AI The opening between the standing stones was no wider than a kitchen door, and on the other side of it the sky was amber.
Aurora stopped with one hand against the bark of an ancient oak. Behind her, wildflowers starred the winter grass of Isolde’s grove, impossibly bright beneath the frost. Before her, rows of vines descended a hillside toward a horizon drowned in honey-coloured light.
The Heartstone pendant gave a slow, warm pulse against her throat.
She caught it through her coat. The crimson stone was no larger than her thumbnail, but tonight its faint inner glow seemed deeper, as if something had lit a lamp several miles inside it.
“It’s never done that before.”
“You have never taken it so near the country that made it,” Isolde said.
Nyx rose from the shadow at Aurora’s feet, gathering themselves into a tall, human outline. Their violet eyes regarded the opening with what she chose to interpret as suspicion.
“Or it is pleased to be home,” they whispered. Their voice stirred the fine hairs at her temple, though the air was still.
“Comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.”
Isolde stepped through first. Her silver hair streamed behind her, nearly to her waist, and for an instant the amber light passed through her as though she were made of frosted glass. Then she was standing on the dark earth beyond. The frost on the Richmond side remained unbroken where she had walked.
Nyx followed, thinning at the edges until the opening swallowed them.
Aurora took a breath and crossed.
Something pressed against her whole body—not painfully, but with enormous, thorough attention . It found her eyes, her teeth, the small crescent scar on her left wrist. For one step she felt herself being turned inside out and politely put back again.
Then her boot struck soft soil, and every smell in the world arrived at once.
Ripe pears. Crushed grapes. Yeast, rosemary, woodsmoke, rain on hot stone. Underneath it all lay a rich sweetness that made her think of fruit forgotten at the bottom of a bowl.
She had imagined Hel as fire. Dymas was a garden with excellent ventilation.
“Well?” Nyx asked.
“I preferred my pit.”
None of them had stood here before. Isolde had seen fragments of the road in visions, which she insisted was not the same as travelling it. Nyx had slipped through more dark places than they could count, but never this one. For once, all three of them were strangers.
They followed the rows downhill.
There was no sun in the amber sky. Light seemed to rise from the horizon and settle over everything like dust. The vines were thicker than Aurora’s wrists, their leaves green-black on one side and silver on the other. When she passed, the nearest leaves turned toward her with tiny, dry whispers.
The grapes were translucent.
Aurora leaned closer without touching them. Inside each skin, a point of golden light moved slowly , circling and circling like a fish in a bowl.
Beyond the vines, an orchard climbed another hill. On a single branch she saw white blossom, green fruit, ripe fruit, and a soft brown collapse being carried away by black bees. Their wings made a sound like distant applause.
Her own footprints pressed clear impressions into the soil. Nyx’s were longer, smudged at the edges. Isolde left nothing at all.
At the end of every row stood a stone figure holding out a bowl. Time had worn their faces smooth, but their carved aprons remained sharp, right down to the stitched hems. Violet flames burned in the bowls without heat.
Aurora initially mistook the copper labels on the vines for varieties of grape.
Then she read one.
THOMAS WREN. LONDON. 1788. PASTRY.
The next was written in a script she didn’t recognise. The next read:
AMARA OKAFOR. LAGOS. 1963. FIRE AND BROTH.
There were hundreds of tags. Some were green with age. Some shone as if polished that morning . Each had been fastened around a vine with silver wire.
Nyx examined one without touching it. “These are not grapes.”
“No,” Aurora said. Her earlier hunger had gone. “They’re staff.”
Isolde trailed her fingers above a label, careful not to brush the metal. “Some came seeking mastery. Some came owing debts. Some were offered a kitchen when their own world had no table for them.”
“And the vines?”
“A garden must be fed if it is to bear.”
Far below them, something struck a gong. The note rolled up the hillside, warm and mellow. A burst of laughter followed it—hundreds of people, perhaps more—and stopped so abruptly that Aurora looked back.
Only the leaves moved.
At the foot of the hill they found an arch carved in the shape of two hands cupping a bowl. Beyond it, a stair descended into the earth.
Figures crowded the relief around the arch: men and women carrying baskets toward the entrance, their clothes drawn from a dozen different centuries. On the other side, the same figures emerged with empty platters. Their faces had not been carved at all.
The air inside was cool.
It smelled exactly like the alley behind the Golden Empress at midnight: hot oil, soap, orange peel, wet stone. For one dangerous second Aurora was simply tired after a shift, hungry, and thinking about the walk home.
Then she heard the cleaver.
Three measured chops. A pause. Three more.
She knew that rhythm . Yu-Fei used it when he wanted the kitchen to hurry without shouting.
The passage opened into a kitchen built for giants.
Copper pans as wide as cartwheels hung from the ceiling, reflecting patches of a sky that wasn’t there. Whole oxen could have turned on the spits above the hearths. Blue flames rose as the three travellers approached, bowed low over the empty grates, and vanished when they passed.
On a marble block, an unseen knife continued chopping.
A pale vegetable rocked beneath the invisible blade. Slices fell one by one, thin as paper, and disappeared before they touched the board.
Aurora’s fingers itched toward the Fae blade beneath her coat.
“Don’t,” Nyx said softly .
“I wasn’t going to stab dinner.”
“No. You were going to see whether it could be stabbed.”
They crossed beneath the hanging pans. At the far side, a curtain of steam rose from a floor grating, carrying with it the fragrance of ginger broth so precisely like Yu-Fei’s that Aurora’s eyes stung.
She rubbed her thumb over the crescent scar on her wrist. Small, ordinary, hers.
“Keep moving,” she said.
The next door opened onto a gallery above a dining hall.
For several seconds, none of them spoke.
A single table ran the length of the hall, so long that its far end disappeared into golden haze. Its centrepieces were living orchards in miniature. Tiny trees flowered over bowls of ice; their petals drifted down and melted into silver. Glass towers held wines that changed colour as they climbed. Roasted birds stood beneath domes of spun sugar, their bronze skins lacquered with jewels of fruit.
Every place was set. Every dish steamed.
Every chair was empty.
Aurora’s stomach clenched. It was not ordinary hunger. It was a sudden, convincing certainty that one mouthful would repair something in her. Not merely fill her stomach —finish her. Make her finally, permanently enough.
On the plate nearest her hand sat rice in a blue-and-white bowl, a spoon resting exactly where she would have put it.
She looked away and counted the gallery pillars backward from twenty.
“Gluttony is not a full belly,” Isolde said. Her pale lavender eyes reflected the shining table. “It is the empty place that swears it can be filled.”
Nyx had turned their back on their own place setting. Their outline had gone very still.
Aurora forced herself to study the room as a room instead of a meal. Entrances. Exits. Sight lines. The gallery floor was mosaic , but one narrow strip of tiles had been worn smoother than the rest. It disappeared behind a tapestry at the eastern wall.
“Kitchens don’t carry dirty plates through the dining room,” she said.
Isolde glanced at her. “A useful heresy.”
“It’s called a service corridor.”
Behind the tapestry they found a plain door, its stone edge polished by generations of shoulders.
Nyx reached for the latch.
Isolde caught their shadowed wrist. “The door is not the lock.”
Aurora drew the Fae blade.
The slender moonsilver dagger was leaf-shaped and always cold, but here it seemed to drink the warmth from her knuckles. No moonlight touched it. It needed none to look sharp.
She extended the point toward the empty doorway.
Fine white lines flared into existence, a net stretched across the frame. Where the blade touched them, they sang.
One downward stroke.
The threads parted without resistance. The sound they made was almost beautiful: a harp string breaking in a room far away.
Somewhere above, something enormous sighed.
The passage beyond spiralled down. Roots had pierced its ceiling, each one veined with dim amber light. Water ran uphill through narrow channels in the walls. Once, Aurora heard footsteps keeping pace with them on the other side of the stone. When they stopped, the footsteps took three more steps before stopping too.
The Heartstone had cooled as they left the vineyard portal behind. Now, against the base of her throat, it pulsed again.
Once.
Twice.
Aurora halted.
“There’s another portal.”
“Or the same one,” Nyx said, “folding back to meet us.”
“You could just say you don’t know.”
“I could. It would be less interesting.”
At the bottom of the stair they found a circular chamber no larger than the Golden Empress’s kitchen.
A tree grew through the stone table at its centre.
Its bark was black, threaded with crimson. Its branches held no leaves. Instead, dozens of deep red stones hung from slender silver stems, each roughly the size of Aurora’s thumbnail. Each contained a faint, living glow.
She lifted her pendant.
The resemblance was not a resemblance. It was an exactness.
“This is where it came from,” she said.
Isolde stood just inside the doorway. “One fruit among many does not name the hand that picked it.”
On the table, half hidden among the roots, lay a pair of secateurs.
They were not ancient. They had red plastic handles and a small patch of rust near the hinge—the sort sold in any British garden centre. A single curl of silver bark still clung to the blade.
Someone from Earth had stood in this room. Someone had come gardening.
Behind the tree, a narrow vertical seam divided the air. Aurora could see nothing through it but darkness. The pendant warmed again, patient as a pulse .
Nyx moved around the table, their body slipping from solid to shadow and back. “Whoever opened that door knew this chamber. And knew what grew here.”
“So my anonymous benefactor had secateurs and terrible taste in gifts.”
“A gift is a root,” Isolde said. “By the time you see the flower, it has already taken hold of something.”
Aurora looked at the shining branches. She thought of the pendant arriving without a name, of wearing it, of the road that had brought her here. For the first time, the question that mattered was not who had sent it.
It was why they had known she would follow.
“We should go,” Nyx whispered.
Above them, a service bell rang.
The sound was small, bright, and horribly domestic. A cook signalling that a dish was ready.
Then came the scrape of a chair.
Another followed. Then hundreds, building into a long stony roar as the empty dining hall filled with guests none of them could see.
Aurora backed toward the stair, the cold dagger in one hand and the warm pendant closed in the other.
“Slowly,” she said. “Don’t run. Don’t touch anything.”
“And if it follows?” Nyx asked.
She glanced once more at the tree, at all its crimson lights watching from the dark.
“Then we find out whether this place has a fire exit.”
Above them, the unseen guests began to applaud.