AI The rift spat them out onto warm earth.
Rory landed on her knees, palms sinking into soil so dark and loose it felt like crumbled chocolate cake . The smell hit her before anything else: caramelised sugar, crushed rosemary, something smoky and rich underneath, like pork fat rendering over a slow fire. Her stomach clenched. She hadn't eaten since the stale sausage roll at Paddington, and her body had noticed.
"Don't breathe too deep." Nyx's voice brushed past her ear, thin as a draught under a door. "The air here wants things from you."
"The air wants things?" Rory pushed herself up and wiped her hands on her jeans. The soil clung to the denim in greasy smears. "Brilliant. Love that."
She looked up.
The sky had no sun. It glowed from every direction at once, a warm amber like light through a jar of honey, and the glow pressed down on the land without casting a single hard edge. Hills rolled away from them in every direction, striped with vineyards whose rows ran so straight they looked ruled with a pencil. The vines stood taller than houses. Clusters of fruit hung from them, each grape the size of a fist, their skins shading from bruise-purple to a pale, veined gold.
Isolde stepped out of the rift last. It sealed behind her with a sound like a held breath let go. She stood between two rows of vines, her silver hair stirring in a wind Rory couldn't feel, and she didn't sink into the soil. Rory glanced down. Her own trainers had left deep, messy prints. Isolde's bare feet rested on the surface as if the ground had agreed not to touch her.
"Well?" Rory folded her arms. "You've seen this place in visions. This what you expected?"
"I have seen a table set for a thousand guests where no one had eaten in a century." Isolde tilted her head towards the nearest cluster of grapes. "I did not see the grapes. They are breathing."
Rory looked. The fruit swelled and eased, swelled and eased, a slow rhythm, like a sleeping dog's ribs.
"Nope." She stepped back . "Absolutely not."
At her throat, the Heartstone gave a lazy throb of heat. She pressed two fingers against it through her shirt. It had been warm since Richmond, since the moment Isolde had opened the rift, but here the warmth had deepened, spreading out under her collarbone like a sip of whisky.
"It likes it here," she muttered.
"It came from here." Nyx drifted closer, and Rory saw the problem at once. In London, Nyx had been a solid, tall silhouette, a man-shaped hole cut out of the night. Here the amber light soaked through them. They had thinned to a smudge, a charcoal sketch someone had half-rubbed out, only their violet eyes holding steady. "No shadows. Nothing in this whole valley throws a shadow."
Rory looked at her own feet. Nyx was right. She stood on the dark soil with nothing pooling beneath her, as if the light came from inside the ground as much as from above.
"Are you all right?"
"I have been worse." The violet eyes narrowed . "In 1643 I was worse. Walk. I will keep close."
They moved between the vines. The rows went on and on, and the silence surprised her. She had pictured Hel as screaming, fire, the dramatic stuff off church windows. Instead she heard the soft creak of vines stretching, the patter of something dripping, and further off, faint and rhythmic , a knife on a chopping board. Tok-tok-tok-tok. Fast, practised. The sound of someone who had diced a million onions and would dice a million more.
"Someone's cooking," Rory whispered.
"Someone is always cooking." Isolde trailed her fingertips along a vine without touching the leaves. "That is the nature of this place. The fire never goes out. The pot never empties. The cook never rests."
"That's not a riddle, that's a job description."
The corner of Isolde's mouth lifted. "Both may be true."
At the end of the row, the vineyard gave way to an orchard. Rory stopped so hard that Nyx drifted through her shoulder, a brief, sharp cold that made her gasp.
The trees grew in spirals. Their trunks twisted around each other in pairs and threes, bark polished smooth and red as lacquered wood. Their branches sagged under fruit Rory had no names for. Pears that glowed from within, faint lanterns hung in the leaves. Clusters of something like cherries that chimed when the invisible wind moved them, a sound like a teaspoon against fine glass. Fat, spiky husks split open to show pulp the colour of fresh blood, and the smell that rolled off them was so rich and sweet she tasted it on the back of her tongue.
Her mouth flooded with saliva. She swallowed hard.
"Rory." Nyx's whisper sharpened. "Your hand."
She looked down. Her right hand had risen towards the nearest branch, fingers spread, reaching for one of the glowing pears. She hadn't told it to. She snatched it back and jammed it into her jacket pocket, her pulse thudding in her ears.
"What the hell was that?"
"Dymas." Isolde's lavender eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point beyond the trees. "Hunger is the soil here. Everything grows from it. You brought yours with you."
"So don't eat anything. Got it." Rory's voice came out steadier than she felt. She pulled her other hand from her pocket and touched the hilt of the Fae blade at her hip. The moonsilver bit cold into her palm, and the cold cut through the fog in her head like a slap of rain. She held on. "That helps."
"It would." Isolde looked at the dagger with an expression Rory couldn't read. "It remembers a place where no one is ever hungry."
They walked on, Rory's hand locked around the hilt. The orchard sloped downwards, and through the spiralling trunks she caught glimpses of a valley below. Terraces cut into the hillside, each one a garden. Herbs in raised beds, their leaves a dozen shades of green and silver and violet. A pond steaming gently , fish the colour of copper coins rising to its surface to gulp at the air. Beyond it, wooden structures hunched against the hills, long low halls with smoke curling from dozens of chimneys, and the smell of roasting meat thickened until Rory breathed through her mouth.
Something moved on the nearest terrace.
She dropped into a crouch behind a trunk, dragging the blade half free. Nyx flattened against the bark beside her, a thin grey stain. Isolde stayed standing and made no effort to hide.
"Isolde, get down."
"He cannot see us. He has not looked up in years."
A man knelt among the herb beds. He wore a white cook's jacket stained yellow at the cuffs, and his hands moved over the plants with the tenderness of a nurse checking a patient. He pinched off a sprig of something pale and feathery, held it to his nose, and closed his eyes. His lips moved. Rory strained to hear.
"Too early. Too early. Tuesday. Tuesday." He tucked the sprig into his breast pocket and moved to the next bed. "Chef wants it for Tuesday."
"Is it Tuesday?" Rory whispered.
"There are no Tuesdays here." Nyx's eyes followed the man. "He carries the day with him, from wherever he came. From whatever kitchen he signed away."
Rory watched the cook work. He looked about sixty, grey-stubbled, a burn scar climbing one forearm. He hummed under his breath, a tune she half-recognised. Something old. Something her nan used to play on the radio in Splott on Sunday afternoons.
"He's human." Her throat tightened. "He's from Earth."
"Helbound." Isolde crouched at last, her silver hair spilling over the dark soil without collecting a single crumb. "He traded his soul for skill. Now he has skill forever, and a kitchen forever, and a master who is never satisfied."
"That's horrible."
"Is it? He is doing the only thing he ever loved." Isolde's eyes met hers, pale and unblinking. "Ask him if he would leave. I cannot promise the answer you want."
Rory opened her mouth, then shut it again. Below them, the cook straightened, pressed a hand into the small of his back, and turned towards the long halls. He walked slowly , without hurry, a man with nowhere else to be. The chopping sound from the halls hadn't stopped once.
The Heartstone flared.
The heat came so fierce and sudden that Rory hissed and yanked the chain away from her skin. The crimson stone swung from her fingers, and for the first time since she'd owned it, its faint inner glow brightened to a steady pulse . Beat. Beat. Beat. Faster than her own heart.
"Nyx."
"I see it." The shade's form darkened, drawing together. "It is pointing."
She held the chain out at arm's length. The pendant didn't hang straight. It tugged, a gentle, insistent pull, like a dog on a lead, angled away from the halls and the cook and towards the far side of the valley. Rory followed the line with her eyes.
Past the terraces, past the steaming pond, where the amber hills folded into one another, stood a single tree. It didn't spiral like the others. It stood straight and black and bare, its branches spread wide, and it was the only thing in the whole valley that threw a shadow.
A long, dark pool stretched from its roots across the golden grass.
Nyx made a sound Rory had never heard from them before. Half breath, half word, no whisper in it at all.
"Aldric."