AI The stones found them before they did.
Rory had walked Richmond Park enough times to know this part of the woods wasn't supposed to exist. The path behind the oaks was supposed to peter out into bracken and mud and dog walkers' trash. Instead the oaks kept going, older than any oaks had any right to be in London, their trunks as wide as cars, their bark silvered with lichen that caught no light at all.
"This is it," Nyx said, and their voice hit her ear wrong, like wind through a keyhole.
Rory stopped with one hand on the roughest trunk. The bark was cold enough to bite. "You sure?"
Nyx had gone solid enough to cast a shadow, which was always a bad sign. They stood at six-two and some change, a human shape cut out of the evening, their edges smoking faintly despite the still air. Where eyes should have been there were only two faint violet coals. When they looked at the circle of stones ahead, those coals narrowed.
"The air is thin here," they whispered. "Like a scab."
Beyond the last two oaks stood a ring of standing stones, half-swallowed by moss and root. They weren't the polite, National Trust kind of ancient. They leaned, listing inward like teeth. Between them the air shimmered .
The Veil.
Rory had only ever seen it in flashes before, when Nyx slipped, or when something with too many joints tried to push through behind the bins behind the Golden Empress. It was a heat-haze over cold ground, a wrongness her bright blue eyes wanted to slide off of.
Now it hung solid between the stones, a curtain of faint, oily light.
The pendant at her throat woke up.
She'd tucked the Heartstone under her jumper out of habit. It was roughly the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson on a silver chain, always a little too warm. Now it pulsed , once, twice, heat blooming against her skin.
"Portals," she muttered. "You didn't say it was a Hel portal."
"It's not," Nyx said. "But it's near one. Or it remembers one. The places where the world is thin forget which side they thin toward."
Rory pulled the stone out and let it sit over her coat. The crimson caught the shimmer and threw it back, a little fainter, a little redder. Her left wrist twisted as she did, and the small crescent scar there pulled white in the cold.
Next to her, Nyx extended a hand that wasn't quite a hand . The shadow stretched, thinned, and then—
"Don't," Rory said quickly .
Nyx recoiled. "It will not hurt me."
"Yeah, but if you go incorporeal and scout ahead we lose you for an hour and I have to explain to Silas why I'm late because my roommate dissolved. Stay solid for five minutes."
A sound that might have been a laugh scraped out of them. "Five minutes."
She nodded and stepped forward before she could think herself out of it. Her boot hit the line between the two largest stones.
The world went quiet.
Not silent. Quiet in the way a library is quiet after the doors close, as if the park itself had been muted . The traffic hum from the A3, the distant planes into Heathrow, the dog barks — all gone. In their place came other things: the sigh of wind through leaves that had no business still being green in December, the low drone of bees too big to be bees, the creak of those massive oaks leaning closer than they had a second ago.
Rory's second foot landed and the light changed.
They were in.
The Grove wasn't large. It couldn't have been more than thirty meters across, and yet her eyes kept trying to make it bigger. The sky above wasn't London's flat winter gray, but not the warm amber Rory had glimpsed in dreams of Dymas either. It was pearlescent, bruised at the edges, as if sunset had gotten stuck. Wildflowers carpeted the ground in a riot that made no sense — snowdrops and cornflowers and things she had no names for, with petals like glass, all blooming at once. They opened as she brushed past, turning their faces to her, not the light.
The air tasted sweet and metallic, like cut grass and old pennies. It was too warm. Sweat prickled under her hair — straight, black, shoulder-length, now sticking to her neck — and she shoved her hands into her coat pockets and found the other thing there.
The blade Isolde had given her last spring, after the incident with the river-wraith. Moonsilver, leaf-shaped, slender enough to hide up a sleeve. Always cold, even through denim. Rory didn't draw it, but she wrapped her fingers around the hilt. The cold grounded her.
"Time," Nyx whispered behind her, and this time their voice was stretched thin. "Rory, feel it."
She did. Her phone, dead already in her pocket, had read 15:42 when they'd left the car park. That had been ten minutes ago. Now the shadows the standing stones threw were long the wrong way, as if the sun had moved hours while they took two steps. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. Isolde's warning, delivered months ago in that maddening riddle-speak.
The unease that had been sitting low in her belly since they'd crossed the stones sharpened. This place was listening .
"It's bigger than a pocket," she said, more to herself . "It's a whole second—"
"Breathe," Nyx said. Their solid form wavered at the edge, like ink in water. They were struggling to stay anchored. "You think too loud here."
They moved deeper, because there was nowhere else to go. The flowers gave underfoot and sprang back, leaving no trace. She looked back and saw her boot prints already gone. Then she looked at Nyx and saw they left none at all, and remembered: Isolde leaves no footprints when she walks.
As if summoned by the thought, the woman was simply there.
Rory hadn't seen her arrive. One blink the clearing beyond the flowers was empty but for a single hawthorn tree twisted in the center, its bark whorled with faces; the next, a figure stood beneath it.
Five-five at most, barefoot despite the cold that wasn't cold, in a dress that looked spun from cobwebs and old light. Hair silver reaching her waist, skin like river stone, ethereal and ageless in a way that made Rory's twenty-five years feel like a tantrum. Eyes pale lavender, catching that stuck sunset and throwing it back.
Isolde Varga.
"Little Carter who carries winter and summer at her throat," Isolde said, and her voice had the cadence of a story being told backward. Her gaze flicked to Rory's pendant, pulsing faintly, then to the dagger-cold weight in Rory's pocket, then to Nyx. "And the shadow who borrowed a name. You step early. The seam is still stitched."
Nyx inclined their head, a ripple going through them. "Seer."
Rory swallowed. Isolde never answered straight. Fae compulsion, couldn't lie but could mislead seven ways to Sunday. That was fine. Rory was good at puzzles.
"Is it supposed to be like this?" She gestured at the shimmer they'd come through, still visible behind them, still wrong. "The Veil's you know — extra shiny. It's not solstice for another week."
"When the year turns, the skin grows thin," Isolde said, smiling, and it was kind and terrible. "You ask if the door is louder because many hands knock. I cannot say no."
So yes. Rory's mind fitted it together, cool and fast the way it always did when she stopped panicking. The winter solstice weakens the Veil. Someone — or something — was using that. The Heartstone only pulsed near a Hel portal. If it was pulsing here, in a Fae-touched place—
"Two doors sharing one frame," she said out loud.
Isolde's lavender eyes brightened. "Clever little knife. The hungry place presses close. Dymas breathes amber through the keyhole."
Dymas. Gluttony. Prince Belphegor's realm of endless feasts and vineyards that stretched for hell-miles. Belphegor didn't usually bother with Fae pockets unless he was shopping .
"Why here?" Rory asked.
"Because what is hidden is sweetest to steal," Isolde said, as if that explained everything . She stepped — no, drifted — closer, and the wildflowers bent away from her ankles. "Will you look, Aurora Carter? Will you see what grows when two soils mix?"
She held out a hand. Not to Rory. To the hawthorn.
Rory followed the gesture and finally saw what the tree was holding .
The hawthorn's trunk split halfway up, bark peeling back like lips, and inside the hollow wasn't wood. It was light, warm amber light, the exact color described in stories about Dymasian sunsets. It smelled of roast meat and ripe peaches and rot, sweet and cloying. Through that light Rory could see, as through a dirty window, a long table laden with fruit that burst as it fell, and far beyond that, distant orchards where shapes moved, harvesting.
A Hel portal, growing like a canker inside a Fae tree, inside Richmond Park, inside Earth.
The pendant against her chest burned.
Nyx hissed, a sound like wind snapping a sail. "It's rooting."
"And it will fruit," Isolde said softly , and for the first time the riddle left her voice. "Unless cut."
Rory's hand was already out of her pocket. The Fae-forged blade slid free, moonsilver cold enough to make her scar ache. In the pearlescent light of the grove it was faintly luminescent, humming against the amber glow of the rift. It could cut through magical wards. Particularly effective against demons. Isolde's gift, given for a reason Rory only now understood.
The wonder of the place hadn't gone — the impossible flowers, the time that stuttered, the beautiful, awful oldness of it — but the unease had sharpened into something else, something clean and useful.
Fear, with a job to do.
"Rory," Nyx whispered, and they were solid again, fully, towering at her shoulder, violet eyes fixed on the breathing light in the tree. "If you cut it here, in the between-place, I do not know what will happen to time."
She looked at Isolde, who watched her with no footprints and too many years.
"If I don't cut it," Rory said, "I know what happens to London."
Isolde smiled again, but this time it was almost human.
"Then cut, little Carter," she said. "Cut cleverly."
Rory took a breath of sweet, metallic air and stepped toward the tree, blade raised, the Heartstone blazing against her skin like a second heart.