AI The air on the other side of the Veil tasted of warm honey and woodsmoke, and it hit the back of Rory's throat so sweet that she coughed.
She had expected cold. She had braced for it when Isolde led them between the oak standing stones in Richmond Park, when the shimmer in the air thickened and bent the winter trees into wavering shapes only Rory seemed able to half-see . She had expected Hel to bite. Instead heat rolled over her skin in a slow, perfumed breath, lifting the ends of her black hair, finding its way under her coat as if the place had been waiting to feed her its weather.
Her boots sank. Not into mud, though the ground gave like the soft crumb of fresh cake. She looked down and saw pale gold soil sifting around her soles, fine as sugar, glittering where it caught the light.
Above them there was no sun. There was no proper sky, either, only a vast amber dome that deepened to burnt orange at its edges and glowed from within, as though they had stepped inside a lantern. Light fell without shadow, except where Nyx stood.
Nyx came through last. For a moment they were nothing but a tall tear in the brightness, a humanoid silhouette drinking the light around their edges. Then they settled, solid enough that the sugared ground dimpled beneath them, their violet eyes opening like two faint coals. At six foot two they should have looked imposing . Here they looked underfed. The place seemed to dislike how little of them there was to indulge.
"You said it would be loud," Rory said.
Isolde walked ahead of them and left no footprints in the gold soil. Her silver hair swung at her waist, untouched by the warm wind, and wildflowers that had no business blooming in Richmond in December were blooming here too, only theirs were too large, their petals veined with something that pulsed . "I said Dymas never hungers," Isolde answered. "I did not say it shouts to prove it."
The sound reached Rory then. Not loud, at first. Low. A hum under the ground and through the soles of her boots, punctuated by distant bells and a rhythmic , wet chopping. Somewhere far off, people were laughing with their mouths full. The noise rose and fell together, feast and kitchen and crowd woven into one long note, and underneath it, even softer, came the sighing of leaves.
They were standing at the edge of a vineyard.
The vines grew without posts or wire, rearing up in green spirals taller than Rory, each one braided around the next. Grapes hung in clusters the size of her head. Their skins were translucent. Inside each fruit, something dark moved sluggishly in amber liquid, not quite a seed and too deliberate to be pulp . When the warm air stirred the leaves, the grapes knocked gently together and chimed.
Rory stopped without meaning to. Her hand went, stupidly, toward the nearest cluster.
Nyx caught her wrist. Their fingers were solid and cool and did not quite have fingerprints . "Don't."
The grape nearest her fingers swelled. A seam split its skin and a scent spilled out, blackberry and roast plum and something animal beneath it, so rich her stomach clenched with a hunger she had not felt a second before. Her mouth watered. Her scar, the small crescent on her left wrist, lay pale against Nyx's shadowed thumb.
She pulled back. The grape sealed itself, slowly , as if disappointed.
"Good," Isolde said from between the vines. "You learn with your eyes first. Some learn with their tongues, and then their tongues learn for them forever."
"That's not reassuring," Rory said.
"No," Isolde agreed, and because she could not lie there was a flat honesty in it that was worse than comfort. "It is accurate."
They followed a path of crushed white stone that had been laid , Rory realized after several minutes, not with gravel but with salt . It crunched under her boots and tasted sharp in the air whenever the wind lifted it. The vineyard gave way to an orchard where trees bent under fruit she could almost name if she did not look directly at it. Pears with scarlet flesh visible beneath gold skin. Apples that steamed faintly, as if baked from the inside. Long yellow fruits that turned, very slightly , to keep their unblemished sides toward the light.
No birds sang. Instead the orchard made a busy, contented sound of growth. Bark creaked. Fruit thudded softly into grass so green it hurt to look at. Split melons on the ground repaired themselves while she watched, rinds knitting, seeds retreating like shy teeth.
Her pendant moved against her breastbone.
The Heartstone had been warm since the standing stones, pulsing in time with a portal her body had felt before her mind accepted it. Now its rhythm changed. The deep crimson stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, throbbed once, hard, against her skin through her shirt, and the silver chain prickled with heat. The glow inside it brightened enough to stain her collarbone red.
Rory pressed her palm over it. "It's faster."
"The heart notices a larger body," Isolde said.
Nyx had turned their head toward the far side of the orchard, where the amber light thickened over rooftops Rory had not noticed because they seemed to be built out of things meant to be eaten or drunk from. Timber dark as fruitcake. Roofs of glazed tile the color of caramelized sugar. Chimneys releasing smoke that separated into scents as it drifted, garlic, thyme, brown butter, blood orange, each arriving in its own clean ribbon and refusing to mix.
"Belphegor's kitchens," Nyx whispered, and their voice came to Rory not quite through the air . It slipped along the shadow under an apple tree and arrived at her ear like wind through a keyhole. "The nearer tables are served from there."
"I thought Belphegor was a prince," Rory said.
"He is." Nyx's eyes dimmed. "Princes here do not sit. They preside."
As they walked, the path widened. Tables appeared between the trees, at first one or two, laid for no one, then whole groves of them. Long boards of black wood bowed under platters that refilled when Rory blinked. Roasted birds glazed and steaming, their cavities stitched with herbs. Bowls of grain that moved like slow water. Cheeses cut open to reveal fruit suspended inside like flies in amber, except the fruit was beating .
No guests sat at the nearest tables, but the benches were warm when Rory passed close enough to feel heat radiating through her jeans. Goblets sweated. Napkins folded themselves into swans, shook out flat, then folded themselves into swans again, patient and mindless.
Wonder rose in her despite the clench in her stomach . It was obscene and it was beautiful, and both facts occupied the same space without canceling each other out. A fountain beyond the tables threw wine upward in a red arc that never splashed. Beneath it, cups held themselves out on thin brass arms, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, though no hand took them. Music came from a cluster of musicians whose instruments were partly grown rather than made, strings stretched over hollow gourds, a flute carved from a bone so white it glowed. The tune was simple enough that Rory found herself timing her steps to it.
One of the musicians had no eyes. Melted wax, or skin, had smoothed over the sockets, but his hands never missed a note. As they passed, his head angled toward her pendant, or toward the pulse under her skin, and his playing faltered for one note only.
Rory kept walking faster.
"Isolde," she said quietly . "Those chefs you mentioned. The souls."
Isolde did not answer at once, which for her was its own kind of answer. They passed under an arch made of intertwined fig branches and into a working garden, and suddenly the kitchens were no longer a scent on the horizon but an open yard before them, screened only by steam.
Men and women moved between cauldrons large enough to bathe in. They wore aprons stained in rainbow strata. Some sang as they stirred. Some wept in a habitual way, the way people might hum while doing dishes, tears falling straight into sauces that accepted them with a hiss. A woman with flour to her elbows rolled pastry so thin Rory could see the table through it, then began again the instant she finished, rolling the same sheet smaller and smaller until it vanished, whereupon a fresh ball of dough appeared under her hands and her shoulders sagged before she lifted the pin .
A man tasted from a spoon. His eyes rolled back with bliss so complete it looked painful. He tasted again. And again. His hand shook, but it never stopped traveling from pot to mouth, pot to mouth, while his other hand fed the fire with split wood that smelled of cinnamon.
Rory's hunger vanished. In its place came a nausea so abrupt she had to breathe through her mouth, which was a mistake because the air itself seemed to want seasoning her tongue.
"They signed," Nyx said beside her, incorporeal now from the knees down, drifting over the salt path. "Most of them. On Earth, a lifetime of mastery. Here, an eternity to practice it."
"That man isn't practicing," Rory said.
"No," Nyx said. "He finished practicing a long time ago."
A bell rang across the yard, deep and soft. Every chef lifted their head in the same instant. So did the eyeless musician behind them, and the trees, she would swear it afterward, leaned a fraction toward the sound. The hum under Rory's boots deepened.
At the far end of the garden, gates made of woven copper vines began to unfold.
Beyond them lay a terrace she had mistaken for a hill, and on the terrace a feast in full motion. Hundreds of tables. Thousands, perhaps, the amber light making distance untrustworthy. Figures sat eating in silks and rags and uniforms from centuries Rory could name and some she could not, and the sound they made now reached her clearly, cutlery and swallowing and laughter and moans, a great tide of appetite that did not ebb. Waiters moved among them carrying dishes that steamed with colors. Above the highest table, draped bunting stirred in air that had gone suddenly still at Rory's back, and the empty chair at the head of it all was large enough that its height had fooled her into thinking it a doorway.
It was not empty. That was the worst of it. The cushions depressed under a weight she could not see . The goblet before it emptied, slowly , and filled again darker.
Her Fae-forged blade, strapped inside her coat against her ribs, turned colder. The moonsilver had always been cold to the touch, but now the chill bled through cloth and skin until her breath shortened. She slid a hand inside and touched the leaf-shaped hilt and felt, faintly, a vibration like a plucked wire.
Isolde had stopped. For the first time since Richmond, her expression showed something Rory could read without translation. Not fear. Recognition, perhaps, and regret sharpening it.
"You didn't tell us he'd be at table," Rory said.
"I told you Dymas never hungers," Isolde said. "A prince is not separate from his realm, Aurora." Her lavender eyes held Rory's. "If I had told you plainly, you would have heard it plainly. That is a different danger."
Before Rory could answer, a waiter detached himself from the nearest kitchen table and approached with a tray balanced on one palm. He was young, or had been young when he died, with burns up both forearms in the neat rows of oven racks. His smile was professional and exhausted and stretched too wide when he saw the pendant glowing at her throat.
On his tray sat three small glasses of something amber and clear. And beneath them, folded once, a card thick as a playing card and cream-colored.
He did not offer the drinks. He offered the card, bowing from the waist with the tray held impossibly level.
Rory took it because refusing would have required a reason she did not yet have. The card was warm. On the outside, in handwriting that looked exactly like her mother's, it said her full name, and beneath that, in smaller letters, Guest of Honor.
Inside there was only a seating number and a single line, written before she had ever heard of Dymas, before the pendant had arrived from no one, before she had fled Cardiff or London or Evan. She knew the date at the bottom the way she knew her own pulse .
It was tomorrow's.
The feast noise dimmed, or her hearing did. Across the terrace, down the long corridor of tables, heads began to turn. Not all of them. Enough. Chewers paused mid-bite. A woman with gravy on her chin stared at Rory with sudden, lucid horror and began, silently, to shake her head.
The goblet at the unseen head of the table emptied again, and this time it did not immediately refill.
Rory folded the card shut. Her hand was steady, which surprised her, and the Heartstone hammered against her fingers through the paper like something that wanted out of her chest and into the ground. "We need to see the kitchens," she said, because that had been the plan, because cool heads were only useful if they kept moving, because the number on the card matched the copper gate now opening at the terrace's side.
Nyx became solid all at once beside her, and their shadow fell across her boots despite the shadowless light, long and dark and hers to stand in.
"Then do not eat," they whispered, as the waiter smiled and smiled and stepped backward toward the steam. "And Rory, whatever is served to you here, do not thank them for it."