Celtic Fire. Alex Archer

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      Annja glanced down the small laminated menu on the bar, thought about asking what was good, then remembered something Roux had said about British cuisine—anything was good as long as it was brown. The Brits seemed to have a penchant for brown food, but she didn’t fancy a pie or battered fish or anything heavy, so she took a chance on a green salad.

      “There’s a few tables free down by the river if you’d like to sit outside,” the landlord said as he wrote her order on a tiny pad of paper and tore the top sheet off. “I’ll bring your food out to you.”

      “Sounds good,” she said, paying for the food and another bottle of water, then heading out into the sunshine. A haphazard arrangement of picnic tables and benches were set out on the grassy bank. There were a dozen large umbrellas fixed through the centers to provide shelter from the sun. Half of them were occupied; some with couples who were oblivious to anything but each other, others with couples who had clearly been together so long that they had little left to say to each other and others with men intent on filling every inch of space with empty beer glasses.

      A mother fussed at a wasp that was buzzing around a small child in a buggy beside her. Annja thought that there was something about the scene that was so English but then corrected herself, remembering that Wales was very definitely not England and saying it was tantamount to a hate crime in some minds.

      The water in the river seemed low, with steep mud banks on either side. She was staring at some kind of mud-wallowing bird she couldn’t name when the landlord appeared with her lunch. “Low tide,” he said as if reading her mind. “At high tide the flow slows down and the water level rises as it’s being held back.”

      She’d forgotten how close they were to the sea and yet she knew that the Romans had brought boats up here from somewhere beyond the horizon. It was funny how the journey across the country could disorientate you. The landlord had moved on before she could reply. She saw him work with one swift movement, pulling a glass towel from where it had been tucked into the top of his trousers and flicking the troublesome wasp away from the child, earning a grateful smile from the mother in return. He stacked the unwanted glasses from the crowded table into a precarious tower and headed inside with them.

      Annja marveled at him, not for his dexterity, but the way he seemed to be aware of all these different things going on around him and just dealt with them with as little fuss as possible. It was a skill. But then to do a job like this you had to be a master of dealing with the mundane as well as the surprises that might turn up.

      From where she was sitting she could see the narrow stone bridge that had brought her over the Usk. Cars came and went, though the sound of the small amount of traffic didn’t disturb the tranquility of the pub garden or drown out the burbling of the river. A bird swooped and touched the surface of the water, snatching something up in its beak and taking to the air again. There was something beautiful about the motion. There was no violence, no brutality in the action; it had more in common with plucking fruit from a tree.

      The garden was a little slice of paradise.

      Annja spread out the street map that the landlord had given her on the table in front of her. The lightest of breezes tugged at the corners so she weighted the farthest one from her down with the water bottle and the half-empty glass. Back in the car she had a number of printouts she’d pulled off the internet when she’d been prepping for the trip, but here, now, this was so much more real.

      She saw the river marked on the map in blue and the bridge that crossed it. The Miller’s Arms was also clearly marked on the map. She traced a finger along the road that continued past the pub, picking out the museum, the amphitheater and the Priory Hotel, where she’d booked herself in for a few days. Despite the relatively small scale of the map, she could count the number of buildings between the pub and the hotel on two hands, proving just how close everything was. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes’ walk.

      She’d been eating without realizing or tasting what she’d been putting into her mouth and now her plate was empty.

      Annja pushed it to one side, poured the last of the water into her glass before she folded the map back into its original shape.

      A quick glance around her proved that life did indeed go on without one; the young mother with her wasp-fearing child had left, but at least the middle-aged couple still weren’t talking to each other. The group of men were working on another empty glass mountain. Time seemed to be passing at a different pace. She could easily have sat there for the rest of the afternoon and just let the world pass her by. After all, it wasn’t often life afforded Annja Creed the luxury of just sitting and thinking about nothing in particular other than enjoying what was around her for what it was.

      She drained the last of the water from her glass, running her fingers on the outside to wipe the condensation away.

      Another wasp fussed around her empty plate. But rather than dive-bomb her, it skirted the edge of her plate, obviously feasting on the sweet tang of leftover dressing, so she let it alone.

      A wave of tiredness hit her from nowhere.

      She caught her head lolling and realized she’d pretty much blanked out while staring at the wasp. So much for soaking up the warmth of the sun. She should probably check into the hotel and grab a few hours’ shut-eye, but if she slept it was unlikely she’d wake up again until the next morning, wasting the rest of the day.

      She hated wasting time.

       Chapter 6

      The house was silent.

      It felt strange to be coming home to an empty house. She was so used to Geraint being there. So used to him just being part of her world it felt peculiar that he’d stay in London even an hour longer than necessary. But he had.

      Awena couldn’t wait to show him the fruits of her labors and, rather like the eager child she used to be, felt acutely disappointed she couldn’t do it straightaway.

      They had shared the large house halfway up the mountain—looking down on every other house in the valley—since they’d been children, usually in the care of a housekeeper-cum-nanny while their father came and went.

      That she could no longer remember what her mother looked like without looking at the few photographs they still had of her was a constant source of pain for her, but memories were like that. So much so she couldn’t be sure if the few she had of the woman were actually true or created from the stories she’d been told by her father. He’d even made her promise not to forget. Could she really remember the trip to St. Davids in Pembrokeshire on the west coast of Wales, when she’d barely been two years of age? It seemed unlikely, but the memory was in her head whenever she reached for it. The place was no more than a village, but somehow had been designated a city simply because some religious soul a few hundred years back decided to build his cathedral there. She’d been there many times since that first visit, of course, but it was the first visit she impossibly remembered. It didn’t matter, really, even if it was an imagined memory. So were the occasional flashes she got of her mother smiling down at her. Sometimes the mind was just being kind.

      It had been a few years since the old housekeeper had lived with them. She’d been replaced by an occasional cleaner who ran the vacuum and a duster over the place a couple of times a week. And if necessary she could double as a cook if they wanted something beyond Awena’s culinary expertise—but those occasions were few and far between, with her father rarely coming home these days.

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