AI The rift spat them out onto warm ground.
Rory landed on her knees. The soil gave beneath her palms like proving dough, soft and faintly damp, and it held the heat of something alive. She yanked her hands back. The Heartstone Pendant burned against her sternum, a coal on a silver chain, and its crimson light bled through the cotton of her shirt.
"Up." Nyx's voice brushed past her ear, thin as a draught under a door. "Don't kneel here longer than you must."
She stood. Above her, the sky stretched in one unbroken sheet of amber, the colour of old whisky held to a lamp. No sun hung in it. No clouds. The light came from everywhere at once, pressing against her skin with a steady, even warmth , and when she looked down she found she cast no shadow at all.
Neither did Nyx. The Shade flickered beside her, edges fraying like smoke caught in a crosswind. Their violet eyes had dimmed to two bruises.
"You're thinning."
"There's nowhere to stand." Nyx lifted a hand and watched their fingers dissolve and re-knit. "Every shadow I've ever slipped through needed a light on one side of it. This place has only the one side."
Isolde stepped through last. The rift sealed behind her with a sound like a cork drawn from a bottle, and the Seer paused, head tilted, silver hair stirring in a breeze Rory couldn't feel. She lifted one bare foot and set it down again. The dough-soft earth didn't dent.
"Well." Isolde's lavender eyes swept the horizon. "Even Hel's floor refuses to remember me. I find that a comfort."
Rory turned in a slow circle.
Vines ran in terraced rows down the slope before them, so many rows they blurred into a green-gold haze at the bottom of the valley. The trellises stood taller than Rory, woven from pale wood that gleamed like polished bone. Grapes hung in clusters as big as her head. Each fruit swelled to the size of a fist, skins so thin and translucent she could see the pulp inside, and within the pulp, something turned over. Slow. Content. Like a sleeper shifting beneath a duvet.
"What's in them?"
"Seeds." Isolde didn't look. "Of a sort. Everything here dreams of being eaten, child. Even the seeds."
The smell hit her next. Rory had worked enough nights at the Golden Empress to know a kitchen's breath, but this layered itself in ways no kitchen could manage. Burnt sugar. Roasting fat. Fresh yeast, sharp and sour. Crushed mint. Beneath all of it, faint as a watermark, sat a sweetness that had turned. Fruit left too long in a bowl. Her stomach clenched, and her mouth flooded with spit.
She swallowed. It didn't help.
"I'm starving." She pressed a hand to her belly. "I ate before we left. I had a full plate of Yu-Fei's noodles two hours ago."
"You're not starving." Nyx drifted closer, a smear of darkness against the gold. "The realm is starving *for * you. Keep the two apart in your head, or it'll blur them for you."
They picked their way down between the first rows of vines. Rory kept to the centre of the path. Leaves brushed her sleeves, broad and velvet -furred, and where they touched, her skin tingled as though she'd rubbed nettles into it. A low hum rose from the clusters, too deep for insects, too even for wind. When she stopped walking, the hum stopped too.
She took a step. It began again.
"They're listening to us."
"Following." Isolde trailed her fingertips along the bone-pale trellis, never quite touching. "The vine turns toward whoever passes, as a sunflower turns to noon. Here, you are the noon."
At the bottom of the terrace the vineyard broke against a stream. Rory crouched at its bank, careful to keep her knees off the soil. The water ran clear but slow, thick as syrup, and steam curled from its surface. She caught the scent of it: salt, marrow, charred onion, star anise. Broth. A river of broth, rich enough that a film of golden fat glossed the eddies.
"This isn't possible."
"You've been in London six months and you still use that word?" Nyx's whisper carried something close to laughter . "Aldric said it once, you know. The night the summoning circle cracked. Much good it did him."
Rory glanced up. Nyx rarely spoke of the man they'd been. The Shade's gaze had fixed on the far bank, where the vines gave way to an orchard.
The trees there grew in perfect spirals, trunks twisted like wrung cloth, bark the deep red of a bitten lip. Their fruit hung low and glowing. Some shone like lanterns of beaten copper. Others pulsed a soft blue, fading and brightening in a rhythm Rory's heartbeat tried to match. A few, near the crowns, looked like nothing she had a name for , many-faceted and shifting, catching the amber light and throwing it back in shards of green.
The Fae blade at her hip had gone so cold it ached through the denim. She rested her palm on the hilt. Moonsilver bit her skin.
"There's a bridge." Isolde pointed downstream with one long finger.
A span of dark stone arched over the broth, carved along its railing with script that curled and hooked back on itself. Rory reached it first. She ran her thumb along the grooves and felt the letters shift, rearranging under her touch into something she could read.
"'Seven courses for the Prince's table,'" she read aloud . "'In exchange: one voice, one memory of a mother's cooking, all dreams of hunger satisfied.' There's a name underneath. Tomasz something. A date. 1987." She moved further along the rail. The script crowded thicker. "There are hundreds. Contracts. They've carved the contracts into the bridge."
"Receipts." Nyx hovered at her shoulder, barely more than a stain. "Every chef who sold themselves to Belphegor, stamped into the stone so the realm remembers what it bought."
Rory's thumb found another line and stopped. *One sense of taste, surrendered in full.* The signature beneath it looked barely dry, the carved edges sharp and pale.
"Who trades away their sense of taste to cook for a prince?"
"Someone who wanted to cook for a prince more than they wanted to taste." Isolde crossed the bridge without a sound, her hair trailing behind her. "Hunger has many mouths, and only one of them sits beneath the nose."
They stepped off the far side into the orchard. The air changed. Cooler here, damp and green, and the smell of rot grew stronger, rising from the fallen fruit that littered the ground between the spiral trunks. Rory stepped around a split copper globe. Its insides had gone black and liquid, and tiny white shoots pushed up through the mess, uncurling toward her boot.
She moved faster.
A blue fruit dangled at eye level, close enough that its glow painted her knuckles. The skin looked soft. Bruisable. A single bead of juice gathered at its base, trembling, and the scent of it slid straight past every thought in her head. Honey and rain and her mum's kitchen in Cardiff on a Sunday afternoon, the windows fogged, a pie cooling on the sill.
Her hand was already rising .
Cold fingers closed around her wrist, right over the crescent scar. Nyx had solidified enough to hold her, though the effort left their outline trembling, violet eyes blazing bright in the gloom .
"Rory."
"I wasn't going to." Her voice came out hoarse . She looked at her own hand, suspended an inch from the glowing skin, and didn't recognise the angle of it. "I wasn't."
"You were." Nyx didn't let go. "It smelled like home, didn't it?"
She said nothing. Her jaw ached from clenching .
Isolde stood a few paces off, watching the tree rather than Rory. "It will always smell like home. That is the whole of its craft. What grows here has never needed thorns."
Rory drew her hand back. Nyx released her, and their form sagged, bleeding at the edges into nothing before it caught and held. She rubbed her wrist. The skin where the Shade had gripped her had gone numb and cold, a bracelet of frost.
"Thanks."
"Don't." Nyx's whisper had frayed to almost nothing. "I can't do that many more times. Not here."
From somewhere deeper among the spiralling trunks came a sound. Metal on metal. A rhythmic scrape, a pause, then the scrape again. Rory knew that sound . She'd heard it every evening through the swinging door of the Golden Empress, the steady rasp of a blade drawn along a whetstone.
Isolde's head turned toward it. For the first time since they'd crossed, her lavender eyes narrowed .
"Someone is sharpening knives." Rory kept her voice low. "In the middle of an orchard."
"A kitchen needs no walls in Dymas." Isolde lifted her skirts clear of a pool of blackened pulp. "The whole realm is a larder, and the larder is the kitchen, and the kitchen, I suspect, has noticed us."
The scraping stopped.
Rory drew the Fae blade. It slid from its sheath without a whisper , and in the amber light its leaf-shaped edge gave off no glow at all, only a pale, hungry chill that climbed her arm to the elbow. She stepped forward between two twisted trunks, Nyx a flicker at her left, Isolde a silent blade of silver at her right.
Through the gap in the trees, a clearing opened. A long table ran the length of it, draped in white linen gone yellow with age. Copper pots hung from the lowest branches, swaying without wind. And at the far end, bent over a whetstone set into a stump, a man in a stained chef's jacket lifted his head.
His lips moved. No sound came out.