AI The pendant seared her skin.
Aurora ripped it from her collar and hissed through her teeth. The crimson stone pulsed against her palm, each beat hotter than the last. Nyx's shadow pooled at her side, condensing into a tall silhouette with violet points for eyes. Isolde had already moved ahead, silver hair trailing like smoke that refused to rise.
The air coated Aurora's tongue. Roast meat. Honey. Something sharp and floral that made her molars hum.
"Where the hell are we?"
Nyx's whisper came from everywhere and nowhere.
"A mouth that never closes. You stand in Dymas, little spark. Prince Belphegor's table."
Isolde turned. Her pale lavender gaze found the pendant, then Aurora's face.
"Hunger wears many crowns. You have crossed wearing one of them."
Aurora shoved the Heartstone back under her shirt. It sat against her sternum like a second heart that belonged to someone else. She took stock. Orchards stretched in every direction, trees heavy with fruit she had no names for. Clusters of gold and violet and a blue so deep it looked wet. Vines thicker than her wrist crawled along low stone walls, sagging with grapes the size of fists. The paths between the rows were packed earth, dark and rich, and they glistened as if recently watered with oil.
She stepped forward. The soil gave under her boot with a soft, wet sound.
Nyx drifted beside her, half-solid. Their edges frayed where the light touched them. Isolde walked without weight . Behind her, the earth lay undisturbed.
"Those stones we came through. The oak ones. That was Richmond Park five minutes ago."
Isolde's mouth curved.
"An hour inside can be a day without. Or a breath. The Grove keeps its own clock. This place keeps none at all."
Aurora's hand found the Fae-forged blade at her hip. The moonsilver dagger bit her fingers with cold, a clean contrast to the pendant's heat. She kept it sheathed. For now.
They moved between the trees.
Fruit hung at eye level. One orb, pale as milk, trembled as she passed. A scent rolled off it, cream and vanilla and the ghost of her mother's kitchen in Cardiff, Sunday mornings, batter in a bowl. Her stomach clenched. She had eaten a supermarket sandwich four hours ago. It felt like a rumour.
She reached out. Her fingertips hovered a breath from the skin of the fruit. It was warm. It leaned toward her, eager as a cat.
Nyx's form sharpened.
"Do not taste. The first bite is a contract here. I learned that with a different mouth."
Aurora pulled her hand back.
"You were human once."
"Aldric had appetites. They followed him through the ritual. They wear my shape still."
She glanced at them. The violet eyes gave nothing. A former sorcerer, trapped between realms since sixteen-forty-three, reduced to a whisper and a silhouette, and still they sounded almost fond of the hunger that had ruined them. She filed that away. Useful or dangerous. Often both.
Isolde paused at a fork in the path. To the left, the orchard darkened into a tunnel of interwoven boughs. Pale things glowed in that dark, low and rhythmic , like lanterns breathing. To the right, the vines opened onto terraces that stepped down and down, each one a different crop, each one more vivid than the last. Sound drifted up from the lower slopes. Metal on metal. A laugh that went on too long. The wet chop of a knife through something dense.
Aurora chose the terraces. Wonder first. Then the knives. Isolde followed without comment. Nyx's whisper brushed her shoulder.
"She already knows what you will find. She always does."
"Then she can say it in English."
Isolde's voice floated back, light as ash.
"The tongue that names a thing claims it. I offer you the mercy of ignorance a little longer."
They descended.
The light changed as they dropped from terrace to terrace. Aurora looked up despite herself. The sky hung warm and amber, thick as melted sugar, and it did not move. No cloud. No bird. A lid on a pot.
Each terrace assaulted a different sense. The first grew herbs in neat, impossible rows. Basil the height of a child. Rosemary like small trees, their needles dripping a resin that smelled of memory. Aurora's eyes watered. She knew that smell . The back garden in Splott. Her mother, Jennifer, crushing a sprig between finger and thumb, saying it would save the roast. The memory arrived too complete, too generous. She wiped her face with her sleeve and kept walking.
The second terrace held mushrooms the colour of bruises, caps as wide as dinner plates, gills that seemed to breathe . Spores hung in the air like gold dust. Nyx passed through them without stirring a single mote. Isolde's silver hair collected none. Aurora held her breath until the terrace ended.
The third was wine.
Channels cut through the packed earth, shallow and precise, carrying a dark liquid that caught the amber light and threw it back as garnet. The smell hit her in the chest. Blackcurrant. Oak. A cellar she had never entered. Vines arched over the channels in tunnels of green, and grapes split themselves without hands, bleeding into the flow. She crouched. The liquid moved with purpose, not gravity. It ran uphill in places, lazy as a well-fed animal.
"Christ."
Nyx crouched with her, or the idea of crouching. Their whisper tickled the inside of her skull.
"Belphegor's vineyards drink as much as they give. The soil here has a throat."
Isolde stood at the channel's edge. She left no reflection in the wine.
"What overflows the cup still owes the vintage."
Aurora rose. She wanted a drink. She wanted a lock on that want. Pre-law had taught her to spot a contract in pretty language. This whole realm was a contract. The fruit, the wine, the air. Sign here. Open your mouth.
They followed the channels down.
A fountain waited at the next landing, carved from a single block of pale stone that looked like sugar and was not . Wine spilled from the mouths of carved faces, a dozen of them, each expression different. Ecstasy. Terror. A blankness that was worse. The basin below churned , never filling, never emptying. Bees the size of walnuts drifted over the surface. They had too many legs. Their hum was a chord, three notes that did not belong together.
One bee landed on Isolde's wrist. She did not brush it off. It probed her skin, found nothing it recognised as food, and left.
Aurora's crescent scar itched. Old accident, childhood, a broken glass on the kitchen tiles and her father's voice going tight. She rubbed her thumb over it and the itch faded. The pendant did not. It kept time against her breastbone, faster now.
"We're getting closer to something."
"To the stove," Nyx said. "All paths in Dymas lead to a heat."
The laugh from below came again, longer, cracking at the edges. Then a hymn, off-key, the words in no language she recognised, the tune almost a drinking song from Silas's bar on a Friday, if Silas's bar had been built from throats.
The fourth terrace stopped her.
Animals hung from wooden frames. Pigs, goats, birds with too many wings. They were not dead. Their sides rose and fell. Their eyes tracked the three of them as they passed. No blood ran. No flies gathered. A low sound came from the nearest pig, not a squeal. A word, almost. A name.
Aurora's jaw tightened.
"They're alive."
"They are kept. Ripeness has a schedule in Dymas. The chefs of Belphegor do not waste."
Nyx's violet eyes dimmed.
"Helbound, some of them. Souls who signed for a longer life and received a longer course."
Isolde crouched by a trough of water that ran along the terrace edge. She did not touch it. Her reflection failed to appear.
"What is prepared with love may still devour the beloved."
Aurora looked away from the hanging bodies. She focused on the path, on the next step, on the cold of the dagger and the heat of the stone. Cool-headed. That was the point of her. That was what Eva had said, years ago, before London, before the flat above the bar, before any of this. Think around the problem. Do not stand in it.
The problem hung from hooks and breathed.
A goat turned its head as she passed. Its eyes were human. Brown. Tired. It blinked once, slow, and she saw the understanding in it. Not animal panic. Bookkeeping. It knew the menu.
She walked faster.
The frames ended. The path narrowed between hedges clipped into the shapes of spoons and knives and a great open mouth. Through the last of them, an arch waited, cut from living green. Light the colour of old whisky spilled across flagstones on the other side. The sounds grew distinct. Voices. Dozens. The clatter of pans. That hymn again, closer, a dozen throats now, none of them in agreement.
Aurora stopped under the arch. She counted exits the way she counted traffic on a delivery run. The arch behind them. The haze ahead. Stations receding into steam. No walls. No ceiling she could name. The kitchen sprawled like a city that had decided to be a meal.
"Forty at least," she said. "Working. Not looking at us. Yet."
Nyx condensed tighter, a blade of darkness at her back.
"Kitchens have eyes in the grease."
They went through.
Copper pots large enough to bathe in bubbled on hearths of black stone. Figures moved between them. Some wore aprons of pale leather. Some wore nothing but the brands on their arms, ranks and recipes seared into flesh. Their faces were human enough until they turned, and then the mouths were too wide, the teeth too even, the eyes filmed with a patience that had nothing to do with waiting.
One of them lifted a ladle and drank. Stock ran down his chin. He smiled at the taste and went back to stirring.
The smells stacked. Saffron. Char. A sweetness that belonged on a birthday cake and had no business next to the rest. Aurora's mouth watered against her will. She swallowed it like an insult.
Isolde drifted toward a prep table. A carcass lay there, half-butchered, ribs like the vault of a small church. She studied it with her head tilted. The ribs were the wrong length for any animal Aurora knew. The meat had a faint inner glow, the same stubborn light as the pendant under her shirt.
"The guest list grows when the door is left unwatched."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning we have been seen."
Aurora's pulse jumped. She scanned the stations. The branded cooks stirred and chopped and tasted. Then one of them, a woman with a scarred scalp and a necklace of garlic bulbs that were not garlic, lifted her head. Her nostrils flared. She set down her knife.
The Heartstone kicked against Aurora's chest, a hard, warning thud.
The woman's mouth split. Not a smile. An assessment.
"Fresh stock."
Her voice carried. Other heads rose. Ladles paused. A pot lid chimed as it settled.
Nyx's whisper turned sharp.
"Run or cut, little spark. The middle path is a plate."
Aurora drew the Fae blade. Cold flooded her hand. In this light the moonsilver held no glow, only a dull, hungry sheen. Isolde had not moved. Her lavender eyes had gone distant, seeing past the kitchen, past the cooks, into some thread of time the rest of them could not reach.
"The feast has a seat for you, Aurora Carter. It has always had a seat. The question is whether you sit, or whether you are served."
The scarred woman stepped around her table. Others followed. They did not rush. They advanced the way a sauce reduces, slow and inevitable, heat doing the work. The necklace swung. The bulbs on it opened tiny, wet mouths and began to sing, thin and eager, the same hymn as before, now on pitch.
From deeper in the kitchen, from the haze, a bell began to ring. Once. Twice. A third time that did not stop.
The hanging herbs along the stations shivered. The copper pots trembled . Something vast shifted in the steam, a shape that had been sitting at a table none of them had noticed, a table that had not been there until the bell insisted it was.
A chair scraped.
Aurora backed toward the hedge arch. Nyx's shadow stretched, reaching for the gaps between flagstones, seeking a darkness deep enough to swallow three bodies. The cooks kept coming. Grease popped on a nearby hearth. A branded man licked his thumb and turned it in the air, testing the wind, finding her.
Isolde finally turned. Her riddle-voice dropped to something almost kind.
"When the prince stands, the meal begins."
The steam parted.
Prince Belphegor rose from his unseen seat, and the kitchens of Dymas bowed.