The July sun was a brass hammer, beating the dust of Oak Haven into a fine, choking powder that tasted of copper and old grudges. Inside the courthouse, the air was a stagnant soup of stale tobacco, unwashed wool, and the sharp, metallic tang of institutional cruelty.

Maryanne Stokes stood before the bench, her spine as unyielding as a rake handle. At thirty-four, the town had long since buried her under the label of “old maid,” a woman as dry and dusty as the acreage she clung to. Her hair, the color of winter wheat, was pulled back with such severity it seemed to strain the very skin of her face. Her hands, rough and stained with the iron-rich soil of the Double Ranch, were clasped tightly in front of her. She did not look at the gallery, where the church auxiliary fanned themselves with a rhythmic, judgmental flutter. She looked only at the scales of justice carved into the judge’s desk, knowing they were weighted with Sterling’s gold.

To her right, the heavy rattle of iron announced the presence of the beast.

Jeremiah Conincaid, known in the darker corners of the territory as “Grizz,” loomed like a thundercloud. He stood six-foot-four, a mountain of buckskin and corded muscle, smelling of pine resin and the raw, iron scent of dried blood. He had been hunted down from the Absaroka range by a six-man posse; two were still under the doctor’s care, and Jeremiah’s own knuckles were split to the bone. His eyes, a startling, glacial blue, burned with a homicidal light that made the bailiff keep his hand perpetually on his holster.

Judge Hyram Potts, a man whose soul was a ledger of debts owed to the banker Josiah Sterling, cleared his throat. The sound was like dry leaves skittering over a grave.

“Jeremiah Conincaid,” Potts boomed, though his eyes darted nervously. “You stand accused of vagrancy, poaching, and resisting arrest. The fines total four hundred dollars. A sum I suspect you do not possess.”

Jeremiah didn’t speak. He simply shifted, the chains at his wrists singing a low, discordant note.

“And you, Miss Stokes,” the judge turned his watery gaze to Maryanne. “You are in violation of the Homestead Preservation Act. A woman without a husband or a son of age cannot maintain a claim on a ranch of this size. The bank’s patience has expired. Unless you produce a husband to co-sign this deed by sunset, the Double Ranch reverts to the bank.”

In the front row, Josiah Sterling checked his pocket watch. He wore a smug smile beneath a waxed mustache. He didn’t just want the land; he wanted the water rights. He wanted to own the very lifeblood of the valley.

“My father paid for that land in blood, Judge,” Maryanne’s voice was low, vibrating with a hidden frequency of rage. “I run it better than any man in this room.”

“The law cares not for sentiment!” Potts snapped, wiping sweat from his bald pate. “However, the court is merciful. Mr. Conincaid needs to work off his debt to society, lest he hang for the assault on Deputy Miller. And you, Miss Stokes, need a husband. I am sentencing Jeremiah Conincaid to five years of indentured labor, remanded to the custody of the Double Ranch. To ensure the legality of the claim, you two will be wed. Now.”

The courtroom erupted in a gasp that was quickly stifled by the cold reality of the sentence. It was a joke to the town—the beast and the crone, shackled together in a mockery of a sacrament.

“I ain’t marrying no one,” Jeremiah growled. His voice was the sound of grinding tectonic plates. “Hang me. I’d prefer the rope.”

“If you hang,” Potts sneered, leaning forward, “the state takes your body. And we know about that young brother of yours up in the peaks, don’t we? The sickly one. Who looks after him when you’re swinging from a cottonwood?”

Jeremiah went deathly still. The rage in his eyes flickered into something sharper: agony.

Maryanne turned slowly to look at the man she was to tether her life to. She didn’t flinch at the scars or the smell of the wild. She evaluated him with the cool, clinical eye of a woman deciding if a horse was worth the winter feed.

“He’s dirty,” she said flatly.

“He’s available,” the judge countered. “Do we have an accord?”

The silence stretched, agonizing and thick. Josiah Sterling leaned forward, his eyes gleaming, waiting for the pride of the Stokes woman to finally break and forfeit the land.

Maryanne looked past the judge, fixing her gaze directly on Sterling. She saw the greed there, the parasitic hunger.

“Unchain him,” she said.

“Do you take this man?” the judge asked, reaching for the marriage license.

“I take the land,” she corrected. “If he comes with it, so be it.”

The ride to the Double Ranch was a descent into a silent war. For two hours, the only sound was the rhythmic clop-creak of the wagon and the distant roll of thunder over the mountains. Jeremiah sat with his knees apart, taking up most of the bench, a caged predator in a flannel shirt that was already too small.

“You got a name for that look?” he asked finally, his voice cutting through the heat.

Maryanne didn’t turn. “What look?”

“Like you just bought a mule that’s likely to kick you.”

“A mule works,” she said dryly. “I haven’t seen you work yet.”

Jeremiah snorted. “You think this piece of paper makes me yours? I could snap your neck and be in the timberline before the moon rises.”

Maryanne pulled the reins, bringing the wagon to a violent halt in the middle of the sagebrush flats. She turned to face him, her hazel eyes flecked with a sudden, dangerous green.

“Then go,” she whispered. “Run to the timberline. Let them hunt you down like the wolf they think you are. Let them find your brother.” She leaned in, her voice dropping to a jagged edge. “Or you can shut your mouth, do the work, and help me keep my home. You need a place to hide. I need a man’s name on a deed. I don’t want you in my bed, and I don’t want your conversation. I want your back and I want your gun.”

Jeremiah stared at her. He had expected tears, or perhaps the trembling fear he was used to seeing in “civilized” folk. He hadn’t expected a partner with ice in her veins and a soul made of flint.

“You got enemies, Maryanne?” he asked, testing the weight of her name.

“I have neighbors,” she replied, snapping the reins. “In Wyoming, that’s worse.”

As they pulled into the yard of the Double Ranch, the sun was a bruised purple, bleeding over the peaks. The farmhouse was a sagging, two-story monument to exhaustion. The fences were patched with wire and desperation, but the land—the valley bowl with its crystal-clear creek—was lush.

“Unhitch the horse,” Maryanne ordered. “There’s stew on the stove. It’s cold, but it’s food.”

Jeremiah moved with a surprising, fluid grace for a man of his size. He checked the barn first. It was meticulously clean, tools organized with a military precision that spoke of a woman who fought chaos every single day.

Inside the house, Maryanne lit a kerosene lamp. The light danced off her sharp features, making her look younger and more tired all at once. She pointed to a small door off the kitchen. “There’s a cot in the pantry.”

“I’ll sleep in the barn,” Jeremiah said, standing by the window. He was watching the shadows. His instincts, honed by years of surviving the Absarokas, were screaming.

“Suit yourself. Food’s there.”

He ate the stew standing up, ladling it directly into his mouth. It was heavily seasoned with sage and black pepper—the best thing he’d tasted in years. “Why do they want it?” he asked, wiping his mouth with a scarred forearm. “Sterling. There’s plenty of dirt in this territory. Why this piece?”

Maryanne stood by the window, her hand resting on the lever of a Winchester rifle. “Because my father was a surveyor before he was a rancher. He found something three years ago. He died before he could file the claim, and Sterling knows it. Or suspects it.”

Jeremiah loomed over her, looking out into the night. “What did he find?”

“Water,” she said softly. “Not just the creek. A massive underground aquifer. In a drought year like this, it’s worth more than gold. If Sterling gets this land, he can irrigate the whole valley and sell the water back to the county at a premium. He’d own every soul in Oak Haven.”

Jeremiah looked at the darkness of the yard. He understood now. This wasn’t a marriage; it was a siege.

“They won’t stop with a lawsuit, Maryanne.”

“I know,” she said, her grip tightening on the rifle. “That’s why I didn’t marry a shopkeeper.”

The silence was shattered by the sound of breaking glass.

A rock, wrapped in a burning rag, sailed through the front window and landed on the rug. Fire bloomed instantly, a hungry, orange beast.

“Get down!” Jeremiah roared.

A gunshot splintered the doorframe exactly where Maryanne’s head had been a second before. Jeremiah tackled her, his weight pinning her to the floor as more lead punched through the timber walls.

“Stay down!” he hissed, his voice no longer human. It was the low rumble of the mountain itself. “Smother the fire. Use flour, not water. I’m going out the back.”

Outside, Jeremiah Conincaid became the wolf.

He didn’t use the door; he slid through the shadows like a draft of cold air. His eyes adjusted to the starlight instantly. He heard the crunch of boots near the corral—two men, maybe three. They were laughing, confident in their cruelty.

Jeremiah circled wide through the high grass. The wind was in his favor, carrying his scent away. He came up behind the first man, a lanky hireling holding a torch. Jeremiah didn’t waste a bullet. He swung the butt of his rifle with brutal, silent efficiency, shattering the man’s knee. As the man buckled, Jeremiah’s forearm closed around his throat, choking off the scream. He dragged him into the darkness and left him unconscious in the weeds.

The second man, hearing a rustle, fired blindly. “Cletus? That you?”

Jeremiah threw a rock against the side of the barn. As the shooter spun toward the noise, Jeremiah loomed up behind him like a landslide. A single hook to the jaw felled the man like a butchered ox.

Silence returned to the valley. Jeremiah recognized the second man—Elias Thorne, a known thug on Sterling’s payroll. He considered killing them. In the mountains, you didn’t leave a wounded predator behind you. But he looked at the house, at the flickering light of the lamp, and remembered the woman inside. He dragged them both to the property line and dumped them like sacks of grain.

When he returned to the kitchen, the fire was out, the room thick with the smell of scorched wool and flour. Maryanne was sitting in a chair, the Winchester across her lap, her face smudged with soot.

“They’re gone,” Jeremiah said.

“Dead?”

“No. Just a long walk back to town.”

He found a bottle of rotgut whiskey in the cupboard and took a long pull before offering it to her. She took a swig without flinching.

“We need to talk,” Jeremiah said, his voice gravelly. “If I’m fighting this war, I need to know the rest of it. The judge mentioned a brother.”

Maryanne set the bottle down. The adrenaline was fading, leaving a hollow exhaustion in its wake. “Tell me.”

“His name is Samuel,” Jeremiah said, his eyes softening for the first time. “He’s twenty-four, but the fever took his mind years ago. Left him with weak lungs. The air up high is too thin for him now, and the air down here is full of Sterling’s dust. I came to town to trade furs for medicine. Sterling’s clerk tried to cheat me, I fought back, and they used Samuel as the lever to break me.”

Maryanne stood up and grabbed the lantern. “Come with me.”

She led him to the root cellar, a cool, earthen space packed with jars of preserves. But in the corner stood a locked oak cabinet. She opened it to reveal rows of amber bottles, meticulously labeled.

“My mother was a healer,” Maryanne said, handing him a jar of dark syrup. “Mustang root and honey for the cough. Camphor for the chest. It’s better than anything in town.”

Jeremiah took the medicine, his massive hand brushing hers. For the first time, the contact didn’t feel like a threat. It felt like an anchor.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Don’t thank me. You can’t leave this land to get him. If you’re seen five miles from here, they’ll shoot you. And Sterling will be back tomorrow with more men.”

“He can’t stay in that cave alone,” Jeremiah’s voice was taut with panic.

“I know,” Maryanne said, her eyes flashing. “That’s why we’re bringing him here. The cellar is dry and hidden. Sterling’s men won’t think to look for an invalid under the floorboards.”

“How?” Jeremiah asked. “I can’t cross the line.”

Maryanne gave a small, wolfish smile of her own. “Sterling and the judge think they own the law. But they forgot one thing: I own the fastest horse in the county.”

The plan was madness.

At midnight, under a shroud of torrential rain, Maryanne saddled her Appaloosa, Bessie. She rode to Miller’s Crossing, the bridge that served as the only way over the fifty-foot gorge.

“Halt!” Deputy Miller shouted as the horse thundered onto the planks.

“Help! Please!” Maryanne screamed, her voice a perfect pitch of manufactured hysteria. “It’s my husband! He’s dying of the fever! He’s thrashing—I need the doctor!”

While she distracted the guards with her performance, Jeremiah moved below. He was a shadow among shadows, climbing the wet, creosoted pylons of the bridge, suspended over the roaring river. He shimmyed across the support beams, his muscles screaming, and vanished into the timberline on the other side.

He ran the three-hour climb in forty-five minutes. He found Samuel shivering in the cave, his breath a wet rattle. Jeremiah lashed the boy to his back with a coil of rope and began the descent. Twice he slipped in the mud, his knees slamming into granite, but he never let his brother hit the ground.

They reached the bridge at 2:55 AM. Maryanne was still there, her wagon parked sideways, blocking the deputies’ view. As a clap of thunder shook the earth, Jeremiah bolted across the deck.

“Hey! What was that?” Miller shouted, spinning around.

“A bear!” Maryanne shrieked, pointing toward the woods. “I saw a bear!”

The three seconds of distraction were all Jeremiah needed to vault the railing into the ditch. Minutes later, they were under the canvas tarp of the wagon, heading home. As they passed the bridge again, Maryanne shouted that she’d “forgotten her purse” and had to go back. The deputies, disgusted by her “womanly flightiness,” let her pass.

By dawn, Samuel was tucked into a cot in the root cellar, breathing the scent of camphor and safety.

The final confrontation came four days later.

A black carriage rolled up the drive, flanked by six riders. Josiah Sterling stepped out, looking pristine in a silk suit that had no business in the wilderness. Beside him was a man with a federal badge—Marshall Vance.

“Mrs. Conincaid,” Sterling called out. “I’m here on a matter of public health. Reports of smallpox. We have a warrant to search the premises and burn any infected structures.”

Jeremiah stepped off the porch, an axe resting on his shoulder. “No smallpox here.”

“Are you threatening a federal officer?” Vance drew his revolver.

“I’m defending my property,” Maryanne said, stepping down beside Jeremiah, her Winchester leveled at Sterling’s chest.

“Take them,” Sterling hissed. “Burn it all.”

The riders spurred their horses forward.

“Now!” Jeremiah roared.

He kicked a wooden wedge from beneath the porch. A hidden rope snapped tight, and a heavy log suspended in the barn eaves swung down in a massive arc. It smashed into the lead rider, de-horsing him instantly.

“Get inside!” Jeremiah shoved Maryanne through the door as bullets began to chew the siding.

They fought from the windows, a coordinated dance of lead and iron. But the numbers were against them. Sterling had brought a small army.

“They’re going to rush us,” Maryanne said, reloading her rifle.

“Let them,” Jeremiah growled. “I didn’t just dig a garden out back.”

He sprinted out the back door, drawing their fire. Five men, including the Marshall, chased him into the backyard. They saw him crouch behind the stone well and charged across the open ground.

They didn’t see the disturbed earth.

Jeremiah pulled a hidden twine cord. The ground vanished.

It was a pit trap, six feet deep and lined with jagged stakes. Three men fell in with a sickening crunch. The others teetered on the edge, only to be met by the barrel of Maryanne’s rifle in the window.

“Drop them!” she screamed. “Or the next one is between your eyes!”

Sterling, seeing his men decimated by a “plain woman” and a “beast,” scrambled into his carriage and fled. Jeremiah stood over the pit, his chest heaving, a shotgun leveled at the survivors.

“Tell Sterling,” Jeremiah bellowed after the carriage. “The Double Ranch is closed for business!”

The victory was sweet, but Maryanne knew it was temporary. “He’ll be back, Jeremiah. He has the bank, the judge, and the law.”

“Then we change the law,” Maryanne said. She pulled a worn, folded map from her pocket. “My father’s original survey. It proves the aquifer exists and that Sterling falsified the records to steal it. If we get this to the Governor in Cheyenne, he’s finished.”

“Cheyenne is a four-day ride. He’ll have the roads watched.”

“Then we don’t take the road,” she said, looking up at the towering, snow-capped peaks of the Absarokas. “We take the Ghost Trail.”

“That’s suicide this time of year,” Jeremiah whispered.

Maryanne looked at him, and for the first time, he saw the fire that had kept her alive all those years alone. “I’d walk through hell with you, Jeremiah Conincaid.”

They left Samuel with a trusted neighbor and struck out for the high passes. For three days, they fought the mountain. The air was a razor, the wind a physical weight. On the second day, a blizzard erased the world.

On a ledge known as Dead Man’s Drop, Maryanne’s horse slipped. She began to slide toward the two-thousand-foot abyss, her fingers clawing at the ice.

“Jeremiah!”

A hand, massive and scarred, clamped onto her collar. He didn’t just pull; he anchored her to the very core of the earth. With a roar that drowned out the storm, he hauled her and the horse back to the ledge. They lay in the snow, gasping, their hearts beating in a single, frantic rhythm.

“You held on,” she rasped.

“I told you,” he whispered, his beard crusted with ice. “I’m not letting go.”

They rode into Cheyenne looking like ghosts—clothed in rags, skin burned by the wind, but carrying the truth. They kicked open the doors to the Governor’s chambers and slammed the map onto his mahogany desk.

The fallout was swifter than a mountain landslide. Marshall Vance was arrested. Judge Potts was impeached. Josiah Sterling, realizing the game was up, fled on a midnight train, leaving his empire to rot.

When Maryanne and Jeremiah returned to Oak Haven, the town didn’t laugh. As their wagon rolled down Main Street, men took off their hats in a silent, shamed salute.

They rode straight to the Double Ranch. The bullet holes were still there, and the fence still needed mending. But as the sun dipped behind the peaks, Jeremiah reached out and took Maryanne’s hand. They didn’t have rings, and they didn’t have a preacher’s blessing.

They had the land. They had the mountain. And finally, they had each other.

The winter of 1885 didn’t arrive with a soft dusting of snow; it fell upon the valley like a white iron curtain.

For Maryanne and Jeremiah, the victory over Sterling had bought them peace, but the land demanded a different kind of toll. The Double Ranch was no longer a battlefield of lead, but one of endurance. Samuel had recovered enough to sit by the hearth, carving intricate cedar birds that looked ready to take flight, while the “beast” and the “old maid” worked in a silent, synchronized rhythm that the townspeople still struggled to understand.

But the ghost of Josiah Sterling wasn’t done with them yet.

It began with the arrival of a man named Silas Thorne—not the thug Jeremiah had tossed into the pit, but his brother, a man who traded in ink and transit lines rather than torches. He arrived in a sleek, black carriage that looked like a beetle scurrying across the pristine white valley.

“The railroad is coming, Mrs. Conincaid,” Silas said, standing in their kitchen, his eyes darting toward the cellar door. “The governor might have protected your water, but he can’t stop the Union Pacific. They need the grade through this valley. Your ranch sits exactly where the spur needs to turn.”

Maryanne didn’t look up from the rifle she was cleaning. “The answer is the same as it was for Sterling. The land isn’t for sale.”

“It’s not a sale anymore,” Silas countered, his voice oily. “It’s eminent domain. They’ll offer you pennies, or they’ll simply lay the tracks over your grave. You have three days to sign the easement.”

That night, the temperature plummeted to -30°C. The wind howled through the bullet holes they hadn’t yet patched, a reminder of the autumn’s violence. Jeremiah stood on the porch, watching the horizon. He didn’t see the lanterns of a posse this time; he saw the glowing orange campfires of the railroad survey crew at the edge of their property.

“They’re waiting for the freeze to break,” Jeremiah rumbled as Maryanne stepped out behind him, wrapping a heavy wool shawl around her shoulders.

“They think we’re soft because the law is on our side now,” she said.

“The law is a slow horse, Maryanne. The iron snake moves faster.”

Jeremiah knew that once the tracks were laid, the aquifer—the secret heart of their land—would be poisoned by the soot and oil of the engines, or worse, drained to feed the thirst of the locomotives.

They didn’t wait for the three days to expire.

While the survey crew huddled around their fires, Jeremiah and Maryanne utilized the one thing the railroad lacked: intimate knowledge of the mountain’s fury. Jeremiah knew that the creek, fueled by the secret aquifer, never truly froze solid. It ran warm deep underground.

Using the survey map her father had left, Maryanne identified a tectonic weakness near the northern ridge—a place where the rock was thin and the water pressure was immense.

“If we blow the shelf,” Jeremiah whispered, looking at the black powder kegs he’d salvaged from an old mining claim, “the creek shifts. It won’t flood the valley, but it will turn the rail grade into a marsh. They can’t lay iron on mud.”

“It will change the ranch forever,” Maryanne noted, her voice tight. “We’ll lose the north pasture.”

“We lose the pasture, or we lose the soul of the place. Which is it?”

They moved under the cover of a blizzard. Jeremiah carried the powder, and Maryanne carried the fuses. They climbed the ridge in a whiteout that would have killed any man not born of the Absarokas.

The blast wasn’t a roar; it was a deep, subterranean thud that shook the very foundations of the valley. For a moment, there was silence. Then, a sound like a thousand breaking mirrors echoed through the night. The warm water of the aquifer, redirected by the blast, surged through the new limestone fissure.

By dawn, the railroad’s carefully staked grade was a steaming, impassable swamp.

When Silas Thorne returned three days later, he found his carriage mired in three feet of mud and mineral-rich slush. He looked up at the porch of the Double Ranch.

Jeremiah stood there, his axe over his shoulder, the “wolf” in him now tempered by the quiet dignity of a man who owned his destiny. Maryanne stood beside him, her hand resting on his arm—no longer a business partner, but the other half of a single, formidable force.

“The grade is gone, Thorne,” Maryanne called out. “Tell the Union Pacific to build their bridge five miles south. This land belongs to the mountain now.”

The railroad moved. The town grew. And the legend of the Conincaids became the bedrock of Oak Haven. They were no longer the beast and the crone; they were the Keepers of the Water.

As the years passed, the ranch didn’t just survive; it thrived. The mud from the blast created the richest soil in the territory. And in the quiet evenings, as the sun dipped below the peaks, Jeremiah would look at the woman who had saved him from the rope, and Maryanne would look at the man who had given her a reason to fight.

They had been forced together by a corrupt judge, but they were held together by the very earth they defended.

The year 1904 arrived with the smell of ozone and the hum of a world moving too fast for the people who had built it.

Oak Haven was no longer a dusty outpost of saloons and secrets; it was a bustling town of brick facades and electric streetlamps. But five miles out, where the shadows of the Absaroka range touched the valley floor, the Double Ranch stood as a defiant monument to a harder time.

Maryanne sat on the porch in a high-backed rocker, her hair now a soft, striking silver. Her hands, though still gnarled from decades of labor, were still. Beside her, a young man of twenty—with Jeremiah’s glacial blue eyes and Maryanne’s sharp, observant mind—was reading a ledger.

“The yield from the north pasture is up, Mother,” he said. “The mineral silt from the spring is like gold for the grass.”

Maryanne smiled, a soft expression that had once been a rare treasure. “Your grandfather always said the mountain gives back what it takes, Thomas. You just have to be patient enough to wait for it.”

Inside the house, the rhythmic scritch-scrape of a knife against wood continued. Samuel, now fifty-four, sat in a sun-drenched corner of the parlor. He was a man of few words, his mind still a gentle, fractured thing, but his hands were legendary.

The birds he carved—eagles with wings spread wide, chickadees mid-song—were sold in galleries as far away as San Francisco. He had never fully understood the wars fought over the land he lived on, only that he was safe. He was the soul of the house, the quiet center that reminded them all why they had fought so hard to keep the world away.

Jeremiah wasn’t in the rocker. He was where he always was when the air turned crisp: at the edge of the timberline.

He didn’t move with the predatory speed of his youth; the “Grizz” had slowed, his joints echoing the groans of the old barn. But as he stood looking over the valley, he saw the steam from a distant locomotive—the “iron snake” that had eventually bypassed their land, just as they had forced it to.

He felt a presence behind him before he heard it. Maryanne walked up the slope, her breath coming in steady plumes. She didn’t stop until she was shoulder-to-shoulder with him.

“Samuel finished the centerpiece for the town hall,” she said, sliding her hand into his.

Jeremiah grunted, a low, satisfied sound. “He’s a good lad. Better than the mountains deserved.”

He looked down at their joined hands. His knuckles were thick with scars—the marks of the courthouse chains, the winter of the Ghost Trail, and the defense of the well. Maryanne’s hand was the only thing that had ever truly tamed the wolf in him.

“Do you ever regret it?” Jeremiah asked, his voice a low rumble. “The judge? The X on that paper?”

Maryanne looked out over the sprawling green valley, the shimmering thread of the creek, and the house that had been a fortress and a home. She thought of the “old maid” she had been—a woman waiting to be erased—and the legend she had become.

“Jeremiah,” she said, turning to him with a spark of that old, green fire in her eyes. “It was the only honest thing that judge ever did.”

As the sun dipped behind the peaks, casting a long, golden shadow over the Double Ranch, the two of them stood as one. They had been a joke to the town, a punishment to the state, and a gamble against the odds.

But as the first stars began to pierce the Wyoming sky, it was clear that the beast and the crone hadn’t just survived the world. They had outlasted it.

The land was theirs. The water was free. And the silence of the mountain was finally at peace.