AI The padlock on the Ham Gate was the size of my fist. I went over the gate anyway, one boot on the hinge, the paper bag from the Golden Empress clamped in my teeth.
Yu-Fei's last words on the subject still rattled about in my skull. *Never walk into their grass with empty hands, Rory. Empty hands mean you are the gift.*
So: four char siu buns, still warm through the paper, and a thermos of jasmine tea. Not much of a bribe for whatever waited past the stones, but it was what I had at half eleven on a Tuesday .
Richmond Park at night wasn't dark so much as thick. The city glowed orange on all sides, a bruise round the edge of the world, and inside that ring the bracken stood black and waist-high. I kept off the bridle path. Deer moved somewhere to my left, that dry cough they make, and I let it settle me. Deer meant ordinary. Deer meant nothing worse was nearby.
I'd walked this line three times in daylight to memorise it. Left at the dead beech, past the pond that smelled of pennies, then the long slow rise where the ground went spongy and my trainers came up green.
The stones sat at the top.
Eight of them, and not stones at all. Oak. Old oak, split and silvered, driven into the earth like teeth into a gum, each one taller than me and worn smooth on the inside faces where something had passed between them for a very long time. Isolde called it a grove. I'd once called it a car park for gods, and she hadn't laughed.
Grass grew right up to the gap between the two tallest posts, then stopped. A clean line, as if someone had run a blade along it.
"Right," I said.
My breath fogged. I stepped through.
It didn't.
That was the first thing. One stride and the air went warm on my face, soft as a laundry room, and the cloud of my own breath simply wasn't there any more. Behind me, through the gap, London still throbbed orange. Ahead, meadow. Cow parsley high as my ribs, foxgloves, poppies, campion, all of it in flower at once in the middle of November, all of it lit by a light with no source that I could find.
I'd been here before. That was the point. I knew this place the way you know a friend's kitchen.
So I knew, straight off, that something was wrong with it.
Silence. Not quiet, silence . A grove full of flowers in bloom should have hummed. Moths, at least. Crickets. The tick and rustle of small hungry things going about their business. I stood there with the bag warming my palm and heard my own pulse in my ears, and nothing else.
"Isolde."
The word went out and didn't come back. No echo , but no dampening either. It went out and kept going, like I'd spoken into a corridor rather than a field.
I crouched and put the buns and the thermos on the flattened patch where I'd always left offerings, near the base of the third post. The grass there had held its shape since my last visit. My knee-prints, my heel. Weeks old, and pressed as fresh as if I'd knelt a minute ago.
Then the pendant grew warm.
I want to be accurate about this, because I went over it a hundred times afterwards. The Heartstone had two settings in my experience. Cold, meaning nothing. And warm, meaning Hel had a door open somewhere close enough to matter.
It had never once so much as flickered in the grove. Isolde's ground and Hel's business had nothing to do with each other. She'd told me that herself, with the particular flat contempt the Fae keep for anything that crawls.
The crimson stone sat against my sternum and put out heat like a mug of tea through a jumper.
"No," I said. Out loud. As if the universe took requests.
A wood pigeon started up somewhere off to the right. Five notes, that fat lazy *my toe bleeds, Betty * rhythm they do. I let my shoulders drop an inch. Birds were good. Birds were normal.
It did it again. Five notes.
Again. The same five, at the same pitch, with the same little hitch in the fourth.
I counted eleven repetitions before I understood I was listening to a recording. Not a bird copying itself. A loop. The same second of sound, cut and stitched and played back, and somewhere in the ninth repeat I caught the join, a tiny click, like a tongue against teeth.
I stood up slowly . Kept my hands where I could see them.
"You can stop that," I said. "It's not very good."
The pigeon stopped mid-note.
The silence afterwards had weight to it, and in that weight I heard the second thing. Far off, thin, coming from the direction of the meadow's centre where there should have been nothing but more flowers.
A bicycle bell. Two quick rings. The exact tinny double-ring of the bell on the Golden Empress delivery bike, the one with the mudguard that sings on Fridays.
I hadn't brought the bike. I'd left it chained outside the bar, in the city, on the other side of the stones.
Something moved at the corner of my eye. Left side, low, a shifting of stems as though a fox had cut through them, and when I turned my head the cow parsley stood dead still, and the movement was on my right instead, closer, sliding behind me on the diagonal.
Rule one for this kind of thing: don't turn all the way round. You give away that you've noticed, and whatever it is stops bothering with subtlety.
I turned all the way round.
Nothing. Flowers to the treeline. Beyond the treeline, the eight oak posts, and through the gap between them, the orange sky of a city that seemed suddenly very theoretical.
The flowers, all of them, had turned. Not towards the light. Poppies and campion and foxglove, every head canted the same way, towards a spot maybe thirty feet from me where the meadow dipped, and stayed canted, patient as a congregation.
I put my hand over the pendant to stop the glow showing through my shirt. It burned my palm.
"Isolde, I'm calling in the favour," I said, and heard my voice come out thin. "Now would be a lovely time to be territorial."
The dip in the meadow breathed.
That's the only word for it. The ground rose, an inch, maybe two, and the flowers rode up with it and settled again, and the warm air moved across my face carrying a smell that had no business in a meadow. Wet iron. Hot fat. Something underneath that, sweet and turned, like a bin bag left in a stairwell over August.
Somewhere between me and the dip, a bare foot pressed the grass flat.
I watched the stems fold. I watched them rise again, unhurried, and fold once more a yard nearer, and the print they left was small and narrow and had a long stride for its size.
"Malphora."
It came from behind my right ear. Warm breath, close enough to move my hair, a woman's voice, kind, delighted, the voice of an aunt who has waited all afternoon by the window for you.
Nobody had ever called me that. And still my mouth opened and my throat moved and something in me answered to it, the way a dog's head lifts at its name, and I felt the shape of the word settle over me like a coat that fitted.
Behind me, the oaks groaned. All eight of them at once, bending inwards, the gap between the tallest two narrowing to a hand's width of orange light.
The bare foot pressed the grass one last time, right beside my own.
Fingers closed round my wrist, over the crescent scar, and they were cold, and they were exactly the size of mine.