AI The rift didn't tear. It peeled.
Rory had expected something violent: a crack of light, a wrench in her gut, the sort of thing films promised. Instead the Fae blade slid into the shimmer between the two oak stones as if it were cutting wet silk , and the air simply came apart along the edge of the moonsilver. Warmth poured through the gap. It carried the smell of bread.
"Now," Isolde said, "or the solstice closes its hand."
Rory stepped through.
The cold went first. One moment Richmond Park's December bit at her ears and the backs of her knuckles; the next, heat settled over her like a blanket pulled from a dryer, and her breath stopped fogging mid-exhale. She stumbled on ground that gave slightly underfoot, soft and loamy, and caught herself on something that turned out to be a vine as thick as her forearm.
She looked up, and forgot to let go.
The sky was amber. Not sunset-amber, not the smudge of city light on cloud, but the colour of honey held up to a window, deep and even from one horizon to the other. There was no sun. There was no source at all. The light simply *was*, pooled in the air, thick enough that Rory half expected it to drip.
"Oh," she said, and the word came out small.
Behind her the rift sighed shut. Nyx came through last, and badly. They poured out of the gap as a smear of darkness, folded in on themselves, and pulled up into their solid form with visible effort. Six feet of living shadow, but thinner than she'd ever seen them, edges fraying like smoke in a draught. Their violet eyes flickered .
"Nyx?"
"There is nowhere to stand." Their voice came as it always did, a whisper on a wind that wasn't blowing . "Look at the ground, Rory."
She looked. The vine she held cast no shadow. Neither did she. Neither did the row upon row of vines stretching away down the slope, heavy with grapes the size of plums, black-purple and glossy as beetles. The light came from everywhere at once, and so it fell behind nothing.
"You can't slip," she said.
"I can barely *be *." Nyx drew themselves tighter, a dark column in all that gold. "I will manage. Walk quickly ."
Isolde had already started down the row. Rory watched her go, silver hair loose to her waist and swaying, bare feet moving over the dark soil, and saw, with a small cold jolt, that the earth behind her was untouched. Rory's own trainers had left deep, clumsy prints. Isolde's path was as smooth as if nobody had passed at all.
She'd known about that, of course. Knowing and seeing were different animals.
Rory released the vine and wiped her palm on her jeans. It came away sticky. She reached under her collar without thinking and found the Heartstone pendant. The crimson stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, was warm against her fingers. It had always been faintly warm near a portal, a pulse like a second, slower heartbeat. Now it was hot, and the pulse had quickened .
"It's never done this," she said, catching up to Isolde.
"It has never been home." The Seer didn't turn. Her lavender eyes were fixed on something down the slope. "Things remember where they were born, even when they are carried far from it. Especially then."
"That's not an answer."
"No," Isolde agreed pleasantly. "It is a truth. Those are rarer."
The vineyard ran on. Rory had grown up with the Welsh valleys, their green folds and the grey drizzle between them, but she had never seen land so crowded with growing things. The vines were trained on trellises of pale wood that looked like bone until she touched one and found it was only wood, smooth as a banister. The grapes hung in clusters so dense they bowed the branches. And they hummed. She didn't notice it at first, just a faint vibration at the edge of hearing, like a fridge in another room, but the deeper they went, the more she felt it in her molars.
She stopped beside a cluster and leaned in.
"Don't," said Nyx.
"I'm not going to eat it." Her stomach chose that moment to growl, loud and long. She pressed a hand to it, embarrassed. She'd eaten before they left. Yu-Fei had pressed a carton of leftover char siu on her at the end of her shift, like she always did, and Rory had wolfed it down on the steps outside the Golden Empress. She shouldn't be hungry.
She was starving.
It came up through her all at once, a hollow ache under her ribs, saliva flooding her mouth. The grapes were right there. Their skins were dusted with bloom, and one had split, and the juice beading at the tear was the red-black of old wine, and it smelled, God, it smelled like every good meal she'd ever had and several she hadn't.
Her hand was halfway to the cluster before she realised she'd lifted it.
Something cold closed around her wrist. Not Nyx; their touch was dry and weightless. This was fingers, long and cool, pressing directly on the little crescent scar on her left wrist. Isolde held her there, unhurried.
"The hunger is not yours," the Seer said. "It is the land's. It opens its mouth, and you feel yourself falling in."
Rory swallowed hard. The ache didn't go, but it stepped back, and she could think around it. "What happens if I eat?"
"You will have eaten." Isolde let go. "And a thing that is eaten belongs to the one who ate it. But here, the hungry belong to the table."
"Brilliant," Rory muttered. "Cheers. Very clear." But she shoved both hands in her jacket pockets and kept them there, and she found the hilt of the Fae blade in the inside one and wrapped her fingers around it. The moonsilver was cold, as it always was , and here in all this sweltering gold the cold felt like a rope thrown to someone drowning. The hunger ebbed a little more.
They left the vineyard at the bottom of the slope and came into an orchard.
Rory had no names for the trees. Some were low and gnarled, their fruit pale and translucent like paper lanterns, each with a darker seed suspended at its centre that seemed to turn slowly as she passed . Others towered, trunks ridged and red as muscle, bearing long pods that split open as she watched and let fall a scatter of glittering seeds that sank into the soil and were gone . Somewhere a bird sang, or something like a bird, a liquid triple note that repeated over and over without variation, the same pitch each time, like a phone left ringing.
And under the birdsong, faint and steady, there was another sound.
*Tok. Tok. Tok.*
Rory stopped walking. "Do you hear that?"
Nyx tilted their featureless head. "Knives."
It was . She had spent enough nights in Yu-Fei's kitchen, waiting for orders, to know the rhythm of a cleaver meeting a block. But this was vast. It wasn't one knife; it was hundreds, thousands maybe, so perfectly in time that they made a single sound, rolling across the orchard from somewhere beyond the trees. *Tok. Tok. Tok.* Unhurried. Tireless.
The pendant pulsed against her collarbone. She counted. It kept time with the knives.
Rory's mouth went dry. She said nothing.
A little further on, Isolde stopped beside one of the lantern-fruit trees and touched a low branch. Something hung there that wasn't fruit: a small brass tag on a loop of red thread, the kind you'd see on a butcher's hook. Rory bent to read it. The script was etched neatly, in plain English.
*M. Holloway. Leeds. 1987. Pastry. Term: Perpetual.*
She straightened slowly and looked around. They were everywhere. She hadn't seen them before, because she hadn't known to look, but now they caught the amber light on every tree, a tag on every third or fourth branch, glinting faintly like Christmas ornaments on a tree no one had bothered to take down.
"These are people," she said.
"These were agreements," said Isolde. "People are what they signed away."
"Chefs." Rory turned a tag on the next tree. *D. Okafor. Lagos. 2003. Sauces.* Another. *T. Brennan. Galway. 1951. Butchery.* Her thumb stilled on that last word. "They sold themselves to cook."
"Some of them to cook," Nyx said softly . They had drifted close enough that the air around her dimmed, the only shade she'd seen since arriving. "Some to eat. The terms are not always what one believes they are when one signs." There was something in their voice, old and careful, that Rory had heard only once before, the night Nyx had told her the year they'd stopped being a man. Sixteen forty-three. A summoning that had gone wrong. She didn't ask. She thought she understood why they'd come anyway.
The trees ended.
They stood at the lip of a ridge, the orchard at their backs, and below them the land fell away into a basin so wide Rory's eyes couldn't hold all of it at once. It was a city, or a kitchen the size of one. Chimneys rose by the hundred, fat brick throats and slender copper flues, and from every one of them poured smoke that wasn't grey but gold, thick and slow, rising to join the amber sky until she couldn't tell where the smoke stopped and the sky began. Maybe it didn't. Maybe the sky *was* the smoke, a whole world lit by the breath of its ovens.
Long tables ran between the buildings like roads. Even from here she could see they were laden: domed platters, towers of fruit, whole carcasses glazed and gleaming . Nothing moved at them. No diners. Just the food, waiting.
*Tok. Tok. Tok.*
Down there, somewhere, thousands of hands rose and fell.
Rory realised she was holding her breath. Her stomach clenched with a longing so fierce it bordered on grief, and she tightened her grip on the cold blade in her pocket until the edges of the hilt dug into her palm.
"Belphegor's table," Isolde said. For once, there was no riddle in it. Her face, ageless and pale in the gold, held something that might have been pity. "Every chair is spoken for, little mortal. Even the empty ones."
Beneath Rory's collar, the Heartstone beat hot and quick, perfectly in time with the knives, as if something in that basin had finally heard it come home, and was calling it in for supper.