AI Rory slipped sideways between two stunted oak pillars and the pendant thudded against her sternum like a small, impatient fist. The chain scraped her neck. Her palms stung. Sap smeared her fingertips, sticky as old honey.
No one followed her. At least, no one she could see.
She let the boughs fold behind her and looked down at the thing the unknown benefactor had sent. Deep crimson caught a faint inner light, like it hoarded a candle somewhere inside. It had led her here, a breadcrumb you wore on a string.
She pinched it between her knuckles and whispered to the empty clearing.
"You wanted me in Richmond. I am here. Now what."
The answer slid out of the dark as a click-click in the undergrowth, too slow for beetles, too measured for a fox. She stilled, listening. It did not come again.
Two rules for walking into a place that does not like you, she reminded herself, because thinking in lists steadied her hands. You keep your name close to your teeth. You do not agree to anything you did not start.
She tugged her jacket cuffs over her wrists until the crescent scar hid. Habit. Then she stepped deeper into the Grove.
The stones were not stones, not in any way her head liked. Ancient oaks had twisted themselves into pillars and arches, bound together with their own roots, bark grey as old bones. They ringed the clearing as if they had taken seats in a theatre. Wildflowers stitched a bright collar around the grass. Bluebells brushed her boots, though it was November in the rest of London and Richmond Park had closed hours ago.
It was night. She felt it in the way the dark pooled, thick against her shins. No roads hummed. The city had thinned to a far-off thought, like something she had dreamed and almost forgotten.
The Heartstone warmed until her skin flushed. She tried to guess if it pulsed with her heartbeat. It did not. It ran on its own rhythm, out of step with her blood.
She crouched and scraped a shallow notch into the nearest oak with her key. Fresh sap welled and gleamed. Copper stung her nose. Blood, her nerves insisted. Recent, and wrong.
"Noted," she said under her breath .
The notch smoothed out at the edges while she watched. Bark crawled. The tree corrected her rudeness.
She straightened. The pendant tugged, insistent now, a dog nosing at a lead. She followed it to a tangle of roots that had buckled the earth into a little mouth. Cold breathed up from it, thin and sharp. It tasted of extinguished candles and coins left too long in the rain.
The Heartstone heated in reply. Her sternum flinched.
Hel, she thought, unhelpfully, and found herself grinning, quick and white, because of all the places to slot a door to the land of the dead, why would it be here. A Fae pocket turned toll booth. Someone had been greedy with thresholds.
She slipped a hand into her jacket and brought out a roll of delivery stickers she had forgotten to return to the Golden Empress till. She peeled one off, stuck it to a flat stretch of bark. The sticker read PAID in red block letters. If the sticker moved when she was not looking , she wanted to know.
From the roots, a thin scraping started, like nails against slate. She forced herself not to step back.
"You need better sound design," she said, and dropped a pound coin into the root-mouth.
It fell for too long. Then it made no sound at all.
Leaves above her whispered. No wind moved them. The whisper shaped itself, clumsy, like a child arranging borrowed syllables.
"Ro-ry."
She never liked her nickname in other mouths. It made her feel twelve. Knowing mouths in a place like this could open and never be seen.
She licked her teeth, just to remind herself they were still there. "That is not what I told you."
No answer. The creak of wood settled like an old man leaning in his chair.
She looked up at the tangle of crowned branches. Bright blue flowers beaded the shadows like eyes. They were not eyes. They were only flowers. She told herself this with the crisp logic she reserved for handling clients who thought fortune cookies could predict traffic patterns.
The shadows shifted at the far edge of the clearing. She pivoted. Something thin slid behind a pillar, fast as a lizard. She caught a pale angle, ankle white as milk, then nothing. She waited for the next movement and felt the wrongness build in tiny increments, like a kettle not quite boiling . The world around her did not breathe, and then it did, with her, against her.
The pendant throbbed .
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. The rush of relief shamed her, even as she grabbed it. One notification. Eva. A photo from last week, her mate pulling a face over a plate of steamed buns.
She glanced at the time. 03:12. She frowned. When she had squeezed through the oaks, it had been just after midnight by the bus stop. The battery icon jerked from 78 percent to 19, then settled on 54. She locked the screen and slid the phone away. Nothing about this place offered a straight line.
The roots stirred. It was subtle. Enough to make the smallest stones tiptoe. Enough to make the hairs stand along her forearms and push against the sleeves of her jacket. She crouched again, knee down, and saw frost forming around the root-mouth in a hard little ring. It rimed the soil with a salt-white grin.
The Heartstone burned. She hissed and lifted it away from her skin, letting it dangle on the chain. It gave off a faint glow now, a coal catching.
"All right," she said. "You win. Show me."
When she leaned close, breath condensed like smoke and curled down into the hollow. A reflection swam up at her, faint and veering. For a second she swore she saw her own bright blue eyes and straight black fringe drifting under black water, as if someone had placed a mirror at the bottom of a well and convinced it to behave like a lake.
She blinked. The face vanished. Some deeper dark rolled, slick, with a shine that made her teeth ache. She put the back of her hand to the stone-cold earth and felt the heartbeat of the Grove, the slow creak of growth counts and sap counts and leaf counts. It did not worry about her. It worried about the mouth someone had cut in its floor.
Across the clearing, the PAID sticker fluttered down the trunk, hit the grass, and slid to a stop with its red letters upside down.
Rory stood. "Cheeky."
The click-click returned, this time right behind her left shoulder. She whirled. Nothing there. Another click to her right. The sound reminded her of a metronome that had forgotten the measure, counting someone else's song.
She scooped two pebbles from the ground, warm from the not-wind. She tossed one towards the pillar where she'd seen the ankle. It flew, hung, changed its mind, and dropped at her own feet with a small unbothered tock.
She pressed her tongue to her molar to stop the laugh that wanted to break out. Laughing here would give too much away. She pocketed the second pebble. In case she needed to remember what weight felt like .
"Malphora," something said from nowhere and everywhere, tasting the syllables like butter.
Her neck went cold. She never told anyone that name, not even Eva. It read like a wrong answer on a quiz, a scribble version of Aurora. She had heard it once, not with her ears. Dreams counted until you woke.
"Who taught you that," she said, careful, lips hardly moving.
Leaves pricked. The green smell sharpened, edges of mint and something bitter. Sap slid down the oak where she had marked it, tracing a new line that did not follow gravity. It went up.
She took a slow step back. The oak pillars tilted, a fraction. She felt it more than saw it, the suggestion of a lean, the way chairs scrape when a room stands.
A low hum started beyond the roots, a standing tone that crawled under her skin and made her teeth throb . The Heartstone flared, crimson brightening to a steady ember. Heat travelled the chain and bit her neck. She swore, yanked the pendant off, and wrapped it in the rag she kept for greasy stairs and restaurant leaks.
The hum resolved into a layered sound. One voice, two keys, three notes, over and over, a child's counting-out rhyme spoken wrong.
"One for the open gate, two for the bone, three for the bright girl walking alone."
She clamped her teeth. She had come here alone. That had been the point. If you brought witnesses, thresholds chewed twice as much.
"Not my song," she said.
The rhyme stopped. The quiet that followed had texture, like cloth drawn tight against knuckles.
Something stepped through it.
She sensed it first in her ears. The complaint of wood as the thing shouldered past branches that closed in querulous huffs. Then she felt it in her shoes, the faintest tremor cruising the top layer of soil ahead of the actual footfalls. Finally she saw its shadow, narrow as a cut, cross the ring of frost. She did not see a body yet. The Grove rearranged itself in expectation. Flowers changed their faces.
"Your father says hello," said the wrong voice using her father's cadence. It landed too square in the air, like a piece placed on a board.
She felt rage then, bright and old, and with it came relief. Anger gave shape to fear. She had a shape to push against.
"You do second-hand impressions," she said. "How original."
"Or Evan," the voice tried, smearing itself into a different tone. "Remember Evan."
She set her foot to the left and put a pillar at her right shoulder, lining sight lines like she was waiting out a brawl in a bar back room. The chain of the pendant tightened around her fist. The rag smoked, faintly, scenting the air with ugly iron.
"Keep shouting the wrong names," she said. "See how doors listen."
A crack spidered across the earth from the root-mouth to her boot. Frost rushed to chase it, careful and eager. The crack opened a little, a lipless grin, and a breath came out that had been underground too long. It wrapped her ankles and slid ice into her marrow.
The wrong voice dropped. It found a register lower than her bones wanted to hear.
"Aurora Carter," it said, and the sound of her legal name used like a key pushed the air hard enough to make her eyes water.
Her heart hit the bars of her ribs. She spun on instinct and slashed with the only blade she had, the little golden box cutter she had swiped from the Golden Empress supply closet months ago. The metal flashed, hopeful.
The air caught the cut and kept it. Her wrist jarred. The cutter sailed out of her hand and vanished into the throat of the root-mouth without making any sound.
Silence shocked her. Then, a heartbeat later, the box cutter rose back up. It came point-first, held between fingers paler than anything she had seen on a living person. Wet gleamed along the knuckle. Not blood. Water condensed and beaded like sweat, like the thing had reached through a wall of cold and brought the chill back with it.
It lifted the blade to her face and turned it so the little golden edge winked at her. An offer. An invitation. A dare.
She did not take it. Not yet. She did not know the cost. Two rules, she told herself. Do not agree. Do not eat. She added a third without meaning to. Do not accept handouts from holes in the ground.
"Fine," she said, and let her voice go flat. "Keep it."
The thing that was still mostly shadow smiled behind the sound of wood creaking. She did not see a mouth. She heard the thought of one.
A smear of movement broke behind her, quick as the white ankle again, and she whirled in time to see the PAID sticker lift from the grass and slap itself across her left wrist. It adhered right over the crescent scar, glue burning like nettles. The red letters pulsed . The pendant inside the rag kicked harder. Her left hand jerked as if someone else had pulled the string.
"Enough," she snapped.
The root-mouth yawned. The cut in the earth widened, black and glossy, and the frost bloomed outward like a tide. A rush of smelling-salt air burst up, sweet and sharp, and the sound came with it, the metronome gone mad, click, clack, cluck, build to a tick-tock that made her throat itch.
From the crease that was not a door, a figure unspooled. Antlers tangled with vine. A shawl of nettles and nightshade hung from shoulders that were only silhouette. Water dripped from its fingers and sizzled where it touched frost. No face showed except what the Grove decided to cast. For a second Rory saw her mother, then Yu-Fei behind the counter correcting her order slips, then Evan slouched and strong, then no one at all.
It leaned its not-face toward her. The nearest oak creaked like a warning.
"Laila," it whispered, and the nickname she had used once when she ran sounded like a stone rolling into place .
Rory took a step to the side, checking escape lines between pillars, easing her weight onto the balls of her feet.
"Names are cheap," she said. "What do you want."
It lifted its wet hand and pointed at the thing on her chest, the poor Heartstone now flaring through the rag and making its own light. The silver chain tightened as if to say it chose a new owner.
"That," the wrong voice said, all hungrily reasonable. "Heart for a heart. Give it."
She shifted her grip on the chain and the rag smoked. Decision lay on the tip of her tongue. She could toss it into the mouth and see which way the Grove spat. She could run between the chairs and risk the stage punishing bad manners. She could call a name she had been given once, a thorn of a name, and owe someone older.
Something moved to her left. Fast, low, careful. She did not look. The wrong thing liked it when her head turned.
"No," she said, and pulled the Heartstone hard, ready to tear the chain or her skin, whichever gave first.
Cold fingers closed around her ankle and pulled.