AI The oak wasn't on any map.
Rory was sure of it. She'd run the north path of Richmond Park three times a week since moving into the flat above Silas's, and there had always been a dip here, a hollow full of bracken and discarded crisp packets. Not this. Not seven stones standing shoulder to shoulder in a perfect circle, each one an old oak grown into itself, bark folded over like scar tissue, their roots knotted together to make a threshold.
"Are you certain?" Isolde said.
The woman hadn't made a sound approaching. Rory turned and found her standing two feet away, which should have been impossible. Isolde Varga looked exactly like she had the last time Rory had seen her - silver hair to her waist, too pale, too still - except now her lavender eyes caught no light at all. Her feet made no dent in the damp earth. No footprints behind her, though the ground was soft.
"Am I certain what?" Rory asked.
"That you wish to enter? The door, once opened, remembers your shape." Isolde tilted her head . Her voice was music played wrong. "What is sought is not always what is found, Aurora Carter."
Behind Rory, the air went cold. Nyx coalesced out of the shadow under a chestnut tree, pulling themselves taller until they held a solid form, six-two of living dusk with two faint violet coals where eyes should be. The old hollowness in Rory's chest eased the second they solidified.
"She's asking if we're sure," Nyx said, their voice like wind through a keyhole. "We are not."
"Helpful," Rory muttered. She pushed her straight black hair back from her face. Her left wrist twinged - that small crescent scar catching as she flexed - and she reached under her delivery jacket on instinct. The Heartstone Pendant was there, on its silver chain. It had been dead cold all week. Now it was warm.
"We need to find where the tear started," she said. "You said the Veil is thin here."
Isolde smiled, and it didn't reach her eyes. "Thin as paper, thick as blood. Winter took its tithe, and summer has not yet repaid it. Come, then. Step only where I step, and do not eat."
"What happens if we eat?" Rory asked.
"You will wish to stay forever," Isolde answered, which was not an answer at all.
Isolde turned and walked straight toward the oaks, and where there should have been trunk there was suddenly a gap, a space between two stones that hadn't existed a second before. It shimmered - not quite light, not quite heat . Rory had seen that shimmer once before above the Thames on a bad night, the air itself warping like cellophane. The Veil.
The Heartstone flared against her sternum, a sudden pulse of deep crimson light that bled through her shirt. Warm, insistent. Near a Hel portal, it had done this. But this wasn't Hel.
Nyx made a low sound. "That is not a Helgate."
"No," Isolde said, already half through. "That is a memory of a door."
Rory swore under her breath, tucked the pendant under her collar so its glow wouldn't blind her, and followed.
The cold hit first. Not winter cold, but the cold of a blade left out under the moon . It sank teeth straight through her jacket. She gasped and the sound was swallowed .
She was through.
She stood with one foot still lifted, because the ground was wrong. The clearing was larger than the circle of oaks could have contained - three, four times larger - and there was no London sky above it. There was a vault, amber and green and moving, like light through deep water. No sun, no clouds. The air itself had color. The amber reminded her, with a jolt, of something she'd read about Dymas - warm amber skies over vineyards that never ended, excess made into a landscape - but this was not that place. This was wetter, wilder.
The grass came up to her knees, and it shouldn't have been grass. It was too white at the tips, too silver, and every blade moved though there was no wind. Wildflowers bloomed year-round here, Isolde had said once, as if that were a small thing. They bloomed everywhere. Flowers Rory had no name for opened as she watched, tight buds unfurling into glassy bells that chimed. Literally chimed. A low, resonant ringing ran across the meadow with each opening.
"Oh," Rory breathed.
Nyx came through behind her with less grace. For a being who could slip between shadows, they came reluctantly into this light. Their form flickered - solid, then thin, then solid again, like a bad signal. Their violet eyes flared brighter.
"It does not like me," they whispered.
"The light remembers what you were before you were shadow, Aldric," Isolde said without turning. She was already ten feet ahead, gliding over the flowers. She did not crush a single stem.
Rory looked down. Where Isolde passed, the flowers sprang back untouched. Where Rory's own trainers had landed, they'd bent and stayed bent, leaving a dark bruise in the silver. She felt suddenly, acutely clumsy and mortal.
"Stay close," she told Nyx . Her voice sounded too loud. The chimes had stopped.
They moved deeper. The clearing was not a clearing, she realized; it was a grove that pretended to be a clearing. Ancient trees lined its edge, but their trunks were wrong - bark that looked like overlapping moth wings, pale and powdery, branches that grew down as well as up, knitting together overhead into a lattice. Through the lattice, that amber water-light filtered and broke into pieces.
The longer she looked, the more she saw things that shouldn't be together. A yew tree heavy with ripe pomegranates. Ivy with leaves the size of dinner plates, each one veined with light. A pool of still water that reflected not the grove, but a different sky entirely, vast and starless.
"Time here—" Rory started.
"—is a river that forgets its banks," Isolde finished. She crouched beside the pool, her silver hair pooling around her like spilled mercury. "An hour may be minutes. Minutes may be a child's lifetime. Why do you wear winter iron to a spring court, Aurora?"
Rory's hand went to her belt. The Fae-forged blade was there, leaf-shaped, moonsilver. She'd taken to carrying it after Isolde had pressed it into her hands weeks ago. It was always cold, even through denim, even now. She could feel it now, a clean line of winter against her hip.
"Because last time I went through a weird door without a weapon I ended up with a demon trying to eat my face," she said.
Isolde laughed, and flowers near her shivered open. "A good reason. A poor reason. Both may be true."
The pendant pulsed again, harder. Rory pulled it out. The thumbnail-sized crimson stone was lit from within, its faint inner glow now a steady throb , in time with her heart.
Nyx drifted closer, and as they did the flowers around their feet withered. Not dramatically. Just... dimmed, losing their silver, going grey. Rory saw it and so did Nyx. They jerked back as if burned.
"I should not have come," they said, voice thinned to almost nothing .
"You're fine," Rory said quickly . She reached for them. Her fingers met resistance like cold smoke, then solidified as Nyx forced themselves solid for her. Their hand was too long, too cold, but it held. "You're with me."
The grove seemed to lean in at that. The chimes started again, but discordant now. Under the beautiful ringing Rory heard something else - a low hum, like bees. She turned, searching.
On the far side of the clearing the trees had opened. There was a hill there, or what looked like a hill, covered in moss so thick it looked like velvet . But moss didn't breathe.
That was the unease, hitting her all at once, low and visceral. The hill rose and fell. Slowly. A sleeping breath.
"Isolde," she hissed.
"I did not tell you to look there," Isolde said lightly , but her pale eyes were fixed and bright. "Some things here were sleeping before your city was a marsh. It is best not to wake them with mortal fear. Breathe, cool-headed one."
Rory forced herself to look away from the hill-that-wasn't. Cool-headed, that was what people said. Intelligent. Quick out-of-the-box thinking. None of that helped when your brain was trying to file a breathing landscape under Things That Are Normal.
She focused on the details instead. On the pool. On the way the air tasted sweet, like overripe fruit left in the sun - gluttonous, excessive even here, at the edge of everything. On Isolde's bare feet that never marked the ground.
The pool rippled though no one had touched it.
In its surface Rory saw, not her own reflection, but a vast table groaning with food, a hall lit amber, vines strangling marble columns. Dymas. She knew it instantly, though she'd never been. The place of Gluttony, where helbound souls cooked feasts that never ended under Prince Belphegor. And at the center of the table, a tear - that same cellophane shimmer, that same wrongness, but larger, hungrier.
A rift. A tear in the Veil.
"That's what Wardens are supposed to watch for," she whispered. The pendant was burning now, not warm but hot against her skin .
"The Wardens watch the doors men make," Isolde said. Her riddles dropped for a second, her voice flat. "This one was made from the other side. Something in Dymas is very hungry, Aurora. And it has learned how to smell spring."
Nyx bent over the pool, their shadow falling across it. The vision shattered . "It wants through here? Through this place?"
Isolde finally looked at them, and there was something like pity in her ageless face . "All places touch, shadow-born. Hel is below. Fae is beside. Earth is between. When winter thins the skin, everything bleeds a little."
Rory's mind raced , cataloging. Winter solstice weakens the Veil. We're close to spring, but not past it. The pendant reacts to Hel portals. The Grove is a pocket between Earth and Fae. If something from Dymas pushes through here—
"We need to close it before it anchors," she said. It came out steadier than she felt.
Isolde's smile returned, sharpened. "And how will you close a mouth with a knife, though sharp your knife may be?"
Rory's hand found the Fae blade. Moonsilver, always cold. It could cut through magical wards, Isolde had told her. Particularly effective against demons. The cold bit into her palm, grounding her.
"Maybe you start by giving it something else to bite," she said.
For the first time, Nyx laughed - a real sound, rusted and surprised.
The grove held its breath. The flowers turned, all at once, toward Rory.