Tima walked well. She walked with that particular determination — the going-forward quality that characterised her movement, the stride that was slightly too wide for her legs and slightly too fast for her lungs but that she maintained because stopping was not something she did voluntarily. She breathed harder on the incline. Papa noticed. Papa always noticed — the way her breathing changed on hills, the way her shoulders rose, the way she compensated for the thing in her chest by working the rest of her body harder, the trade-off that the condition imposed and that she accepted with the uncomplaining pragmatism of a child who has never known any different.

"Want a carry, daffodil?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"I'm walking, Tad. Like Eira."

Like Eira. Always like Eira. The aspiration, the north star, the girl she was walking toward even when what she was walking toward was simply the next tree, the next turn, the next mushroom that was secretly a fairy house.

Peter slowed his pace. He did this without being asked, the way he did most things — the adjustment was invisible, a fraction of a step shorter, a pause at a bend disguised as appreciation of the view, the generosity of a man who understood that the group moves at the speed of its smallest member and that the smallest member's dignity is preserved by not making the slowness visible.

"Look at that," Peter said, standing at a gap in the trees where the valley opened below them. The view — the whole of it, the Ebbw valley spread out like a map of itself, the river glinting silver in the morning sun, the houses climbing the hillsides, the old colliery site where the forest drive ran over the shafts of mines that had been closed since the sixties, the green reclaiming everything, the stubborn Welsh green that covered scars the way moss covers stone, not by removing but by growing over.

Tima stopped beside him, breathing hard, and looked.

"It's big," she said.

"Aye," Peter said. "It is."

"Where's our house?"

Peter crouched, pointing. "See there? Where the road bends, just past the rooftops? That's us. That's Hawthorn Place."

Tima looked. She looked with the concentration she gave everything — the total, scanning, absorbing look of a child who is not merely seeing but recording, filing, adding the view to the expanding archive of the world that she was building inside herself.

"It's small," she said. "From here."

Peter nodded. "Most things are, from far enough away. That's why you've got to get close to know them proper."

They kept walking.

Part Four: The Hilltop

The playground at the top of the forest drive was the kind that existed before safety was invented.