AI The rift didn't look like much from the London side: a smear in the air behind the bins of a shuttered patisserie in Soho, like heat rising off tarmac in a month that had no business being warm. Rory would have walked past it a hundred times on deliveries. She probably had.
Now she stood on the other side of it, and the first thing that hit her was the smell.
It came at her all at once, the way the Golden Empress kitchen did when Yu-Fei flung open the swing door at the height of the Friday rush. There was caramelising sugar in it, and roasting fat, and something floral and green, crushed basil or wet tomato vines. Under all of it ran yeast, bread proving somewhere, a warm and patient smell. Her mouth flooded before her brain caught up. She swallowed hard and pressed the back of her wrist against her lips, the little crescent scar cool against her skin.
"Breathe through it," said a voice at her shoulder, thin as wind through a letterbox. "It's meant to do that."
Nyx had come through last, and they hadn't come through well. In Soho they had been a smudge of dark along the brickwork, barely there, a tall shape the streetlamp couldn't quite find . Here they stood fully solid, six feet and more of shadow given edges, and they held themselves the way a man holds himself on ice. Their violet eyes had narrowed to slits.
Rory looked up, and understood why.
The sky was amber. It wasn't sunset-orange or the sodium-glow of a city night. It was the deep, even gold of honey held up to a window, and it poured light down from every direction at once. She searched for a sun and couldn't find one. The light simply *was*, pooling in the air, and beneath it nothing cast a proper shadow. Her own lay at her feet as a faint grey puddle, apologetic, barely clinging to her boots.
"You alright?" she asked.
"There's nowhere to go." Nyx flexed one long hand and watched it as if it belonged to someone else. "Every shadow is shallow here. I can't slip. I'm—" The whisper caught on the word. "Stuck in myself."
"Welcome to having a body," Rory said, and meant it kindly. Something in the set of their shoulders eased a fraction.
Isolde had already walked ahead.
She moved down the slope before them as though she'd been here a hundred times, silver hair swinging to her waist, bare feet whispering through soil so dark and rich it looked edible. Rory followed and sank to the ankle in it. The earth was soft and faintly warm. It gave off a smell like chocolate cake. When she looked back, her own footprints trailed behind her in a clumsy line, and Nyx's longer ones beside them, and between the two, where Isolde had walked, the loam lay smooth and undisturbed.
It shouldn't have bothered her. She'd seen the Seer do it on the frost in Richmond Park. But here, where everything else seemed to *take *, where the ground drew at her boots like it wanted to keep her, the absence felt deliberate. It was as if the land didn't dare touch Isolde .
"Have you been to Dymas before?" Rory called.
Isolde paused at the bottom of the slope and turned her pale lavender eyes on her. "No door I have opened led here."
Rory filed that away. After three months of Isolde, she'd learned to hear the gaps in a sentence. *No door I have opened.* That didn't mean *never *.
At the bottom of the slope, the vineyards began.
They ran out to the horizon in rows so straight they looked ruled, and the vines were heavy, almost obscene with fruit. The grapes hung in clusters the size of Rory's head, some purple-black, some a luminous green, some a red so dark it was nearly the colour of the pendant at her throat. She reached for the stone without thinking. The Heartstone was warm against her collarbone. It had been warm since Soho. Now, standing among the vines, she felt it *pulse *, one slow beat and then another, the way her own heart went when she lay awake too late.
"It knows where it is," Nyx murmured.
"It came from here." She hadn't known that for certain until she said it aloud. The certainty settled into her like a stone into a pond.
They walked between the rows. The air hummed. At first Rory took it for insects, but there were none, no bees at the blossoms, no flies at the split skins. When she leaned closer to a cluster of green grapes, the hum grew louder. It came from the fruit itself, a low, contented thrum, like a cat on a lap.
She stepped back fast.
"Don't," Isolde said, without turning .
"I wasn't going to eat it."
"You were thinking of it." The Seer's voice was mild. "In this place, thinking is the first bite."
Rory's stomach chose that moment to growl. She scowled at it. She'd had a full bacon roll before they'd left. She wasn't hungry. She *wasn't *. But the hunger sat under her ribs anyway, patient and borrowed, and she realised with a crawl of unease that it didn't feel like hers. It felt like wearing someone else's coat and finding their hands still warm in the pockets.
The vineyard gave way to orchard. The trees stood taller than any she'd seen in England, their bark gleaming like lacquered wood, and the fruit they bore was wrong in ways that took her a moment to name. There were pears as clear as blown glass, with a single dark seed suspended in each like a fly in amber. There were apples whose skins shifted colour as she passed, red to gold to a bruised violet that matched Nyx's eyes. There were long, pale pods that split open along a seam as the three of them walked beneath, releasing a scent so sweet it made her eyes water.
Nyx reached up and touched one of the glass pears with a single fingertip. It chimed, a clean, sweet note that rang through the grove. One after another, the neighbouring pears chimed back, and the sound travelled away from them through the trees like a rumour.
All three of them went very still.
"Well," Rory said quietly. "That's announced us."
"Things here were grown to be noticed," Nyx whispered. They drew their hand back and tucked it against their chest. "I forget. It's been a long time since I touched anything that answered."
She glanced at them. There was something raw in the way they said it, and she didn't push. She had her own things she didn't like touched.
They found the table in a clearing at the orchard's heart.
It was absurdly long. It ran easily the length of a football pitch, laid with white linen so crisp it looked starched that morning , and every inch of it was covered. There were roast birds glazed like varnished mahogany. There were pyramids of pastries dusted with something that glittered. There were tureens of soup still steaming and cheeses weeping gently onto slate, bowls of cream, towers of oysters on ice that hadn't melted, and wine in crystal decanters catching the amber light and throwing it back as rubies. Chairs stood pushed neatly in, a hundred on either side, and at each place lay a silver knife and fork and a folded napkin.
No one sat at any of them.
Rory walked slowly along its length. Her delivery-driver brain did the maths without asking: the soup was hot, the ice was solid, the bread was still crackling faintly as it cooled. This hadn't been left . It had been *laid *, and recently, for guests who hadn't come yet.
Or for guests who had just arrived.
She stopped beside one of the chairs. On the napkin, stitched in thread so fine she had to squint, was a name.
*Aurora.*
The warmth drained out of her hands so fast they tingled. She heard herself breathe in and didn't hear herself breathe out. She reached, instinctively, for the hilt at her hip, and the Fae blade met her palm, cold as always, a small bright winter against her skin. The shock of it steadied her. The moonsilver didn't glow. There was no moon here to wake it. But it was cold, and it was hers, and it didn't hunger for anything.
"Isolde." She kept her voice level. "Did you see this?"
Isolde came to stand beside her and looked down at the napkin for a long moment. The Seer's face was ageless and unreadable , but her fingers, where they rested on the chair back, had gone white at the knuckle.
"I saw a table," she said at last. "I saw a feast. I did not see who would be fed."
"That isn't an answer."
"No," Isolde agreed softly . "It is all I can truthfully give you."
Nyx had drifted to the far end of the table, where the linen ran out and the trees crowded close again. They were crouched , examining the ground. "Rory. Footprints."
She went. In the dark soil, leading away from the table's end into the orchard, was a single line of prints. They were human, bare, and deep, as if whoever had made them had carried something heavy. Beside the trail, caught on a low branch, hung a scrap of fabric. It was white cotton, chef's whites, stained at the hem.
And somewhere ahead, beyond the trees, a bell began to ring. It was deep and bronze and unhurried. It wasn't an alarm. It sounded more like a summons to dinner.
The Heartstone pulsed against her throat, warmer now and faster, as if it were glad.
Rory looked at the trail. She looked back at the table with her name on it, at the soup that would never cool. She thought of every door she'd walked through in London with a carrier bag of someone else's supper, never knowing what waited on the other side.
"Right," she said, and tightened her grip on the cold blade. "Let's go and meet the chef."