AI Richmond Park had been a hunting ground for kings for nearly four hundred years, and at a quarter to midnight it still carried itself like one: wide, dark, and certain it had no use for her.
Rory walked into it anyway. She had come because of the card.
It had been pushed under the door of her flat above Silas' bar sometime between the last Golden Empress run of the night and her bed. Heavy cream card, no stamp, no name. Pressed flat inside was a primrose, pale yellow and unbruised. Primroses belonged to March. They did not belong to the second week of November, not in London, not anywhere she had ever lived. The handwriting was looping and careful, the hand of someone who had been taught that the shape of a letter mattered. "The Grove. Midnight. Bring what you were given." She had checked three maps for a grove by that name and found nothing. Whoever wrote the card had known where it was anyway.
She had been wearing what she'd been given for nine days. The Heartstone had arrived in a plain box addressed to her full name, spelled correctly. Inside were a silver chain, a crimson stone the size of her thumbnail, and no note at all. Nobody had ever admitted to sending it. For nine days it had lain cool against her breastbone, a weight she had almost stopped noticing. She had asked questions, and then asked herself the same ones, which was worse, because she never liked the answers she came up with.
So she had given herself sensible instructions. Go, look, leave. Twenty minutes. Phone at sixty-one percent. The little LED torch from the bottom of her delivery bag, the one she kept for unlit stairwells and alleys that smelled of bins. She had texted Silas: "Richmond Park, back by one. If I'm not, send someone with a better sense of direction than me." He'd sent back a skull, and she had almost laughed. Then she'd locked her bike to a railing and slipped through a gap where the fence had been bent back by years of teenagers and deer, and the almost-laugh went out of her with the sound of the road.
For the first few hundred yards, the traffic followed her. Tyres hissing on wet tarmac, the bass thud of a car going past, a siren somewhere to the north. Then it thinned and stopped, the way a sound stops when someone closes a door on it. Mist lay in the hollows between the oaks, low and pale. Her hair, straight and black, had gone damp at the ends and kept sticking to her cheek. She shoved it back and kept walking.
The deer should have been everywhere. On the dozen night rides she'd made past the park's edge, there had always been deer: bulky shapes in the bracken, the odd heavy snort, the clatter of hooves on the verge. Tonight the bracken lay flat and still. Then, on the path ahead, a hind stood with her head turned toward Rory, perfectly motionless. Rory lifted the torch. Every deer's eyes caught light. It was one of the first things you learned about them, that green-gold flare. This one swallowed the beam whole. Its eyes went on regarding her out of a darkness with nothing shining in it.
Neither of them moved. After a while the hind turned her head away, unhurried, and walked into the trees without a sound.
Off to the east, a stag bellowed. It was the rut. She knew that sound, the rasp that seemed to climb up through the soles of her boots . But it went on far too long. Every animal ran out of breath eventually. This one didn't. Somewhere in the middle, the roar bent, and there were vowels in it, and it sounded like someone trying to remember the shape of a word.
Rory stopped and made herself think the way she always did: in order, looking for the reasonable explanation. Animals did strange things in autumn. Rut made them stupid and loud. Mist warped sound. Her heart was going too fast, and she'd been awake since five. Each explanation held for a second and then slid off her like water off slate.
She checked her phone. 11:58. No signal, which was ordinary enough in the middle of a park. The time was not ordinary. She looked up at the moon, a lopsided thing hung over the oaks, then back at the screen. The digits did not change. She watched them the way you'd watch a kettle that refused to boil, and they sat there, 11:58, 11:58, still as a photograph. The battery still read sixty-one percent. The screen was alive. The time was simply not going anywhere.
She counted her heartbeats instead. She got to four hundred and lost the thread, because somewhere in the count, the pendant began to warm.
It came up against her sternum like a palm pressed flat, and then the pulse started: one slow throb beneath the cloth of her shirt, then another. Warmth, not heat. She knew this feeling. It had come twice in the nine days since the box arrived. Once in a bus shelter after a late shift. Once on a towpath by the river, when she'd turned around and found nothing behind her but a man walking a dog. Both times it had pulled her toward something. This time it wasn't pulling so much as pointing, and what it pointed at was not the trees ahead. It ran past them and down, toward the roots, toward the cold beneath the grass. A door, some part of her thought, and she did not like how easily the word arrived: Hel. The cold country under the roots in the old stories, where the dead went when nobody wanted them back. She could not have said where she'd read it.
The stones came into the torchlight at last, marking the edge of the grove. Eight of them, a ring of grey pillars taller than a man, set close enough to form a wall, with a single gap on the path side where she had stepped through without a second thought . They were not stone. Beneath the lichen the grain ran up in long whorls, knots like shut eyes, a crack down one face where the wood had split and dried and refused to rot. Oak, she thought. Someone had stood whole trees on end, and the trees had gone on being trees for a very long time afterward. Carved into the nearest trunk, so weathered it might have been a child's scratch, was a single word: Isolde.
She did not touch them. Every instinct she had wanted her to, and that was reason enough not to.
Beyond the ring, the flowers began. Bluebells, in November. Foxgloves standing tall as altar candles, their purple bells hung all the way up. Drifts of primrose, forget-me-nots, a sweet white froth of meadowsweet. Nothing was dying . The petals were beaded with dew and open to the cold, and when her torch passed over them the colours flared bright and hungry, then sank back into the dark. The air smelled of honeysuckle. Her breath smoked in front of her, and it was the only thing in the grove that behaved as it should.
"Hello?"
Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. The grove took it and gave it back a fraction too slowly , from the wrong side of the stones. It was mostly her own voice, only lower, and it said hello again with a patience she did not own, as if trying the word for size .
Somewhere far off, a handbell rang. It was small and bright and ordinary, the sort of bell her mother used to rattle across a playground to bring children in out of the rain. It rang once. Then nothing, as though something had closed a hand over it.
Leaves crunched.
It came from beyond the ring, out in the bracken: a light, unhurried stepping. Rory stopped. The steps stopped. She took three quick paces toward the centre of the grove to test it, and the steps kept pace on the far side of the stones. When she halted, they halted too, but a beat late, as if whatever was walking out there had needed to hear her stop before it knew it should.
Her shadow was wrong as well. The torch threw it long across the grass toward the middle of the ring, and when she lifted her free hand, the shadow lifted a half-second after, like a dancer who had missed the cue. She lowered her arm. Her shadow was slow to come down.
Between two trees beyond the far stones, something stood where the mist was thickest. Tall. Pale, the colour of peeled birch. It had the outline of a person who had been standing still for a very long time and had no intention of stopping. She swung the torch onto it, and there was only mist, moving the way mist moved. But the foxgloves nearest that spot hung bowed, as if something had pushed through them and not troubled to let them spring back.
She looked down at her boots, because she needed to look at something ordinary. Frost had crept into the grass, a fine white crust that broke under her weight . Her own prints ran in a line toward the centre of the grove. Beside them ran a second line, the same tread, the same stride. It had not been there when she came in. Whatever had made it had walked the whole way with her, left, right, left, every print landing a fraction after her own, neat as an echo . She hadn't heard a thing.
She wasn't alone. She had known it since the hind's eyes swallowed her torchlight, and she had spent every minute since refusing to say so.
"You brought it."
The voice came from very near, from the far side of the nearest stone. This time it was not an echo . It was low and warm and patient.
"Good," it said. "Let me see it, Laila."
Nobody had called her that since her mother's kitchen in Cardiff, when Rory was small enough to be carried in from the car and was pretending to be asleep. Her mother had only ever said it in the dark, in a whisper , as though the name belonged to the two of them and nobody else. Rory's thumb found the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the way it always did when she needed something solid to hold, and pressed until it hurt.
"Who's there?" Her voice cracked on the second word, and she hated that.
"You know who I am." It sounded almost fond. "You just haven't said it yet."
The Heartstone had woken fully. Its faint inner glow seeped through the cloth of her shirt, and when she pulled the silver chain free and held the stone up, the crimson light spilled over her hand. The grass went black. The frost went red. In the dark depths of the stone, her own reflection swam up at her, pale and blue-eyed and not quite steady . Her pulse beat against her fingertips, out of step with the pendant, then slowly , deliberately , fell into it.
She counted the stones because counting was something she could do. Eight, when she came in. She swept the torch around the ring, one grey trunk at a time, and ended on the gap she'd entered by. Eight. She counted again, slower.
Nine.
The gap was gone . In its place stood a tall grey trunk with a split down one face. It had not been there when she came in, and she was as sure of that as she was of her own name.
She had no idea how long she had been inside. Her phone still said 11:58, and the frost had crept halfway up her laces.
Behind her, very close, something breathed out slowly , pleased with her. Then it said a name she had never once been called .
"Malphora."
It settled over her like a coat she did not remember owning, and it fit. Her heart kept time with the stone. Out past the nine grey trunks, something that had been listening for a very long while began, patiently, to keep time with them both.