AI The silver chain caught on bark and snapped against her collarbone as she squeezed between two oak monoliths. The pendant thudded once, hot as a fresh bruise.
She had come because of a note stapled to a delivery docket, a neat little square of cream paper that smelled faintly of mothballs and violets. Richmond Grove, it read in tight block letters, bring the Heartstone, come alone. The handwriting looked like it wanted to pass inspection. The words did not.
The clearing opened like a held breath. The standing oaks, some of them too broad to hug even with outstretched arms, formed a circle with roots that looked like sleeping serpents . Wildflowers scattered the grass where no wildflowers should have survived, small starry throats in whites and blues and teeth-red, their stalks fuzzed with soft hairs that caught on her boots as if in greeting. Faint light came from nowhere sensible. It made edges sharpen and middles soften.
The Heartstone stirred again against her sternum, a pulse that did not match the one in her neck. Her fingers went to it without thinking. It felt smooth and alive. No one at Golden Empress had seen under the note. Yu-Fei had stacked foil containers, money counted swift and tidy, and smiled with the kind of smile that made you behave. Aurora had slipped the paper into her pocket and told no one. Silence travelled faster than gossip, in the right lanes.
Something moved at the rim of her vision. She turned her head. A small moth twitched among the flowers. It had too many wings.
She kept walking. The oaks watched, their bark ridged like old knuckles. Her palm skimmed one and came away with a slick of sap the colour of weak tea. The smell clawed at her with notes of iron and crushed mint, old pennies forgotten in a damp drawer. The air pressed close, not cold, not warm, occupied.
A branch clicked somewhere above. She paused and looked up. Nothing obvious. The canopy knitted tight enough that only thin skeins let anything through. A bead of moisture dropped from somewhere and broke on her cheek. She tasted wood and something that did not belong to any tree.
The pendant heated, an insistent throb that urged her left. She obeyed in small degrees, cool-headed even with adrenaline squirming, mapping her steps with the sort of care she used on sketchy stairwells and worse clients. The trick with bad ideas lay in deciding where to step and when to run.
Halfway to the heart of the circle, she heard laughter. It came from the left, close and low, a girl's laugh cut short in its own mouth. It made her skin quiver like a plucked string.
She stopped. Her throat swelled with her own voice before she had given it permission, but she kept it neat.
"Isolde?"
The trees held themselves still. The laugh did not come again. The wildflowers angled micro-faces to her. She had never met Isolde. People spoke her name as if it had teeth. Some called the place hers, in the same tone used for pirate coves and condemned houses.
"Fine. Show me."
Her voice came back to her late, too late. It sounded like a film out of sync, lips moving before words arrived. Her shoulders tightened. She laced her fingers behind her head for a beat, then dropped them. Reflex. The pendant beat warmth into the meat of her chest, steady now, insistent now, the pace of a jogger hung at a red light.
The first oak she had brushed stood where it always had. The second did not. She had marked a twist of its bark with a scrape from her ring. It should have been to her right. It now crouched to her left, a fraction of a turn different, as if the whole circle had flexed while she blinked. The flowers below it made a shy rustling sound. Leaves whispered without moving.
"Eva would love this," she said, and then shut up at once. Names did things, here. The desire to fill the hush sat in her mouth like a stone. She turned it over with her tongue and spat it into the grass.
She took out her phone. The battery indicator informed her of a health she did not trust. No signal bars. Of course. She opened the notepad app and typed the time. Her own handwriting turned to little blocks and then to letters again. She tasted metal.
A distant engine rumbled, heavy and slow, like an aeroplane laying its belly against the city. The sound stretched and grew thin, drew itself across the clearing like spun sugar, and then it snapped back to a clean, brief roar. She checked the notepad. The time had skipped forward six minutes. Her fingers had not stopped moving in that span.
"Stop it," she said. Not to the phone. To the place.
The answer came as a breath across the back of her neck, light as a cat's tail. She slammed her elbow back and met nothing. The space behind her grinned.
"Enough games."
Her words drifted to her in their own time. The tail of the last consonant caught on something, as if snagging on a nail . The pendant warmed until it hurt. The warmth ran into her bones and set up house.
She reached the centre of the ring. The grass gave underfoot with the peel and pull of a damp rug. The ground changed there. It felt thick and sprung, as if something coiled below it had shifted to accommodate her weight . The wildflowers crowded closer. Their faces looked too eager. Faint light caught in the silver outlines of spiderwebs that made maps from branch to branch. A lone blackbird scolded and then forgot how to finish the phrase.
The Heartstone brightened, snagging her like a hook. Under its glow, the world drained of its own colours until bark looked like old photographs and her hands like someone else's. The pendant was the only proper red. It had no business glowing in a place that made its own decisions about light. It did.
"Come alone," she said, speaking the note to the empty air. "I did."
A reply lifted from the grass, sibilant, fond in the wrong way.
"Alone."
Her hands curled. Her left thumb found the small crescent scar on her right wrist, the old smooth ridge that had never quite faded after that childhood accident with the broken jam jar. She stroked it and found herself anchored, ridiculous and human inside an old place that knew better.
She kneeled and put her palm flat to the ground. The skin there felt warm, the way a seat holds a trace of whoever just left. Below the warmth , something ticked. Not a clock. Too wet for that. A living metronome, an organ pumping against earth.
The heat from the pendant sharpened, not pain yet, but with intentions . She unhooked the chain and held the gem in her fist. Light seeped through her fingers. Its glow licked the webbing between them, red on brown skin, made thin shadows of her knuckles. The warmth soothed as a hot water bottle and threatened like a kettle left singing too long.
"Where," she said. It came out as air.
There. The word did not happen inside her head. It opened in the hollow of her right ear with the intimacy of a whisper that did not need breath.
She turned her head. A hawthorn arched low to the ground just beyond the inner ring. It had not existed a moment before. It looked old enough to remember blankets as currency and apples as dowries. Its thorns were pale, almost clear, like fish bones held to light. Tiny blossoms clustered along its cords, each a perfect five-petalled star, each wet as if licked. Their drop-sweet scent rode under the iron and mint. Her mouth filled with saliva.
She ducked beneath the hawthorn. The bark snagged a lock of hair and held it until she spoke out loud.
"Let go."
A soft click, and it did. She pulled free and entered the little hollow under the thorn. The sound of the clearing leaned away, like someone stepping out of conversation. Here, a pool sat in a stone dish no wider than a dinner plate. Water beat invisible against its sides. The surface did not ripple. Her face hung there, too clear. Bright blue eyes, a smudge of crushed earth beneath one cheekbone, mouth thinned to pragmatism. The face learned her expressions late.
Her reflection blinked. She had not. Her gut climbed her ribs. She reached for the edge of the dish and found it warm and unpleasantly yielding, not stone at all. Bark? Bone? It pushed back.
She held the Heartstone close to the water. The red bled into the surface in slow fingers, and the water refused to accept it. A thin skin quivered and flinched. Then, with the politeness of a door on oiled hinges, the pool opened.
Not inwards. Backwards. A seam unzipped across air. The light in the hollow went thin and stringy and then dense as unlit glass. The smell that came through ruled nothing that grew on this side. Cold rose like a thought and pushed against her gums. Frost bloomed in her sinuses and then withdrew, embarrassed.
The hear-it of a crowd swelled, too far to touch, and with no voices in it. Something scraped the threshold like claws unhappy with their length. The pendant burned against her fingers with a hound's impatience at the line of a field.
Behind her, leaves made a sound like someone smoothing a dress. She did not look . Forward held her. The crackled-glass slit in the air held. Along its edges, the world kissed the world and found no purchase.
"Rory," someone said, as to a lover kept waiting. The name dropped like hot sugar onto a plate. Then, with a spiteful little lift, "Laila." Then, softer still, in a child's voice she had not used in fifteen years, "Aurora."
She set her teeth against reply. Names did things, here. Names raised dogs and old gods both. She held the Heartstone to the seam. The seam thickened, brightening with a red drawn from under the world rather than from this side of it, a colour as old as spilt blood and older than that.
The standing oaks spoke to one another in roots and pushed her boot soles askew. The hawthorn shook itself without moving, a ripple that travelled its length as if a hand had passed over all its flowers. Pollen stung her eyes. Water made no sound on the leaf litter, and yet her ankles chilled as if she had stepped into a stream.
"Give it back," the voice whispered, as coaxing as sugar on a rim. "Malphora."
No one living knew that name for her. It did not fit and it did. The hollow budded with shadows. Little things flicked their bodies along the inside of the thorn arch and pretended to be leaves. The reflection in the pool copied her stillness and did not copy the tremor in her hands.
"No," she said, simple as a closing hand.
She lifted the gem a fraction higher. The seams of the hollow tightened. The world to the left of the slit slurred a little, like paint brushed in the wrong direction. Through the gap, something breathed and did not breathe.
The birds in the Grove did not chirp. They knew when not to. She remembered walking past tourists who fed the wrong animals for the wrong reasons in this park and thought how small they were, her old problems, how sharp and human. This was a different calculus. When she had run from Evan, from the slam of doors and the hissed apologies, she had brought nothing but money, papers, hands that did not shake. Now she held a thumbnail of Dymas in her fist, the word Hel on the underside of her tongue like a blister.
"Time's up," said the world beyond in the shape of a woman she would not yet look at. The words came from inside the gap, and the taste of them was grave dirt and alder sap.
"I decide my time," she said.
The seam shivered. Light coiled and tightened. The pendant leached heat that made her skin damp. The hawthorn's scent went sickly and then righted itself. An animal noise ticked from the crack, not a growl, not a purr, an under-voice that pinned spine to marrow.
She stood, because kneeling conceded ground. She set her feet and pulled the chain back around her neck, because her hands had already made that decision . The silver lay cool, then warm, then a brand she would answer to later.
The step back to the circle felt like stepping off a kerb you had not seen. Her stomach knocked her heart. The oaks loomed . The ring no longer held polite space. She had the odd sense of standing in someone's hex, chalk lines sealed with spit, even though no chalk had ever survived here.
A shape moved between two trunks. It came as a sliver, then as an outline trisected by branches, then as a figure, the wrong size by a degree most eyes missed. It stopped with the neatness of someone finishing arithmetic. It had a woman's shoulders, a long old coat that had once been nice, and hair that hung heavy as wet rope. Its face waited in the dark created by the shapes of other darks.
"You are late," it said. The voice belonged to no one she knew and to every auntie who had ever caught her bruised and made her lie about steps and newel posts. It had a smile in it and teeth behind the smile.
"You sent the note?" Her mouth worked fine. Her pulse did not.
"The note found you. Notes know the way. You came because you want what comes next."
"I came to end a problem."
A soft, pleased hum. "You brought it, then."
"It?" She let the foolishness of that word sit between them. It told her how she had judged the figure already as something with superior etiquette and no scruples.
"The little old crimson Dymas heart. What else do you have worth this walk?" The thing made a small gesture of her kind and bled light across her fingers without light touching them. "Give it here, Malphora."
Aurora's hands stayed at her sides. One thumb grazed the scar. The chain rested against skin sticky with sweat. She could feel the Heartstone's shape as if it had imprinted on her.
"You're not Isolde," she said.
"Isolde is no one's. Isolde is a place when she wants a place and a woman when she takes that shape and a rumour when men need to explain where they left their good cufflinks. I am sufficient for you. Give."
The clearing caught its breath. The small windy sigh of the city beyond the park, the rumour of roads and late voices, lost itself at the boundary of bark. Time in her pocket phone walked forward, tripped, and stood up again as if nothing had happened.
Aurora took one step back. The ground under her heel softened. Roots shifted, a warning disguised as indulgence. The figure's head cocked, interested as a heron watching a flick in water. She pictured, briefly, the warm fug of Silas's bar below her flat, the glass that smelt of citrus and gin, Yu-Fei's voice counting in Cantonese, steadiness dressed as song. Those rooms belonged to a world with clean laws. This cleared throat of a wood wrote its own.
The figure moved. It moved without asking permission of space. One instant it stood across from her, the next its coat brushed bark a breath from her shoulder. She had not seen the in between. The air it brought smelt of cool basements, of lye soap and something animal kept too long indoors.
A hand came up. Not a woman's hand, not in the ways that mattered. The nails shone clear as hawthorn thorns, curved with a thoughtful arc. The knuckles had a second set of knuckles impossible for bone. It reached for the chain as if to lift a necklace from a friend who had asked for help unclasping.
Rory's body answered before she finished the thought. She twisted, stamped down and forward. The roots tried to cradle, then realised her intent and gave her traction. Her shoulder took the brunt of the movement. She drove it into the figure's midline. The coat felt full of sticks. The figure gave just a little and made a pleased noise, as if made of reeds that liked to be bent.
The chain went tight around her throat. Fingers that were not fingers caught it and tugged. Silver bit. She got both hands under it in time to save her carotids from being neatly closed. She smelled old rain in cellars and saw, in the tightmost part of the figure's shadow, something look out at her with the wrong number of eyes.
"Give," the voice said, right against her cheek now, as intimate as a bite.
The seam in the hollow under the hawthorn exhaled. The red quivered to white, the white to something that had no name and no place to stick language. The lean-in from the gap took the sound in the ring and laid it flat.
Something, not wind, hit the clearing from the open crack like a slap. The hawthorn shed all at once. Five-petalled stars fell thick as rain. The figure's coat flared, its hair lifted with a slow, tidal motion, and the chain in Aurora's fists ripped forward with a force that did not come from the hands in front of her.
The Heartstone tore free of her grip.
The clearing screamed. Not aloud. Sap screamed, and stone screamed, and the red flower faces curved back on themselves in a silent chorus of oh. The seam yawned, an unhinging. Breathless, dragged, Aurora saw the gem hang for a tiny measure of time and then fly toward the gap as if yanked on a fisherman's line.
She threw herself after it. She did not plan the movement. Her body chose, and the rest of her ran to keep up. Her boots skidded on crushed petals and old bark, and the figure's hand snapped shut on the back of her coat and missed. The edge of the hawthorn caught her shoulder like a fishhook and she ripped through it, flesh laced with sting. The stone dish split its circle open again as if grinning wider to taste what came .
The silver chain went taut in her hands, cut into her palms, and the world beyond the seam reached out with a cold that had a direction and a pair of hands.
They closed on her wrists and pulled.