Alice turned her face to her cousin, though Lory didn't look at her. "The what?" But she didn't press for Lory's suggestion shocked her and drew her attention away almost instantly.

"Don't ye know that's wicked. We do not give up our own." That was what her father had said. Yet some grudgeful part of her felt she had been given up by her own. "If ye choose to do what makes a bairn, ye must also look after it!" Coincidentally also her father's words.