AI The standing stones rose out of the frost like the ribs of something vast that had died lying down, and the wildflowers at their feet were blooming . In December. Rory stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at them — purples and golds, open to a grey sky that had no business feeding them — and decided not to ask. Isolde answered questions the way water answered a fist.
"Stay close," Isolde said. She crossed the frost without leaving a mark on it, silver hair swaying at her waist, and Rory's own boots crunched along behind like an apology.
Nyx came last, unhurried, a six-foot absence shaped like a person. Where the morning light touched them, it simply failed to continue. Their violet eyes found the far side of the clearing, where two ancient oaks leaned toward each other. "There," they said, in that voice like wind through a keyhole. "The wall is thin. I can smell the other side."
"What does it smell like?" Rory asked.
"Supper."
Between the oaks, the air was wrong. Rory would have walked past it — would have walked through it — but the pendant under her coat had gone from its usual faint warmth to something close to a burn, and when she pulled it out the crimson stone was glowing from within, pulsing, patient as a pulse . Isolde drew one finger down the empty air and the air parted, a seam of amber light stitched into the grey morning, and beyond it lay hills that went on forever under a sky the colour of whisky held to a window.
"Eat nothing," Isolde said. "Drink nothing. Give the land nothing it asks of you."
"And if it asks nicely?"
"It will."
Rory stepped through.
The world inhaled. Cold water closed over her head, pressed at her ears, and then released her all at once into warmth — not summer warmth, but kitchen warmth, the kind that has a source and a purpose. She stumbled on soft grass and stood breathing air so thick with smell it was nearly a meal: woodsmoke, caramel, roasting meat, cinnamon, citrus, something floral gone heavy and sweet past the edge of ripe. Her stomach clenched hard enough to hurt. She hadn't eaten since yesterday.
Nyx came through like a spill of ink, and Isolde after, and the seam sealed itself behind them with a sound like a plucked string.
There was no sun. The whole sky glowed, an even amber vault from horizon to horizon, and nothing anywhere cast a shadow. Nothing except Nyx, who stood in the bright open grass looking like a hole cut out of the world, their edges sharper than Rory had ever seen them. They turned slowly, taking in the bare, shadowless hills.
"I am used to doors everywhere," they whispered. "Here the walls are naked."
Rows of vines climbed the nearest slope and kept climbing, over the crest and away, more rows beyond than the eye could count. The grapes hung in clusters dark as bruises, fat as the end of a thumb, each one faintly lit from inside, like lanterns at the far end of a hall. Rory walked up the row and the ground gave under her boots with a softness she didn't like — not mud, not moss. Yielding. The vines had tendrils, and the tendrils had a stillness about them that felt considered, and once, when she looked back over her shoulder, she thought the nearest vine was closer to her ankle than it had been. It wasn't moving. It had never been moving. She was nearly sure.
"It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen," she said, "and I think I hate it."
"That is the correct shape for the feeling," Isolde said. "Hold on to it."
At the crest they found the tree. It stood alone in the rows, white-barked, and its leaves were thin and translucent and faintly gold, and when the warm wind moved through them they chimed — hundreds of small glass voices, a sound so lovely that Rory's eyes stung. Nyx reached up and let one leaf ring against their fingers.
"Sugar," they said. "The whole tree. Someone grew music you could eat."
"Everything here is something you could eat," Rory said. "That's the problem, isn't it?"
Below the tree, a stream ran gold and slow between grassy banks, and it was not water. Bees the size of her thumb drifted over it, fat and lazy and drunk as lords, and one of them landed on the surface and floated, unmoving, content to be carried. Rory crouched and dipped no part of herself in it and smelled honey and apples and time. Her mouth flooded. She bit the inside of her cheek until the copper taste pushed the sweetness back.
Then the wind changed, and she smelled Welsh cakes.
Nutmeg and butter and the hot iron breath of the griddle. Her mother's kitchen in Cardiff, Sunday morning, rain on the window, Mam humming something in Welsh under her breath. It was so exact, so impossibly exact, that Rory was on her feet before she knew she'd moved, turned toward it, one step taken —
She stopped. The smell came from nowhere and from the vines and from inside her own memory, and underneath the nutmeg, under the butter, there was something sweetly wrong, like fruit left too long in the bowl. The realm had found the softest door in her and leaned on it.
"Rory." Nyx's whisper , close. Her hand had gone to the dagger at her belt, and the moonsilver was so cold it ached through the leather, cold enough to burn, colder than it had ever been on Earth. She gripped it and let the cold climb her arm and clear her head.
"There's a demon near," she said.
"There are demons everywhere," said a man's voice, tired and London-flat. "That's rather the point of the place."
He stood three rows down, half-screened by vines: an old man in chef's whites gone grey at the seams, pruning shears in one hand. Around his neck sat a collar of dull gold, snug as a torc, and where it touched his throat the skin had the shiny look of an old scar. He snipped a tendril and moved down the row without looking at them again.
"You're human," Rory said.
"Was." Snip. "Died in '71. Fire off Borough High Street. They offered terms, and I chose the kitchen over the oven." He glanced up then, and his eyes were the most ordinary thing she'd seen in this place, and the saddest. "You're not bound. None of you. So turn round, go back through whatever hole you fell in, and forget the way."
"We can't," Rory said. "We're looking for—"
"Don't tell me. Don't tell it." He gestured at the vines, the hills, the whole glowing sky. "It listens. It feeds." His gaze dropped to her chest, where the pendant still hung outside her coat, crimson and quietly beating with light, and the tiredness in his face curdled into something older. "Christ. Cover that up. Everything here belongs to the Prince, and he doesn't like to be reminded of things he's lost."
"Lost? What do you—who gave this to me?"
"Can't say." He was already turning back to the vines. "Contract. But I'll tell you this for nothing, because I had a daughter about your age." Snip. "He sets a place for whatever he wants. And the table always gets fed."
A bell rang somewhere far off, small and silver, and the man flinched at it and walked away down the row with the unhurried pace of someone for whom hurrying had been beaten out decades ago. The vines closed behind him.
Rory tucked the pendant inside her coat, where it lay against her sternum like a second heart. The scar on her left wrist itched. "We keep going," she said, because the pull was there now, unmistakable, the pendant tugging her toward the far side of the hill the way iron knows north .
They crested the rise, and all three of them stopped.
The valley below held a table. One table, running the length of the valley, white cloth blinding-bright in the amber light, gold plates and gold goblets and candles already lit, hundreds of settings, thousands, the far end not ending so much as dissolving into the golden haze. No one sat at it. Every chair stood empty and pushed in, ready. The candle flames burned perfectly straight in a wind Rory could feel on her face, and the whole length of it was set for guests who had not arrived.
Except the near end. The place closest to the foot of their hill had a chair pulled out, waiting. A small gold holder stood beside the plate with a card in it, and Rory walked down and read her own name.
Rory, it said, in handwriting she almost recognized.
The cutlery was warm when she touched it. The wine in the goblet breathed a faint vapor, and it smelled, of all things, of blackberries picked at the end of August, of a field outside Cardiff she'd forgotten until this moment. The pendant hammered against her chest like something knocking to be let in.
"We should not be here," Nyx whispered, and their eyes had gone wide and violet-bright, fixed on the table's vanishing length. "This is not a feast. It is a fishing line."
Isolde stood very still, her lavender eyes on the far haze, and when she spoke it was soft, and it was not a comfort.
"The guest has come before the invitation," she said. "Now the host will hurry."
Down the valley, so far away it should have been silent, Rory heard a door open.