AI The bike chain rattled once behind me and then went quiet, which was the first thing that felt wrong. I'd leaned it against the last of the standing stones, that squat blackened oak trunk with the crack down its middle, and the chain had swung, and then it had stopped swinging. Straight away. No wobble, no second pass. Like the air had taken hold of it.
I stood there with a plastic bag of cold noodles in one hand and told myself it was nothing.
Richmond Park at night is not silent. That's the thing people get wrong. There's aircraft crawling over Heathrow's approach, there's the hum of the South Circular bleeding through the trees, there's deer coughing at each other like old men in a pub. I'd cycled in past Roehampton Gate an hour ago with all of that in my ears.
Inside the grove there was none of it.
"Isolde." My voice came out flat, no echo , absorbed. "You said midnight. It's midnight."
Nothing moved. The wildflowers stood in their impossible summer, cornflower and campion and something white with a throat like a bruise, all of them wide open in the dark. Flowers close at night. Every one of these was open, and every one of them faced me.
I set the noodles down on the flat stone at the centre, where the grass grows in a spiral if you look too long. Cold sesame, no meat, because Yu-Fei said the old ones don't take flesh from strangers and she'd rapped my knuckles with a chopstick when I'd suggested char siu. Beside the box I put a thimble of cream and a pinch of salt on a paper napkin from the Golden Empress, gold dragon printed in the corner. Not dignified. Best I had.
"Right," I said. "Offering's made. Come and have a word."
The pendant lay cool against my sternum. Cool was good. Cool meant nothing from Hel within a mile, or so I'd been told by a man who'd then vanished into a bus queue and never come back.
I waited.
I'm good at waiting. Three years of my father's dinner tables taught me how to sit still while something unpleasant circled the room. So I counted, and I listened, and at somewhere past four hundred I noticed the sound.
A soft tick-tock. Not a clock. Wetter than a clock. It came from behind the treeline on the left, in the deep part where the oaks knit together, and it kept perfect time, and after a while I understood that it was the sound of something being chewed . Slowly. Thoughtfully. With no particular hurry, because whatever it was, it had all night and I clearly wasn't going anywhere.
"Hello?"
The chewing stopped.
The relief lasted about two seconds, which is how long it took me to work out that a thing that stops eating when you speak to it is a thing that is now listening.
I did not run. Rule one of the grove, according to Isolde herself, delivered while braiding grass into a ring: never run in a place that decides its own distances. Run and the trees get further apart. Run and the way out goes shy.
Instead I turned, slow as a shop window mannequin, and looked at the boundary.
Seven stones. I'd counted them coming in, because I count things, because my mother made me count the stairs at Cardiff Central when I was six and it never quite wore off. Seven blackened oak stumps in a ragged circle, one with a crack, one with a shelf of yellow fungus, one leaning like a drunk.
I counted eight.
The new one stood between the leaner and the cracked one, in a gap I could have sworn was empty grass. Same colour. Same weathered ridges. Slightly taller. My bike was still propped where I'd left it, and the front wheel had turned to point at me.
"That's not funny," I said, to nobody, to the flowers.
A breath of air crossed the clearing then, and the wildflowers all bowed together, and every single one of them bowed towards the eighth stone.
Something in my chest went very tight and very quiet. I made myself breathe out through my mouth. Think. Not panic, think. The gate out is the way you came, unless the way you came has changed, and it had, so the gate out was now a coin toss between two gaps, and coin tosses in Richmond Park cost you more than money.
I walked to the flat stone and picked the salt back up. Held it in my fist.
That's when the deer came.
It stepped out of the black between two oaks with no sound whatsoever, a red hind, and stood twelve feet away, side on. Ordinary. Beautiful, even. I've seen a hundred of them out on the bracken, and I've had them stare me down over a dropped sandwich.
This one didn't blink.
I counted again, because counting is what I do when the alternative is screaming. One minute. Two. Its flank rose and fell and its eye stayed wet and open and fixed, and there was no lid coming down over it, ever, and the longer I looked the more certain I became that the eye was not looking at me but at something standing just behind my right shoulder, at head height, roughly nine inches away.
I did not turn round.
"Aurora."
My mother's voice. Warm, Welsh, the way she says it with the middle drawn out, Auror-a, come and get your tea.
It came from the treeline where the chewing had been.
"Aurora, love."
She was in Cardiff. I'd spoken to her at six o'clock, she'd been complaining about a boiler and a neighbour's cat, and she was two hundred miles away with the telly on.
"Nice try," I said. My voice cracked in the middle and I hated it. "She'd say Rory."
Silence. A long, considering silence , the kind that means a thing is filing something away for later.
Then, from a different part of the trees, closer, lower, and with the exact lazy amusement I'd spent a year learning to read through a wall:
"Rory."
Evan.
Every muscle in my back locked. My hands went cold to the wrist, right over the little crescent scar, and for a heartbeat I was twenty-two again and standing in a hallway working out from the sound of a key in a lock how the next four hours would go.
He was in Cardiff too. In a flat I'd stopped picturing. He'd never once been to London, never once been here, and there was no way on God's earth that anything in this clearing had ever heard that voice except from inside my own head.
Which meant it had been in there. Rummaging. Pulling out the sharpest thing in the drawer.
"You want to try again," I said, and I was proud of how level it came out, "you'll have to do better. He never called me Rory. Only strangers do that."
A soft sound answered. Not words. Something like a page turning.
I stepped backwards towards the gap I'd chosen, salt fist raised, eyes on the hind that would not blink, and my heel found the flat stone. The offering was gone . Noodles, cream, napkin with the gold dragon, all of it, and in its place, laid neat as a place setting, sat a small circle of braided grass, gone brown, gone old, the ring Isolde had made and given me eleven days ago and that I had left on my bedside table above Silas' bar, forty minutes away across a locked city.
The Heartstone woke against my skin.
Not a pulse . Not the faint warm nudge I'd been taught to watch for. It went hot as a fresh-poured cup, hot enough to burn, and it did it fast, and it dragged the chain tight around my neck as if the stone wanted to be somewhere else and was going to take me with it.
Behind me, in the middle of the grove, the grass began to smell of ash.
And every flower in that clearing turned, all at once, to face the eighth stone as it started to walk.