AI The cold in Richmond Park had teeth that afternoon. It cut through Aurora Carter's jacket and found the gap at her collar where her black hair, straight and shoulder-length, had stuck damp to her neck. She zipped higher and kept walking, following the narrow deer track Isolde had chosen between the bare oaks, while last week's leaves made a slick brown carpet under her boots.
To anyone else the park looked empty. A dog walker had passed them near the Petersham gate with a muddy spaniel, two cyclists rang their bells on the road, and somewhere beyond the trees a child was shouting . Then the dog walker had gone, and the cyclists, and the shouting, and none of them had come back. Aurora had not noticed when the ordinary park sounds thinned out. Only later would she realise the birds had stopped first.
Nyx walked half a step behind her, or rather, the shadow of something tall walked there. In the flat grey light Nyx had taken a solid-enough shape, six foot two of humanoid darkness with a suggestion of shoulders and a head, but the edges of them blurred whenever Aurora tried to look at them directly. Their eyes were the only solid thing, faintly glowing violet, and their voice when they spoke came as a whisper on the wind even though the air was still.
"You are cold," Nyx said, and the words brushed the back of her ear.
"I'm fine," Aurora said. "You're the one flickering."
Nyx did not answer. The shadow at their feet stretched too long for the sun.
Ahead, Isolde Varga moved without hurry. She was small, five foot five in a long coat the colour of wet slate, her silver hair reaching her waist and lifted now and then by a breeze that did not touch Aurora. Her steps made no sound on the leaves. Aurora glanced down at the track and saw her own bootprints pressed into the damp earth, and beneath them a darker smudge where Nyx's shadow held, but no prints at all for Isolde. She told herself she had imagined it, and then she saw it again.
"How much further?" she asked.
Isolde did not turn. "Far enough that the way back knows you," she said. "Near enough that you have already forgotten it."
"That's not an answer."
"It was not a question that required one," Isolde said, and Aurora felt her bright blue eyes narrow against the cold. She had known Isolde for only a few weeks, since Eva had insisted on the introduction, and in that time she had learned that the woman could not lie and would not help. It was a particular kind of honesty that left you more unsettled than a lie would have.
The trees thickened. The path, which had been wide enough for a tractor, narrowed between black trunks whose roots rose like knuckles from the ground. The standing stones marked the change before Aurora understood what she was seeing . They were not neat pillars. They were ancient oaks of stone, moss and lichen growing in the shapes of trees, weathered columns half swallowed by real roots, arranged in a broken circle in a shallow dip. The air inside the dip was heavy. Aurora's ears popped as she stepped between the two nearest stones, and the pressure settled behind her eyes like the moment before an ascent in a plane. The chain of the Heartstone Pendant, tucked under her shirt, left a cool line against her skin. The pendant itself, no larger than her thumbnail and deep crimson, stayed still and cold.
On the other side, the light was wrong.
It was not brighter, exactly. It was warmer, as if November had been pushed aside and a late summer afternoon had been let in through a crack. The sky above the clearing was a soft green-gold, though there were no clouds to explain it. Wildflowers were everywhere, impossibly. Cornflowers and bluebells pushed through leaf mould, foxgloves lifted purple bells along the path, cow parsley foamed white at the edges of frost that had not formed. A bee moved slowly from one bloom to another, its wings audible in the sudden quiet. Aurora's breath made no mist. She put out a hand without thinking and touched a petal. It was warm.
"That shouldn't be," she whispered.
"No," Isolde agreed. "But it is."
She stepped forward and the grass closed behind her ankles without bending. Aurora stepped after her and felt the ground give like a mattress over springs, soft and damp and alive. Everywhere the small sounds of the grove pressed in — water dripping somewhere to her left, a thrush singing a phrase over and over, insects, the faint creak of branches settling. It was a living quiet, not an empty one. The smell was honey and wet earth and something green and sharp she could not name, like crushed leaves in sun.
Nyx made a low sound that was not quite a word . Their shadow thinned at the edges, becoming smoke that curled back toward their centre. The violet of their eyes flared.
"The light is too much here," they said. "It sees in."
"What does?" Aurora asked.
"Everything that lives in shadow prefers not to be seen." Nyx's whisper seemed to come from farther away than their face. "This place was not made for us."
Isolde smiled without showing her teeth. "This place was made before you were a warning, little shadow. Walk where my feet would walk, if I had them."
Aurora looked down again, suddenly aware of the uncanny smoothness of the path. There were no footprints, not hers, not Nyx's, not Isolde's. The moss sprang up behind them as if they had never pressed it.
The grove deepened around them in a way that defied distance. The trees grew closer, trunks twisting into one another, branches interlocking overhead until the golden light filtered through in shafts. Dust and pollen drifted in those shafts, glowing. Aurora's hair brushed low branches and she felt the faint tug of twigs, as if the grove were curious. She ducked under a limb heavy with ivy and saw, through a gap, a pool she had not known they had passed. The water was black and perfectly still, and it did not reflect the trees above it. It reflected a sky full of stars, though it was still day, and a moon that was too large and too pale lavender to be Earth's.
She stopped on the bank. "That's not—"
"A memory of night," Isolde said. "The grove keeps what the world forgets."
Aurora crouched. The water had no ripple when a leaf fell into it. It simply ceased to be there where the leaf touched, and in the place where it had been she saw a tiny cottage window lit warm, and a woman's hand waving. She jerked back so quickly she nearly fell. Her left wrist, where the small crescent-shaped scar had whitened since childhood, throbbed under her sleeve. She rubbed it with her thumb, a habit she had never broken.
"Don't stare long," Nyx said sharply . "Some pools stare back."
Aurora forced herself to stand. Her heart was beating too fast and she was angry at it. She was twenty-five and cool-headed and good at thinking her way out of problems, but out-of-the-box thinking did not help when the box itself had flowers growing out of season and a sky in a pond. She took a breath that smelled of rain that had not fallen.
They continued, but the path now seemed to loop. Aurora was certain they had passed the same foxglove three times, certain she had seen the same split oak. Yet the light changed each time, dimmer, more amber. Isolde led them on with her hands folded, her silver hair catching the light like woven moon. When Aurora asked if they were lost, Isolde replied, "Only those who know the way can be lost. You do not yet know the way, so you are found."
"You could just tell us where we're going," Aurora said.
"I could," Isolde said. "Whether you would want to hear it is another matter. The tongue that cannot lie learns to choose its silence ."
Nyx moved closer to Aurora, casting a patch of cool dark across the flowers. Where the shadow fell, the bluebells closed. Aurora felt a flicker of gratitude and unease in equal measure. There was something watching them now, she decided, not a creature so much as an attention. The thrush had stopped. The heavy warmth on the back of her neck was not the sun. Branches overhead, which had seemed still, had shifted. One trunk that had been to her left was now to her right, she would have sworn it. She kept her eyes forward and did not run.
Then Isolde stopped in a small clearing where the trees formed a dome. In the centre stood a hollow stump wider than Aurora was tall, its interior dark. The air there was colder, and Aurora was relieved of the cold. This was where the grove felt oldest, as if the rest were only its garden. Isolde knelt, though her knees made no impression on the moss, and drew a cloth bundle from inside her coat.
"For your hand," she said to Aurora. "Because your hand has been empty and the road ahead will not be kind."
She unwrapped it. Inside lay a dagger. It was slender and leaf-shaped, made of a metal Aurora had never seen, a pale moonsilver that seemed to hold light rather than reflect it . The hilt was plain and dark. When Aurora reached for it, Isolde placed it in her palm without ceremony. The blade was always cold, cold that bit deeper than November, and it sent a shock up through her wrist, right through the crescent scar. She gasped.
"The Fae Courts forged it," Isolde said. "It cuts wards as a scythe cuts wheat. It is unkind to demons. It will keep its own counsel."
Aurora turned it in her fingers. In the dimming golden light of the grove the blade gave off a faint luminescence, as if moonlight had been trapped in it. "Why give it to me?"
"Because you are the one who will be tempted to leave it behind," Isolde said, and her pale lavender eyes were kind and entirely without pity. "And because a cold thing belongs in a warm hand, to teach it patience."
Nyx's voice came close, a wind that smelled of ash. "She is being given a weapon for a fight she has not chosen. That is not a gift."
"It is a gift," Isolde said simply. "Whether it is a kindness is for you to decide. I cannot lie, Nyx, but I can leave you to argue among yourselves."
Aurora slipped the dagger into the belt of her jeans, where it sat cold against her hip through the fabric. It steadied her more than it frightened her. The grove, she realised, had been testing the weight of her in it, and she had needed something to hold onto.
Isolde rose and pointed with her chin to the far side of the clearing, where the trees parted over a tangle of brambles woven so tightly they formed a living wall. The thorns were black and the leaves were slick, and a faint shimmer moved across the weave like heat over a road. Aurora could feel the ward before she could name it, a pressure against her teeth, a hum in the pendant chain.
"That is the way on," Isolde said. "It will let the grove's own pass, and no other. Open it if you wish to see."
"I don't wish," Aurora said.
"Wishing and seeing are different countries," Isolde replied.
Nyx stepped forward and pressed a shadowy hand against the brambles. The darkness dispersed like smoke around invisible glass. They hissed through their teeth, though they had no teeth in that form. "It will not open for me. It knows what I was."
Aurora drew the dagger. She meant to cut a single stem, to test the edge. The blade moved easily, too easily. Where it touched the woven thorns, they parted as if sliced by a thread of cold light, and the ward shivered and dissolved in a sigh of green sparks. The wall of brambles unraveled without resistance, revealing the path beyond. Aurora's breath caught. She had not expected it to work so cleanly, and the ease of it frightened her more than the pressure had.
Beyond the brambles the grove changed again. The trees were sparser and the air was thicker, sweet with overripe fruit. At the end of a short slope the ground fell away to a cliff of root and earth, and beyond that cliff there was no more grove. There was a tear.
Aurora saw it first as a distortion, a faint shimmering in the air like the Veil she had heard Isolde describe in riddles over tea in a Richmond café — the barrier between Earth and the other realms, visible only to those who had learned to look sideways. At the tear, the shimmer widened into a window. Through it, she saw a sky of warm amber, vast and hazy, and below it vineyards stretching to the horizon, orchards heavy with fruit she did not recognise, and long tables set for feasts where no one sat yet. The smell that came through was enormous: cinnamon and smoked meat and fermenting grapes, music from far off, laughter with an edge to it. An excess that blotted out the quiet of the grove.
The Heartstone Pendant burned against her sternum. The deep crimson stone, still as stone all day, pulsed faintly with warmth , once, twice, in rhythm with her heart. Its faint inner glow filtered through her shirt in a soft red light. Aurora clutched it through the cloth. "It's a Hel portal," she said, though the words felt borrowed . "Dymas."
She had never been to Dymas, the place of Gluttony, but the pendant knew the way there the way a compass knows north. The warmth flooded up her throat, enticing and sickening at once. For a second her mouth watered involuntarily at the scent of exotic dishes carried on a warm wind, and she hated herself for it.
Nyx was beside her now, solid as they had been in the park, their violet eyes wide. "Close your eyes," they whispered, and the wind of their voice was urgent. "Do not look long. In Dymas, they notice who notices them."
Aurora tore her gaze away. The amber light left an afterimage on her vision. Isolde was already stepping back, her hand light on Aurora's elbow, though Aurora had not felt her move. "Wardens watch such tears," Isolde said, calm as if they were discussing the weather. "Winter weakens the Veil and summer strengthens it, but a tear made by hunger is always open. See, and then come away. That is the rule for doors that open from the other side."
Aurora nodded, not trusting her voice. Her hand had found the dagger again without her meaning it to. The cold of it was now a comfort, anchoring her. She could feel the grove's attention easing as she stepped back from the tear, the heavy warmth lessening, the pendant cooling to its ordinary stillness. She understood, with a clarity that settled deep in her stomach , that the grove had shown her a wonder and a danger in the same breath, and that Isolde had known it would.
"We should go," she said. "Before time decides to take more of us."
Isolde's mouth curved. "Time has already taken its toll. Count your breaths against the clock outside and you will find the debt small. The grove is generous to the unafraid, and sparing to the curious."
They retraced their steps, yet the path was not the same path. The pool was gone , or Aurora walked around it on a bridge of roots she had not seen before. The foxgloves were taller. Nyx walked close, their shadow now a steady coolness at Aurora's back that kept the golden light from pressing too hard. When they reached the standing stones, Aurora felt the pop in her ears again, and the warm green-gold light thinned into the grey November afternoon with a suddenness that left her blinking.
Richmond Park was cold and ordinary and loud again. A cyclist rang a bell. Somewhere a dog barked. Aurora's breath misted. She looked down and saw her bootprints in the damp track, clear and deep. Beside them, a smudge of shadow that faded quickly into the leaf mould. Of Isolde there was nothing.
Isolde was already several paces ahead, walking toward the gate, her silver hair darkening in the real light, her coat flapping. She did not look back.
Aurora pulled the dagger from her belt and wrapped it in the cloth Isolde had given her, and tucked it into her delivery bag among the empty containers and a crumpled receipt from the Golden Empress. The cold seeped through the fabric and found her palm when she lifted the bag onto her shoulder. The pendant was cold again, quiet. Her wrist no longer throbbed .
"You kept it," Nyx said, their whisper thin in the park air, their form already losing solidity as a jogger passed through the place where they stood and did not notice.
"Of course I kept it," Aurora said, and started after Isolde, her boots loud on leaves. The grove was behind them now, hidden between the oaks, but the taste of honey and overripe fruit still clung to the back of her mouth, and somewhere in her bag the moonsilver blade lay patient and cold, waiting for a hand that had learned, all too quickly , how to hold it.