AI The standing stones in the grove were not stone at all but ancient oaks, their trunks twisted together until the bark had fused into archways. Someone—something—had carved slow spirals into the wood centuries ago, and the lines crawled with pale lichen that glowed like frost. Wildflowers pressed against Aurora’s boots even though it was winter on the other side of Richmond Park’s fence. White anemones, blue cornflowers, foxglove bells that opened and closed as if breathing.
“It’s never not creepy that the flowers move,” Rory said under her breath.
“They nod to the breath of the world,” Isolde replied. “And the world holds its breath for hunger.”
The Seer’s silver hair fell like a spill of water down her back, untouched by wind. Her bare feet did not sink into the damp soil and left the moss unruffled when she turned. She tipped her head, listening to something Rory couldn’t hear, pale lavender eyes narrowing. “Do not taste the shadows in there. They bite back.”
Nyx swayed beside one of the oaks as if they had risen up out of the trunk’s dark seam. Rory’s brain slid over the idea of Nyx’s body without finding hooks to hang it on. In one light, they were a tall silhouette cut from night; in another, they had a shoulder she could lean into. Their eyes were a faint amethyst ember under the hood of nothingness that was their face. Their voice unfurled in the air like dusk on a summer lane. “She says it poetically,” they murmured. “I would have gone with, ‘Don’t put anything in your mouth.’”
Rory’s hand found the Heartstone pendant where it lay warm against her skin beneath her jumper. The gem was the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson with a soft radiance like banked coals. The warmth had begun as a whisper earlier, when they crossed the park’s invisible border and the sound of traffic thinned to a breath. Now the warmth came in pulses against her sternum, in time with her heart. She pressed the gem between thumb and forefinger, and it pressed back.
“The seam is open,” Isolde said. “The year turns on a thin pin. The Barrier thins as an old man’s patience, and the door you carry wishes to see its mother.”
Rory tried not to think about the fact that the “door” on her chain had come from an unknown benefactor. Tried not to catalog the uncanny coincidences that had stacked up since she left Cardiff for London and ran deliveries by day and outran other things by night. You could get stuck replaying things. Sometimes you had to step through.
“Right,” she said. “No snacking. Stay away from biting shadows. And if anyone asks, we’re here to borrow a cup of sugar.”
Nyx’s breathless laugh made the leaves shiver.
Isolde stepped forward into the arch of oak as if into an old church. Rory followed, heart thrumming and palms prickling. The space between trunks was barely wide enough for a person, but it did not feel tight; it felt deep. The air tasted warm and rich against her tongue, as if someone had opened an oven and released the scent of a thousand caramelizing sugars. The pendant on her chest grew hot the instant she crossed the threshold, not enough to burn but enough to make her teeth tense.
The shimmer came and went like heat over tarmac, a quick distortion in the air that caught at the edges of sight. For a moment Rory saw a line that wasn’t in the arch, a tear in nothing with light spilling through—amber light, the color of late afternoon in a kitchen with old pine cabinets and honey in a jar.
Then she was through, and her boots pressed into loam as soft as sifted flour, and the sky opened.
It was warm, though she knew it should be winter in Richmond Park. The light poured down from a sky the color of glaze—amber thick as tea someone forgot. The sun, if there was one, did not sit anywhere in particular; the whole sky glowed, and it was gentle on the eyes in the way candlelight is gentle. The first thing that hit was smell: herbs bruised underfoot, spirals of cinnamon, hot stone, slow fat. Rory had never been much of a foodie, but even she knew the wild excess of it. Every scent layered on top of the last, sweet and savory, butter and baker’s yeast and char and citrus zest, until her mouth flooded and her stomach went cruel.
They stood on a hill terraced with vines. Grapevines, except that the leaves were deeply cut like cilantro and the grapes hung in clusters as big as a man’s torso. The skins were translucent; light oozed through them, and the grapes looked like garnets breathing. Bees drifted from blossom to blossom, their bodies delicate filigree, wings beating rings in the air. When one settled on Rory’s sleeve it felt weight less as ash and left a constellation of golden dust that tasted like nutmeg when she licked it without thinking.
She jerked her hand away as if she’d been caught stealing a biscuit. “Okay. That was… delicious,” she admitted, shame prickling up her neck.
“Salt keeps sweetness honest,” Isolde said serenely, slipping between two vine-laden trellises without brushing a leaf. “But here, nothing keeps anything honest.”
Nyx’s head—that suggestion of a head over a broader darkness—tilted. The suggestion of a shoulder bumped hers. “You sensed it?” they whispered. “The realm leans. Some call it abundance. Some call it trap.”
The terraces stepped downward toward a plain that rolled with orchards. Pear trees bowed under swollen jewels of fruit. An avenue of fig trees formed a tunnel; the figs split at their seams, revealing insides like mouths. Fountains played among raised beds of basil and coriander and mint, but the water had a sheen like oil and the droplets left damp rings that sparkled.
Far in the distance, something like a city squatted—the low sprawl of countless kitchens, vents breathing out steam. Between here and there, scattered courtyards held long tables stacked with never-finished platters. Laughter reached them, and knives clicking against boards, and the steady slap of dough being thrown .
Rory touched the chain around her neck again. The Heartstone pulsed faster, tugging like a small insistent hand toward the valley and left. A path wound between two towering hedges shaped like arches, and the space beyond them shimmered with the wobble she’d seen in the oaks. Her pendant burned hotter. She glanced at Isolde. The Seer nodded once, that maddening Fae tiny nod that meant Yes but also Everything Past This Is Not My Fault.
They took the path.
The hedges were sculpted from something that wanted to be rosemary and wanted to be bay laurel and had found a third thing by splitting itself into needle and slick tongue. When Rory brushed it, the scent cut clean through the sugar-fog around her brain. Her hands stopped shaking. She could see the veins in the leaves. The sharpness steadied her like a slapped face.
Then they stood before a trellis of branches woven so tight she couldn’t see through. The branches were not wood. They were bones. So many rib arcs and finger-length phalanges hooked into a fence and scrubbed smooth by hundreds of hands. Symbols flickered along the lengths with greasy light. The fence hummed under the skin; she could feel it in her teeth. The pendant blistered into near-pain against her sternum.
“Ward,” Nyx breathed. “Old, fat on crossing.”
Rory had never met a ward that was fat before, but the word fit. This fence was gorged on purpose. A barrier not to keep things out, but to keep them in—whatever lay on the other side of that sizzle. She drew in air through her nose, and it smelled like clove smoke. Cold slid into her palm when she reached for the dagger at her belt. The moonsilver bit her skin with the hunger of winter. Even in this heat, the Fae-forged blade was always cold, and the cold snapped a person awake like a glass of water in the face.
“You remember the price of everything you cut,” Isolde murmured. “Every thread resists for a reason. Do you have coin for the reason?”
Rory swallowed. The blade lay along her palm like a leaf fallen from a tree made of stars. Her fingers found their grip as if they remembered it from some dream. She set the edge where two thin bones crossed and pressed. The blade didn’t so much cut as persuade reality to allow the idea of cutting. The ward’s buzz jumped into her elbow, into her teeth, and then something gave, the sensation like a violin string snapping. Cold spread along the weave in a delicate frost pattern. The greasy symbols stuttered; the hum died.
The trellis opened with a sound like ribs separating. Rory winced. “Coin enough?” she asked, bitching by reflex to make the hairs on her arms lie down.
Isolde’s mouth tilted, amused and not. “You have paid with attention. That coin buys small doors.”
They slipped through. The space beyond breathed different. The air pressed damp against Rory’s neck like an eager tongue. They stepped onto a pathway of long, flat stones that looked like overbaked loaves spelling out a word in a language Rory didn’t know. Between the stones, a syrup ran—amber thick enough to slow a finger if one were foolish enough to dip. Bubbles rose and burst with quiet sighs.
“Don’t fall,” Nyx said, terribly helpful.
Rory snorted and nearly slid off the second loaf anyway. Nyx’s hand came out of the shadow in time. For a second they were solid and warm, the warmth of something that lives in the idea of places rather than sunlit ones. Their fingers felt like velvet pressed into her skin, real enough to sob over if you happened to be an idiot. “Thanks,” she said, a beat too fast.
They came into a garden boxed in by hedges taller than houses. Iron fruit trees grew there instead of iron fences: branches sprouting forks, leaves like the curve of spoons, and from each twig, knives ripened in sheaves. The air rang with their faint chiming. In the center, a fountain rose, not water but broth, golden and clear, pouring from the mouth of a statue carved as a big man with a belly like a throne. His face was bored and beautiful. Visitors had rubbed his lips to a polish.
“The hungriest king leaves crumbs for mice so he can hear them later,” Isolde said. “Silence spoils appetite.”
“Who is he?” Rory asked before she could stop herself.
“Prince. Master of tables. One of many names.” Isolde’s gaze slid to the statue and away again, a skipping stone across a lake. “He covets the end of every meal.”
Rory’s pendant throb bed now like the inside of her wrist used to after she scraped it on the swing as a kid and the skin swelled tight around the cut. She could have sworn, just for a second, that the little gem in its silver chain echoed something in the statue’s chest. It tugged her toward a doorway at the garden’s far end. Steam feathered out of it and carried a smell so exact—ginger and spring onion thrown into smoking oil—that she teetered on her heels with a memory of the Golden Empress kitchen, voices and heat and Yu-Fei barking, “If you’re standing, you’re in the way, Carter!”
This wasn’t home, though. This wasn’t anything that called you by your last name like it meant to make use of you. This was the place that wanted to use up even your wanting.
They went through the doorway into a room with a ceiling lost in steam. The floor was laid with black stone worn matte by countless feet. Stations lined the walls: chopping blocks, grinding mortars, racks and racks and racks of bright instruments, but no dust settled on any of it. People moved through the steam, precise and economical, helbound souls in aprons white as saints’ robes. Their eyes were focused ; their mouths were busy with nothing—chewing invisible words, maybe. A woman with a tattoo of a rose around her wrist bent to smell a pot without opening it and nodded to herself, then lifted the lid and tipped in a scoop of something like pearls. A man was breaking down an ox the size of a van with caresses. The meat sighed. No one looked up.
“Are they—” Rory started.
Nyx shook their head, the movement slow. “Don’t look too hard. Don’t give names. That’s worse than tasting.”
A bell tolled somewhere, not a harsh bell but one of those small handbells you use at home to call someone in from the garden. The signal slid into the room like silk . The workers lifted platters as if they had rehearsed this all forever and filed out through a back door into a corridor of light. Laughter rolled back at them, huge and hungry.
“Feast begins,” Isolde said. Her voice did not lift. “Feast never ends.”
Rory wasn’t sure whether it was sweat or condensation on the back of her neck. Her chest felt tight. The Heartstone didn’t hurt anymore; it called. She followed the pull into a side passage where the floor angled down and the walls took on a sheen. Shelves crammed with jars marched into the dim, each jar labeled in a hand that made her skin crawl—for all its beauty, it refused to tell her what it said. The jars held things that looked like fruit soaked in syrup, but close in, the fruits were thoughts. She saw an argument preserved like lemon slices, each brandished point suspended in shine. On the next shelf, confessions kept like cherries, red and black and sticky.
“Keep moving,” Nyx breathed in her ear. The whisper made the hair along her arms rise a little. “The deeper store. Your jewel is a key to a key. Or a stolen tooth returned to a mouth.”
Lovely, she thought. That wasn’t going to freak her out at all.
The passage opened into a domed conservatory draped in steam-lit leaves. Huge herbs fanned their strange fronds under the amber glow; basil the height of men and fennel that sounded like wind chimes when it shivered. Down the center lay a furrowed bed where something heart-shaped had been growing once and now had been harvested , leaving pale root-tunnels and dark holes. The air beat. That was the only word: beat, like a slow drum under the planet. At the far end, behind a freestanding screen of beaded bones, a soft throb pulsed like the one under Rory’s sternum.
She parted the screen. A chamber lay beyond, walls slick with condensation. In the center, on a low table carved with spoons and knives and forks in patterns that hurt to follow, lay a stone. It was the size of her fist and had the look of a pomegranate been turned to mineral. The surface flamed with inner light, not red but deep wine, and the light pushed at the edges of the stone like something alive and wanting more room.
Rory’s pendant blazed in answer. Pain shot down the muscles over her ribs and into her wrist where the small crescent-shaped scar shone white against her skin. She sucked a breath. “Okay,” she said, and even she didn’t know whether it came out as steadiness or plea.
Isolde stood with her hands folded like a woman in an old painting, eyes on the stone and deceptively mild. “Not a heart. A promise pretending to be one. Everything here pretends to be the thing that fills you. Beware.”
Nyx’s shadow leaned into the table’s curve. Their voice slipped under the words like cool air through a crack. “You don’t have to touch it,” they said. “Keys recognize locks without kissing.” Their violet eyes flared, soft and chill. “But if you want to wake a door, sometimes you knock.”
The stone’s hum settled into a low hunger in her bones. It felt like a magnet to her pendant. It felt like gravity. Rory reached halfway, then stopped. She thought of the Golden Empress and the way the wok flared when oil hit iron. She thought of home, the shape of the kitchen her parents had kept in Cardiff, the scar on her wrist from reaching into a drawer she shouldn’t have. She thought of the Seer who could not lie but could send you into danger with a smile. She thought of Nyx, laughing in a voice like fallen rain.
Above them, a muffled cheer rose, and then the mighty, appalling sound of hundreds of people taking a first bite at once. Pleasure rolled like thunder. The conservatory’s glass rattled in its old fastenings. The knives on the iron tree in the garden chimed.
“We can’t be here when they remember they’re missing a piece,” Nyx murmured. “The prince counts ribs before he naps.”
“Take, make, break,” Isolde recited, watching Rory’s hand. “Stealing is what the hungry do when they forget what their hands are for.”
Rory swallowed and closed her eyes. She eased the pendant out from under her jumper and let it swing, the silver chain cool across the back of her fingers. When the gem reached the lowest point of its arc, it tugged hard toward the larger stone, like two notes seeking harmony. The air softened. Something gave, the same violin string but tuned lower, and the edge of the table lifted a fraction on its carved legs, as if a sigh had gone out of it. The chamber smelled suddenly of apples left too long in a bowl.
She did not touch the big stone. She let the pendant swing once more and stop dead on its own, arrested by an unseen pull. Then she stepped back.
“Door,” Nyx said, pleased in the way one is pleased when a puzzle yields. “Not opened. But seen.”
Rory looked up. A seam had appeared behind the table, thin as thread, running down the slick wall into the floor. A seam that glowed with amber light where it broke, like sugar scored by a sharp knife. Her chest loosened. She grinned despite the sweat and the ache.
“Right,” she said, too bright because bright was better than shaking. “So we come back with, I don’t know, oven mitts? And a plan?”
Isolde’s smile was brief as fog. “Plans are scaffolds over rivers. The river chooses, not the wood.”
Footsteps whispered on the other side of the bone screen. Not human footsteps . The sound had weight and clink and a wet breath hitch. Rory’s fingers closed over the Fae blade until the cold burned her palm clean as snow. Nyx’s shadow swelled, height and breadth coalescing, edges hardening. The amber glow through the seam sharpened.
Rory felt the pull of the world beyond the seam and the heat of the world they were in, the warm amber sky and vineyards sweating sugar, and in the slender slice between them her own steady heartbeat. She swallowed again and steadied her grip. Wonder and terror tasted much the same on the tongue. She figured that was the point.
“Back the way we came,” Nyx whispered.
“Back with empty mouths,” Isolde said.
Rory nodded once. “Back fast,” she added under her breath, more to herself than to them, and turned, the Heartstone against her skin a living coal, the air humming, the chamber’s walls brightening as if the realm were waking to the fact of them. She moved, and they moved with her, three shadows slicking between hedges and steam and knives, deeper in and then, if luck held, back out through the ancient oaks where wildflowers failed to understand winter and the world held, just for now, its breath.