AI The gate at Sheen Lane had been chained since dusk, so I went over it, and the cold iron left a stripe of rust across my palm.
Twenty past two in the morning. My last delivery of the night still clung to me, five-spice and hot vinegar, the thermal bag strapped across my back like a schoolgirl's satchel. Yu-Fei had told me to go straight home. Silas had told me not to go at all. Isolde had sent a folded oak leaf through my letterbox with three words scratched into it in sap, and between the three of them, the leaf won.
*Come at the dark.* No please. Fae never say please.
Richmond Park at night is not a park. It is a piece of countryside that London forgot to eat, and it knows it. Bracken to the knee. The grass gone silver and stiff underfoot. Somewhere off to my left, a stag coughed, and the sound rolled across the flat ground like something being dragged .
I counted my paces to the oaks, because counting keeps a person honest.
Eight hundred and forty.
The standing stones came up out of the dark the way they always did, all at once, as though they had been walking towards me and stopped when I looked. Not stone at all, whatever the maps said. Ancient oak, five trunks, dead so long they had gone grey and hard as granite, each one taller than a man and split down the middle like a struck match. Isolde called them a door. I had never worked out which side was the handle.
I put my hand flat on the nearest one and waited for the pull.
It came. That soft lurch behind the navel, like a lift stopping a floor too early, and then I was through, and the noise of the world went out like a snuffed wick.
No traffic. No aeroplanes. That was the point of the grove, the reason I had learned to love the horrible little half second of crossing. In Isolde's clearing you got silence with a floor under it, wildflowers in February, cowslip and campion and bluebell all blooming together in defiance of every rule the seasons ever wrote, and moths the size of my thumb going about their business.
Tonight the flowers were open. The moths were not there.
I stood at the edge with my hand still on the wood and let my eyes do the work.
No moths. No crickets. Not one gnat riding the warm air above the grass. In two years of coming here I had never once stood in this clearing without something small and stupid flying into my mouth.
"Isolde."
My voice came back to me smaller than I sent it. The grove is a bowl, roughly, ringed by hawthorn that never needed cutting, and it usually gave a person a bit of an echo . Tonight the sound went out and simply stopped, as though it had been caught in cloth.
I stepped in. The grass gave under my trainers, damp, sweet, and the wildflowers turned their faces towards me.
All of them. Together. A slow ripple of heads, campion and cowslip and bluebell, swinging round to point at the spot where I stood the way sunflowers follow the sun.
There was no sun. There was no moon either, come to that. Just that dim silver nothing-light the grove made for itself.
*Right *, I thought. *Fine. Botany's excited to see me. Perfectly normal night.*
The pendant lay against my sternum under my shirt, cold as it had been all evening. Dymas' gift, or whoever had actually left it on my pillow while I slept, a crimson stone the size of a thumbnail on a silver chain. It only ever warmed near one thing. I hooked it out and held it in my fist and felt nothing at all, and let out a breath I had not planned to be holding.
"You asked me to come at the dark," I said to the clearing . "It's dark. I'm here. I've got prawn crackers going cold in a bag, so if this is a lesson about patience, I'd like to skip to the end."
Nothing.
Then, from the far side of the grove, out past the hawthorn: a wet, rhythmic sound. Slow. Deliberate.
Digging.
Not a badger. Badgers scrabble. This was the noise of a spade being driven into soft ground by someone in no hurry whatsoever, and there is no way to be twenty-five years old and hear that at half two in the morning and think anything cheerful about it.
I did not run. Running in the grove is how you end up two years late for your own life.
I walked, slowly, towards the middle, where Isolde's stump sat like a table, and I kept my eyes on the hawthorn and my ears on the digging, and I did the arithmetic I always do. Exits: the five stones behind me, forty paces. Weapons: keys, a bike lock, a lighter, an opinion. Allies: none, no phone signal, no time to speak of, because time in here does what it likes.
The digging stopped.
The silence that came after it was worse, and had a shape to it. The shape of somebody listening to me listen .
"Isolde, if that's you being funny, it isn't."
"It isn't."
My own voice. From the hawthorn. Exactly my own voice, right down to the Cardiff sitting under the London, that little flattening of the vowel I have spent seven years trying to file off.
The cold went through me in one clean sheet.
"Say something else," I said.
"Say something else," the hawthorn said, and it was already closer than it had been, and it had got the timing wrong. It did not wait for me to finish. It spoke over the last word, the way a person does when they already know what you are going to say because they have heard you say it before.
The flowers had turned again. Not towards me now. Towards the gap in the hedge on the western side, all of them, a whole clearing's worth of little pale faces pointing at one place like a congregation.
I looked where they looked.
The wildflowers there were dead. A patch of them, black and slumped, and the patch was not a patch, it was a footprint. Bare. Long. Toes splayed. As I stood there another one blackened beside it, the stems folding down in a soft crackling rush, and then another, and another, coming across the grass towards me at a walking pace, one print at a time.
Whatever was making them, I could not see it.
The pendant went warm in my fist.
Not the gentle pulse it gave off near the small cracks, the ones Silas taped over with a chalk sigil and a grumble. This was heat, a coal against my palm, and the crimson stone threw its light up through my fingers so I could see the bones in them.
There is only one thing that makes the Heartstone do that. And a Hel portal cannot open inside Isolde's grove.
"That's not possible," I said.
"That's not possible," said the grass, six feet away, in my voice, and then, in a different one, low and pleased and dry as a page turning, "Hello, Malphora."
I had never heard that name in my life. Every part of me knew it.
The stones behind me groaned. All five of them at once, that long splintering complaint old wood makes before it goes, and I turned in time to see the nearest one lean inward, and the gap where I had come in seal itself shut like a mouth.
In front of me, the hawthorn parted, and Isolde stepped out wearing her own face badly, smiling with far too many teeth for it, dirt to her elbows and something long and pale cradled in her arms.