AI The grove breathed around the standing oaks, each trunk gnarled into the shape of a pillar. Air bent at the centre, a ripple in glass. Light poured through it in a thin sheet, too smooth for any London sky.
The pendant against Rory’s collarbone warmed again, a heartbeat under silver. She pressed a palm to it.
“It’s tugging,” she murmured.
Nyx rose from her shadow like a figure unhooked from the ground. Their outline held for once, a long-limbed silhouette with violet eyes like coals banked under frost.
“The door remembers its maker,” their voice drifted, wind sneaking under a window, “and welcomes the thief.”
“Flattery now, is it.” She pulled the moonsilver dagger free by an inch. Cold bit her thumb. “In and out. No licking the walls.”
“You have a rich imagination.”
She snorted.
Isolde leaned against an oak, arms folded, silver hair pooling over bark that didn’t take her weight . She left no marks in the damp earth. Pale eyes watched the ripple without blinking.
“A feast waits that never ends,” Isolde’s words lilted, slow as rain over leaves, “yet a guest may starve at the table if she forgets her own bread.”
“So don’t eat,” Rory translated.
“A blunt knife still cuts.” Isolde’s mouth tilted . “He cannot lie, but hunger does.”
Rory rubbed her wrist where the old scar lay, a crescent, a familiar anchor. “Keep the door open.”
“The Veil breathes like the sea. Doors close. Doors open. Choose a tide that will not drown you.”
“Brilliant pep talk.”
Nyx stepped nearer the shimmer. Their hand drifted through until their fingertips vanished. “Listen.”
Rory didn’t hear, not with ears. The sound slid into her like heat. Pans clanged a distant rhythm. A low hum stroked the spine. Something stirred sugar into butter with a smooth circular scrape, over and over.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s go steal from a prince.”
They stepped through.
Heat laid itself over her skin, sweet and heavy. The sky burned a warm amber that never quite hurt to look at, the colour of honey pooled in a wide dish. Below it, the world unrolled in terraces—vineyards marched over hills in even green stripes, leaves thick and glossy, and beyond them, orchards drooped with fruit in impossible shades. Water ran in channels of wine. She tasted cloves on the air.
Vines crowded the path like curious snakes. Tendrils curled toward the warmth of her wrist, paused when the Fae blade flashed, and twitched back as though scalded.
“Friendly,” she muttered.
“They suffer a lack of guests who refuse their gifts.”
Far off, a bell rang, but it didn’t toll. It chimed like a glass touched by a wet finger, one note that swelled and held. Left of them, a cooking fire rose and sank in time, hearths embedded in the very hillside, mouths cut into stone and lined in red tile the colour of tongues.
The path underfoot wasn’t dirt. It sprung under her boots with a whisper . She bent, pressed two fingers into it. A fine crust broke. Beneath, the ground gave like stale cake. She wiped crumbs on her jeans, grimaced.
“Of course.”
They moved. Across the vineyards, figures bent in motion that never stopped. Knives leapt and froze and leapt again, chopping green herbs that released bursts of pepper. Pots swung over coals without chains. Tasting spoons darted from pot to lip to pot, quick as dragonflies, leaving ripples across their own reflection. Wherever Rory looked, hands worked—no bodies, just sleeves rolled to the elbow with nothing inside them, stained cuff edges, flour dusted across invisible knuckles. A long table ran between two trees; plates slid along it by themselves, each one holding a dish that remade itself after each scrape.
“Helbound,” Rory murmured, breath a slice of air. “Those are… contracts on their wrists?”
The cuffs bristled with black thorns that wrapped where wrists should be; something writhed under them. She swallowed.
Nyx’s eyes flickered . “The paper burns long after the ink.”
A cluster of grapes swelled under her nose. Every one had a small mouth at the bottom, a neat O that inhaled and exhaled. Tiny sighs threaded the vine. A drop of juice formed and fell. It hit the ground and turned to a bee that lifted into the amber glare, its wings glass thin. The bee sagged mid-flight, heavy on sugar, and settled on Rory’s sleeve for a beat before losing interest in her and angling toward a candlelit alcove.
“You ever been here?”
“I learned hunger with a human stomach .”
“That’s a yes.”
“A memory more than a map.”
The pendant warmed again, a pulse in time with the bell. It drew her gaze to the right, toward a slope that tumbled into poured-stone steps. The stone had been swirled while soft then left to harden, a marbling of cream and pomegranate. Between the steps, herbs battled in fragrant knots—rosemary like tiny trees, basil leaves slick with oil that had wept out of nowhere, lavender that bled colour into the air with every brush.
“It wants us to go down,” she said.
“Or it wants company.”
“Quit with the fortune-cookie act.”
They took the steps. Down they went into a carved gullet of a hall, arches ribbed like the inside of a giant whale. Copper pots hung high as bells. Their bellies glowed with a light that came from a hearth with no flame. The floor was a mosaic of spices—stars of anise set into resin, glittering sugar like frost, crushed pepper that still stung her nose. Her boots left dark marks that filled in at once, as if the hall had decided that footprints spoiled the pattern.
A cart rattled past them without wheels. It carried a mountain of figs that rose and fell in a slow breath, as if something under the lot of them slept.
Rory’s stomach growled. She kept her jaw set. She didn’t blink at the roasted birds that turned on spits, skins lacquered to a mirror. She didn’t inhale the steam off a tureen that made her think of her mother’s kitchen, beef and barley and that quiet that only fell on Sundays when the windows steamed over.
Nyx leaned in, eyes narrowing. “Do not taste.”
“Do I look stupid?”
“You look human.”
She tapped the blade’s hilt. “I look armed.”
“Guns do little to soup.”
A laugh tugged at the corner of her throat and failed to escape. She stepped past an hourglass big as a horse that ran salt instead of sand. On the wall above it, someone had carved a feast in reverse—plates emptying into mouths that shrank, goblets pouring into throats that closed, a table that pulled back into a seed. The carver had given the empty plates a kind of longing, circles yearning for load.
“This hole’s old,” she said.
“The glutton remembers the first churn .” Nyx put fingers to the wall, pulled them back, slick with oil that seeped from the stone. “The same meal, made and remade.”
The pendant flared hot against her sternum. She hissed and fished it out. The gem at the centre—deep crimson—throbbed with a slow, deep light. It threw a red stain across the spice floor.
“Easy,” she muttered. “We’re here.”
The light found a seam in the far wall, a thin irregular line that didn’t match any join. It ran from eye level to foot level, like a mouth that had been sealed and tilted. Rory traced it with the back of her hand; stone hummed under skin and went cold. She rolled her shoulders and glanced at Nyx.
“You think —”
“A ward,” their voice cut, light as breath. “Poorly set, well fed.”
“It’s like law school all over again.”
“Do you wish to file a motion?”
“Oh, I’m cutting it.”
She drew the Fae blade. It woke in her hand like winter. Cold sank to her bones. The leaf-shaped edge held the amber light and turned it wan. She set it to the seam. It bit with no effort. The sound it made didn’t match a knife. It made a clean unzipping hiss that felt through the teeth more than heard. Sugar spiderwebs inside the crack dissolved, a bright sweetness burned into the air.
The seam parted. The wall puckered like flesh, then rolled back. A pantry opened beyond, narrow and deep. Jars lined both sides, stacked to the ceiling in filigreed metal racks. Each jar held no fruit, no meat, but sound. Words moved inside like smoke. They swam in currents, voices pressed to glass, old tongues and new, laughter, crying, the clatter of plates, prayers whispered over cakes. Each jar had a tag written in iron gall, the ink crackled into a sheen that caught the light, names and dates. She knew some of the surnames from her deliveries, from the mailbox in the building over Silas’s bar. A Hargrave. A Keong. A Carter, but a century older. Brendan, Jennifer, current; no, this was a Seamus Carter, 1919, Wales.
Rory reached out and stopped short.
“Eat and be eaten,” Nyx breathed. “Recipe and cook traded in the same breath.”
She moved her hand away. Kept her gaze on the metal brackets instead. Each one had been hammered with small ant faces, mandibles open. Sweet-smelling mould grew in patterns, spirals that resolved into script if she didn’t look too hard. The hum inside the jars pressed close to the edge of hearing and wobbled there, ready to spill.
“This feel like a thing the heart wants?”
“The Heartstone hums for home.”
“It came from here.”
“A gift that brings you back to thank the giver.”
“Stop. Enough.”
She turned to the centre of the pantry where a table waited, cut from a single block of some stone that looked edible and wasn’t. Its surface had been worn by a thousand cutting boards, faint trenches that kept oil to its lanes. On it sat a single place setting—plate, knife, fork, spoon, glass—each etched with a crest she didn’t recognise: a fat toad, crowned, tongue lolling. The fork had four tines, long and narrow like needles. The knife had no serration. The spoon had a lip that would catch any drip.
Nyx circled once. “He enjoys a joke.”
“Prince Belphegor throws a dinner party, leaves us a place.”
“The place is a pit.”
She blew hair out of her eyes. “Anatomy not your strong point?”
“You poke jokes until they bleed.”
She let the pendant drop back to her chest. Heat soaked her shirt. She lifted the place’s napkin by one corner. It unfurled and didn’t stop. Cloth spilled and spilled, a waterfall of linen that fell to the floor and kept coming in a slow slide as if the table birthed laundry. The runoff smelled of starch and roses. It ran over her boot like cold water, then vanished as if a mouth under the table gulped it down.
“Deep pockets.”
“This place eats even its own mess.”
At the far end of the pantry a second door showed, smaller, carved with vines that drooped carved fruit. Each fruit had a keyhole where the pit would be. Light rimmed the door, a thin crimson line.
“The stone wants that,” Rory said.
“It wants many things.”
She crossed to it, careful to brush no jars. A spoon darted at her hair and then swivelled away, uninterested in someone who refused to taste. At the door, she fit the flat of the gem to the topmost carved grape. It warmed under her palm. She pressed harder. The pulse matched hers. The door sighed and loosened a hand’s width. Sweet air touched her face, syrup and salt layered until they pulled her tongue. The blade lifted itself in her grip, mind of its own, and came to balance ready in front of her.
“I thought you didn’t like soup,” she muttered.
“It’s the ward I dislike. Soup is honest.”
Behind them, a tray skated into the pantry, loaded with six tiny tarts. Each one shone. The crusts were pale, delicate as moth wings. The filling wasn’t fruit. It gleamed red like muscle. As they watched, one tart split, not from heat, but from a breath that came from inside it. It took a breath then sagged, again, like a sleeping animal.
Rory forced her eyes away. “We keep moving.”
Nyx’s eyes narrowed . “Your hands shake.”
“Fuck off.”
“Good. Hold to that.”
She eased the door wider. Inside, dim light held something that rotated without moving. Shelves circled a cylinder of crystal that pulsed faint behind frost. It wasn’t frost. It was sugar spun so fine it made fog. In the crystal , seeds floated, black and hard. They ticked against the glass like rain. Each tick echoed deeper than the space could account for. The echo touched bone.
“Seeds from a hunger plant,” Nyx breathed, fingers spread. “Feed them names and watch them sprout.”
“You swear and you poet in the same breath.”
“An old habit.”
A label had burned itself into the doorframe. Dymas, in script that curled indulgent, then four more marks that defied her reading, less letters than tastes. Her tongue touched her teeth of its own accord. Metal sang against enamel.
She reached for the cylinder. The blade in her hand hissed once, a sound like frost racing over glass, and tiny threads of magic that had knitted over the latch snapped. She laid the knife flat. The cold in it killed the warmth of the room by a sliver. The orb within pulsed again, not a heart, but a stomach contracting as if to swallow .
“You going to judge me if I break it?” she asked.
“I do not judge,” Nyx’s voice thinned. “I watch, and sometimes I grieve.”
“Useful.”
On the shelf under the crystal , a book had been wedged open by two ivory spoons. The paper had been pulped from onion skins and still held their translucent veins. Quill scratches formed lines that twisted between recipe and spell. She traced a title without touching. Reduction of Light. The next entry read: Binding Sugar for Wayward Doors. The notes in the margin changed hand halfway down the page. One script rushed, hungry. The other had precise loops as if the hand moved through treacle and loved it.
“Less stealing, more studying,” Rory breathed. “Which I swore never to do again.”
“Look. The margin.”
She leaned in. A familiar curve hit her gut, not meaning, but shape . A letter like how her father made his capital B—too tall, that kinked back a touch when he smiled and corrected her in the margins of her homework. Her neck prickled.
“Names travel,” Nyx whispered. “They sneak into records where other eyes forget to look.”
“You don’t miss a thing.”
“I miss everything. That is how I learn to watch.”
The bell chimed again. The tone ran through the jars and woke them. Voices lifted. Some sobbed. Some laughed with mouths full. A language older than the oak grove breathed from a jar that shook on its rack, a tide pulling at the metal brackets. Another clacked like shells. The air thickened. Sugar clung to Rory’s lashes.
“We move,” she said.
“Forward.”
“You keep my back.”
“I am your shadow.”
She swung the blade toward the cylinder’s latch. The cold slid under the warm. A hairline crack traced the lock, white and clean, spidering across crystal . A seed inside rolled. It struck with a neat click that echoed against her ribs. She ground her teeth to kill the desire that rose with it, a wish to stop here, to root, to eat until the world narrowed to mouth and gut.
“We move,” she repeated, and her voice steadied.