Alex Archer - Celtic Fire

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 She’d been replaced by an occasional cleaner who ran the vacuum and a duster over the place a couple of times a week.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.

In the evenings it was almost always just the two of them, comfortable with no other company and never needing anyone else. It was how they had been for most of their lives. It was how she wanted it to stay for the rest of their days. Her greatest fear was that there would come a time when one or the other of them would feel the need for more, for that something their twin couldn’t give.

She wrapped the stone in the blanket that had kept her warm through the night and carried it into the house from the car.

It felt even heavier now than it had when she had stolen it from the museum, but then she had been fueled by adrenaline and urged on by the fear of discovery. Now there was no strength brought on by the risk of failure, and she was still stiff and tired after trying to sleep in the back of the Land Rover. She wasn’t good when it came to sleeping away from her own bed. She was a homebody. Besides being cramped, the back of the car had been stuffy and her sleep had been restless at best.

She felt an overwhelming sense of relief when she placed her burden down carefully on the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

She was hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a hot shower and fresh clothes. But she was happy and that was the most important thing.

She tackled her needs one at a time: first, she spooned coffee into the filter machine, filled the reservoir with water and switched it on, then she headed upstairs for a shower. She knew that she would feel better after that, more alert and ready to face the day. Geraint was unlikely to be back from his trip until at least lunchtime. Like their dad he was always disappearing somewhere, but that was the nature of his job; people needed him to fight their technological fires. It didn’t matter if it was their websites, their databases, their security protocols or whatever else he did; if it was to do with computers he was every bit as much a wizard as Myrddin Wyllt. That thought led her to stretching out on her bed without even getting undressed, and pretty soon she’d drifted into sleep, all thoughts of showers and coffee gone.

When she woke it was well past eleven o’clock and the sun was glaring in through her window.

The heat from the shower quickly steamed up the small room. She stripped, shedding her clothes like a snake sloughing its skin, and stepped behind the curtain.

Needles of hot water stung where they struck, turning her skin red and raw, but the warmth made her feel alive.

She lathered up, luxuriating in the little agonies of the hot water, suds sluicing off her back to gurgle down the drain, and long after she’d finished washing she stayed beneath the spray, head down, her long red hair sodden and hanging over her face.

Finally, after more than half an hour under the flow with the water finally beginning to turn cold, she switched off the shower and stepped out.

She felt the sudden blast of cold air from the open window, but didn’t move for the towel. Instead, she let the air dry her body, then dressed in fresh clothes, her damp hair sticking to the clean T-shirt as she went downstairs.

The hot-plate of the coffee machine hissed as she entered the kitchen, the pot dripping condensation down the outside of the bell jar. She’d put enough water in the pot so that it hadn’t dried up yet, but there was only enough for one treacle-thick cup, so she poured it and focused her attention to the bundle on the table.

She didn’t unwrap it straightaway. She stared at it, like she half expected there to be nothing inside the blanket. Then slowly she eased back first one corner and then the next.

It wasn’t much to look at—a simple piece of stone with a hole in the middle.

It wasn’t the kind of treasure that made it on to TV shows. It wasn’t sexy enough for any of those. Looking at it, it was easy to see why it had been mistaken for a quern. Although a decent archaeologist ought to have been asking where the second offset hole was. Otherwise, how could they have inserted the stick to rotate the stone and grind grain between this stone and the second lying beneath it?

But it could have been the bottom of the pair, she thought suddenly, angry that she hadn’t considered it earlier. Her heart raced a little faster at the mere thought of it. She scrambled to get her fingers underneath and lever it up on its edge. Her fingertip snagged at the rough stone until she realized that she could use the blanket as a cradle to tilt it upward until it stood on its round edge.

With one hand on either side she ran her fingertips over either side, comparing them for differences in texture.

If this had been used for grinding corn, then one face ought to have been worn smooth as it rubbed against its mate. Both were rough. She couldn’t find anything resembling wear or weathering that she would have expected on a millstone.

Her hands were trembling as she moved them out toward the very edge of the stone, knowing that this was where she’d find the proof she needed to confirm that the stone had been used the way she suspected.

She moved gingerly at first, with the lightest of touches, then started laughing as she rubbed her hand across the smoothest of surfaces.

This was no quern; it had been used for sharpening blades, not grinding down grain. She knew that she was right. The only question that remained was whether this was the stone she was looking for, or whether it was just any old mislabeled whetstone, and she couldn’t work that out by touch alone. It would have to wait. Today was about showing her doubting twin precisely what she was capable of.

It had taken a while to convince him that she was right about the stone, and even then there was that gleam in his eye he got when he was humoring her. Thirteen minutes older than her, he liked to think that he was the dynamic force in their little family of two, but she was no slouch. And this would prove it.

She held the cup of coffee a few inches from her mouth, feeling the heat and breathing in the aroma, savoring every second of it.

* * *

BEFORE AWENA WAS able to brew another pot of coffee, she heard the sound of a car approaching.

Geraint coming home.