AI The gap between the two oak stones was narrower than her shoulders, and Nyx wanted her through it sideways.
"Out-breath held. Old doors resent a stubborn guest."
"You're smoke with opinions. Pour yourself through the cracks."
"Threshold law. Shadow follows flesh, never the reverse. Go on, Rory Carter."
Fine. Her own skeleton was the last obstacle between her and the Seer. Three nights they had hunted this ring of oaks in Richmond Park, three nights of Nyx tasting shadows for the flavour of a door, and now that they had found one, the door objected to her shoulders. She emptied her lungs, twisted, and shoved. Warm wood rasped her anorak. The oak groaned like a man hauled out of a good chair, and spat her into summer.
The frost ended between one step and the next. Warm air closed over her, thick as a June greenhouse, sweet with cut grass and honey and something riper underneath, apples going soft in a bowl. Light came from everywhere and nowhere, a gold-green glow with no sun in it, and the distant growl of the A3 had vanished from the world. In its place, bees. Fat golden bees drowsing through the air with the low hum of an orchestra tuning.
Behind her, shadow poured through the seam between the stones. It pooled, gathered, stood. And then Nyx did something Rory had never seen them do.
They had edges.
The Grove's light gave them a jawline, knuckles, the suggestion of an old coat with its buttons worn to brass. Nyx raised both hands and turned them over, slow, like a man reading a letter he had long feared lost.
"I had hands like these once."
"Creepy. Keep them to yourself."
"This place lends me the memory of a body. I mistrust lenders."
Rory checked her phone. No bars, no wifi, and the clock read 21:52, which was cheerful of it, given they had stepped in at half four. She counted ten seconds out loud. The digits rolled from 21:53 to 22:07 while she said them.
"Time's broken."
"Time is honest here. It is your world that lies."
They walked. Wildflowers crowded to her knees, cornflowers the colour of bruises, ox-eye daisies, foxgloves taller than she was, none of them in season anywhere on Earth. Every bloom faced her. Not the way flowers face the sun, because there was no sun, but the way a crowd faces a speaker . When Nyx drifted close, the nearest flowers folded shut, petal by petal, like small hands making fists.
Birdsong started when she walked and stopped when she stopped. She tested it three times. It passed the test every time.
A bee landed on her knuckle. Its fuzz was warm, and where it walked it left prints of gold dust that glowed for a breath and faded.
The path found them before they found it, a line of grass pressed flat, zigzagging downhill between the flowerbeds. Rory knelt at its edge. The mud beside it drank her boot print, deep and clean. The pressed grass itself held nothing. No hoof, no heel, no claw.
"Something light walks here."
"Or someone."
They followed it down. The Grove deepened, and the trees changed. Fruit hung from the branches now, pale plums the colour of candle wax, heavy over the path. The smell hit her the way a wave hits from behind: her mum's apple cake straight from the oven, birthday candles, salt and vinegar chips on the seafront at Porthcawl in Eva's rust-bucket of a car with the windows down. Her hand rose all on its own.
Cold fingers closed around her wrist.
"Eat nothing."
"It's fruit."
"It is bait. Fae hospitality is a hook dressed as a garden. Swallow once and you sit at their table forever, hungry, and the feast never fills."
She pulled her hand back. The nearest branch swung, though no wind moved.
The leaves overhead began to hiss. Not wind-hiss. Word-hiss. The sound sharpened into three syllables, repeated, patient, the way you repeat a name at a door.
Malphora.
Her mouth shaped it before her brain agreed, and it fit like a key fits a lock, which was the problem. The flowers shivered, all of them at once. Nyx went still as a dead flame.
"Do not answer."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it with your teeth. Names are nails, Rory. That one will pin you to a table you cannot see. Let the leaves keep their word."
Her thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and rubbed it raw while they walked. The Seer had better be worth this.
The path curled down into a hollow, and the Grove saved its best trick for last. A pool lay at the bottom, round as a coin, ringed by a hawthorn strung with hundreds of scraps of cloth, bleached grey and new red, all fluttering in wind that did not exist. The pool's surface held a night sky, deep and starred, though above her the Grove glowed its sourceless noon. And beneath those reflected stars, down in the water, stood a second grove, upside down, its trees bearing fruit she did not look at twice.
A woman with silver hair to her waist stood at the water's edge, barefoot in the mud, humming.
The pressed-grass path ended at her feet. No prints anywhere near her. Not one.
The humming stopped. She turned, and her eyes were pale lavender, and she smiled the way a door smiles when it opens.
"Malphora. Late, as ever. You have been late for three hundred years and nine days, so a few minutes more hardly signifies."
"That's not my name."
"No. Rory is the name at your door. Malphora is the name at your table. Doors and tables are tonight's subjects, so mind which one you answer to."
Rory's thumb went back to the scar.
"You're Isolde."
"Called that here. Elsewhere I am called worse, and earlier, and by things with too many teeth." Her gaze slid past Rory's shoulder. "Hello, Aldric."
Nyx's edges guttered like a candle in a draught.
"You have the wrong dead man, lady."
"I never have the wrong dead man. My pools show me a circle in 1643, a clever man, a door that shut on him. The between-places remember you, Aldric. So does the table that set your place."
"Enough."
Rory filed that away with the stack of questions Nyx owed her, then dug the pendant out of her collar. The deep crimson stone hung dark and quiet on its silver chain, as it had been for three weeks, ever since someone had slipped it into her delivery pouch between an order of salt and pepper ribs and a tub of prawn crackers. No note. No face on the shop's cameras.
"Start with this. Who put it in my bag?"
"A cook."
The word dropped into the hollow and sat there, greasy and wrong.
"What cook?"
"One who means to feed you." Isolde stepped closer, and where she stepped, the mud stayed smooth. "Dymas minted that stone. Gluttony's realm, Prince Belphegor's pantry. It stirs when a door out of Hel stands near. That is its nature. Hear its purpose. It is not a compass, child. It is a place card."
"I don't follow."
"You do not have to eat, Malphora. You only have to attend."
"In nine days the sun bottoms out. The Veil wears thin as breath on glass, and every door left ajar swings wide." Her lavender eyes travelled the hollow, the pool, the hawthorn and its trembling rags. "This grove is a door left ajar. And you, clever girl, carried a place card through it."
The cold landed in Rory's stomach before the thought did.
"So coming here was a mistake."
"Coming here was on time. I told you. Late for three hundred years, punctual tonight." Isolde knelt at the hawthorn's roots and drew out a bundle of grey linen, long and slim. She unwound it. Inside lay a dagger, slender and leaf-shaped, its moonsilver blade carrying a faint glow, like moonlight pooled in a spoon. Cold breathed off it. "A gift. Forged in the courts that exiled me. It cuts what wards keep whole, and it is unkind to things out of Hel. It will never warm in your hand. That is its honesty."
Rory took it. The hilt bit her palm, and the ache crawled up her wrist to the old scar.
"Why give me this?"
"In my country, a gift is a debt with lovely manners. Carry it. Nine days is a long time to be the only thing at a table that can cut."
The pendant woke.
Heat bloomed against her sternum, quick and greedy. The stone pulsed , once, twice, a heartbeat out of sync with her own, its glow lighting the inside of her coat like a coal.
Isolde's head snapped up. The smile shut like a door.
"Nine days early. The host is hungry."
The gold-green light dimmed. Above the pool, the air split along a seam and folded back, and amber light poured through, thick as syrup. The smell arrived ahead of everything else, roast fat and burnt sugar, woodsmoke and vinegar, a kitchen at full roar. The wildflowers browned in a widening ring. Bees dropped from the air and lay curled on the path. In the pool, the reflected stars went out one by one, like candles pinched by a waiter's fingers.
The seam stretched and became an arch. Beyond it stood rows of orchards under a warm amber sky, strings of lanterns, and the long white gleam of a table set for a feast.
Nyx poured between Rory and the arch, violet eyes blazing, edges sharp enough to cut. Frost feathered down the moonsilver blade in her fist.
Somewhere beyond the arch, a bell tolled. Once. Twice. A dinner bell, in a house where no one dared be late.
Then the voice, warm as dripping fat and polite as a maître d', came through the arch and said:
"Your table is ready."