decision was suddenly made, it reversed course and his smile was wide and welcoming. “Anton de Lionne.”
“Choosing not to use a family name? No titles? Pray, what sort of Court am I attending?”
“One could say it does not fit the work,” Anton shrugged. “I find it better to trade on my own name these days instead of relying on my stout and oppressive lineage. Also, I should note that coming from the family that I do, such lineage is not the best help to my endeavors. This country is imprisoned in a regime that is slowly and painfully willing itself to death.”
Liz walked away from the group, and Anton followed at a respectful distance to her side. “And what endeavors are those, sir? “
“Have we already arrived at that level of trust with one another, Lady Snowdon?”
“Categorize it as discovery.”
“Ah! In the interest of discovery then. I am in employ of the King as an Advisor. Particularly in the location, isolation, and destruction of foreign agents that seek to undermine his Crown. One could say that I am a witch hunter.”
Liz’s breath caught in her chest, but felt she managed to hide it well enough. “A witch… hunter?”
Anton laughed. “Yes as crude as it sounds. Sometimes you just have to find the witch, or warlock, whichever it may be. Those nefarious agents of Satan himself abound.”
“And then what?” Liz feigned ignorance. Liz turned her head and she caught the shimmer in his aura. He has prepared to confront her. He was wearing a ward. Something old. This fucker had just twisted his chance of getting the best lay of his life into having his insides and outsides switch places, preferably through this pores of his skin.
“Well I usually start by binding the witch to an object, as to remove them from their locus, and then forcing a confession of sorts, for the courts of course…”
“Of course, of course.” Liz amiably agreed. “It is critically important to have legal standing in such things.”
“And then we convert them to faith, assist in the repenting for sins, and commit them to God.”
“You splash them with water, have a priest pray for them, and then execute them, if I am translating correctly.”
“Often all three at the same time,” Anton shrugged. “As the good book instructs, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'”
“Yet.” Liz nodded sagely.
“Pardon?” Anton stumbled at the interjection and had to quicken his step to catch up.
“One must be a part of what they hunt, no? A hunter must understand their prey. And that implies that one must suffer a witch to live.” Liz took the chance to look him over more closely, acting coy, all the while as she folded her fingers out of sight and uttered a small invocation under her breath.
‘Seven brushes by seven folds by seven depths, all untold. Six to witness, five to lie, four to death, three to sign, two to follow, and one…‘
“Divine.” Liz said aloud. The trigger rang like a bell in her head, and power flowed through her attacking whereever the nearest threat was.
Anton stopped walking. His hands lifted suddenly, scratching at his throat as if he was being licked by fire underneath his jacket.
“What ever is the matter?” Liz asked in a haughty tone.
“Damn necklace under my clothes. By the devil, what is this?” Anton ripped his buttons, one hand pulling his tunic open while the other threw his jacket to the ground. “My sincere apologies Lady Snowdon…”
He pulled a glowing necklace from his chest and dropped it on the ground. He blew on his fingers with a look of dismay.
“My father is going to kill me.” Anton whispered. The necklace curled in on itself, the metal fusing into a series of molten pellets, clicking lightly as it cooled.
“That is a protection ward?” Liz played up her ignorance all the more. Was was this Anton de Lionne’s game? He was either the stupidest man she had ever met, or this was the cleverest ruse she had ever been a victim of. He was an an admirable package and probably had an admirable package to boot. Her mind wandered back to the chances of a romp. It had been a while.
If she was going to get caught by a witch hunter, she could have some fun first. Right?
“It was a protection ward. Damn. My father carries a notion that I become some version of his uncle. He was a great hunter, worked for the Church, found some notoriety in Eastern Europe eliminating vampires or some nonsense like that.” Anton pointed at the ruined amulet. “Supposedly that was my great uncle’s.”
“Well congratulations, Mr. De Lionne, you have found a witch in the Court! You are a success!” Liz curtsied as sarcastically as her tone.
Anton’s eyes went wide. “Well, shit.”
…
“Well, shit.” The same voice, hundreds of years later, but the response was an exact match to her memory of the day she inadvertently made Anton de Lionne both a convert and an unlikely, yet strangely formidable, competitor.
Liz hated competition. Especially when they were people that were exceptionally resistant to her normal charms. Like Anton having a thing for his own gender. That made it all the worse. She would have to play nice.
Gag.
“Hello, love,” she replied from her alcove table in the Grand Gallery of the Met. Her fingers were smoking from the work on the Wards, and let them glimmer and spark as she took a small sip from her coffee cup.
“You are the one that is fucking with the Wards.” Anton smiled. His retinue of three assistants spread out behind him, taking flanking positions on every side they could to keep her from escaping. “After all these years, I find the one time Lady Snowdon fucking about with my shit. You know this is my job, right? I get paid for this, Ms. Montfort.”
“Elizabeth, please. And you must calm down, Anton, and have a seat. How many fellow gays you got running with you these days?” Liz turned her head slowly, getting small reads on every person he had with him. “Mixing work and pleasure? Do you take turns fucking each other? How does that even work?”
“You know, my sexuality aside, I remember a time when you thought I was worth a turn in the grass, Ms. Montfort.” Anton pulled a chair out slowly, and settled into it like a leaf on the wind.
Ignoring the fact that Liz had asked for first names was an annoying move. She deflected her anger as best she could. “Don’t remind me. It still irks me.”
“Versailles?”
“Forget about it,” Liz rolled her eyes.
“Come on.” Anton insisted.
“Yes, Versailles, obviously. How was I supposed to know? Now, can you let it go?”
“Sure, Ms. Montfort. Now tell me why you are fucking with the wards on my fucking building.”
“Anton, dear, the wards are intact. If you took a half measure to look, you would see that nothing is wrong.”
“At this point, if the Wards were to grow mouths and scream obscenities at our guests, I would not be surprised. I am instead fucking surprised to find Elizabeth de Montfort, of all people, sitting here, with her trademark shit eating grin spewing lies in every direction. Why are you trying to break them? I mean that is asking for an epic shit storm.”
“Break is such a harsh word. I am not going to break anything. Like so many of the works in these hallowed halls, the Wards are works of art themselves. I am only admiring them.” Liz smiled innocently.
“Yeah, right.” Anton scoffed. He waved one of his assistants over. “‘Admiring’ them. Keep your hands were I can see them, please.”
Liz rested her wrists on the table, setting her coffee cup down gently. “Now Anton. We don’t want to make this… problematic.”
Anton raised his own hands in response. “Look at my hands, Ms. Montfort. Now look at your hands. You have been caught red-handed. Literally.”
“It’s only literal when it is written down, Anton.” Liz eyed the assistant approaching the table.
“Then I will write it down and I will tack it to your fucking forehead. Stop what you are doing. Now.”
The nearest assistant pulled what looked like loops of hair from his satchel. Liz was impressed they were so well prepared. How many witches did they incarcerate at the Met on a yearly basis? To have Bindings of Morgane prepared and on hand to tie a witch up to restrict the flow of magic? Liz nearly wanted to ask who made the rope of hawthorn and the yew bark, since the person that makes it determines just how effective it is. But since she was not here for the pleasantries…
“If you want to write it down, perhaps, you should write this down,” she said instead.
“What is that?” Anton held his hand over his shoulder for his assistant to hand him the bindings. He sounded borderline annoyed he was having to interact with her.
“You. Are. An. Idiot.”
“Duly noted.” Anton sighed heavily. The assistant handed over the Bindings and stood behind Anton’s chair glaring.
“You didn’t write it down.” Liz said in a teasing voice. She noted the assistant was cute, in a confused Greenwich Village teenager sort of way. More rebelling against his parents than a true pupil of the art. His stylish pomp of curly hair was definitely ensorcelled. And once she got the smell of it, she knew those Bindings were his as well. Amateur hour at the Met.
“Kindly fuck off, Ms. Montfort. Now I am going to put these on, and I am going to escort you off the premises, and if you come back, I will notify the New York Accords Chapter to file a grievance.”
“Oh, no, a grievance. How terrible.”
“I mean it, Ms. Montfort.”
Liz dropped her voice to an sharp grating whisper. “For the last fucking time, Anton. You. Can. Call. Me. Elizabeth.”
She shifted her right hand to her left wrist in a blur, sending the half full coffee cup skittering across the table and falling to the floor. She laid her middle finger on the bracelet’s emerald. She winked at Anton and she knew Anton’s assistant would remember this day for the rest of his goddamn life.
Liz felt the dump of stored magic across her chest, a flash of warming through her lymph nodes as the energies she had carefully stored unfurled themselves through her nervous system. Her blood felt like it was sparkling under her skin, and she reminded herself that she did not have to pee, it was just a sensation.
Sure as the sun rising, she felt the urge to release her bladder. Liz pushed the urge away and instead… touched Anton’s hand.
Three things happened.
The assistant leaned forward in surprise, probably trying to invoke something idiotic while one hand pulled his boss out from harm’s way. Anton looked at his own hand as if he was just introduced to static electricity for the first time. And lastly, the spell hit the Bindings as if they were made of high yield detonation cord.
Magic is a powerful flow, like a river. It is the first thing a student of the art learns. It was the first thing Liz had learned. It is the movement of energy from all things, through all things, to all things. It is both of the world and apart from it. Magic flows through everything because it is separate from it. Like light passing through glass. The glass is real, and light is real, but because of the properties of both glass and light, one passes through the other. Magic flows through. Some things can handle it. Others… well, not so much.
Magic flowed through Anton. It flowed through the Bindings. It flowed through the assistant. And all of it was lashed to Liz’s will. Her eyes flashed, her retina’s glowed red momentarily as she released her invocation word.
“Calanthe,” Liz exhaled.
The Bindings had not been meant for this level of power. They were fashioned by an amateur that was not prepared to meet someone like Liz. She refactored their creation, and they flowed down Anton’s arm and up the assistant’s arm as if they were alive. Their eyes went wide as the bindings flowed under their clothing and around their bodies. Other strands leapt through the air as if they had been loosed as arrows from a bow, their sinews hitting the other assistants in a flash, writhing down underneath their clothing, to nestle against their skind and surround them as well.
It was over in about half a second. Human brains typically don’t process information that fast, but in the realm of magic, it could have been a lifetime. For the four of them, it probably had felt like a lifetime as they were put into submission in every single way that mattered.
To all the other patrons crowding the Met, nothing had happened. Three people were chatting nearby, two sitting and one standing. One moment, it looked as if someone had spilled their coffee, knocking if off the table as they were talking animatedly, and the next, the woman was apologizing for the spill.
“I am so sorry, Anton. But I was telling the truth, I am not trying to break anything.” Liz stood slowly, making eye contact with the other two assistants nearby. They were standing just as still as Anton and the assistant behind his chair. All of them were eerily still, as if they were waiting.
Which they were. Liz wiggled her fingers and all four of them wiggled a bit where they either sit or stood.
“Honestly, having marionettes is so much fun.” Liz grinned as she stood. “I should find a cliff.”
Anton could only blink and move his eyes. He did both a lot. Liz knew he must have been freaking out.
“Oh you shush, you will be fine,” Liz admonished.
She waved her hand, and the other two assistants wandered over. They were walking stiffly, but no one noticed. She made them pull chairs up and sit at the table clumsily. She stood and commanded the nearest assistant with the curly hair to take her previously occupied seat. “There. Now you are all the best of friends! You can sit here, stare at each other, and think about what you have done. I will let you all go when I am done admiring the Wards. Anton. Admiring them.”
Liz walked towards the core of the original building to finish her work. She was nearly done before she had been so rudely interrupted. Shirin had done her part. Al had done his.
Now it was her turn so that Milos could do his part. The vampire thief.
Liz laughed to herself. That sounded like a book title. The Vampire Thief by Anne Rice. Milos was about to do something that had never been attempted since the Met had been built. Oh sure, things had been stolen, and likewise, things had been recovered.
All of that was by humans. And normal humans were oblivious. Oblivious to the real world. The underlying complexity of it all. The ones that cared, the ones that figured it out, those humans reached a nirvana of sorts. They turned into familiars and scholars, into witches and warlocks, some turned into other things, all of the groups defining themselves for the very Accords that were written to maintain the balance between them. But most humans just assumed their reality was actual reality and blundered about in their sad little lives, waiting for payday and binge drinking their upcoming weekend away.
Those that were within scope of the Accords, that were the sorts that the Met was designed to keep out. The primary target of those protections were against the Fey. How does one keep the Fair Folk out? Especially since they typically ignored such preventions?
The Sentinels were there to detect them if those bound by the Accords tried to enter. Thanks to Al, and a little help from Liz, the Sentinels in question were quite crispy and unable to perform their duty.
The Watcher was there to trap those bound by the Accords if they attempted to sneak in. Thanks to Shirin, the Watcher was no longer watching anything.
And lastly, the Wards had two functions, one to repel those bound by the Accords if they had any intent to defy the Accords, and second, to contain them if they violated the same Accords. Breaking or destroying the Wards would have massive consequences, again, because of the Accords. It is a self referential trap that would collapse on anyone trying to fuck with it.
Liz thought about how silly it all was. How it simple it was in the end.
Magic is a flow. Technology is not counter to magic, per se. But magic flows. Technology is man’s attempt to infuse rocks with lightning and force the rock to think on their behalf. Of course, if you submerge something as delicate as micron level integrated circuits into a directed flow of any sort energy, then of course, things are going to get wonky.
One would wonder how a thief would steal anything in a well protected museum. It was about timing, preparation, and execution.
Liz could feel the Wards trembling. She had overlaid the same spells on top of them, inverting them in layers, subverting them by small degrees. Her work was ephemeral in nature, temporary and fleeting. The underlying work of the Wards worked into the very fabric of the building, carved into the stone and arrayed with design, that would persist. Her own work was meant to redirect it.
The flow. She was redirecting the flow of a powerful river, and it just so happened that the building was full of technology. Technologies that normal oblivious humans put so much stock into.
She knew it was ready. She just had to push. Liz pushed the commlink connect button on her ear.
“Milos. Are you ready? When I let go, our comms will be offline. Everything will be offline, at least until the Wards realign.”
Milos came back instantly, his voice sounded like he was smiling ear to ear. Which would be bad in the company of humans, even in his weakened daytime state. She didn’t know his part, but Liz assumed he had it covered.
“I am ready. See you all at Liz’s tonight.”
Shirin and Al both vocalized their sign offs and Liz did the same. She pulled the commlink from her ear and threw it into the nearest trashcan she passed.
Liz closed her eyes, waved her hands in her final invocation, and released the framework she had built. Mentally, it was like a powerlifter completing a rep and setting the bar down. She just released it.
The Wards gasped at the strain instead. All the weight that Liz had been shouldering in her work was immediately transferred to the ancient Wards, and the energy that flowed through them stopped, and instead went sideways.
Every single light in the Met flickered at once.
Liz turned on her heel, walked through the Grand Gallery, and out the front doors as every single cell phone, computer, camera, laser, sensor, server, and network collectively decided that lightning in rocks should not, would not, and could not work at the whim of any mortal human being.
Because… fuck ’em. That’s why.