AI The frost stopped at the standing stones.
Rory noticed because her boots had been crunching through Richmond Park for twenty minutes, and now they sank into warm grass. A white flower brushed her ankle. Beyond it stood another, and another, their petals open beneath a sky that should have been dark.
She glanced back.
Winter waited on the other side of the ancient oak stones. Bare branches scratched at the London glow. Here, bees moved among bluebells.
“No,” she said softly .
Nyx slipped across the boundary behind her. For an instant their violet eyes appeared without a face; then shadow gathered into shoulders, long arms, the suggestion of a head.
“That is a reasonable first response.”
Rory pulled out her phone. No signal. The time read 11:42, then 11:41.
She put it away.
Isolde stood beside a pool at the centre of the clearing, her silver hair falling almost to the flowers. She had left no trail through the wet grass. The reflection beneath her showed the pool, the sky, and an empty bank.
“You came before the longest night ended,” she said.
“You said before midnight.”
“A clock is a small cage for a large animal.”
Rory had been cold, tired, and willing to tolerate riddles when they left the park gates. Now she was merely tired.
She drew the Heartstone from beneath her jumper. The thumbnail-sized crimson gem rested against her palm, warm enough to make her skin prickle. Its silver chain caught between two fingers.
“It’s been doing this since yesterday.”
Isolde’s pale eyes moved to the pendant.
“Something has remembered its way home.”
“Wonderful. Can it remember without taking me along?”
The pool stirred.
No breeze touched the clearing. The flowers stood still. Yet rings spread across the water, and each ring carried a different reflection: a ceiling crossed by golden ribs, a branch crowded with red fruit, a table set with so many glasses that they looked like rain suspended in the air .
From somewhere below the surface came the sound of a spoon tapping porcelain .
Nyx moved closer to Rory.
“The opening is young,” they whispered. “The place beyond is not.”
Rory looked between them. “Have either of you been there?”
“Not through this door,” Nyx said.
Isolde lifted one bare foot and set it on the pool.
The water held.
That was worse, somehow, than if she had vanished beneath it. Rory watched the seer take another step. Ripples crossed the surface without wetting her hem.
“The thorn has grown around the lock,” Isolde said. “Bring what I gave you.”
Rory’s hand went to the dagger tucked inside her coat. Even through its wrapping, the moonsilver chilled her fingers.
“You gave me a knife and directions to a pond. You could have mentioned the pond.”
“Would you have come?”
“No.”
Isolde turned. “Then I have mentioned it at the proper time.”
Rory almost laughed. Instead she looked at Nyx.
Their outline shifted at the edges. “I can follow you. I cannot promise the return.”
It was the first useful thing anyone had said.
She tightened her grip on the pendant and stepped onto the water.
For one sickening moment there was nothing beneath her boot. Then something met it—not solid ground, exactly, but a yielding resistance, like a hand catching her weight . Warmth climbed through the sole.
Her next step carried her down.
The clearing folded above her without a splash. For a moment she saw flowers overhead, roots dangling beneath them, each root tipped with a tiny star. Then the world turned right way up, and her boot struck pale stone.
Amber light poured over her.
Rory stood on a terrace overlooking an orchard that ran to the horizon. Trees grew in sweeping rows, their black trunks braided around columns of translucent green stone. Fruit hung in glassy clusters: violet pears, oranges patterned with silver veins, round white things that opened and closed along a seam as though breathing .
Between the rows, streams carried dark red water.
The air smelled of hot bread, crushed leaves, and a spice she could almost name. Every breath suggested a meal she had forgotten she loved.
Above the orchard, an amber sky held no sun.
Nyx emerged beside her, stretching thin before gathering into their usual shape. Their shadow went the wrong way across the terrace.
Isolde followed last.
“Dymas,” she said.
Rory had heard the name before. Hearing it here made the distant rows seem to draw closer.
“Hel.”
“One of its more generous faces,” said Nyx.
Across the terrace stood a fountain carved from dark stone. Its basin was dry. Water nevertheless rose from it in a narrow column, broke into glittering beads, and disappeared before falling. In each bead Rory glimpsed a moving mouth.
She looked away.
At the terrace steps, two stone figures knelt beneath an arch. Their heads were bowed, their arms raised to support a huge shallow bowl. Trees had grown through their shoulders and split their backs. The bowl held a single ripe plum.
It was the size of a car.
“Are those statues?” Rory asked.
Nyx studied them.
“They are stone now.”
She kept to the middle of the steps.
Below, the orchard was much cooler. The enormous leaves filtered the amber light into green bands, and something ticked steadily in the branches. Rory mistook it for insects until they passed beneath a low bough and she saw hundreds of tiny silver knives hanging by their handles.
They turned as she passed.
All their points followed the pendant.
She tucked it beneath her jumper.
The knives turned with it.
“Subtle,” she muttered.
Their path curved towards a building half buried in the orchard. At first Rory took its roof for a hill. Then she saw windows beneath the roots, tall and narrow, their glass clouded gold. A stairway led down between two walls carved with dishes of food. The carving was worn almost smooth where hands would naturally touch it.
She dragged one finger over a stone loaf.
Something beneath her fingertip gave slightly .
She snatched her hand back. A smear of flour whitened her skin.
Nyx watched her wipe it on her jeans.
“Best not to taste anything.”
“I do deliveries for a living. I know when something’s been left out too long.”
But her stomach cramped with sudden hunger.
She had eaten before leaving London. Toast over the sink, half a bowl of rice from the restaurant. Enough. Yet the smell rising from the staircase made her mouth fill with saliva.
At the bottom stood a door of green bronze. There was no handle. Roots crossed it in thick cords, disappearing into the walls, and pale threads stretched between them.
The Heartstone pulsed hard against her chest.
Isolde stopped a pace from the door.
“Here,” she said.
Rory waited.
The seer said nothing else.
“You do know how maddening that is?”
“The blade will open what fingers cannot.”
Rory unwrapped the dagger. Its leaf-shaped blade held a soft sheen in the dimness, and cold bit into her palm.
She brought its edge towards one of the pale threads.
Nyx caught her wrist.
Their touch felt like the chill beside an open window.
“Listen first.”
Behind the door, someone was breathing .
Not one person. Dozens. Slow breaths, almost together. Under them came a softer noise: a fork scraping a plate, teeth clicking against a spoon.
Rory held still.
“People?”
“Perhaps.”
She leaned close to the bronze. “Hello?”
The eating stopped.
Every last scrape.
Then a voice from immediately on the other side said, “Have you brought dessert?”
Rory stepped back so sharply that Nyx’s hand passed through her wrist.
Isolde’s expression did not change.
“An empty table cannot answer,” she said.
“That doesn’t make an answering one better.”
But the pendant was pulling now. Not physically. Rory could still move away. She simply knew, with the same certainty as knowing where her tongue sat in her mouth, that something behind the door belonged to it.
She slid the dagger beneath a thread.
It parted without resistance.
A note rang through the stairwell, low and beautiful. The severed ends curled away, each shedding a drop of gold. As Rory cut the next thread, the roots loosened. By the fifth, they had withdrawn into the walls.
The door opened inward.
Inside lay a hall so long its far end blurred into amber haze. Slender pillars rose like the trunks outside, their capitals branching across a ceiling hung with glass fruit. Candles burned in shallow bowls along the walls. Their flames leaned down.
A table ran the length of the hall.
At its nearest end stood three empty chairs.
Beyond them sat the diners.
Some were human. Some might once have been. A woman in a stained chef’s jacket stared into a silver bowl. A man with branching horns held a grape halfway to his mouth. Farther down, Rory saw a figure whose face was hidden by a veil of falling sugar.
None moved.
Every plate was empty.
Then the horned man lowered his hand, and food appeared beneath it: a little bird browned crisp, steam rising from its breast .
The woman’s bowl filled.
Movement travelled down the table. Knives lifted. Glasses darkened with wine.
No one looked at the newcomers again.
Rory stood on the threshold, unwilling to put her back to the orchard.
On each of the three empty places sat a folded card.
The nearest read AURORA CARTER.
Her name was written in her mother’s handwriting.
She knew the shape of the A, the impatient cross through the t. For a moment she could smell the kitchen in Cardiff, rain drying on the radiator, potatoes roasting while her mother marked exercise books.
Rory’s eyes stung.
On her plate appeared a slice of toast.
Not a feast. Cheap bread, butter melted to a translucent patch, one corner burned. The toast her mother used to bring her when she was ill.
Beside it, a cup filled with tea.
“Oh, you bastard,” Rory whispered.
Nyx said nothing. Their empty place had no plate at all. Instead there lay a small brass key, green with age.
They reached towards it.
“Nyx.”
Their hand stopped.
Rory could not read their card from where she stood. The shadow around their shoulders shivered.
Then they drew back.
Isolde’s place held a white pear pierced by a golden pin. She regarded it for a long moment.
“The house remembers the shape of hunger,” she said.
Rory looked away from the toast. The effort hurt.
At the head of the nearest table stood a low pedestal. Something round had been fitted into its top, leaving a dark hollow beneath a dusting of crimson grit.
The Heartstone warmed again.
She took it out.
Light stirred in the hollow.
“Is that where it goes?”
Isolde stepped close enough that her silver hair brushed the table. “A seed may return to its shell. It need not choose to grow.”
Rory crouched beside the pedestal. Around its base, under a fringe of fine roots, ran an inscription. She could not read the letters. But below them was a carved image: a hand offering a little stone to a tree.
In the next image, fruit filled the hand.
In the last, roots climbed the wrist.
Her own left wrist prickled beneath its small crescent scar.
She stood.
The woman in the chef’s jacket was watching her now. Flour lined the creases of her knuckles. A narrow metal band circled one wrist and vanished into the table.
Very slowly, the woman shook her head.
Rory closed her fingers around the pendant.
“Thank you,” she said.
The woman lowered her eyes. Her bowl emptied. A moment later, it filled again.
From the far end of the hall came a heavy creak.
One of the distant chairs had moved.
Nyx turned towards the sound. “We should go.”
For once, Isolde offered no alternative.
Rory backed through the door. The smell of toast followed her, warm and ordinary and unbearable. She made herself climb the stairs without looking round.
Halfway up, someone called her name in her mother’s voice.
She gripped the cold dagger until its hilt hurt.
At the top, the orchard had changed.
The fruit was open.
Every pear and orange and pale breathing globe had split, revealing chambers lined with gold. Inside each hung a tiny room: beds, firesides, baths steaming beneath open windows. Rory saw her flat above Silas’ bar in one violet pear, but larger, cleaner, with sunlight on the floor.
Another held a classroom. Another a ship.
The ticking knives had gone silent.
Nyx moved ahead, a dark shape slipping from tree to tree. Rory followed their violet eyes. Behind her, Isolde’s bare feet made no sound.
She wanted to run. The orchard seemed to be waiting for that.
So she walked.
They passed the kneeling stone figures. Their bowl was empty now, and a crack ran through the terrace between them. Warm red light showed beneath it.
At the top of the steps, the way back looked like a sheet of water standing on edge.
Through it, Rory could see bluebells.
She nearly laughed with relief.
Then she saw how narrow it had become.
Nyx went through first, flattening to a ribbon of darkness. Isolde followed, silver hair trailing across the water without disturbing it.
Rory turned sideways and squeezed into the opening.
Something caught the chain.
She stopped with one boot on wet grass and the other on warm stone. The pendant had lifted from her chest. Its silver links stretched taut towards the orchard.
No hand held it.
Behind her, cutlery began to clatter.
Rory brought up the dagger. For a heartbeat she considered cutting the chain and leaving the stone where it so plainly wanted to be.
Instead she slid the cold blade between the pendant and the amber world.
Resistance pressed against her arm.
She pushed.
Something snapped with the sharp sound of a bitten seed.
Rory stumbled onto both knees in the grove. Water collapsed behind her, splashing her coat and vanishing into the pool.
The pendant lay in her fist, cool and dark.
For a while she could only breathe.
A bee settled on a bluebell beside her knee. It crawled patiently into the flower, dusted itself with pollen, and backed out.
Rory watched it fly away.
Nyx stood beneath the oak stones. Isolde waited beside the pool.
“What was that place?” Rory asked.
The seer looked down at the still water.
“A door left open for someone who has not yet decided to come home.”
Rory rose, carefully , and tucked the Heartstone beneath her jumper.
“Then they can keep waiting.”
Beyond the standing stones, the frozen grass glittered. She stepped towards it, hungry for the cold.