The forest drive began at the end of the road. Not metaphorically — literally at the end, past the last cottage, past the trees that separated the houses from the hillside, past the gate that marked the boundary between the lived-in world and the other world, the forest world, the seven miles of road and trail that wound up the flanks of Twmbarlwm through woods that had been ancient, then felled, then planted, then felled again, the forest that kept coming back because forests do, because the ground remembers what grew there and grows it again.

They walked. Peter in front — he was always in front, not because he was fastest but because he navigated the way he did everything, with the body's full commitment, leaning into the hill, his walking stick (not Stick-Stick — that was Tima's, found on a different walk, a different day — but his own stick, the hazel one he'd cut and stripped himself, the handle worn smooth by his palm) tapping a rhythm on the road that the girls behind him matched without being asked.

Eira held Tima's hand. This was non-negotiable. Eira held Tima's hand on walks the way she held Tima's hand on everything — with the proprietary grip of a child who has decided that another child belongs to her and that the belonging is expressed through physical contact. She was taller. She was stronger. She was the engine, and Tima was the cargo, and the cargo was willing because the cargo adored the engine with a devotion that was absolute and uncomplicated.

"Look," Eira said, pointing at a mushroom on the verge. "A fairy house."

"It's a mushroom," Papa said.

"It's a fairy house shaped like a mushroom. Mummy says all the mushrooms in the forest are fairy houses."

Peter, without turning: "Your mother would know."

This was true. Steph would know. Steph knew things about forests that other people didn't — not in the academic sense, not the Latin names and the classifications, but in the other sense, the sense that comes from being a woman who keeps dried mugwort in jars and moon water on the windowsill and who has, on more than one occasion, walked into a forest and come back knowing something she didn't know before, the knowledge arriving not through reading but through — what? Listening. The kind of listening that Steph did, and Peter respected, and Papa was slowly learning to understand.

The road climbed. The houses fell away below them and the trees thickened — birch and oak and the occasional larch, the survivors of the felling, the ones that the disease hadn't taken. The canopy closed overhead and the light changed, softening, filtering through leaves into the green-gold wash that forests make of sunlight, the light that turns everything beneath it into something from a different century.