AI The gate at Sheen Lane had been chained since dusk, so Rory went over the wall.
Her trainers found the top, then the grass on the other side, and Richmond Park swallowed her whole. No streetlights. No traffic hum, though the North Circular should have carried this far. Just the long black slope of Kingston Vale going down into the dark, and the trees standing about like people who'd stopped talking when she walked in.
The pendant lay cold against her breastbone. She checked it with two fingers. Still cold. Still just a stone.
"Twelve minutes past the third oak," she muttered. "Which third oak, Silas? There's nine hundred bloody oaks."
She'd written the directions on the back of a Golden Empress receipt, because that was the kind of woman she'd become in eight months. Yu-Fei's spidery Cantonese on one side, Silas' block capitals on the other. FOLLOW THE DEER PATH. DON'T STEP OFF IT. IF SHE SPEAKS FIRST, DON'T ANSWER.
The deer path showed itself soon enough, a pale ribbon worn through the bracken by generations of hooves. Rory followed it with her phone torch down low, the beam catching frost on the seed-heads. Her breath went up in ropes.
Somewhere ahead, a stag coughed. That awful noise they make, like a man being sick in an alley.
She stopped.
Because that was the thing. The stag coughed, and then nothing coughed back. Rory had grown up on the coast road outside Cardiff and she knew what a wood sounded like in October . It sounded busy. Owls arguing. Mice in the leaf litter. Somewhere, always, a dog.
Here, the sound of the stag went out and didn't come back, like a coin dropped down a well too deep to hear the splash.
She kept walking. Slower.
The bracken thinned. The ground rose. And the standing stones came out of the dark all at once, the way a face comes out of the dark, and her stomach did something unpleasant.
They weren't stone. She'd known that, she'd been told that, but knowing and seeing were different countries. Oak. Ancient oak, dead and grey and hard as flint, each one the girth of a wine barrel, standing upright in a ring wider than a tennis court. Nine of them. She counted twice and got nine both times, which felt like a small mercy .
The wildflowers started at the boundary. Cow parsley in October. Foxgloves. Poppies with their heads up as if June had never ended. They stopped in a perfect line where the ring stopped, as though someone had run a blade along the grass.
"Right," Rory said.
She said it out loud, and hated how thin it came out.
Isolde had promised her a name. That was the deal, struck in Silas' back room over a glass of something that had made her tongue go numb. A name for a favour. And Rory needed the name the way a drowning woman needs the rope, so here she was at whatever hour this was, standing outside a wood that wasn't a wood, waiting to be let in.
She stepped between two of the oaks.
Nothing happened. No shimmer, no chime, no lurch in the gut. She just walked from cold grass onto warm grass, and the frost stopped, and the air came up around her thick with the smell of crushed stems and honey and, underneath it, faintly, meat.
The pendant against her chest warmed a fraction. Not the pulse Silas had described. Just a suggestion of blood in the stone.
"Isolde?"
The clearing lay empty under a moon that had been a waning crescent an hour ago and was now, definitively, full.
Rory looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked away, because looking at it made the back of her neck crawl, and she counted the oaks again.
Ten.
She counted again, going the other way round, touching each trunk with her eyes and holding it, the way her mother had taught her to count sheep on a Welsh hillside. Ten. One of them stood between two others that had been shoulder to shoulder before, and its bark was smoother, paler, and if she let her focus drift the vertical channels in it arranged themselves into something like a mouth held shut .
She turned her back on it.
That was a mistake, and she knew it as she did it, the way you know a step is wrong the instant your weight goes onto it.
The grass behind her whispered.
Not a footfall . Grass laying down. The long soft hiss of something dragging low and wide through a meadow, moving from her left towards her right, unhurried. Rory swung the torch. The beam went out into the flowers and showed her nothing but flowers, all of them upright, all of them still.
The whisper continued for three more seconds after she'd stopped moving.
Then it stopped too.
"I'm here for Isolde." Her voice came out steadier . Good. Fear was just chemistry, her father used to say, cross-examining the sofa cushions. Fear is chemistry and cowardice is a choice. "She invited me. I've got the token."
She dug it out of her jacket pocket. A hazel twig, split and bound with red thread. Held it up like a bus pass.
The clearing considered her.
Rory had been in rooms with men who wanted to hurt her. She'd learnt the physics of it, the way the air thickens in a doorway, the way you can feel someone's attention land on your skin like a hand. She felt that now, and she felt it from every direction, and that was the part her body objected to most. Something behind her, fine. Something in front, fine. But the pressure came from the whole circle, evenly, the way water presses on a swimmer.
A skylark started singing.
At night. In October. In a clearing where nothing else made a sound. It went up and up and up in that ecstatic scribble, and then it faltered, and repeated the same three seconds of song, and repeated it again, and again, with the exact same catch in the exact same place, like a scratched record.
Rory's mouth had gone dry as paper.
"You can stop that," she said.
The skylark stopped mid-note.
She stood in the ringing silence with the torch shaking, and she thought about the rules. Don't step off the path. She'd stepped off the path. But the path had ended at the stones, so what was she supposed to have, hovered? If she speaks first, don't answer. Nobody had spoken. Nobody had done anything except rearrange the trees and the moon and play her one bar of birdsong on a loop, and none of that was speaking , technically, and Rory had grown up in a house where technically was a load-bearing wall.
Something moved at the edge of the torchlight.
She didn't turn her head. She'd learnt that too, in London, in the tunnels under Camden with Eva screaming somewhere behind her. Movement in your periphery wants you to turn. Turning gives it your back.
So she watched it sideways, with the corner of her eye, and it stayed exactly where the corner of her eye ended, matching her, a pale vertical smudge about the height of a woman.
Rory took one step to the left.
It took one step to the left.
"Isolde," she said, "if this is a test, I'd like to lodge an objection."
The smudge tilted. Not like a head tilting. Like a plank tipping over, slow, from the ankles, going down towards the flowers, and it never landed. It went down and down at that same lazy angle, past the horizontal, and just kept going, until it was pointing into the ground.
Then it was gone, and the flowers where it had stood were bent flat in the shape of a body.
The pendant flared.
Not warm. Hot, sudden, a coal against her sternum, and Rory gasped and got a hand under it and pulled the chain out from her collar. The crimson stone throbbed in her palm, bright enough to paint her fingers red, bright enough to throw her own shadow onto the grass in front of her.
Onto the grass in front of her, where the light was coming from.
She had a shadow in front of her. And behind her, cast by that same pulsing crimson, she had another one.
And the second shadow had its arms raised.
Rory did not turn round. She stood with her fist closed round the burning stone and her eyes on the two dark shapes on the flowers, hers small and huddled, the other tall, the other reaching, and she watched the reaching one's fingers stretch and stretch across the ground until their tips touched the back of her heels.
Behind her, very close, something inhaled with her mother's voice.
"Rory, love. You're miles from home."