AI The tear sealed itself behind them with a sound like silk ripping underwater, and Aurora's first breath of Dymas nearly folded her in half.
The air had weight . It sat on her tongue like syrup, honeyed and dense, threaded with cinnamon and roasting meat and something older beneath it all, something sweet the way rot is sweet. Against her sternum, the Heartstone pulsed , no longer the faint flutter she'd learnt to ignore near rift points but a steady, eager throb . A dog straining at a lead.
"Right," she said. "That's vile. And gorgeous. Mostly vile."
Nyx unfolded from the shadow of a fallen stone, violet eyes sweeping the slope below. Where they passed, the light seemed to flinch away.
"The dark here has a landlord," they murmured, voice a whisper carried on wind that wasn't moving. "It does not know me. It does not wish to."
Isolde came last, and even the soft black soil refused her footprints. She tilted her face upward, silver hair spilling over one shoulder, and smiled at nothing Aurora could see.
"Taste nothing that offers itself," the Seer said . "Here, the first bite is a signature. The second is a seal."
"Noted. No snacking in hell."
"Gluttony does not feed you, little Carter. It teaches you to feed it."
They stood on a ridge of nutmeg-coloured stone, warm through the soles of Aurora's boots. Above them stretched a sky of warm amber, sourceless, glowing from everywhere at once, as if the whole firmament were a lantern shade. Below, the land fell away in gentle folds, row upon row of vines curving downhill like the ribs of some enormous sleeping animal. Far off, deeper in the valley, drifted the sing-song lilt of a fiddle, one note always wrong, off by a hair in a way that made her molars ache.
They descended. Crushed spice crackled underfoot and released its ghosts with every step. Cloves. Saffron. Something smoky she couldn't name.
The grapes hung heavy as plums, purple-black, skins pulled drum-tight. Aurora slowed despite herself. One split as she watched, a slow, deliberate rupture, and juice ran down the bunch in a ribbon so red it looked arterial. The smell hit her a heartbeat later, the best wine she'd never tasted, and beneath it, copper.
The nearest vine twitched. Turned. Leaned towards her wrist, towards the small crescent scar there, towards the heat of living blood.
"The plants are looking at us," she said.
"They are looking through you." Nyx's voice had gone thin . "At what is buried below them."
"What's buried below them?"
"Do not dig."
The Fae-forged blade had gone cold enough to ache against her hip. Aurora hooked two fingers round the hilt, and the vine nearest her recoiled, leaves shivering, curling in on themselves like scolded fingers.
"Oh," she said. "They don't like the cold. Good to know."
They found the woman at the bottom of the row, bent over a copper pot slung above a low blue flame. Grey braid. Scarred forearms. A brand burned deep into her collarbone, a spiral of three interlocked rings, and the Heartstone gave a hard, answering throb at the sight of it.
She didn't look up from her stirring.
"London," the woman said. "Camden, if the vowels aren't lying. You're a long way from the Holloway Road, love."
"Close enough. Rory."
"Names are currency here. Spend yours careful." The spoon kept its slow circle. Something in the pot rose to the surface, regarded Aurora with one pale eye, and sank again. "I'm Marla. Manchester, before. Long before."
"Before what?"
"Before I signed." The brand caught the amber light as she leaned forward. "My daughter had a fever no doctor could touch. A gentleman came to the hospital chapel with a contract and a very fine pen. She lived. I simmer." She tasted the spoon, considered it. "Fifty years of service, and the stock's still not right. That's Dymas for you. Nothing is ever enough. That's the whole of the law."
Aurora crouched to her level. "Marla. The brand. What is it?"
"Kitchen mark. Says who owns the hands." Marla's gaze dropped then, snagged on the pendant where it hung against Aurora's chest, and the spoon stopped dead. All the warmth drained out of her face. "Where did you come by that?"
"Post. No note. No sender."
"Then someone's hung a target round your neck and called it jewellery." Marla's voice dropped below the bubble of the pot. "That's a house stone. Old blood. The rows will smell it on you, the tasters will smell it on you, and when the feast begins..."
"When the feast begins, what?"
"Begins?" Marla laughed, one short cracked note. "Oh, love. It never ends. It only gets louder. Eat nothing. Sit at no table. And if the music stops, don't run. Nothing runs in Dymas that the table doesn't catch."
She went back to her stirring, and that was that. Dismissed by a dead woman and her impossible soup.
They climbed the far slope in silence . Even Isolde had gone quiet, lavender eyes fixed on something past the ridge, and Aurora had learnt enough about Seers in the past months to find that unsettling. The pendant pulled at its chain with every step, insistent, angling her like a compass needle towards whatever waited over the crest.
They crested the rise, and the valley opened up below them, and for a moment Aurora forgot how to be afraid.
The table curved out of sight in both directions, a single impossible arc of dark polished wood laid end to end with itself, groaning under roasts the size of wine barrels, pyramids of fruit in colours that had no names, breads that sighed faintly when the guests tore them. Lanterns floated overhead in drifting constellations, and each flame had something tiny and winged beating at its heart. A river of wine wound through the valley floor, slow and garnet-dark, and barges of sugared pastry sailed it like gondolas. The guests sat in silks and scales and antlers, beautiful the way a chandelier is beautiful, all glitter and sharp edges, and their laughter rolled up the hill in waves.
The smell struck Aurora like a fist. Her stomach clenched so hard it hurt, and she understood, with a clarity that turned her cold, that she was starving. That she had always been starving. That the place had simply opened a door inside her and shown her the empty room behind it.
"Hunger is the first chain they forge here," Isolde said softly . "Wear yours loosely , or it will walk you to a chair."
Beside her, Nyx had gone rigid. Their shadow stretched downhill across the spice-dark soil, long and reaching, pulled taut towards the table like a plant straining for the sun. They drew it back with visible effort, hand over hand, and it fought them.
"Something collects shadows here," they whispered. "Mine wants to be collected."
"Then we do this quickly ." Aurora lifted the pendant off her chest and let it swing. It didn't swing. It hung at an angle, defying gravity, pointing up the valley's curve towards the head of the great arc, where a chair sat raised above all the others, vast and carved and, for the moment, empty. "Whoever sent this is up there. We get a name, we get answers, we get out. Nobody eats, nobody sits, nobody signs anything."
"Sensible," Nyx said.
"Fate laughs at sensible," Isolde said, which Aurora chose to file under unhelpful.
They had made it perhaps twenty paces down the slope, keeping to the vine rows, moving low and slow, when the fiddle tune stopped.
Not faded. Stopped, mid-note, as if a hand had closed round its throat.
The silence that followed had texture. It rolled up the valley and over the ridge and pressed against Aurora's eardrums. The vines went still. The lanterns stopped drifting. Down the long curve of the table, hundreds of faces turned as one, antlered and scaled and beautiful and wrong, and every single pair of eyes found the three figures on the hillside with the unerring precision of a blade finding a joint.
The pendant flared against Aurora's palm, hot enough to blister, beating like a second heart.
Then a voice spoke, warm as the amber sky, rolling out of the earth and the air and the wine-dark river all at once, and it did not say Aurora.
"Malphora." A pause, thick with pleasure. "You've kept my table waiting."