AI Richmond Park was already dark at five, the paths empty and wet enough to darken the soles of Rory's trainers. She still had the Golden Empress delivery bag slung over one shoulder, its insulated lining holding the warm, yeasty smell of rice and something Yu-Fei had fried earlier, and she kept checking the time on her phone in case the last order had made her late for whatever Isolde had called a walk.
Isolde waited by the gate where the ground dipped toward the deer park. She did not queue, she did not shiver, and she did not turn when Rory came up behind her. Her silver hair fell past her waist, catching what little light the street lamps gave, and her pale lavender eyes were fixed on something past the trees.
"You came," Isolde said.
"You said the stones would be waiting," Rory said. "You didn't say to bring a Shade."
She tilted her head. To her left, where there had only been shadow a second before, Nyx stood now in solid form, a little over six feet, humanoid and too still. Their eyes gave off a faint violet glow that did not belong in a London park in winter.
"Safe is a word mortals use for things that have not yet happened," Isolde said.
Rory pressed her thumb, without thinking, to the small crescent scar on her left wrist. "That is not an answer."
"It was not a question you were ready to hear," Isolde said, and started walking .
Rory had to hurry to keep up, her black hair whipping against her shoulders in the wind. Nyx fell in beside her, and that was the strangest part. They were there and, in the way shadows pool under a tree in the wrong place, they were not. Their voice, when they spoke, seemed to come from just behind her ear even though their mouth did not move.
"Stay between us," Nyx whispered. "The Grove does not like to be crossed alone."
The ancient oaks thinned and the standing stones began, one after another, half sunk in the grass. They were taller than Rory, grey and lichen-spotted, and between two of them the air looked different. It was not fog. It was a faint shimmer, like heat over tarmac in summer, though the night air bit through her coat.
Isolde stopped an inch from it. "Look with your eyes, not your phone," she said.
Rory lifted her phone anyway. The screen showed 5:17. She slipped it into her pocket, annoyed with herself. Isolde's footprints should have marked the damp grass. They did not. Where she had walked, the blades sprang back unbent, as if nothing had pressed them.
"After me," Isolde said. "And do not count the steps. You will lose count by seven."
She stepped through.
The sensation was like walking through a soap film that was also cold water. Rory's ears popped, her breath caught, and for a heartbeat the dark of the park was replaced by a green so deep it seemed to have a sound. Then she was through, and Nyx was beside her again, solid enough that she could see the edge of their shoulder against the light, and then they thinned at the edges, incorporeal, a silhouette of living shadow that slipped along the ground faster than walking.
The Grove was not a clearing so much as a held breath. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, impossible in the cold: bluebells, foxgloves, tiny white stars Rory did not know, their colours too bright for twilight. The trees leaned in, not threatening, but close , and the air smelled of rain that had not yet fallen and of soil that was warm under her shoes. No cars, no distant traffic, no aircraft. Only a small, constant rustling overhead, as if wind moved through leaves that were not visible.
"It is quieter inside than it should be," Nyx whispered. The sound travelled ahead of them, down the path, and returned from somewhere else.
Rory's sternum prickled. The Heartstone pendant, deep crimson and no bigger than her thumbnail on its silver chain, had been a habit against her skin since it had arrived with no note. Now it pulsed faintly with warmth through her jumper, once, twice, in time with something she could not hear.
Isolde saw. She reached into the folds of her coat and drew out a dagger, hilt first. The blade was slender and leaf-shaped, moonsilver, and even in the dimness of the Grove it gave off a faint luminescence, as if it remembered moonlight.
"For the wards," Isolde said. "And for what stands behind them."
Rory took it. It was always cold to the touch, and this cold was different from the night air. It moved up her palm and settled in her bones. "You are giving me this?"
"I am lending it to the hand that will need it," Isolde said. "A blade leaves a hand more easily than a hand leaves a blade."
Nyx's violet eyes flicked to the dagger. "Demons will smell moonsilver," they whispered. "Hold it close."
"Can I cut a ward with it?" Rory asked.
"You can cut whatever a ward is made of," Isolde said, "if you are quick enough to learn its shape."
They walked deeper. The path was not a path, but the wildflowers bent aside where Isolde passed and closed behind them, and Rory found herself noticing details the way she did on a delivery run in an unfamiliar building: which doors were locked, where the light was, how long a corridor felt. The Grove stretched. Her phone, when she risked a glance, said 5:19. It had to be longer than that. She could feel the minutes in her calves.
Time moved differently here. She understood that not because Isolde explained it, but because the light did not change and her own shadow, cast by no clear sun, stayed long and thin in front of her.
The pendant warmed again, stronger this time. Rory pressed a hand over it through her jumper. The pulse was insistent now, a small, bright throb against her ribs.
"There," Nyx said, and pointed.
Between two oaks a tear hung in the air , vertical and ragged, like a seam pulled open. Within the tear the shimmer thickened and glowed the colour of late afternoon skin. No supernatural sight was needed to see that part . Rory could see the edge of it wavering , and beyond it, not the park, something amber and crowded with green.
"That is why it is warming," Nyx said, and their voice had a thinness to it, as if they were speaking through a gap. "A rift point. The Wardens watch them. Or they should."
Isolde stood with her hands empty at her sides, looking at the tear as if it were a window she had chosen not to open. "The balance tips," she said. "What is hungry will come looking for what feeds it."
Rory slipped the Fae blade into the side pocket of her delivery bag, where the strap would keep it hidden. The cold of it sank through the lining. "Are we going through?"
Isolde's lavender eyes met hers. "We are already going."
Nyx stepped forward and became shadow first, pooling at the base of the oak and then rising on the other side of the tear in a single, smooth pour. When they reformed, they were taller than before, solid again, their violet eyes bright. They held out a hand, not quite touching the air of the rift .
Rory took a breath that tasted of flowers and wet earth and stepped through.
Heat hit her first, and smell, and light that had no weather in it. The sky above Dymas was a warm amber, wall to wall, with no sun and no clouds, only a perpetual glow that made everything look ripe. She stumbled on grass that was not grass but a soft, springy turf , and caught herself on a vine heavy with grapes the size of plums. The vine was warm to the touch. Beyond it, vineyards rolled away in terraces, orchards stacked on hills, gardens spilling over stone walls in a profusion that made the Grove look restrained .
Sound rushed in. Laughter, music from instruments she could not see, the clatter of plates, a chef shouting an order in accented English, another answering. The air was thick with roasting fat, crushed fruit, spices Rory recognised from the Golden Empress kitchen and spices she did not. Her stomach turned over, not with hunger, but with something more insistent, a pull she had not felt since she was a teenager in Cardiff and had skipped lunch before exams.
"Do not eat," Nyx whispered, suddenly close to her ear. "Not here. Not yet."
"I was not going to," Rory said, too sharply . Her mouth was watering . She hated that she had noticed.
They moved between the rows because there was nowhere else to move. The vines were trained over archways and the paths were flagged with stone worn smooth by feet. In the orchards, fruit grew in wrong seasons and wrong places. She saw pears hanging from a tree that also bore carrots, and a fig tree whose figs split open from their own weight and dripped a dark juice that steamed faintly though it was not hot. A gardener, human, in an apron smeared with berry stains, was tying up a branch and humming. His name tag, when he turned, said MARC and underneath, in smaller print, CONTRACTED.
Rory stared. "Contracted from Earth," she murmured.
"Helbound," Nyx said. "They trade years for kitchens."
Further in, the gardens opened into a long, low building with its roof removed, kitchens spilling into the open air. Long tables were set under pergolas heavy with melon and cheese wheels and whole roast animals that glistened. People sat at the tables, hundreds of them, laughing, reaching, eating steadily as if no one had ever told them to stop. Waiters moved among them carrying platters on their shoulders. No one with a phone. No one looked up at the amber sky.
Wonder and unease sat side by side in Rory's chest. The colour of it all was indecent. A pomegranate tree overhung one table, and its fruit burst without being touched , raining seeds onto plates where diners caught them on their tongues. The juice smelled of summer. Rory's hand, before she could stop it, rose toward a low branch where a fruit had split and shone.
She stopped her hand by catching her own wrist. The scar there was cold under her thumb. She thought, quickly and clearly, the way she did when a delivery address made no sense and she had to find a back entrance by logic. Tasting was an entrance. So was accepting . She did not know the rules, but she knew a trap when it was dressed as a gift.
Isolde watched her without surprise. "The hand that refuses is the hand that remembers," she said.
Rory opened her delivery bag. The blade rested cold against the lining. She took out the insulated container that had held rice earlier, now empty except for a damp cloth, and laid it on a flat stone. When a fruit from the nearest branch drooped close enough, she did not pluck it. She held the container under it and let one fall in of its own accord. It landed with a soft thump, heavy and warm. She sealed the lid and slipped the container back into the bag. Evidence, not a meal. Something to show, something to study, if she ever needed to.
Nyx made a sound that might have been approval. "Clever," they whispered. "They will not think to look in a mortal's bag."
A bell rang then, from somewhere beyond the kitchens, a clear note that cut through the laughter. The diners did not stop eating. The chefs did. Marc in the orchard froze with his string in his hands. A line of figures in dark robes moved between the tables, not eating, not drinking, their faces turned toward the rift. Wardens, Rory guessed, though no one had told her what they looked like . She did not need to be told.
Isolde turned at once. The wildflowers back in the Grove had seemed to bend aside for her. Here, the vines seemed to lean in, as if the place itself were listening .
"Counted," Isolde said. "The Prince counts his guests, and we are guests who did not arrive by invitation."
Rory's pendant was thrumming now, hot against her skin. "Can we go back?"
Nyx was already thinning into shadow at the edges, slipping between the vine and the stone, between one patch of shade and another, faster than any of them could run. They reformed by the tear, which was still open, still shimmering, still amber on its far side. "Now," they whispered, and the word came from the tear itself .
They ran. It was not running so much as hurrying without looking greedy, Rory's trainers finding purchase on the turf, the delivery bag bouncing against her hip, the cold blade shifting inside it. The vineyard rows blurred. The smell of roasting and crushed fruit fell behind them, and as she approached the rift she felt the pull of it in her teeth, a sudden, absurd desire to turn back and sit at the table and eat until she could not move, to be fed and counted and kept.
She stepped through the tear with her eyes open.
Cold. Darkness. The smell of wet grass and the Grove's flowers, clean and sharp after Dymas. Her knees hit the damp earth and she stayed there for a moment, breathing hard, one hand pressed to the pendant, which was cooling rapidly, pulse fading.
Isolde stood a few paces off, looking back at the tear, which was closing like a seam being pressed shut. Nyx reformed beside her, solid and tall again, their violet eyes dimming as the amber glow from the rift vanished. The wildflowers, when Rory looked, were already wilting at the edges, as if the pocket of the Grove were letting go of its borrowed summer.
She pulled out her phone. 5:23. She had been inside Dymas for what felt like an hour, had walked a vineyard, had watched a feast. The screen said six minutes.
Rory laughed, once, breathlessly, and pressed her thumb hard to the crescent on her wrist until the skin went white. The Fae blade was still cold in her bag. The container with the fallen fruit was still there, sealed and heavy, and when she lifted it she could feel it through the lid, warm even here, as if Dymas had not quite let go of it .
Isolde reached out a hand, not for the bag, but toward the closing tear . "The veil thins and thickens," she said. "Winter loosens it. Summer holds it fast. Remember which season you entered, and which you left."
Rory shut her phone off. "Are we going back?"
Isolde's lavender eyes were on the fruit container now, and she smiled in a way that did not quite reach reassurance . "We have seen it," she said. "That is a kind of entering. What we do next decides if it was an invitation."
Nyx stepped between Rory and the fading shimmer, their shadow long in the false light of the Grove, and whispered, "Then we should not stay hungry for it."
The park, when they walked back through the standing stones, was dark and ordinary and cold in the way London in winter should be. The grass was wet under Rory's shoes and left prints. Isolde's did not. Somewhere behind them, the stones stood, and the air between them no longer shimmered . The pendant against Rory's sternum was cool again, a deep crimson stone on a silver chain, quiet as a held breath.