AI The gate should have been locked.
Rory stood at the Ladderstile entrance with the delivery bag warming her hip and read the sign again, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something reasonable. Richmond Park closes at dusk. The padlock hung open on its chain, swinging slightly , though there was no wind.
Pinned to the notice board, exactly at her eye level, was a brown envelope. *For the delivery girl *, it said, in handwriting too elegant to be a joke. Inside were four ten-pound notes, old and dry as pressed leaves, and a sprig of something dried that she didn't recognize and didn't touch twice.
"Brilliant," she said, to hear a human voice. Forty quid to carry noodles into a park at night was either a prank or a felony.
She thought of Yu-Fei at the Golden Empress, two hours ago, taking the call. Her boss had written down the order, then the address, and then stopped writing altogether. *The old oaks. Richmond Park. Leave it at the table-stone.* Yu-Fei had looked at her for a long moment and said, flat as a cleaver: take the bag, walk in, set it down, walk out. If anything calls your name, don't answer. Don't eat anything. Don't thank anyone.
Rory had laughed. Yu-Fei had not.
"You want me to refuse the order?" she'd asked.
"I want you to come back," Yu-Fei said.
She went in. The park swallowed the streetlight within fifty yards, and London became an amber smudge behind the trees. Her breath came out in white stitches. Frost silvered the grass. Somewhere off to her left, deer shifted in the dark — she caught the green sparks of their eyes, too many of them, all watching, none of them moving away the way deer were supposed to.
Richmond sat under the Heathrow flight path. All evening the sky had muttered every minute or two, another jet dragging itself west. She noticed when it stopped. Not faded — stopped, the way a radio stops when you pull the plug. The silence that replaced it had texture. It pressed against her eardrums like deep water.
The path was frosted enough to hold prints, and there were prints ahead of her, going her way. One set. Boot prints, smallish, with a worn crescent taken out of the left heel.
Rory stopped. She looked down at her own left boot. The worn crescent matched, curve for curve, like a stamp.
Someone with the same boots. Same size. Same worn heel. It happened. It had to happen. She walked on, off the path now, on the grass, and did not look back to check whether the prints had stopped where she'd stopped, turned around, faced the way she'd come.
She told herself that firmly , and walked faster, and looked back.
The prints had stopped. They stood in the middle of the path, both feet together, pointed at her.
She rubbed the small crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb, hard, until the skin stung. Tired, she thought. Low light. A prank, like she'd said. She turned and walked on, and a plane crossed the sky overhead, lights winking, and everything was ordinary again for almost a whole minute.
The standing stones rose out of the dark like the ribs of something buried.
There were nine of them, maybe ten — it was hard to count, because oaks grew between them, old and huge and black, and stone and trunk kept trading places in her vision. Beyond the ring she could see a clearing, and in the clearing, impossible in the third week of November, flowers. Cowslips. Wood anemone. Red campion, glowing faintly in the moonlight like embers. Spring flowers, summer flowers, all blooming together in a warm breath of air that rolled out to meet her, green and sweet and wrong.
The pendant under her shirt gave a small, warm pulse against her sternum.
She'd worn the Heartstone for months without it doing anything at all — a gift from no one, left in her flat in a box with no note, deep crimson and thumbnail-small on its silver chain. Now it beat like a second heart.
"Delivery from the Golden Empress," she called, stepping between two stones, and her voice came out too loud and too flat, swallowed instantly. "Leaving it on the stone. Like you asked."
The clearing held a flat slab at its center, grey and moss-edged, exactly the size and shape of a table. She crossed to it through flowers that brushed her shins, and she had the strangest conviction — she would think about this later, lying awake — that they leaned toward her as she passed. Not wind. There was no wind. They leaned the way sunflowers lean, except she was not the sun.
She set the bag down. The pendant pulsed again, warmer.
Then she heard humming.
A tune without words, low and patient, coming from everywhere in the ring of stones and nowhere. She knew it. It took her three freezing seconds to place it, because it belonged to a Cardiff kitchen and a woman with flour on her hands, twenty years gone. *Suo Gân.* Her mother's lullaby. Her Welsh mother, who had never in her life hummed it outside their house.
"Who's there?" Rory said, and hated the thinness of it.
The humming stopped. In the silence she heard her own pulse , and the pendant's, slightly out of step with it, like a second set of footsteps .
That thought had no sooner formed than she tested it. Quick thinking was the one thing she'd ever been proud of. She took three steps, scuffed her boot deliberately , and stopped dead.
Half a beat later, soft as a apology, the scuff repeated itself.
Something stood between two of the oaks. She was certain — she would swear it on anything — that it had not been there when she'd entered. It was tall, and its proportions were almost right, and that was the worst of it, the *almost *. The flowers nearest it had turned away, every one, the way they'd turned toward her.
It did not move. It was closer.
"Aurora Carter," it said. The voice was almost Eva's. "Laila." Almost her mother's . "Malphora."
That one was no voice she knew, and still something in her chest stood up to answer it, some buried thing that fit the name like a key fits a lock. The pendant flared hot against her skin.
"We thank you for the offering." The words came layered, several people speaking one syllable late. "The door has slept so long. And you bring a warm little heart to light it awake. What a kind girl. What a kind, clever girl, to bring us food, and bring us the stone, and bring yourself."
Don't thank anyone, Yu-Fei had said. Leave the bag.
Leave the bag, and the terms were met . She understood it whole, the way she understood things, all at once and from the side: the open gate, the envelope, the prints walking her route before she did, all of it one long invitation, and the food on the table-stone the last word of it. An offering was a door held open.
Rory picked the bag back up.
The temperature dropped thirty degrees in a breath. Every flower in the clearing turned to face her at once, a thousand small faces, and from the dark beyond the stones the voices began.
"Rory?" Eva's voice, worried, from the left. "Rory, where are you?"
Her mother's endearment, in Welsh, from the right.
Then, from directly behind her, close enough to feel breath: Evan's voice, soft and reasonable, the exact tone that had always made her turn around. Her body remembered before her mind could stop it. She felt the turn begin in her shoulders, and she bit her tongue until she tasted blood and did not turn, did not answer, did not speak her own name in her head.
The gaps between the stones had multiplied. She counted twelve, fifteen, dark doorways all alike, and none of them was the one she'd come through. Panic climbed her throat and she pushed it back down with the scar under her thumb. Think. The pendant warms toward the door. Then the way out is the way it cools.
She lifted the Heartstone out on its chain and turned slowly , a full circle, ignoring the voices, ignoring the tall shape that was now at the table-stone, now at the edge of the flowers, now — she refused to look — now. The pendant pulled warm toward the clearing's heart, toward it. She walked the other way. Toward the cold. Toward the first thin thread of November she could feel on her cheek, real winter, real air, and the humming rose up behind her into something with many throats.
She stepped between two stones that had not been there a moment before.
Sound hit her like a wave — a plane overhead, the far-off hiss of the road, a fox barking across the park. Frost. Her own breath, ragged and white. She stood on the path with the delivery bag clutched to her chest and her phone in her shaking hand, and the phone said 2:58 a.m., and there were seventeen missed calls, Eva and Yu-Fei, Eva and Yu-Fei, over and over.
She'd walked through the gate at nine-twenty.
The bag was light. She looked inside, once. Where the containers had been there was a nest of black petals, still faintly warm, and she dropped the whole thing in the frost and did not pick it up.
She walked back to the gate without running, because running felt like the last term of the agreement, the final word it was waiting for. On the frosted path her own prints walked beside her, going out, and next to them — she made herself look , once — another set kept pace. Long. Narrow. Barefoot, in November, the toes too many or too few, she would not look closely enough to know.
They stopped at the gate. Whatever had made them had not come through.
Rory stood in the orange spill of the streetlight, under the ordinary roar of an ordinary jet, and pressed her hand flat to her chest.
The Heartstone, cold as any stone since she'd passed the boundary, gave one slow, warm pulse against her palm.