AI The grass on the other side of the stones was the wrong green.
Rory stood with one foot in Richmond Park and one foot somewhere else, and the somewhere-else foot had sunk ankle-deep into turf so vivid it looked lit from below. Her hand still rested against the oak standing stone. It was warm. Wood shouldn't hold heat like a kettle, and yet her palm came away smelling of summer and something older, something like the inside of a church .
"Don't let go of the stone until you've fully crossed."
"Bit late for the safety briefing, Isolde."
The Seer stood ahead of her on the path, silver hair drifting in a wind Rory couldn't feel. As usual, the ground beneath Isolde's bare feet bore no print, no bend of grass. She might have weighed nothing at all. She might have weighed everything and simply declined to mention it.
Rory let go of the stone. The park behind her, the grey drizzle of it, the distant snarl of traffic on the A308, all of it folded shut like a book. What remained was the grove.
She turned in a slow circle. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in drifts, blue and gold and a purplish white she had no name for, blooming in defiance of any season she knew. Above, the sky held a light with no sun in it, a pearly glow that came from everywhere and cast shadows nowhere. Her own shadow was missing. She checked twice.
"Nyx. Please tell me you're still attached to me and this isn't a me-only problem."
A patch of darkness peeled away from the treeline and poured itself upright. Violet eyes kindled in it, faint as struck matches.
"I am here." The voice arrived the way smoke arrives, from no particular direction. "Though I confess this place disagrees with me. There are shadows here older than my dying. They do not care for company."
"Comforting. Love that for us."
Behind Nyx, Eva would have been, had Eva come. She hadn't. Three was the number Isolde had asked for, and Rory had learned in the past month that when a three-hundred-year-old exile says three, you don't argue. So it was the Seer, the Shade, and the delivery girl with a pendant.
The pendant. Her free hand found it at her throat without conscious thought, the way it always did now. The Heartstone sat dark against her sternum, its deep crimson stone cold. Cold was good. Cold meant no portal, no Hel, no prince with a silver tongue and an appetite.
"Walk," Isolde said. "The grove does not like to be stood in. It prefers to be walked through. Like grief."
"And you couldn't have mentioned that before we walked through the front door?"
"You did not ask how to enter a grove. You asked whether you would survive it."
"Those feel like the same question."
"They never are."
The path unspooled ahead of them through the flowers, and here was the thing Rory couldn't get past: the path hadn't been there a moment ago. She was nearly sure. She looked back and the standing stones were gone . Not hidden. Gone, as though the grove had swallowed the door behind them and licked its lips.
"Isolde."
"The grove will return the way when the way is needed. It is hospitable that way. Do not mistake hospitality for kindness. They are different animals, and only one of them bites."
"Which one?"
"Yes."
Nyx made a sound that in a human throat would have been a laugh. In theirs, it was the sound of wind finding a crack in a window at three in the morning.
They walked. The flowers parted for Isolde and closed again untouched. For Rory, they parted too, but she felt the brushing of them against her jeans, faint and deliberate, like fingers testing fabric. At one point a blue bloom the size of a dinner plate turned on its stem as she passed and she caught the distinct impression of being sniffed .
"It's smelling me."
"Everything here will smell you. You are the only thing in this grove that bleeds warm and thinks slowly . You are fascinating the way a comet is fascinating . Admired from a distance. Watched."
"Watched by what?"
"The grove keeps its own counsel."
Deeper in, the trees changed. Rory noticed it the way you notice a stranger following you, in the stomach before the eyes confirmed it. The oaks gave way to pale birches, then to trees she had no name for, their bark smooth as candle wax and the colour of a bruise, silver and violet and that deep arterial red. Their leaves hung motionless. All of them. Every leaf on every tree, still as held breath, and yet somewhere overhead a sound persisted, a slow tolling chime like a bell heard underwater.
"Time is wrong here," Nyx said. Their form had drawn in tight, denser, more solid than Rory had ever seen them. "I was born in a century. I know its weight . This place has swallowed centuries whole and not yet finished chewing."
Rory pulled out her phone. Habit. The screen lit and told her it was 03:47, which was a cheerful trick for half past four in the afternoon, and the date was three days ahead of the one she'd woken up on. The battery read ninety percent and then, as she watched, ninety-four.
"It's charging itself off the wrong timeline. Brilliant. Even my phone's having a spiritual experience."
"Put it away." Isolde hadn't turned around. She never seemed to need to. "The grove does not care for little lit windows. It thinks we are showing it our souls, and it is gathering ideas."
Rory pocketed the phone. The chime overhead tolled once, closer.
The trees opened without warning, the way a held breath releases, and the heart of the grove lay before them: a pool, perfectly round, water black and still as poured glass. No ripples. No insects skating its surface. Around its rim grew a single ring of the red-barked trees, all of them leaning inward, attentive, an audience waiting for a performance to begin. At the pool's centre stood a stone island no wider than a kitchen table, and on the island grew one white flower, closed tight as a fist.
Rory's pendant woke up.
Not warm. Hot. Heat bloomed through her shirt and she hissed, yanking the chain over her head, and the Heartstone swung free of her collar blazing from within, its crimson core lit like a coal, pulsing. Not flickering. Pulsing. Steady as a heartbeat, and quickening.
"That's new." She held it at arm's length. It pulled. The stone strained against the chain toward the pool like a dog against a lead. "That's very new. Isolde, it's never done this. It pulses near portals. That's the whole trick. That's the only trick."
"There is a door beneath the water." Isolde's voice had gone quiet and flat, all the riddle drained out of it, and somehow that frightened Rory more than the pendant did. "It has been drowned and sleeping for a very long time. Your stone is not reacting to the door, child."
"Then what's it reacting to?"
"The fact that the door is no longer sleeping."
Nyx flowed to the water's edge and stopped there, coiled. "The Veil thins at the solstice. It is December."
"Two days out," Rory said. "It's two days out, we checked, that's the entire reason we came now, to get ahead of it, that was the plan."
"Plans," Isolde said, "are stories we tell the future. The future rarely reads."
The pendant burned hotter. Rory's palm flushed red around the chain. Across the pool, on the far side, the ring of pale trees shivered, every motionless leaf trembling at once, and the chime overhead struck and struck and struck, no longer distant, no longer underwater, and underneath it now she could make out a second sound. Footsteps. Not behind them. Above them. Walking on air, unhurried, coming closer with the patience of something that had crossed a very long way and knew it had arrived.
Isolde turned, finally, and her lavender eyes had gone wide as a child's.
"When we entered," she said, "I told you three. I did not lie. But I misled you, and I am sorry for it. Three came through the stones."
The footsteps stopped directly overhead.
"Something," Isolde said, "came with us."
The grass on the other side of the stones was the wrong green.
Rory stood with one foot in Richmond Park and one foot somewhere else, and the somewhere-else foot had sunk ankle-deep into turf so vivid it looked lit from below. Her hand still rested against the oak standing stone. It was warm. Wood shouldn't hold heat like a kettle, and yet her palm came away smelling of summer and something older, something like the inside of a church .
"Don't let go of the stone until you've fully crossed."
"Bit late for the safety briefing, Isolde."
The Seer stood ahead of her on the path, silver hair drifting in a wind Rory couldn't feel. As usual, the ground beneath Isolde's bare feet bore no print, no bend of grass. She might have weighed nothing at all. She might have weighed everything and simply declined to mention it.
Rory let go of the stone. The park behind her, the grey drizzle of it, the distant snarl of traffic on the A308, all of it folded shut like a book. What remained was the grove.
She turned in a slow circle. Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in drifts, blue and gold and a purplish white she had no name for, blooming in defiance of any season she knew. Above, the sky held a light with no sun in it, a pearly glow that came from everywhere and cast shadows nowhere. Her own shadow was missing. She checked twice.
"Nyx. Please tell me you're still attached to me and this isn't a me-only problem."
A patch of darkness peeled away from the treeline and poured itself upright. Violet eyes kindled in it, faint as struck matches.
"I am here." The voice arrived the way smoke arrives, from no particular direction. "Though I confess this place disagrees with me. There are shadows here older than my dying. They do not care for company."
"Comforting. Love that for us."
Behind Nyx, Eva would have been, had Eva come. She hadn't. Three was the number Isolde had asked for, and Rory had learned in the past month that when a three-hundred-year-old exile says three, you don't argue. So it was the Seer, the Shade, and the delivery girl with a pendant.
The pendant. Her free hand found it at her throat without conscious thought, the way it always did now. The Heartstone sat dark against her sternum, its deep crimson stone cold. Cold was good. Cold meant no portal, no Hel, no prince with a silver tongue and an appetite.
"Walk," Isolde said. "The grove does not like to be stood in. It prefers to be walked through. Like grief."
"And you couldn't have mentioned that before we walked through the front door?"
"You did not ask how to enter a grove. You asked whether you would survive it."
"Those feel like the same question."
"They never are."
The path unspooled ahead of them through the flowers, and here was the thing Rory couldn't get past: the path hadn't been there a moment ago. She was nearly sure. She looked back and the standing stones were gone . Not hidden. Gone, as though the grove had swallowed the door behind them and licked its lips.
"Isolde."
"The grove will return the way when the way is needed. It is hospitable that way. Do not mistake hospitality for kindness. They are different animals, and only one of them bites."
"Which one?"
"Yes."
Nyx made a sound that in a human throat would have been a laugh. In theirs, it was the sound of wind finding a crack in a window at three in the morning.
They walked. The flowers parted for Isolde and closed again untouched. For Rory, they parted too, but she felt the brushing of them against her jeans, faint and deliberate, like fingers testing fabric. At one point a blue bloom the size of a dinner plate turned on its stem as she passed and she caught the distinct impression of being sniffed .
"It's smelling me."
"Everything here will smell you. You are the only thing in this grove that bleeds warm and thinks slowly . You are fascinating the way a comet is fascinating . Admired from a distance. Watched."
"Watched by what?"
"The grove keeps its own counsel."
Deeper in, the trees changed. Rory noticed it the way you notice a stranger following you, in the stomach before the eyes confirmed it. The oaks gave way to pale birches, then to trees she had no name for, their bark smooth as candle wax and the colour of a bruise, silver and violet and that deep arterial red. Their leaves hung motionless. All of them. Every leaf on every tree, still as held breath, and yet somewhere overhead a sound persisted, a slow tolling chime like a bell heard underwater.
"Time is wrong here," Nyx said. Their form had drawn in tight, denser, more solid than Rory had ever seen them. "I was born in a century. I know its weight . This place has swallowed centuries whole and not yet finished chewing."
Rory pulled out her phone. Habit. The screen lit and told her it was 03:47, which was a cheerful trick for half past four in the afternoon, and the date was three days ahead of the one she'd woken up on. The battery read ninety percent and then, as she watched, ninety-four.
"It's charging itself off the wrong timeline. Brilliant. Even my phone's having a spiritual experience."
"Put it away." Isolde hadn't turned around. She never seemed to need to. "The grove does not care for little lit windows. It thinks we are showing it our souls, and it is gathering ideas."
Rory pocketed the phone. The chime overhead tolled once, closer.
The trees opened without warning, the way a held breath releases, and the heart of the grove lay before them: a pool, perfectly round, water black and still as poured glass. No ripples. No insects skating its surface. Around its rim grew a single ring of the red-barked trees, all of them leaning inward, attentive, an audience waiting for a performance to begin. At the pool's centre stood a stone island no wider than a kitchen table, and on the island grew one white flower, closed tight as a fist.
Rory's pendant woke up.
Not warm. Hot. Heat bloomed through her shirt and she hissed, yanking the chain over her head, and the Heartstone swung free of her collar blazing from within, its crimson core lit like a coal, pulsing. Not flickering. Pulsing. Steady as a heartbeat, and quickening.
"That's new." She held it at arm's length. It pulled. The stone strained against the chain toward the pool like a dog against a lead. "That's very new. Isolde, it's never done this. It pulses near portals. That's the whole trick. That's the only trick."
"There is a door beneath the water." Isolde's voice had gone quiet and flat, all the riddle drained out of it, and somehow that frightened Rory more than the pendant did. "It has been drowned and sleeping for a very long time. Your stone is not reacting to the door, child."
"Then what's it reacting to?"
"The fact that the door is no longer sleeping."
Nyx flowed to the water's edge and stopped there, coiled. "The Veil thins at the solstice. It is December."
"Two days out," Rory said. "It's two days out, we checked, that's the entire reason we came now, to get ahead of it, that was the plan."
"Plans," Isolde said, "are stories we tell the future. The future rarely reads."
The pendant burned hotter. Rory's palm flushed red around the chain. Across the pool, on the far side, the ring of pale trees shivered, every motionless leaf trembling at once, and the chime overhead struck and struck and struck, no longer distant, no longer underwater, and underneath it now she could make out a second sound. Footsteps. Not behind them. Above them. Walking on air, unhurried, coming closer with the patience of something that had crossed a very long way and knew it had arrived.
Isolde turned, finally, and her lavender eyes had gone wide as a child's.
"When we entered," she said, "I told you three. I did not lie. But I misled you, and I am sorry for it. Three came through the stones."
The footsteps stopped directly overhead.
"Something," Isolde said, "came with us."