AI Nine stones. She had counted eight on the way in.
Rory stood with her torch dipped low, the beam pooling on wet grass, and counted again. Eight oaks turned to stone, grey and split and older than the city, ringing the clearing like teeth in a jaw. Then the ninth, squat and leaning, sitting in a gap that had been empty when she stepped through it four minutes ago.
She had good reasons to be sure of that. She had marked the gap with her scarf, tied it round the trunk of the birch beside it, red wool on white bark, because Eva had told her a hundred times that people came out of the Grove through a different door than they went in and spent the rest of their lives explaining the missing decades to strangers.
The scarf was still there. The stone stood in front of it, cutting the wool in half.
"Right," she said, out loud, because silence had weight here and she wanted to put a dent in it.
Her voice went nowhere. That was the first thing she properly noticed. In Richmond Park at night you got the hum of the South Circular pushed flat by distance, a plane stacking for Heathrow, the odd stag coughing like a chain smoker in the bracken. Here, nothing. Her words dropped out of her mouth and landed at her feet.
The pendant lay warm against her sternum, warmer than skin should make it, and she pressed her palm over it through her jumper. Isolde had said midnight. Isolde had said come alone, bring the Heartstone, don't eat anything, don't thank anyone, and don't, under any circumstance, follow the music.
Isolde had not said anything about the flowers.
They covered the clearing floor, thick as a lawn, and they were all wrong for October. Cornflowers, foxgloves, a scatter of poppies gone black in the torchlight. Wildflowers bloomed here year-round, that was known , that was in every account she had read in Silas' back room with a whisky she hadn't asked for going warm at her elbow. Fine. Lovely. Except the poppies nearest her boots had turned their faces towards her, and poppies did not have faces, and the moon was behind her left shoulder.
Rory did not move for a long moment. She watched them the way you watch a wasp on your wrist.
Nothing happened. The flowers did not turn further. She breathed out through her nose and told herself that petals moved with air currents, and that she had walked through them, and that her own body heat was probably doing something a botanist would find dull.
She started across the clearing towards the centre, where the grass grew in a flattened ring like something large slept there regularly.
Halfway, she stopped again. Her boots had left a track behind her, dark bruises through the silver of the wet flowers.
There was a second track running parallel to it, a metre to the left, exactly as long, exactly as fresh.
She lifted the torch. Two lines of crushed stems came from the stones and ended at her feet, hers and the other, side by side like a couple out walking. The other track had no boots in it. Something had pressed the flowers flat with a shape she could not name, wide at one end, tapering.
"Isolde." Her mouth had gone tacky . "If this is a test, I'd like it noted I'm not enjoying it."
Water answered her. Not a stream. A drip, slow and patient, from somewhere above head height where there was nothing but open air and a sky full of stars in the wrong arrangement.
Rory counted her heartbeats to twenty. The dripping stopped at fourteen.
Cool head. That was what her father called her gift, the only compliment he ever gave that didn't come with a career attached. Rory doesn't panic, she plans. So she planned. Stay in the middle, away from the treeline. Keep the stones in sight. Fifteen minutes past the hour, and if Isolde hadn't come, walk out through the scarf gap, stone or no stone, and never mention any of this to Eva, who would only say I told you.
She reached the flattened ring and crouched, hands on her knees, and made herself look properly at the Grove instead of at her own fear.
It was beautiful. That was the obscene part. Beyond the stones the oaks stood in deep summer leaf, and the air smelled of cut hay and rain on hot stone, and the light had a quality that torches and moons could not account for, a faint green under-glow that came up out of the ground itself and made her hands look like a drowned woman's. Somewhere off to the right, past the trees, she could hear the park at last. Traffic. Distant, thin, and running backwards, the sound of engines arriving instead of leaving.
Then her name.
"Rory."
Eva's voice. Unmistakable, that Cardiff bounce she had never scrubbed off, the way she leaned on the r like she was propping herself against a bar.
Rory's whole body turned to it before her brain caught up. Relief flooded her, hot and stupid, and she was two steps towards the treeline before she remembered that she had left Eva asleep on the sofa in Bermondsey with a bowl of Yu-Fei's cold noodles balanced on her chest, and that Eva did not know where she was, and that no one on this earth knew where she was.
"Rory, I'm here, I can't find the gap."
She stopped. The pendant had gone from warm to hot, a coal against her breastbone.
"Where?" she called.
"Here."
Not an answer. A word learned by copying. She turned her torch on the treeline and swept it slowly along the black between the trunks, and the beam picked out leaves, bark, a low bramble, and then, at the height of her own eyes, two flat discs shining back at her, set too far apart for a fox and too high for a deer.
They did not blink. The voice came again from a completely different place, thirty feet to the left, in exactly the same tone.
"Rory, I can't find the gap."
She stepped back. Her heel came down on nothing, and she staggered, and when she righted herself the shining discs had gone and something else had arrived.
She could not have said what alerted her. A pressure change, the sort you feel in your ears in a lift. The certainty arrived complete, without evidence, the way certainties do at three in the morning: someone was standing behind her, close enough to lean, and had been for some time.
Rory did not turn round. Every animal instinct she had screamed at her to turn round, and she held herself still, and she listened.
Breathing. Slow, wet, and matching hers, half a beat behind, the way a bad singer follows a hymn.
She lifted the torch, angled it down, and let the beam splash on the flowers in front of her boots. The light showed her own shadow, long and thin across the crushed poppies.
Only her own shadow.
The breathing came again, closer, warm on the back of her neck, and it smelled of turned earth and honey.
"Don't thank me," said something with Isolde's mouth and none of her music, and eight of the nine stones began, one by one, to lean in.