Papa caught Peter's eye. Peter nodded — the nod that contained an entire conversation: she's tired, she won't admit it, don't ask, just adjust. Papa adjusted. He lengthened his stride to close the gap and crouched.

"Hop on, daffodil."

For once, she didn't argue. She climbed onto his back — arms around his neck, legs around his waist, Hoppy pressed between her chest and his spine — and the weight of her settled against him, and he stood, and the walk continued, and she rested.

Peter walked beside him. The stick tapping. The valley below. The afternoon tilting toward evening, the light going gold, the shadows lengthening under the trees.

"Good day," Peter said.

"Good day."

"She liked the Sweden stories."

"She likes all stories."

"She likes your stories." Peter glanced at him. "You should tell them more."

Papa didn't answer, but the silence was agreement.

The Philanthropic Inn sat on the corner where Pontywaun met the road, the kind of pub that every Welsh valley village has — stone walls, low windows, a sign that had been repainted enough times that the current version was a palimpsest of every version that came before. The Philanthropic. The name was aspirational in the way that Victorian pub names were aspirational — the builders believed that naming a pub after a virtue might instil the virtue in its patrons, a theory that had been tested by a hundred and fifty years of darts and bitter and had produced, at best, mixed results.

They went in. The pub was warm and dim and smelled of the particular blend of spilled ale, wood polish, and carpet that constitutes the British pub's signature perfume. A fire was going — unnecessary in August, but the Philanthropic kept a fire the way churches keep candles, as a statement of identity rather than a response to temperature. The bar was dark wood. The taps were brass. Three men at the far end were watching a football match on a television mounted too high on the wall, their pints at various stages of depletion.

And someone was playing. A small stage — barely a stage, more a slightly raised area of floor near the window — held a guitar case, an amp, and two people who were either setting up or packing down, it was hard to tell. One of them strummed a chord. The sound was warm and slightly out of tune, the sound of a pub band that has been playing the same songs in the same pub for years and has achieved that particular state of competence where the music is not good, exactly, but is right — right for the room, right for the evening, right for the pints and the fire and the particular quality of a Saturday late afternoon in a South Welsh valleys pub.