AI The note had come folded into a fortune cookie.
Rory had found it at the bottom of her delivery bag at half ten, after her last drop in Putney, sitting among the loose sachets of soy sauce as if it had always been there. No one at the Golden Empress had packed it. Yu-Fei swore to that later, or would have, if Rory had thought to ask. The paper strip didn't carry a fortune. It carried four words in cramped green ink: *The Grove. Tonight. Alone.*
Beneath them was a single letter. *I.*
Isolde didn't write notes. Isolde didn't need to. That was the first thing Rory should have listened to, and she knew it now, standing at the edge of the treeline with her bicycle chained to a fence post half a mile back and the cold getting into her trainers.
Richmond Park at night was a different country. The deer had gone somewhere, and the paths she knew by daylight had dissolved into grey on grey. She'd switched off her phone torch ten minutes ago because the beam made everything beyond it blacker, and because some small animal part of her didn't want to be the only lit thing for a mile in any direction.
She found the oaks the way she always did, by not looking for them.
They rose out of the bracken ahead, the standing stones that weren't stones: seven trunks of ancient oak, dead so long they'd gone hard and silvered, weathered into shapes that suggested shoulders, hunched backs, bowed heads. She'd walked between them twice before. Both times she'd felt the air change as she crossed, a pressure in her ears like a train going into a tunnel, and then warmth , and the smell of wildflowers.
She stepped between the two nearest trunks.
The pressure came. Her ears popped. Then nothing else did.
There was no warmth . The air on the other side was the same November cold, and it was worse, somehow, for being the same. The clearing opened out in front of her, the long oval of grass she remembered, ringed in by the dark bulk of the oaks. The flowers were there. They were always there, foxglove and campion and meadowsweet, blooming in defiance of every season. But they were closed. Every one of them. Petals folded tight as fists, heads bowed toward the earth.
Rory stood very still and listened.
The Grove had always had a sound to it. A kind of hum at the bottom of hearing, bees in July, though there were never any bees. It was gone . In its place was a silence so complete she could hear the blood moving behind her ears.
"Isolde?"
Her voice went out into the clearing and didn't come back. No echo . It was as if the air had simply taken it .
She pushed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Her right hand found her keys and closed around them, the teeth poking out between her knuckles the way Eva had shown her years ago, back in Cardiff, back when a man with a temper had been the worst thing Rory could imagine waiting in the dark. She made herself walk forward. Ten steps. Fifteen. The grass was wet and silver and it whispered against her ankles.
On the twentieth step she heard the footsteps behind her.
She stopped. They stopped.
It was so neat that for a moment her mind offered her an easy answer: an echo . Her own steps, bouncing back off the oaks. She let herself believe that for as long as it took to breathe in and out, and then she took another step, and listened, and heard it again.
It came a half-beat late. A soft, wet press of weight onto grass, precisely matched to her own, but late. As if whatever was making it was watching her feet and copying.
She didn't turn around.
It cost her something not to. Every nerve down the back of her neck was shouting at her to turn, but the cooler part of her mind, the part that had got her out of a flat in Cardiff with nothing but a rucksack and her mother's old car keys, said very quietly: *if you turn and there is nothing, you'll have to turn again. And again. And you will never stop turning.*
So she looked at the flowers instead.
They had moved.
Not much. She couldn't have said what was different, only that it was, the way a room is different when someone has straightened a picture frame. The closed heads of the foxgloves nearest her were no longer bowed toward the earth. They were tilted , very slightly , toward her.
Something warm touched the skin below her collarbone.
Rory's hand went to her chest before she could stop it. Through her jumper she felt the small hard shape of the Heartstone, no bigger than her thumbnail, lying against her sternum on its silver chain. She'd worn it every day since it arrived, unsigned, in a padded envelope with no postmark. She'd never taken it off. She'd almost stopped noticing it.
It was warm now. A slow warmth , spreading outward in a gentle beat, like a second pulse .
She knew what that meant. She'd felt it once before, in a stairwell in Deptford, seconds before the wall had begun to breathe. The pendant warmed for one thing only.
But not here. It couldn't. This was Isolde's place, a seam between this world and the Fae. Whatever was on the other side of the Heartstone's warning had nothing to do with the Fae, and they did not share their doors.
Did they?
She drew the chain out from under her collar. The crimson stone lay in her palm, and the faint glow inside it, the one she normally had to cup her hands to see, was bright enough now to paint the lines of her fingers red. It lit the crescent scar on her left wrist, the little pale moon she'd carried since she was seven and fell through a greenhouse pane. In that light the scar looked darker than the rest of her skin. Like a mouth.
The pendant pulsed . Warmer.
At the edge of her vision, to the left, one of the oaks moved.
She snapped her head around. Seven trunks. Grey, still, silent. Shoulders and bowed heads. She counted them, and her throat went tight, and she counted them again.
Eight.
She couldn't tell which one was new. That was the worst of it. They all looked like they'd stood there for a thousand years. They all looked patient.
"Isolde," she said again, and this time it came out smaller than she meant it to.
Something answered.
It wasn't a voice, at first. It was a sound like a breath being drawn in slowly through a narrow gap, a long wet inhale from somewhere in the dark between the trunks. It went on longer than any lungs should allow. Then it stopped, and in the silence after, a voice said, very softly , in her mother's accent:
"Rory, love . Come away from there."
Every muscle in her body locked.
It was perfect . It was Jennifer Carter's voice exactly, the lilt of the Valleys, the particular downward fall on *love * that her mother had used when Rory was small and had wandered too near the road. It came from behind her, and a little to the right, from the place where the footsteps had stopped.
Her mother was in Cardiff. Her mother was asleep in the house on Llandaff Road, with the reading lamp still on because she always fell asleep before she remembered to switch it off.
"Rory." Closer now. Patient. "You'll catch your death. Come here and let me see you."
The pendant was hot. Not warm. Hot, a coin left on a radiator, and the red light from it was spilling out between her fingers and across the grass. In that light she could see the flowers clearly, and she wished she couldn't. They had all turned. Every closed head in the Grove, hundreds of them, tilted in her direction. Not toward the voice. Toward her.
As if they were trying to see her face. As if they wanted to know which way she'd go.
She thought, absurdly, of her phone. She could check the time. She could find out how long she'd been standing here, whether it had been ten minutes or a night or a week. The Grove did that. She'd been warned . She kept her hands where they were.
"Aurora." The voice had changed. It was still her mother's, but lower, and something about it had come loose, the vowels stretching like wet paper. "Aurora. Turn around."
Rory looked down at the stone in her hand, at the red glow and the scar it lit, and made herself think . Isolde didn't write notes. Whatever wrote this one had known where she worked and what bag she carried. It had known about the Grove. It had known she would come alone, because she was Rory Carter, and Rory Carter always went to see for herself.
It had known her mother's voice.
What it didn't seem to know, not yet, was her face. It kept asking her to turn.
She closed her fist around the Heartstone until the heat made her eyes water, and she took one step forward, away from the voice, toward the far side of the clearing where the oaks stood thickest.
Behind her, half a beat late, something took a step too.
She took another. So did it.
Ahead, between the grey trunks, the dark was darker than it should have been. It was a shape more than a shadow, a narrow upright seam of black, and the pendant in her fist beat like a heart that had started to run. She didn't know whether the way out lay through it or away from it. She didn't know whether the thing at her back was trying to herd her there or trying, in its horrible borrowed voice, to warn her off.
The flowers watched her.
The oaks, all eight of them, waited.
And the voice behind her, so close now she could feel the cold of it on the nape of her neck, beneath the black fall of her hair, whispered in a tone her mother had never once used:
"There you are."