AI The stones didn't want us. I felt it in my molars when I crossed between them, a pressure like a plane dropping altitude, and then the whole of Richmond Park went silent behind me as if someone had shut a very heavy door.
"Say something," I said.
"Something." Nyx's voice came from my left, then my right, then somewhere under my ribs. "I have said it. Are you comforted?"
"Not remotely."
Silas came through last, ducking his head under a branch that hadn't been there when I looked at it. He was still holding the crowbar he'd brought from behind the bar, which said everything about what Silas thought of the Fae.
"That's not right," he said.
"Which bit?"
"All of it. But start with the grass."
I looked down. Bluebells. In August. Bluebells and cowslips and a spill of poppies, and threaded between them, crocuses, the little purple ones that come up through frost. Four seasons growing shoulder to shoulder like nothing had ever told them not to. When I lifted my boot, the flattened stems rose again behind me, unbending slow, the way a cat stretches.
"No footprints," I said.
"You're leaving them." Nyx crouched, a smear of black in the shape of a person. "For a moment. Then the grove tidies up after you. It does not like evidence."
The air smelled green. Not the polite green of a garden centre, but something older and wetter, moss and cut apple and the underside of a stone. I breathed it in and my chest ached, the way it does when you hear a song your dead grandmother used to hum.
We walked in.
The oaks stood in a loose ring, twelve of them, and they were not shaped like trees. Their trunks looked plaited, great ropes of grey bark twisted together and then twisted again, and where the ropes parted you could see through the gaps to more grove on the other side, but not the same grove. Different flowers. Different light. I put my hand up to one of the gaps and felt warm wind pushing out of it, carrying a smell of hot bread.
"Don't," Silas said.
I didn't.
Above us the sky had gone the colour of the inside of a shell, pink turning to green turning to a soft dirty gold, and there were no aeroplanes. That was the thing that got under my skin. Twenty minutes' walk from the A3 and there was not one white scratch across the sky, no distant hum, no sirens, no dogs. London is never quiet. London breathes all night. Here, the silence had a texture, like felt pressed against my ears, and every sound we made fell into it and vanished.
Then the birds started, and I wished they hadn't.
It was blackbird song, I'd know it anywhere, my mother used to make me stop on the garden path and listen. But it ran backwards. It rose where it should have fallen, and the trills ate themselves, and when it finished, it played again exactly the same, note for note, like a tape loop.
"Rory." Silas had his sleeve pushed up. "Look."
His watch hands were going round. Not fast. Steady, both of them, the minute hand and the hour hand at the same pace, sweeping like they'd agreed to stop competing.
I pulled out my phone. 21:47. I watched it. 21:47. 21:47. The screen showed no signal, no wifi, and the little battery icon had filled itself to a hundred per cent, which it had absolutely no right to do after the day I'd had.
"How long have we been in here?" I asked.
"Since we came in," Nyx said.
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only honest one." They straightened, and I noticed then what had been bothering me since the stones. Nyx cast no shadow. Neither did I. Neither did Silas, or the oaks, or the flowers. The light in the grove came from everywhere and nowhere, soft as a lamp behind muslin, and it laid nothing dark on the ground.
Nyx noticed me noticing. Their violet eyes dimmed a fraction.
"You can't travel," I said.
"I cannot slip. There is nothing here to slip into." A pause. "If we must leave quickly , we leave on foot, like meat."
"Charming," Silas said.
"Accurate."
We went deeper. The ground sloped down, which made no sense, because Richmond Park doesn't do valleys in that spot, and a stream came up to meet us running the wrong way, uphill, over stones that chimed faintly when the water crossed them. Silas knelt and put two fingers in and swore, quietly, and shook them like he'd been stung .
"Cold?"
"Sweet," he said. "It tastes sweet from the smell of it. I'm not drinking it."
"Nobody's drinking anything." I'd read enough . Don't eat, don't drink, don't dance , don't thank them, don't give your name.
Past the stream, we found the shelf.
That's what I called it in my head, though it was really a fallen oak, hollowed, its inside worn smooth as a church pew. Things lay along it in a neat row. A tortoiseshell hair comb. A brass pocket watch with the glass gone. A pair of spectacles, wire, bent at one arm. A Walkman, orange foam crumbling off the headphones. A single child's trainer, velcro strap, light-up heel, and when I picked it up the heel lit red and flashed three times.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Offerings," Silas said, hopeful .
"No." I set the trainer back exactly where it had been. "Offerings go on altars. This is a lost property box."
The blackbird played its loop again. Somewhere off behind the twelfth oak, something laughed, high and delighted, and stopped as if a hand had gone over its mouth.
Silas gripped the crowbar tighter. "Right. Where's your seer, then?"
"She finds you." I turned a slow circle . "That's how it works, apparently. You come in and you wait and she decides whether you're worth the conversation."
"And if we're not?"
"Then we're a comb," Nyx said.
Wildflowers had grown up through the sole of the child's trainer. Years of them. I made myself look away.
That's when the pendant woke up.
It sat against my sternum, that stupid crimson stone some stranger had posted through my letterbox in a jiffy bag with no note, and for three weeks it had been nothing but a cold lump that occasionally warmed near Camden Lock. Now it went hot. Not warm. Hot, the way a mug goes hot when you've microwaved it too long, and the heat pushed out through my shirt in a slow pulse , on, off, on, faster.
"Rory." Silas had gone grey. "Your chest is glowing."
"I know."
"Your chest is glowing."
"I know."
And then the smell came, and it was all wrong for a place full of flowers. Burnt sugar. Caramelised fat. Wine gone to vinegar in the bottom of a cask, and under it, faint, the reek of a kitchen bin left three days in the heat. My mouth watered and my stomach turned over at once, and I hated my own body for the first half of that.
Nyx went from person to smoke to person again, and their whisper came out flat and hard.
"That is not Fae."
The oaks began to bend. All twelve of them, leaning inward from their roots like men craning to see a fight, and their plaited bark groaned, and the loop of birdsong cut off mid-note.
"Out," I said. "Now. Back the way we came."
The way we came wasn't there. Flowers, stream, slope, more grove.
"Ah," said Silas.
A woman's voice spoke from behind my shoulder, close enough that her breath moved my hair, and it carried three hundred years of tiredness in it.
"Child," Isolde said, "what did you carry through my stones?"
The air split open between the fifth oak and the sixth, seams of red light peeling apart like a mouth, and something on the other side of it took a long, wet, appreciative sniff.