AI The rift didn't look like much. That was what bothered Rory most. She had expected a wound in the air, something torn and bleeding, and instead there was only a place between two oaks where the frost-stiffened grass seemed to bend, like a heat shimmer on a July road. In Richmond Park, at two in the morning on the longest night of the year, it was the only thing in sight that wasn't holding still.
"The Veil is thin tonight," Isolde said. She stood a pace ahead, silver hair loose down her back, and the snow beneath her feet held no print of her at all. "Thin as a promise made by a drunk man. It will bear us, though it may not like it."
"Comforting," Rory said.
"I did not say it would be comforting . I said it would bear us."
Against Rory's sternum, the Heartstone had gone warm. It pulsed once, then again, a slow heartbeat under her jumper, the crimson glow bleeding faintly through the wool. She pressed her palm over it. On her other hip, the Fae blade hung in its sheath, cold enough to ache through her jeans.
Nyx drifted at her shoulder, a tall silhouette with the edges of a candle flame that had forgotten how to flicker . Their violet eyes fixed on the shimmer. "I have crossed between many places," they whispered, in a voice like wind through a keyhole. "Never into that one. It was always closed to me. A door with a very particular lock."
"And now?"
"Now the lock is sleeping." A pause. "I find I'm not sure I want to wake it."
Rory almost laughed. She was twenty-five, she delivered egg-fried rice for a living, and she was about to walk into Hel with a ghost and a woman who couldn't lie. "Right," she said. "Together, then."
She stepped through first, because if she waited she wouldn't.
The cold went out of her all at once, as though someone had lifted a lid. Her ears popped. Something brushed the whole surface of her skin, curious and unhurried, and then let her go. She stumbled onto ground that gave slightly under her boots, and when she looked up, she forgot to breathe.
The sky was amber.
Not sunset, not the sodium-orange haze of London at night. It was a deep, honeyed, luminous amber that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and it lit the world below without casting a single hard shadow . Under it, the land rolled away in terraces, and every terrace was alive with vines. They stretched to the horizon in ordered rows, heavy with grapes the size of plums, dark as bruises and so glossy they seemed wet . The air smelled of crushed fruit and woodsmoke and butter browning in a pan.
Her stomach clenched hard enough to hurt.
"Oh," said Nyx behind her. They had come through at her back, and something in their voice had snagged. "Oh, I had forgotten that."
"What?"
"Smell." The shadow-shape turned slowly , head lifted. "Bread. That is bread. Four hundred years, and I can still name it."
Isolde arrived last, without a sound. She looked at the sky, at the terraces, at the two of them, and her lavender eyes were unreadable . "Dymas," she said. "Prince Belphegor's table. Mind your hunger, children. It is the only coin here that spends itself."
They followed a path of pale, packed earth between the rows. Rory kept expecting it to feel hostile, and it didn't, which was worse. Bees the color of old brass drifted between the vines, and their hum had a lazy, contented note. Somewhere far off, bells were ringing, low and rounded, like a dinner gong the size of a cathedral. Under the bells ran a murmur she couldn't place until they crested a rise and she saw the source: a valley floor swarming with tents and long tables, thousands of figures in motion, and the glitter of copper and steam and fire.
"A competition," Isolde said. "Or a feast. Here, the difference is a courtesy."
They didn't go down. They skirted the ridge instead, following the tree line, and the orchard began.
It began gradually, first a pear tree, then a dozen, then a whole cathedral of branches arching overhead. The fruit hung at eye level and glowed from within, each one a small lantern of gold or blush or green. Rory slowed without meaning to. A peach dangled near her face, its skin furred and flushed, and she could feel the weight of it in her palm before she'd lifted her hand. Juice, she thought. Cold, sweet juice running down her wrist, over the little crescent scar...
Her hand was halfway up when the blade shivered against her hip.
She snatched her fingers back. The peach hadn't moved, but it seemed to sigh. Very quietly, from inside the tree, something whispered *go on *, in a voice like her mother's when she'd been small and sick and wouldn't take the medicine.
"Rory." Nyx's whisper was close and sharp. "Don't."
"I wasn't."
"You were." They didn't sound angry. They sounded frightened, and that frightened her more. "I nearly did, too. Twice."
"I told you," Isolde said, without turning . "Eat nothing that offers itself. Here, the fruit that begs is the fruit that keeps."
Rory wiped her hand down her jeans as if she could scrub the wanting off. The Heartstone throbbed against her chest, faster now, warm enough to be uncomfortable. "Why's it doing that?" she muttered. "The pendant. It's like it recognizes the place."
Isolde's silence was answer enough, and Rory did not like it. *Cannot lie *, she reminded herself, *but can mislead.* An oracle's silence was never empty.
Beyond the orchard the path dipped into a walled kitchen garden. Herbs grew there in beds so precise they looked drawn with a ruler, and every leaf shone with dew. Rory recognized basil and thyme and, absurdly, the flat-leaf parsley from the Golden Empress's back step. Then she saw the man.
He knelt between two rows, a thin figure in a stained apron, snipping chives into a basket. He might have been fifty. His hair was gone to wisps, and he hummed under his breath, a tuneless little sound, the kind people make when they've forgotten anyone can hear them.
"Excuse me," Rory said.
He looked up. His eyes were kind and very tired, and behind the tiredness lay something hollowed, like a house with the furniture removed. "Ah," he said. His accent was pure Glasgow. "New, are ye? Ye'll want to get out of the gardens before the horn. They don't like visitors underfoot at the horn."
"You're from Earth," Rory said.
"Was." He smiled, and it was gentle and dreadful. "Signed a wee contract in 'eighty-seven. Best kitchen in the world, they said. Never a bad service." His gaze slid past her to Nyx, and he crossed himself slowly with the hand holding the shears. "I've cooked for princes since. I cannae remember the taste of my own mother's soup, mind. Funny, that. You'd think it'd be the first thing they'd let ye keep."
The bells rang again, closer. He flinched, gathered his basket, and was gone through a green door in the wall before Rory could think of a single useful thing to say.
Nobody spoke for a while.
Nyx stood very still in the amber light, violet eyes lowered. "He gave up his hunger for the pleasure of feeding it," they said at last. "It is a stranger trade than mine."
"Yours was an accident," Rory said.
"Was it?" The whisper almost smiled. "I have had four centuries to wonder."
Isolde walked on, and her bare feet, as always, left the earth unmarked. Rory noticed, though, that the soil behind Nyx's passing was darkening in a faint, spreading stain, and that the shadows of the herb beds had begun to lean toward them, curious, as if remembering something .
They climbed the last rise together. From the top, the whole realm lay open: vineyards rolling to the sea, and a river the color of burnt sugar winding through it all, and far off on a black-glass promontory, a palace built like a wedding cake, tier upon tier of blazing windows. The Heartstone burned against Rory's skin, and she understood, with a certainty that made the fine hairs rise along her arms, that she had been *expected *.
She drew a breath that tasted of honey and smoke, and put her hand on the cold hilt of the blade.
"All right," she said. "Which way?"
Isolde's lavender eyes turned toward the palace, and for once she answered plainly.
"Down."