AI The Veil gave way with a sound like a held breath let go.
Rory had expected resistance, some pressure against her skin, but the shimmer between the two oak standing stones simply opened around her. The Grove's year-round wildflowers vanished behind her, and the cold December air went with them. Warmth fell over her shoulders like a hand-warmed coat. The Heartstone woke against her sternum, pulsing once, twice, a slow crimson heartbeat that she could feel through her jumper.
"Don't look back," Isolde said. "The way rarely likes being watched."
Rory looked back anyway. There was nothing there but a slope of dark, tilled earth and, faintly, a distortion in the air, a wavering like heat above a road. If she hadn't been able to see it, she'd never have known where it was. Beside her, Nyx turned and studied it with their violet eyes, then turned away without a word.
"Charming," Rory said, and her voice came out smaller than she'd intended.
Then she saw the sky and forgot what she'd been going to say.
It was amber. Not sunset, which is a color that leaves, but a thick and permanent gold, like honey held up to a lamp. No sun hung in it. The light seemed to come from everywhere at once, so that the world cast soft, diffuse shadows that pooled around her feet like spilled tea. She had to blink several times before she could take in the land beneath it.
They stood on a terrace, one of hundreds. Vineyards stepped down a vast hillside in curving green ribbons, each row heavy with grapes the size of plums, so dark they were nearly black. Beyond them, orchards ran to the horizon, and in the far distance, where the amber thickened to brown, something enormous rose against the sky. It might have been a city or a single building. Smoke rose from it in a hundred slow, greasy columns.
"Oh," Rory said.
"Yes," said Nyx. Their voice was a whisper carried on a wind that did not exist here, because the air was perfectly still. "That is how I looked, the first time I saw a cathedral."
They started down the terrace path. The dirt was soft and warm, and her boots left deep prints in it. She glanced over her shoulder, a habit from too many nights of delivering Yu-Fei's orders down unlit alleys. Nyx's tall silhouette moved as smoothly as poured ink, one moment solid, the next trailing at the edges into nothing. Isolde walked between them, silver hair drifting though there was no breeze. The dirt beside Rory's tracks stayed smooth as a plate where Isolde had passed.
The smell arrived slowly , and then all at once. Rory had spent two years carrying bags of duck, ginger beef and black bean noodles through London's rain, and she thought she knew what hunger smelled like . She did not. This was roasting meat and browned butter and bread coming out of an oven, wine and woodsmoke and something like caramelized figs, all braided together until it stopped being a smell and became a want. Her stomach clenched so hard she almost doubled over.
"Rory." Isolde's lavender eyes were on her. "Breathe through your mouth. Think of something dull."
"Council tax," Rory managed. It helped a little.
They reached the vines. Up close, the grapes were splitting on their stems, weeping juice that ran down the leaves in dark tracks and pooled on the ground. Flies drifted lazily through the sweetness. Rory reached without thinking, and her fingers stopped an inch from the nearest cluster. It was warm, like something alive. The skin flexed. It was breathing .
She snatched her hand back. On her left wrist, the little crescent scar from that childhood fall had gone tight and white.
"Nothing here is given," Isolde said, and for once she did not sound like she was speaking in riddles. "Only lent. I cannot lie to you, so I will say it plainly: what you eat here, you will owe."
"Owe who?"
"Whoever holds the table."
Rory thought of her father in his wig and gown, tapping a finger against a contract, saying that the trouble was never what a document said but what it let you forget you'd agreed to. She put both hands in her pockets.
Nyx had stopped several paces ahead. They were standing very still in the middle of the path, head tilted, and the shadow that ran out behind them was long and sharp and perfectly solid, thicker than any shadow ought to be. When Rory came up beside them she saw why. Nyx's hands, ordinarily wisps at the fingertips, were fully formed, dark and finely made, and they were trembling.
"I can feel my fingers," Nyx whispered. "Rory, I can *feel * them. Three hundred and eighty years, and it is only ever the cold. And here—" They flexed their hand, slowly , wonderingly. "The light has weight . It is holding me together."
"Is that good?"
"I do not know." The violet eyes turned toward the smoking city. "I am very hungry. I had forgotten I could be."
Rory looked at Isolde, who only said, "Keep walking."
The path took them into the orchard, and the sounds began. At first Rory took them for birdsong, a shivering, chiming music from the branches, but the fruit was making it. Pears hung in heavy golden ranks, each one faintly vibrating, and when the wind that wasn't there brushed them together they rang like glasses at a wedding. Some had already fallen. They lay split open in the grass, and the flesh inside glittered.
Farther in, beneath a tree with bark like poured wax, they found the first person.
He was crouched between the roots, picking through a basket of windfall apples, and for a moment Rory thought he was another kind of fruit, he was so pale and so still. Then he looked up. He was human, or had been. His white apron was stiff with old stains, and his cheeks were hollow, cut in like a skull's. His eyes were very bright.
"Not yet," he said, in a pleasant Yorkshire voice. "Not ready. Not yet, not for you. Tell them. Tell them the sauce is not ready."
"We're not—" Rory began.
"Nineteen ninety-one." He held up an apple. Tooth marks scored it, hundreds of them, a whole tiny alphabet of bites. "That was my year. I made a promise for a Michelin star. Wonderful stuff, the star. I have it in a drawer. I've not been allowed to taste it." He smiled and bit the apple again, chewing with fierce mechanical joy, and juice ran down his chin. "It's *lovely.* Isn't it lovely? You'll see."
Rory found she had stepped backward without deciding to. Her right hand had gone to the hilt at her hip, where the Fae blade lay in its sheath, cold as river ice even through the leather. The cold steadied her. It always did.
"Come away," Isolde said gently , and put a hand on her sleeve. "He will not follow. He cannot leave the row."
They walked on. Behind them the chewing continued, patient and endless, until the pear music swallowed it.
At the crest of the next hill the orchard fell away and the city opened below them. Now she could make out its shape: tiers of stone kitchens climbing in a spiral, chimneys spitting flame, long tables laid in courtyards from which laughter rose in hot gusts, laughter that went on a beat too long, as if no one there had ever been allowed to stop. Banners the color of blood and butter hung from every tower. Somewhere a gong sounded, and a great many voices roared approval.
The Heartstone had gone hot enough to sting. Rory drew it out on its silver chain and held it in her palm. The crimson gem glowed from within, bright as a coal, and beat in time with the gong.
"It knows this place," she said quietly. "Whoever gave me this knew."
"Yes," said Isolde.
"Is that all you're going to say?"
"It is all I can say that is true."
Nyx laughed, a dry, rustling sound. "She means that the rest would be a guess, and she is too old to guess aloud."
Rory closed her fingers over the stone. It throbbed against her scar like a second pulse . The amber light lay heavy on her face, and every fold of her body wanted to lean toward the smell, toward the noise, toward the long tables and the terrible generous warmth . She stood on the hilltop anyway, cool-headed, with her hand on a blade made for cutting through wards, and made herself look at it whole.
"All right," she said. "Then let's find out who's holding the table."