AI The gate stone was warm when I shouldn't have been able to feel warmth through my gloves.
I pressed my palm flat against the ancient oak anyway, half expecting it to flinch. It didn't. The bark pulsed under my fingers, slow and patient, like something enormous asleep with its back against the wood.
"Right," I said to nobody . "In and out. Find the marker. Leave."
Nobody answered. That was the first wrong thing, actually. Silas had promised the Grove was never silent at night. Crickets, he said. Nightjars. The Fae equivalent of tinnitus. What I got instead was nothing, a held breath stretching from the standing stones to the treeline and back again.
The Heartstone pendant shifted against my sternum. Not the usual gentle pulse , more insistent, like a heart picking up pace two ribs away from mine. Near a Hel portal, it warmed. Near a Hel portal it did not, as a rule, throb .
I clipped the silver chain to my belt loop instead of my neck. Better that the thing stayed a tool. Tools couldn't whisper .
The wildflowers parted around my boots as I crossed the clearing. Foxgloves. Snowdrops. A scatter of poppies that had no business blooming in November, all of them leaning, just slightly , toward the path I was taking . My torch beam swung across the grass and found dew drops hanging in the air where no dew should hang, caught mid-fall, suspended like beads on invisible wire.
I kept walking.
Dymas's instructions had been simple enough, scrawled in handwriting that looked like it had been done left-handed on a train: The third stone. The one split by lightning. Look beneath the roots. And Rory, whatever hears you, do not answer it.
Third stone. Split by lightning. Easy.
Except the grove had stopped cooperating with geometry. I'd passed the split oak twice now. I was sure of it. The scar ran down its trunk like an old tear, blackened wood silvered at the edges, and both times the pendant had throbbed a beat later than it should have, as if it were remembering to warn me rather than reacting to anything at all.
The third time I found the tree, the split had widened.
Not much. A finger's width. But on my previous two visits the halves had been pressed together like a healed wound, and now something gaped there, dark and vertical, the torch light going into it and not coming back.
I did not answer the thing that heard me. But it seemed only fair that I be allowed to listen .
Footsteps. Behind me and to the left, unhurried, barefoot on grass. The cadence was almost human, almost, with a hitch in it, a little stumble of rhythm, like someone who'd only ever read about walking.
I turned the torch. Empty grass. The flowers nearest the sound had all turned their faces away.
"Looking beneath the roots," I said out loud, because my voice needed the reassurance of existing. It came out thinner than I wanted, swallowed at the edges by that perfect , expectant silence . I knelt at the base of the split oak. The roots rose from the soil in knotted grey coils, and between two of them the earth had sunk into a shallow depression, recently disturbed, the soil dark and loose.
I dug with my fingers. Cold, wet, the smell of it like pennies and old cellars. An inch down, my nails struck something smooth.
Bone. A fragment, pale as china, curved like a knuckle. And beneath it, folded in oilcloth gone stiff with age, a rectangle the size of a playing card. I unwrapped it by torchlight. A photograph. A standing stone, this stone, and in front of it a woman in a long dark coat. She faced the camera with her chin up and her hands at her sides, and her hair was shoulder-length and black, and her eyes, even in faded sepia, even ninety years old if they were a day, were bright blue.
My scar itched. The crescent on my left wrist, the one from the childhood accident, the one I'd never been able to explain to anyone's satisfaction, burned like a lit cigarette end.
I stood up too fast and the world tilted sideways. The grove had moved.
Not the trees. The arrangement. The split oak now stood where the clearing's edge should be, and behind it, where the open grass had been, there was forest, dense and grey-barked and leaning inward. All of it leaning inward. The wildflowers at my feet were closing, one by one, petals folding like shutting eyes.
The pendant went from warm to hot. I yanked it free of my belt and it sat in my gloved palm glowing that faint inner crimson, brighter now, rhythmic , matching, I realised with a lurch , my own heartbeat. It had been matching my heartbeat since I knelt down. It had been leading it.
"Oh, that's not yours," said a voice from the treeline. "That's been yours since before you were born, dear."
I didn't look up. Dymas's rule sat in my skull like a splinter: whatever hears you, do not answer it. But nothing had said I couldn't answer myself, and the voice, that was the wrong thing, the worst thing so far, because it had my vowels. My flat Cardiff consonants worn slightly smoother, like my own voice played back after a long day, softened by something that didn't use its throat the way I used mine.
I put the bone fragment in my pocket. I put the photograph in my pocket. I picked a direction, any direction, and walked.
The footsteps fell in behind me. Matching my stride exactly, and when I stopped, they stopped one beat late.
The trees thinned ahead, which was a mercy, and then the standing stones rose up out of the dark, a full circle of them, which was not a mercy, because the Grove's boundary was a handful of old oaks, five at most, and this circle held eleven stones, tall as doorways, and every one of them was split down the middle. Eleven lightning scars. Eleven vertical gaps, each one a shade darker than the night around it.
The pendant was burning now, actually burning, I could smell singed leather through the glove, and my heartbeat sped to match it, and behind me the footsteps stopped.
"You shouldn't have dug," my voice said, closer than it had any right to be. "But you were always going to. That's rather the point of you."
I turned around after all. Rules were for people who had better options.
The grove was empty. The grove was empty except for the wildflowers, which had all turned to face me again, and except for my own footprints in the dew, which doubled back toward the split oak in a neat line, made by no one, going the wrong way.
The pendant gave one enormous pulse , hard enough to yank the chain through my fingers, and pointed, dragging my hand with it, toward the nearest open split in the nearest stone.
Something inside the gap exhaled. Warm. Delighted.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket. One bar of signal, here, in a place that had never once had signal. A message from Silas, timestamped three days from now:
*Get out of the circle, Rory. That's not the grove you walked into. And whatever comes out with you, do NOT let it hear you scream.*