AI Rory ducked under the low branch and stopped cold.
The oaks shouldn't have been there. She'd cut through Richmond Park enough times on her delivery bike to know this stretch by the knots in the roots, but the trees ahead were wrong. Too tall, too straight, their bark silvered with lichen that caught no light. They stood in a perfect circle, and the air between them rippled.
The Veil. She'd only ever heard Isolde talk about it, but now she could see it — a faint shimmering distortion, like heat haze trapped at eye level, humming at the edge of her vision.
"You feel it, yes?" Isolde said from the other side of the distortion. The half-Fae woman was already inside, her waist-long silver hair catching a light that didn't exist outside the circle. Her pale lavender eyes fixed on Rory. "A door that is not a door, unless you know how to ask."
Rory touched the pendant at her throat out of habit. The Heartstone was the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson in its silver chain, and it had been cool against her skin all evening. Now it pulsed . Once. A faint, insistent throb of warmth .
Beside her, Nyx rippled.
Rory glanced over. From the corner of her eye they looked almost solid — six-two, human-shaped, the night cut into a silhouette — and then they weren't, thinning at the edges where the park's sodium lamps hit them. Their eyes opened, faintly violet.
*It is thin here,* Nyx whispered, and the voice didn't come from their mouth but from the air just behind Rory's ear, like wind through dead leaves. *Like wet paper. We can step.*
Rory's black hair, straight and still damp at the ends from the drizzle, stuck to her neck. She pushed it back, her left wrist flashing in the dim. The small crescent-shaped scar there caught the light, white against her skin. She clenched her fist and stepped forward.
The shiver hit her first in her teeth.
The world didn't tear. It gave. One moment her boot was on damp leaf litter and half-rotted acorns in London, the next the ground was soft and gave no sound. She stumbled.
Wildflowers broke under her shoe, and sprang right back up.
"What the—"
"Mind your feet," Isolde said, and it might have been a riddle and might have been literal. She drifted ahead, and Rory stared down. No footprints. The moss and tiny white starflowers pressed flat and then recovered, but where Isolde had walked there was nothing. Not a bent stem.
Nyx came through last. The shimmer clung to them for a half second, outlining that living shadow, and then snapped. The air behind them sealed with a sigh.
Rory turned. The oak standing stones were still there, but now she was on the wrong side of them. Through the gap she should have seen the path and the distant orange glow of the Roehampton Gate. Instead she saw sky.
It wasn't night anymore.
The sky was warm amber, like late honey poured over everything, with no sun visible. Light came from everywhere and nowhere. It made Isolde's silver hair look gilded. It made Nyx's edges sharper.
"We were supposed to be in your grove," Rory said, keeping her voice level. Cool-headed. That was what Eva always said about her, and right now it took effort. "This isn't your grove."
Isolde smiled, ageless and not quite kind . "My grove is a pocket. Pockets have seams. And sometimes, child of iron and ink, the seams have pockets of their own."
"She means we're not in Richmond anymore," Nyx whispered, closer now, their form solidifying just enough that Rory could feel a drop in temperature. "Listen."
So Rory listened.
Outside, Richmond at night had traffic and planes and foxes screaming. Here, the silence had weight . Then underneath it, sounds layered themselves in. A distant, slow drip, too thick to be water. The rustle of leaves too big to belong to any English tree. Somewhere far off, a laugh — or a cough — and the clink of a glass bottle rolling.
And smell. God, the smell. Rory worked for the Golden Empress; she knew kitchens. This hit her nose like one. Ripe, overwhelming, green and rotting and sweet all at once. Herbs she didn't have names for, charred sugar, meat smoking over wood she couldn't identify.
The Heartstone pulsed again, hotter this time.
Rory curled her fingers around it. "This is Hel," she said quietly . "Isn't it."
"Dymas," Isolde said. "The hungry quarter. Where the Prince who never fasts keeps his table."
Dymas. Gluttony. Sprawling vineyards, orchards, and gardens — that was what Isolde had told her once, while braiding wildflowers into a crown that never wilted. Rory had thought she meant a metaphor.
The trees around them weren't oaks at all up close. Their trunks were braided vine, as thick as houses, climbing up and up until they lost themselves in that amber haze. From them hung fruit the size of fists, splitting open as she watched, spilling seeds that glowed faintly and then dimmed. The wildflowers at her feet had become a low carpet of thyme and something that smelled like blood orange, blooming impossibly in the same square foot, year-round and all at once.
Rory took a step deeper, and the ground breathed.
She froze. Looked down.
It wasn't ground. It was moss, but beneath the moss, root matter interwoven so dense it flexed under her weight . It exhaled a puff of warm, spiced air that brushed her ankles.
"Don't like that," she muttered.
Nyx was already ahead, or rather, they were everywhere ahead. They had gone incorporeal again, a smear of shadow sliding between trunks, violet eyes flitting. *There are things here that remember being people,* they said, and their wind-voice thinned. *Their mouths are still full.*
"Stay together," Rory snapped, and for once Nyx obeyed, snapping back into a solid silhouette beside her. Solid enough that when Rory's shoulder brushed theirs, she felt a shock of static cold that bit through her jacket.
Isolde had stopped by what Rory had thought was a rock.
It was a table.
Half-sunk into the root, a long banquet table of dark wood stretched, covered in plates that had never been cleared . Goblets crusted with old wine. Loaves hard as stone beside loaves still steaming. And at the far end, a chef's knife laid neatly beside a half-plucked bird that was too big, its feathers iridescent black.
Rory's hand went to her other side without thinking. The Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her sat in its leather sheath at her hip. Even through the sheath, the moonsilver was always cold to the touch. Now, under this amber sky, she could see the faintest luminescence bleeding through the leather, leaf-shaped and patient.
"For cutting wards," she remembered Isolde saying when she pressed it into Rory's hands. "And for other things that wear borrowed skin."
"Rory?" Nyx's voice was suddenly very close, very human in its concern, despite the whisper . "Your scar."
She looked down at her left wrist. The tiny crescent was dark, as if the blood had rushed right to the surface.
The unease that had been a low thrum in her stomach tightened into something sharper. She wasn't just overwhelmed; she was being noticed . By the air, by the root-floor.
And then she saw the footprints.
Not Isolde's. Not hers. Bare, human, cutting through the thyme carpet, leading away from the abandoned table and deeper into the orchard, where the amber light went syrupy and thick between the vine-trunks. They were still steaming faintly.
"Somebody else came through," Rory said.
Isolde crouched — no, hovered — just above the trail. Her pale eyes traced the prints. She did not touch them. "A little mouse who followed the smell of cheese through the wrong hole," she said, and because she was half-Fae, she could not lie. "He went seeking a feast. And he is still seeking, I think."
The Heartstone gave a third pulse , hard enough that warmth shot up Rory's neck. Not a warning now. A direction. The prints and the pull were the same.
Rory pulled the moonsilver dagger free. The cold bit her palm and immediately steadied her. The lunatic glow along its edge brightened in the strange light.
"Okay," she said, her voice cool and clear in the perfumed air . "New plan. We find out who made those prints before whatever lives here finishes its dinner. We do not split up. And Isolde — if time moves weird here, how long do we have before it's actually been a week in London and Yu-Fei fires me?"
Isolde's laugh sounded like a bell heard underwater . "That depends," she said, "on whether you are a guest or an ingredient."
Nyx, who had been staring into the amber gloom , went still. Their violet eyes flared.
*Something comes,* they whispered. *Through the vines.*
The orchard rustled, not with wind, because there was no wind, but with movement . Fruit dropped with soft, heavy thuds that didn't stop. From between two vast braided trunks, a shape resolved , too tall and too slender, with too many joints, carrying something on its shoulders that steamed.
Rory stepped in front of Isolde without thinking, dagger up, pendant burning against her chest.
"Stay behind me," she breathed.
And deeper in Dymas, something rang a dinner bell.