I thought about the Swede and Daffodil upstairs. They hadn't been meant for this valley either. They'd stumbled into it the way Gwion stumbled into the Awen—running from something, burned by something, not knowing yet what they were becoming. The world had chased them through a dozen shapes already. Greenwich, Sweden, the cramped fear of that London flat. Shape after shape, trying to survive the pursuit.

The Swede would be fine. He had the kind of stubborn love in him that reminded me of mountains—solid, unchanging, willing to weather any storm. He was in the grain-of-wheat stage, I reckoned. Small, quiet, enduring. Waiting to discover what he'd become on the other side of all that patience.

But Daffodil... Daffodil was the one I watched. She moved through the world like she wasn't entirely sure she belonged to it, her eyes sometimes going distant, as if she was looking at a version of herself that the rest of us couldn't see. She was still mid-chase. Still shifting. Still being pursued by voices and versions of herself that the cauldron hadn't finished with yet.

But there was something else in her too. A brightness at the brow. The same radiance the old story talked about—the light that comes not from being spared the fire, but from having passed through it. That was the thing about the Taliesin tale that most people missed. The gift wasn't the three drops. The gift was surviving what came after.

Tomorrow, I would drive to Cardiff and do another favor for the money that kept us afloat. I would come home and cook something with too many leeks. I would pretend not to notice the way the Swede was struggling with feeling like he wasn't contributing enough. And I would hold the line, the way you hold the line when you understand that some people need to learn that being held up isn't the same as being held down.

For now, I had the fire and the whisky and the knowledge that upstairs, in a small stone cottage in the middle of the Welsh winter, two people were sleeping soundly for the first time in months. That was enough.

I turned another log into the fire and watched it catch.

The transition from the grand castle walls to the lived-in warmth of Steph's kitchen was seamless, felt in the way the air changed from the sharp scent of pine to the savory, heavy aroma of roasting potatoes and gravy. On Christmas Eve, we made the short journey down the road to Risca, leaving the "fortress" on the hill to join the chaos of a house with a two-year-old at its heart.

The house is loud-happy today. Mummy is making the kitchen smell like the brown-sugar-ham and the oven is humming a warm song. I am wearing my sparkly socks—the ones with the reindeer that have itchy noses—and I am practicing my fast-running in the hallway.