AI The gates were chained . That was the first wrong thing.
Yu-Fei had pressed the box into my hands at twenty past eleven, the woks still hissing behind him, the pass-through window fogged with pork fat. Sawyer's Hill gate, Richmond Park. Someone meets you there. He'd already turned back to the stove before I could ask who.
So I'd ridden out past Hammersmith with the box jammed under my thigh, and the pendant sat against my sternum doing what it had done every night for three weeks, warming like a thumb pressed to a bruise. It had gone past warming somewhere around Kew. Now it hummed against my collarbone, steady, as though something on the other end of it had woken up.
I killed the scooter's engine and listened.
Nothing. That was the second wrong thing. Richmond Park at midnight should have been full of noise, foxes screaming, the low grumble of the A3, planes stacked over Heathrow. I got none of it. The air smelled of bracken and wet bark and something underneath, sweet and faintly rotten, like fruit left in a warm room.
The chain on the gate was new. Galvanised steel, bright where the links had rubbed, padlock oiled and closed. No delivery in London gets a padlocked gate. I checked my phone. Twenty past midnight. I checked it again while I was putting it away and it said eleven fifty-one.
Fine. Out-of-the-box thinking had got me out of worse.
I found the deer fence twenty metres along the treeline, sagging where something heavy had leaned on it, and I went over it with the box under one arm and my coat snagged twice on the wire. The ground on the other side gave under my boots, soft and springy, and the wildflowers were out.
That stopped me.
Wildflowers. In November. Not the grey husks you'd expect either, but whole drifts of them, white and yellow and a blue so deep it read as black in the low light, all of them open, all of them facing me. Every head turned the same way. I took a step. The flowers nearest my boot closed, quick as a fist, and the ones behind them opened in a slow ripple that ran off into the dark and kept going, further than I could see, further than a person can hear.
The pendant burned.
I walked. Not because I wanted to. Because the box was warm in my hands now, warm through the cardboard, and Yu-Fei pays cash, and cash means next month's rent on the flat above Silas', and a woman who has run from one bad man in Cardiff does not get to be squeamish about one strange errand.
Under the oaks the dark thickened. These weren't ordinary oaks. They were too tall, too straight, and they stood in a ring, seven or eight of them, so evenly spaced that my eye kept insisting they'd been placed , and their bark ran in deep vertical channels that made them look less like trees and more like standing stones someone had dressed in wood. The flowers grew right up to their roots and stopped there. A perfect circle of bare earth, ten feet across, dry and pale as a scar.
The deer came first.
I don't know how long they'd been watching. Twelve, maybe fifteen of them, red deer, hinds mostly, standing in the black between the trunks with their heads lowered and their eyes catching the little light there was. None of them moved. Not an ear. Not a tail. I've walked through Richmond at dawn and been ignored by better animals than these, and I have never in my life stood in front of something with a heartbeat and had it hold entirely still, watching, like a room full of people waiting for the host to finish his toast.
"Right," I said, because silence has to be broken by somebody.
Not one of them blinked. The nearest one, a big hind with a torn ear, turned her head maybe two inches to follow my voice and then stopped, as though the movement had cost her something.
I stepped into the circle, because that's where the path led, and the deer were gone . Not run off. Gone, the way a light goes when someone hits the switch.
The pendant went cold.
Every hair on my arms stood up, and I have learned to trust that, because the last time it happened I was nineteen and Evan was standing behind me in the kitchen doorway with his keys still in his hand and his face arranged into an apology I had not asked for. I turned slowly, one boot at a time, and looked back the way I'd come.
The flowers were closed. All of them. Every last head shut tight, and the ripple was gone , and the gap in the deer fence through which I had so recently climbed was not where I had left it. I could see the fence. I could not see the gap.
Something walked. Behind me and to the left. Two steps on dry leaves, then a pause. I stopped. It stopped. I counted to five and stepped again, and it stepped with me, and then, a half beat after I put my boot down, it took one more step than I did.
I have known that trick since I was a child, from a story my mother told me in Welsh, the one about the man who walked home from the pub and heard his own feet on the road behind him and did not turn around, and did not turn around, and did not turn around, and was never seen in that village again.
The pendant was still cold. The box was not. It had gone from warm to hot, and as I stood there with my arms wrapped round it, something inside rapped once against the lid. One knock. Polite. As though it had waited a long time to be let out and had decided not to be rude about it.
"Someone's meeting me," I said, out loud, to the trees and the flowers and whatever had borrowed a pair of boots. "So you may as well come on."
And the grove answered, in Eva's voice.
"Rory."
Eva's voice. Her exact voice, the Cardiff slur on the O, the little upward lilt at the end that she puts on when she wants something from me. I felt it land in my chest like a hand. My oldest friend. The one who'd found me a room, a job, a life, who had stood in my doorway in London three years ago with a duvet under one arm and said, you're not going back to him, and who has never once, in all that time, asked me for anything in return.
"Rory," it said again, from the far side of the circle, out of the dark between two of the standing oaks. The oak trunk shifted. Not swayed. Shifted, the way a person shifts their weight .
"Eva's in Bethnal Green," I said. My voice came out level, which surprised me. "Asleep. I saw her at six."
"Laila," the grove said.
That one hit the back of my neck like a draught. Only one man ever called me Laila, and that man is dead, and the fact that I had used the name afterwards, quietly, on a passport and a lease and a bank account, does not make it his to use.
I put the box down. It was too hot to hold.
"Aurora," the grove said, and smiled. I don't know how I knew it smiled. The sound simply had a shape to it.
Behind me, the circle of oaks had rearranged itself while I was listening . There had been eight of them. I was certain of eight, because I had counted them twice on the way in. There were nine now, and the ninth stood where the gap in the deer fence should have been, and its channels of bark were running , slowly , in a direction I did not want to follow with my eyes.
The box knocked again. Twice. Hard.
And then, very gently , from somewhere inside the wood, something said the one name I have never heard a living person say out loud, the one that sits under all the others like a stone at the bottom of a well, the one that does not belong to anyone from Cardiff or London or anywhere with a postcode, and I turned, because it was my name, and I have always answered to my name.