WALES 2022
I WAS CARRYING ARDEN ’ S soul in my hands. Of that much I was certain.
As I lay on my bed drinking sweet, milky coffee, I read Ten Hundred Years of You from cover to cover, every line, every stanza etching grooves into my chest. It was as though Mikha was back from the dead; that version of Arden I so often missed. A different person entirely from the cold-hearted executioner in El Salvador.
One poem described Arden’s heart as a haunted house, surrounded by a moat of their own digging. It cast their stoicism in a new light, made me think that perhaps they hated the way they had become, so closed off and unfeeling, but that it was less painful than the alternative: letting themselves love, with the knowledge it could only end one way.
I thought of my own pre-emptive grief, the way I doggedly rehearsed loss as though it somehow protected me from the inevitable pain, and I thought maybe Arden had a point. Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it.
Yet, for better or worse, I always let myself love anyway.
Call it courage, call it insanity; both would be correct.
In truth, a part of me believed that everyone I’d ever loved would come back to me again in another life, in another form. They wouldn’t necessarily know that we had met before, and nor would I, but that energy would still thrum between us, that recycled love, that historic bond.
A few years before the Great War, a travelling psychic medium called Anais Lamunière had visited our small French border village, and I’d snuck out to see her against the will of my parents, who believed spiritualists defied biblical teachings. In a tiny cafe with fogged-up windows, Anais had adjusted her floral headscarf and told me, in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, that lost souls were drawn to the love still felt for them by the living. This meant that parents were often reborn as their children’s own children, and siblings who died together were reborn as twins, and various other dynamics that I’d found troubling and yet strangely resonant.
I wasn’t sure if I entirely bought into Anais’s theories, but something about her belief system rang true. Whenever I thought of the patchwork blanket of love surrounding the Blythe family, I had to wonder whether those seemingly disparate people – postmen and farmhands, nurses and teachers and classmates – were drawn to us by some ancient, enduring force. They had once been more to me, to my mother, to my sister, to my late father.
And so, in the absence of any abiding religious convictions, this was the one blind faith I had: that love was a physical force, and it was never wasted. Once it was called out into the universe, it would echo back to us forever.
When I’d told Arden as much, back in the rat-infested trenches, and asked if he believed the same, his eyes had fluttered closed, head tilted back against the dugout wall, and he’d said: ‘No, I don’t think I do.’
‘You believe love dies with the body?’ I’d muttered incredulously. ‘Then how do you explain what happens to us ?’
He didn’t have a good answer.
As I read Arden’s final poem, a new suspicion came to me, half formed, cloaked in shadow.
Could Nia be my long-time assassin?
She’d been so awkward, so shy, as she handed me the book.
No eye contact. Bashful, almost.
She’d always been closed off around me. Hell, around everyone.
It didn’t make much sense by the numbers. She’d been the year below me at school, though it was possible she’d been held back. And I’d worked alongside her all year without suspecting a thing. There was no electric current when our fingers brushed while counting copper coins, no knowing glances.
Then again, there had been no electric current in El Salvador.
Nia was obsessed with chess, with birds, with nuclear warfare.
Did that tally with Arden? I had a fleeting vision of a chessboard in the desert, decades ago, or maybe centuries, the image sharp and bright then murky and indecipherable. This was how memories of early lives came to me – tiny vibrant bursts, like butterflies I could never quite pin down. The ever-changing kaleidoscope, twisted by some great hand.
So Arden and I had played chess before, and the love of nature had always been there, which would explain the birds. Had they taken much interest in nuclear warfare during the Cold War? I couldn’t remember. So many details of Arden had been washed away like seashells on an ebbing tide, leaving behind only a blank plain of sand and foam.
In any case, if Nia was Arden, why hadn’t she killed me before now? Had she been waiting for the book’s publication? Did she want me to finally read a thousand years’ worth of love poems about myself before my inevitable demise?
Yet Arden had guarded their writing for centuries. Why offer it to me on a platter? In this life, where we’d barely exchanged words? Was it to make up for the cold brutality of El Salvador? To remind me that, despite it all, they still loved me?
Everything in me bristled at the thought that Nia could be Arden.
It would mean another round of this twisted game lost to my hunter.
The next day, I saw the blonde stranger again on my way into work.
He was sitting outside the cafe next to the bookshop, sipping a black coffee and reading a newspaper. This struck me as an oddity – a modern-day teen reading a physical broadsheet – but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why my attention kept snagging on him.
Was it his unfamiliarity? The way he lurked on the periphery of my life?
He glanced up at me as I passed, and a flicker of something darted across his pointed features.
My instincts twitched like spider legs beneath a magnifying glass.
Who was he? Where had he come from? Should I be more worried about him?
Perhaps. First, I had to rule out Nia.
As I passed the cafe, my gaze went to the vacant retail space next door. It had been many things in the last few years – a greetings card shop, a delicatessen, a hardware store – and sometimes I liked to fantasize about opening a vintage boutique there.
Few things brought me more pleasure than beautiful clothes. I often coveted the idea of gathering old, rare pieces from around the world. It would be like reliving my past lives, in a small way, to collect flapper dresses and tailcoats, baroque breeches and airy culottes, then adapt them for the modern wardrobe. New buttons, fresh embroidery, sharper cuts and clever window dressing.
Yet the sewing machine in my bedroom had been gathering dust for nearly a year.
It wasn’t that I’d stopped believing such a dream could be possible. Even after all this time, there was still a chance, especially because Arden had changed his mind in Siberia. It was more that all my energy had been absorbed by my sick sister, and the need to keep her, and by extension myself, alive. But once I’d accomplished that – and I would accomplish it – nothing would feel better than the first glide of dressmaking scissors through a bolt of clean fabric, the way the Singer would judder beneath my palms, milky coffee growing cool beside me.
The first item on my list of things I’d do upon survival: make and sell beautiful clothes.
I wanted it so badly I could taste it, and I still believed I could reach it.
So much power in those three simple words.
I still believe.
Beacon Books smelled like ink and paper and stale shortbread, sawdust from the stockroom and old coffee from the little back office. The space was small and neat, only a few thousand books on the shelves, but all lovingly curated by Mr Oyinlola and his daughter. Antique oddities were dotted around the tables – sepia globes on squeaky hinges, quills and inkwells, broad-winged moths preserved in amber.
It was surprisingly busy that morning, and Nia determinedly did not make eye contact with me while she was serving customers on the till. I wandered the shop floor, offering recommendations to anyone who needed them, checking the stockroom for a title I knew perfectly well we didn’t carry. As the hours trundled on, I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to speak to her, but eventually the crowds parted like clouds and it was just the two of us. I hovered near the till, aimlessly rearranging the selection of locally printed calendars.
‘I read the book,’ I started, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.
‘Oh.’ Her hand, heavy with an eclectic mix of gold, silver and jade rings, stilled. ‘What did you think?’
Her nervous edge made me nervous.
‘Beautiful,’ I answered carefully. ‘If a little overwrought in places.’
A subtle test, to lightly criticize the work, but she didn’t take the bait.
‘Who do you think wrote it?’ I prodded. Drawing on centuries of maintaining my composure when deep down I wanted to run , I kept my tone lightly curious rather than outright accusatory.
She tapped a pile of loyalty cards into a neat little stack. ‘Someone who’d found their soulmate, and who also believed they’d met before. And that it would end in unspeakable tragedy.’
She delivered her theory plainly, but I didn’t miss the bob of her throat as she swallowed.
There was emotion there.
‘It means something to you. This book.’
She nodded, but said nothing more.
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I just …’
The sentence trailed off to nothing. She was deeply uncomfortable, and I worried I’d pushed too far. But I had to know. There had to be something that would ease the truth loose.
‘Do you think you’ve met me before?’ I asked finally.
‘No,’ she replied, then gave a curious little yelp of laughter. ‘I think I’m brand new.’
And then she disappeared back into the stockroom, her chin tucked to her chest, her eyes not quite meeting mine.
I left the conversation feeling more confused than before. She was right; she did seem brand new. Uncertain, of the world and of herself. Nia did not have the jaded air of a centuries-old killer. And I’d never felt any sort of tug or pull towards her, any kind of fateful undercurrent towing me in her direction.
Yet Rafael … We’d circled each other for years without me ever guessing it was Arden.
How much better at hiding had they become?
I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of jittery unease, studying Nia for glimmers of Arden. But we didn’t say anything else to each other, and there was nothing suspect in the wooden way she restocked shelves or rearranged tote bags.
About an hour before the end of my shift, I worked on refreshing the window display with some new middle-grade fantasy releases. Just as I was perching a papier-maché dragon on an overturned cardboard box, I glanced out on to the street and saw the blonde stranger.
The blonde stranger, standing once again outside the flower shop.
The blonde stranger, hand cupping a peach-pink rose, lifting it to his face like a perfumier.
The blonde stranger, staring straight at me.
Watching.
And then he smiled, slow and cocky, and I knew.
He had appeared in town as if from nowhere, then never left my orbit.
It wasn’t Nia. It was him .
Fear and desperation mired together.
I knew I shouldn’t confront him – not yet, anyway. My hand went to the hideous wishbone around my neck. I had to save my little sister first. She needed my stem cells. She was an integral part of the patchwork blanket that would keep my mother warm when I died.
Yet pride would not allow me to hide.
I could not lose this game again.
Flooded with star-bright adrenaline, I clambered inelegantly out of the shop window and stormed on to the street, barely looking for cars as I crossed the narrow road. My blood roared in my ears, the pastel shopfronts blurring around me, a horn blaring, clusters of clucking pedestrians hardly registering. The hills towered beyond it all, as vast and indifferent as sleeping gods.
Thrusting my hand into the pocket of my hand-made tea dress – red, my favourite colour – my fingers closed around the Swiss army knife I’d picked up a few months ago. It was cheaply made, and the parts had been stiff and reluctant. I’d spent hours each night opening and closing the blade, wearing down the hinge until it flicked out with ease.
I didn’t withdraw it yet, but it steadied me to know it was there.
The blonde stranger watched me approach with a lazy confidence, and my blood pulsed with loathing. He was playing not just with my life, or his life, but with my little sister’s. And that I would not abide.
His mouth opened as I got within a few feet of him, but before he could speak I planted a palm on each of his shoulders and shoved with all my might.
Sheer surprise sent him careening off balance, tripping backwards into a bucket of orange and yellow carnations and sending the whole lot clattering into the street.
Gasps rippled down the sleepy pavement. The bucket rolled into the road, and car brakes screeched.
‘Not this time, Arden,’ I growled, pulling myself up to my full height as I stood over him, blocking the sun from his face.
He blinked up at me and then down at his bleeding hand. He must’ve gripped the thorny rose stem as he fell. Its neck lay broken in his palm. ‘What the hell?’
‘Leave me alone, all right?’ Blood roared in my ears, an animalistic desperation filling my limbs. ‘My little sister is sick. She needs me. So please , Arden, just leave me alone for a few more days until –’
‘Who’s Arden?’ He scuttled backwards like a beetle, knocking over a brushed-steel watering can, then held up his hands like he was under arrest. Blood slicked down one white wrist in a dark-red rivulet. ‘Look, I’m sorry for smiling at you – it was probably a bit creepy, but I’m not good at flirting and this … this is a bit much, all right?’
A flicker of doubt crossed my mind. He seemed genuinely confused – and a little afraid.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Arden had tricked me into lowering my guard. And though the blonde stranger didn’t seem to be armed, he could have been concealing a weapon until he had a clean shot. It would be no good merely to injure me, especially if he ended up in a jail cell unable to finish the job.
Better safe than sorry.
I swallowed hard. ‘Show me some ID.’
The name would give me nothing, but his date of birth would tell me everything I needed to know. If we’d been spawned on the same day in late March, he was my immortal enemy.
Eyeing me like I was a rabid mountain wolf, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a black leather wallet, handing me the turquoise provisional driving licence tucked between a crumple of receipts and bus tickets. I squinted at it against the stark daylight.
Ceri Hughes, born on the sixth of October.
He’d turned eighteen several months ago.
Blood rushed to my cheeks with a shameful heat, but I didn’t have time to fumble for an explanation, because the florist appeared in the doorway with a miniature watering can in one hand and a pair of secateurs in the other.
Angharad Morgan. My mum’s friend from Welsh class.
‘Bran?’ Angharad’s voice shook as she peered at me. Her frizzy brown hair was pulled back from her middle-aged face with a daffodil-printed headband. ‘What’s going on?’ Then she threw a scathing look at Ceri. ‘Are you giving her bother?’
‘Just a misunderstanding,’ I replied quickly, shooting Ceri a look that hopefully said play along or I ’ ll decapitate you here and now .
He nodded vaguely, never tearing his eyes away from mine.
‘Just a misunderstanding,’ he echoed, the words shot through with a kind of jest, as though this were just some whimsical private joke we were sharing.
The pale-blue depths of his eyes sparked with something I couldn’t name.
Intrigue? Entertainment? Or just plain and simple confusion?
Why would he willingly lie for me, if he was not Arden?
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ Angharad’s features twisted with dismay as she surveyed the wreckage we’d caused. ‘But you’ll pay me back for the ruined flowers, won’t you, Bran?’
‘Of course,’ I mumbled, guilty heat rising to my cheeks. ‘Sorry.’
She smiled warmly. ‘S’all right. Now clear off, won’t you? All the fuss is bad for business.’
As I strode shamefaced back to the bookshop, I didn’t look back at Ceri, but my heart skittered like a snare drum.
Had I just laid my palms on Arden’s chest?
Had I just spoken my first words to them in nearly eighteen years?
Or had I just made a royal fool of myself?
The blonde stranger had seemed genuinely bemused by my ambush, and his date of birth would suggest he wasn’t my perpetual hunter. And yet confusion could be feigned, and driving licences could be forged, and after being caught so off-guard in El Salvador, I felt more uncertain in my own instincts than ever.
How could I figure out whether this stranger was telling the truth?
And if he was Arden, how could I survive the next three days when he was right here in Abergavenny?