AI The pendant burned against my breastbone. Not warm. Burning, the way a kettle handle burns when you grab it without thinking.
I pressed my palm flat over the stone and stepped through anyway.
The rift spat us out onto our knees. One moment, frost and the rotten-leaf stink of a Southwark alley on the longest night of the year. The next, soft earth under my hands, loose and dark as coffee grounds, and air so thick with sweetness it coated my tongue before I'd even opened my mouth.
"Don't breathe through your mouth."
Nyx's whisper came from somewhere to my left. It sounded thinner than usual. Frayed.
"Bit late for that." I spat. The taste lingered anyway. Burnt sugar. Cloves. Something underneath it, faint and meaty, that I didn't want to name. "Isolde?"
"Here, and not here, and here again." A pale hand appeared in front of my face. "Up, little lawyer. The ground listens when you kneel on it."
I took her hand. Her skin felt cool and dry, like paper left in a drawer. She pulled me upright with more strength than her slender frame suggested, and for the first time, I looked at Dymas.
The sky glowed amber. No sun hung in it. No moon, no stars, no clouds. The whole dome of it shone the colour of honey held up to a lamp, bright enough to see by and dim enough to feel like late evening forever. Beneath it, vineyards rolled away in every direction, row after row, over hills so smooth they looked sculpted. The vines climbed trellises of pale, knotted wood. Bone, I realised after a second look. Polished and lashed together with something that glistened.
Grapes hung in clusters the size of my head. Deep purple, nearly black, their skins so tight they shone. As I watched, one cluster swelled. Then relaxed. Then swelled again.
"They're breathing."
"Ripening." Isolde tilted her head . Her silver hair hung straight down her back, untouched by any breeze. There was no breeze. "Everything here ripens. That is the whole of its purpose. To grow fat, and to be eaten."
"Charming. And the bone trellises?"
"Also ripened. Once."
I checked the Fae blade at my hip. Cold, even through the leather sheath. A small, reassuring bite against my thigh. Isolde had given it to me three weeks ago with a warning I still didn't understand. *It cuts what binds. Mind what binds you.*
Nyx had not spoken again. I turned, looking for the familiar tall smudge of darkness, the violet glint of eyes.
Nothing.
"Nyx?"
"Here." The whisper came from my feet.
I looked down. A puddle of shadow pooled around my boots, no bigger than a bin lid. Two faint violet sparks flickered in it, dim as dying embers.
"What happened to you?"
"Look around, Carter." A tremor ran through the dark. "Tell me what's missing."
I looked. Vines. Trellises. Hills. A path of crushed white stone winding between the rows. And the light, pouring down from everywhere at once. From every direction. Every angle.
No shadows. Not under the grapes. Not beneath the trellises. Not behind Isolde. The world sat flat and golden, like a painting nobody had bothered to finish.
"There's nowhere for you to stand."
"Nowhere to *be *." The sparks dimmed further. "I am borrowing yours. Walk carefully . If you step into full light, I believe I shall simply stop."
"Right." I swallowed. The sweetness had crept down my throat and settled in my stomach , a warm, spreading ache. "No pressure, then."
We took the white path. It seemed safest, which in my experience meant it probably wasn't, but the alternative involved wading through breathing fruit. The stones crunched under my boots with a sound like biting into sugar crystals.
Isolde walked beside me, and after twenty paces, I noticed.
"Your feet."
She glanced down. Behind her, pressed neatly into the white gravel, a line of small, bare footprints trailed back toward the rift.
For three hundred years, as far as I knew, the earth had refused to hold her weight . Grass sprang back. Snow stayed smooth. Mud forgot her.
Dymas remembered.
"Hm." She studied the prints the way someone might study an unfamiliar word in a book. "It seems the table has set a place for me."
"Is that bad?"
"It is not good."
Fae couldn't lie. They could, however, make you wish they would.
The path crested a hill, and the vineyards fell away below us into a valley, and I stopped walking.
Orchards filled the basin. Trees with silver bark and leaves like hammered copper, heavy with fruit I had no names for. Globes of translucent gold with something dark curled inside, like a sleeping foetus. Long, ridged pods that dripped a thick red syrup onto the ground, where small pale flowers opened their mouths to catch it. Pears, or something pear-shaped, whose skins shifted colour when I looked at them directly, flushing pink as a cheek.
And at the heart of the valley, running straight as a ruler through the trees, a table.
I couldn't see the end of it. White linen draped over it, spotless, crisp enough that I could see the fold lines from the hill. Silver glittered along its length. Candelabras, tureens, domed platters, goblets. Chairs lined both sides, high-backed and carved, hundreds of them. Thousands.
Every chair sat empty.
Steam rose from the dishes.
"Somebody's expecting guests," I said.
"Somebody," Isolde said, "is always expecting guests here."
The ache in my stomach sharpened. My mouth flooded with saliva. I hadn't eaten since a cold spring roll in Yu-Fei's back kitchen at lunchtime, and suddenly I could smell it all, rising up from the valley on air that didn't move. Roasted meat, crackling fat, garlic browned in butter. Bread straight from the oven. Something with cinnamon and pepper and orange peel that made my knees go weak.
My feet had carried me three steps down the slope before I noticed.
"Carter." The shadow at my feet tugged. An actual physical tug, like a dog on a lead. "Carter. Stop."
I stopped. My hands trembled . I pressed them against my thighs and my right palm found the hilt of the Fae blade, and the cold of it shot up my arm like a slap.
The smell faded. Not gone. Muffled.
"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. That's new."
"Mind what binds you," Isolde murmured.
"Yeah, I got that, thanks." I kept my hand on the hilt. "Anyone want to explain why a Hel realm built entirely out of dinner needs *us * on the menu?"
"Not on the menu." Nyx's whisper had sharpened into something close to fear . "At the table. Look at the chairs."
I looked. Squinted. Then pulled out my phone, useless for signal, and zoomed the camera as far as it would go.
Each chair had a small card propped against the goblet in front of it. Cream-coloured, gilt-edged. Place cards. Names written in a looping, elegant hand.
The first I could read said *Harold Pemberton, Leeds, 1987.* The next, *Marguerite Aubin, Lyon, 1731.* Then *Sunil Rao, Mumbai, 2011.*
"Contracts," Isolde said softly . "Every soul who sold themselves for a taste of more. They cook, in the great kitchens beyond the hills. And when the feast bell rings, they sit, and they are served, and they cannot stop."
"Cannot stop eating?"
"Cannot stop being eaten." She said it gently , as if it were a kindness. "Hunger is a mouth with two ends, Aurora."
I lowered the phone. My thumb hovered over the screen. The camera had caught the nearest end of the table, where the chairs sat grander, the linen whiter, the silver heavier. A place of honour.
A single chair stood at the head, larger than the rest. Carved with vines and open mouths.
Its card sat propped against a goblet of dark crystal . I zoomed. The image blurred, sharpened, blurred again.
*Malphora.*
The pendant at my throat flared so hot I gasped. Crimson light spilled between my fingers, bright enough to throw my hand into silhouette, and for one wild second I had a shadow, a proper shadow, stretching long across the white stones.
Nyx surged into it with a hiss of relief.
"Where did you get that name?" I rounded on Isolde. "You called me that once. In the grove. I thought you were being cryptic."
"I am always cryptic." Her lavender eyes did not leave the valley. "I am never wrong."
"That's not an answer."
"No." She lifted one pale finger and pointed. "That is."
Down in the valley, a figure had stepped out from between the silver trees. Tall, thin as a whip, draped in a white apron stained to the elbows. It held a brass handbell in one long hand.
It looked up at our hill. At me. Across half a mile of orchard, I felt the weight of its attention land on my skin like a warm, wet cloth.
It raised the bell.
"Carter," Nyx whispered from the shadow the pendant threw. "Whatever you do, do not let that ring."
The figure smiled, far too wide, and swung its arm.
The bell sang out, clear and sweet as a dinner gong, and every single chair at that endless table scraped back at once.