"When I was a boy," he said, and the girls went still, because when I was a boy was the opening, the spell, the words that turned the blanket on the hilltop into a vessel and the afternoon into a journey, "I used to ride a train."

"What kind of train?" Tima asked.

"A slow train. The slowest train in Sweden. They called it the Inlandsbanan — the inland railway. It ran from the south all the way up to the far north, through forests and mountains and places where nobody lived, places where the land was so empty you could look out the window and see nothing but trees for hours."

"Hours?" Eira said, sceptical. Eira's world was contained within the valley, and hours of nothing was a concept she approached with suspicion.

"Hours," Papa confirmed. "But not boring hours. Different hours. The kind where you watch the world go by and it doesn't need anything from you. It just… shows itself."

"Who did you go with?" Tima asked.

"My grandmother. Nain. She'd take me in the summer — just the two of us. We'd pack a bag and get on the train and we'd go north, stopping whenever we felt like it. Sometimes at a town, sometimes at a station in the middle of nowhere, and we'd get off and walk."

"Walk where?"

"Wherever looked interesting. We'd find lakes. Rivers. Little shops that sold smoked fish and candy. Churchyards with stones so old you couldn't read the names anymore." He smiled. "She never had a plan. That was the thing about Nain. She'd been everywhere, knew people everywhere — if we needed a place to stay, she'd know someone. A friend with a cottage. A cousin with a spare room. Sweden's like that, up north. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone's door is open in summer."

Peter unwrapped a biscuit. "Sounds like Wales before telly."

Papa laughed. "Maybe. But colder. And the mosquitoes were the size of your fist."

"Now you're exaggerating," Peter said.

"Only slightly."

Tima had abandoned the beetle. She was leaning against Papa's chest now, her head on his ribs, looking up at the sky the way she looked at everything — with the total, absorbing attention that was her gift and her nature.

"What else?" she said. "More about the train."

"Well," Papa said, "there was the treasure hunting."

"Treasure?" Both girls, simultaneously.

"My sister Sofia and I — she's older than me, a couple of years — when we were small, maybe five and seven, we used to go treasure hunting. In Östersund, where we lived, and on Gotland, the island where my family went in summer. We'd spend entire days looking."

"For what?" Eira demanded, because Eira demanded everything.

"Bottle caps, mostly."

The girls stared at him.