AI Rory's boot sank into moss that drank the sound of her step.
Nyx unspooled from the nearest shadow, violet eyes catching what little light the grove allowed.
"The stones have teeth today."
"Comforting." Rory pulled her foot free . The moss released it with a wet sigh, reluctant, almost offended. "Any other cheerful observations?"
"The air tastes of old bargains." Nyx's voice arrived from three directions at once. "And something that has not finished dying."
Wildflowers crowded the path that was not quite a path, petals the colour of bruises and fresh blood, blooming with a fever that ignored every season Rory knew . Their scent hit her in waves. Honey first. Then copper. Then a sweetness so thick it coated her tongue and made her swallow twice.
She kept walking.
The Heartstone against her sternum warmed, a slow pulse that did not match her own. She pressed her palm over it through her jumper and felt the answering throb of the gem, deeper, hungrier.
Nyx noticed. Of course they noticed.
"It knows this place."
"It knows a lot of places I wish it didn't." Rory let her hand drop . The Fae-forged blade rode at her hip, moonsilver so cold it left a ache in the bone even through the sheath. Isolde's gift. Isolde's invitation, if you stretched the word far enough to cover a riddle delivered by a crow at three in the morning.
The grove opened.
Not gradually. One moment the trees pressed close, bark like old leather, branches knitting overhead into a ceiling that breathed. The next, space. A clearing that should not have fit inside Richmond Park, that could not have fit, because Rory had walked these woods on deliveries and hungover Sunday rambles and none of them had ever contained this.
Grass grew in spirals. Pale gold, then green, then a blue that belonged under water. At the centre, a pool no larger than a dining table, surface still as glass and twice as reflective. It showed the canopy. It showed the sky that was not quite the sky they had left . It did not show Rory.
She crouched at the edge. Reached.
Nyx's shadow-hand closed over her wrist. Cold without temperature.
"Look, don't touch. The Grove keeps what it is given."
"I wasn't going to drink it."
"You were going to test it. You test everything. It is why you still breathe."
Rory sat back on her heels. The pool remained empty of her. A dragonfly hovered above it, wings like stained glass, then dipped. The surface did not ripple. The dragonfly did not come back up.
"Right." She stood. "Noted."
Deeper, then. The trees here grew in ranks, trunks too straight, too evenly spaced, like columns in a hall that had forgotten it was a forest. Between them, light fell in shafts that did not match any sun Rory had ever stood under. Gold, then amber, then a bruised violet that made Nyx's form thicken, more solid, more present.
They paused beside a trunk scored with marks. Not carving. Not claw. Something that had pressed language into living wood and left it weeping sap the colour of milk.
Rory traced one symbol with her fingertip. The wood was warm. It pulsed once, in time with the pendant.
"Aldric knew this script." Nyx spoke the old name like a bruise they had learned to press. "Before the ritual. Before the spaces took the rest of him."
"Can you read it?"
"I can remember wanting to." A pause, long enough for a leaf to fall and never quite land. "It says the hungry ones walk in gardens now. It says the Veil has learned to starve."
Rory's jaw tightened. She moved on.
Sound arrived in pieces. A brook that ran uphill, water climbing stone with the patience of something that had all the time it had stolen from visitors. Birds that sang in intervals too precise, too measured , like a choir that had rehearsed for centuries and grown bored of variation. Under it all, a hum. Low. Constant. The kind of note you felt in your teeth before you heard it.
She stopped at a stand of foxgloves tall as her shoulder. Each bell housed a tiny light, drifting, circling, never escaping. One of them pressed against the purple wall of its prison and the light flared white, then dimmed, then flared again.
"Don't." Nyx, closer now, a pressure at her left side.
"I wasn't."
"You were calculating how many you could carry in a jar."
Rory almost smiled. Almost. "Occupational hazard. Yu-Fei would lose her mind over ingredients like this."
"Your employer cooks for the living. These lights are not food. They are debts."
The foxgloves leaned toward her as she passed. She did not look back to see if they followed.
The ground changed underfoot. Moss gave way to a carpet of petals that crumbled to gold dust, then reformed behind them, erasing their trail as they made it. Rory glanced over her shoulder. The path they had walked was already gone. The standing stones were a rumour at the edge of vision, then not even that.
Time. Isolde had warned her in that crow's voice, or something like a warning, folded inside a poem about rivers that forgot their names. An hour inside. Minutes outside. Or days. Or years, if the Grove took a liking to you, or a disliking, and those were not always different things.
"How long have we been walking?"
Nyx considered the question the way they considered most things, as if time were a language they had once spoken and since misplaced.
"Long enough for the light to change twice. Not long enough for your heartbeat to forget the city."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only honest one I have."
The trees thinned again. A second clearing, smaller, ringed by oak standing stones that mirrored the ones at the boundary, except these were older, grooved by rain that had not fallen in this realm, or had fallen too often. In the centre, a woman sat on a root that had grown into a throne by accident or design, silver hair pouring over her shoulders to pool on the grass, pale lavender eyes already on them, as if she had been watching since before they stepped through.
Isolde did not stand.
"The delivery girl arrives with a borrowed night at her shoulder. How punctual. How doomed."
Rory's hand found the dagger's hilt. Habit. Not quite threat.
"You sent the crow."
"I sent a truth with wings. The crow was merely convenient." Isolde's mouth curved. Not a smile. The shape of one, left out in frost. "You wear my gift. You wear another's. The Heartstone does not belong to the living, Aurora Carter. It remembers a kitchen where the ovens never cool and the guests never leave."
The pendant burned. Rory hissed through her teeth and dragged it out from under her jumper. The crimson gem threw light across Isolde's face, across the stones, across Nyx, who flinched as if struck.
"Dymas." Isolde tasted the name. "Prince Belphegor sets a long table. He has set a place for you."
"I'm not hungry."
"Gluttony is not always about the mouth." Isolde rose without using her hands. Her feet met the grass and left no print, no bend, no proof she had weight at all. "You came for a vision. You came because the Veil tore in Camberwell last Tuesday and you were the only one who saw the amber on the other side. You came because the shade at your back cannot cross certain thresholds alone, and you have a talent for doors that should stay shut."
Nyx said nothing. Their form had gone thin, edges fraying.
Rory stepped closer. The air around Isolde smelled of rain on stone and something floral that had no name in English.
"Then give me the vision. That's the deal. That's why I'm here."
"Deals with my kind are rivers, child. You step in. You do not dictate the current." Isolde lifted a hand. Not to Rory. To the space between the inner stones, where the air had begun to shimmer, a faint distortion, the Veil made visible to anyone who had already paid enough to see it. "But I will show you what the Grove has already decided you will witness."
The shimmer thickened.
Rory smelled it before she understood it. Roast meat. Spices she could not name. Wine so dark it was almost black. Bread, fresh, the crust singing. Her stomach clenched. She had eaten a Tesco meal deal four hours ago, or four days, or never, and her body did not care about the maths.
The shimmer became a window.
Beyond it, an orchard under an amber sky. Fruit hung in clusters, each one swollen, dripping, too ripe, too perfect . Figures moved between the trees. Some wore chef's whites stained with colours that were not sauce. Some wore nothing but contracts burned into their skin. At a table that stretched without end, plates arrived and arrived and arrived, and the diners ate with a desperation that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the inability to stop.
Nyx made a sound like wind under a door.
"I remember the kitchens," they whispered. "Not these. Older. The same sin in a different coat."
Isolde's voice braided through the vision.
"What is consumed in Dymas does not leave. What crosses from Dymas does not forget the taste. The Veil starves in winter and gorges near the solstice, but someone has been feeding it out of season. Someone has been cutting doors where doors should not be cut."
Rory could not look away from a figure at the far end of the table. Broad. Slow. A crown of grapevine and bone. Belphegor did not look up. He did not need to. One of the diners turned, and the face was wrong, stretched, smiling with too many teeth, and for a slice of a second it wore Evan's mouth, the one that used to say *you made me do it *, and then it was a stranger again, and then it was her own face, chewing, chewing, chewing.
She wrenched her gaze free.
"Turn it off."
"It is not a lantern." Isolde's lavender eyes held no apology. They could not. "It is a wound. And wounds do not close because you ask them to."
The window widened.
Petals on the ground lifted, spun, and did not fall. The standing stones hummed, a chord that found the hum in Rory's teeth and joined it. The Heartstone's pulse became a hammer. Heat poured down her chest, through her ribs, into her hands.
Nyx surged forward, shadow stretching to a blade's edge.
"Isolde. The boundary."
"I know." The seer's composure cracked, a hairline, nothing more . "I did not open this. I invited you to see. Someone else has accepted the invitation on your behalf."
The amber orchard pressed closer. A vine, thick as a wrist, slid through the shimmer and tasted the Grove's grass. Where it touched, the wildflowers blackened, curled, and put out new buds the colour of cooked meat.
Rory drew the Fae blade. Cold raced up her arm, a mercy, a warning. The moonsilver caught the amber light and threw it back as silver, as refusal.
"How do we shut it?"
Isolde's answer came in the cadence of a riddle she did not have time to dress.
"A door cut from both sides must be sewn from both sides. You have the needle. You lack the thread. The thread is in the kitchen. The kitchen is in the prince. The prince is already looking at you."
Belphegor's head lifted.
Across the wound in the Veil, across the orchard and the endless table, eyes like banked coals found Rory's face. Found the pendant. Found the blade.
He smiled.
The vine around Rory's ankle tightened and yanked.