AI The wildflowers had not closed for the night, and that was the first thing Aurora noticed when she stepped off the path. In Richmond Park they bloomed at all hours, blue and white and a stubborn, out of season yellow, spilling up to the ancient oak stones. They should have smelled of damp earth and rain. Instead the air here smelled of warm sugar.
Isolde walked ahead of her and left no mark at all. The path was soft with leaf mould, the stones slick, Aurora's own trainers sank and showed dark crescents behind her. Behind Isolde the mould lay untouched. Her silver hair fell to her waist and lifted now and then when there was no wind to lift it, and her pale lavender eyes did not go to the trees. They went to the place between them, where the light thinned.
"The door is not a door, Rory," Isolde said. "It is a hunger that has learned to wear a shape."
Aurora tightened the strap of her delivery bag across her body out of habit. The habit steadied her. The Fae-Forged Blade rode at her hip inside its sheath, a narrow weight of moonsilver that stayed cold even through her coat. Cold against the heat coming through the grove. The Heartstone Pendant on its silver chain, no bigger than her thumbnail and deep crimson in the middle, had begun to throb against her collarbone, faint warmth spreading under the gem like a second pulse .
"You feel that, do you?" Nyx said from the shadow of the largest stone, where they had not been standing a moment before. At six foot two in solid form they usually filled a doorway. Here they did not. Their silhouette peeled at the edges, violet eyes faintly glowing in a face that would not quite hold still . Their voice came as it always did, a whisper carried on wind, but there was no wind in the grove to carry it, and the words arrived thin and late. "It was quieter before."
"It will be louder still," Isolde said.
Nyx put a hand, if it could be called a hand, into the air between two standing stones. The shadow there did not belong to any tree. It stretched. The shimmer Aurora had only ever seen in fragments, the faint distortion in the Veil that made the edges of things look wet, opened like a seam being picked at with a fingernail. Warm air breathed out of it, thick and sweet and faintly metallic, like a kitchen left to simmer too long.
"After me," Isolde said. "And do not answer if the table asks your name."
Aurora had time to think that was an oddly specific warning and no time at all to ask about it. The ground tilted. Nyx went first, folding inward, becoming less a body than a smear of darkness poured through the seam. Isolde followed without a sound, still leaving no prints on ground that should have taken them. Aurora went last, and the crossing was not falling and not walking.
It was stepping through warm water up to her chest. The shimmer closed over her head and the amber light slammed into her blue eyes and she tasted copper at the back of her tongue. Her shoulder length black hair lifted off her neck all at once in the heat. The pendant burned. Then her feet found ground again, soft and yielding, and the seam sealed behind her with a soft sigh she felt in her teeth.
The sky was warm amber.
There was no sun to find. Light came from everywhere and nowhere, a low, honeyed dome that turned everything the colour of late afternoon and kept it there. It lay on the skin like a hand. Aurora blinked and her eyes watered, not from pain but from the sheer glare of it, vineyards beyond vineyards rolling down in terraces she could not see the end of. The air tasted of ripe fruit and roasting fat and something yeasty and old.
She could hear before she could properly see. A constant drip, drip, drip, not rain, something thicker. The heavy, sideways hum of insects far too large to be bees. Distant music, a fiddle tune played too slowly , and underneath it a sound she recognised from kitchens at the Golden Empress and made her stomach turn over - a knife going thud, thud against a board, in steady, mindless rhythm, many knives at once.
"Oh," Nyx whispered, and the whisper scattered . Their form was thinner here. Light went through their arm when they gestured. "There are no shadows to hide in. Only shade I make myself."
Aurora looked down. Where Nyx stood, the ground was paler, a shape without darkness. Where Isolde stood, nothing. Where she stood, her own shadow was a short, blurred thing that did not point in any direction she could name.
The vines nearest the path were as thick as her wrist. Their leaves were glossy and enormous, veined like hands, and they moved without wind, slow as breathing. Grapes hung in clusters the size of melons, translucent amber and deep purple, and when Aurora leaned closer she saw shapes moving inside the skins, slow swirls like ink in water. One split open as she watched and wept a clear syrup that sizzled faintly where it hit the warm loam.
Isolde stopped beside it. "Do not catch it on your tongue," she said. "What is sweet here has already been eaten once."
Beyond the vines the terraces opened into an orchard, but the trees were wrong in a way that took Aurora a second pass to understand. The apples were lanterns, thin skinned and glowing from within. The pears hung low and wept syrup from split sides, the drips she could hear striking leaves below with a soft tick. A fig tree bore fruit the colour of fresh bread crust, and where the wind, or whatever passed for wind, touched them they opened to show soft, pale flesh that smelled of warm milk. The branches did not creak. There was no creak, and no birdsong, and no bird at all.
That was the unease that settled. An orchard should be noisy with life. Here the silence between the drips was complete, and the music kept playing, and the knives kept going, all of them tuned to a pace that was almost Balthazar's speed but never quite reached the next beat.
They went deeper because there was no other way to go. The path, barely a path, wound between the rows and the heat increased with every step until sweat dampened the back of Aurora's shirt and the cold blade at her hip felt like holding ice in a bath . The pendant throbbed harder now, in time with her heart, or just ahead of it. The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled as if sunburnt. She flexed her fingers to shake it off and found her hand was trembling , not with fear, but with a sudden, ravenous hunger that was not hers.
She knew restaurant hunger. She knew the smell of Yu-Fei's noodles in a delivery bag swelling through a stairwell at five in the evening, and the way it made her mouth water even when she was tired of the job. This was different. It rose from the air itself, sweet and meaty and spiced, and it fixed on the fruit and the syrup and the distant roast, and she had to press her teeth together to keep from reaching.
"Cool head, Carter," she muttered to herself, and was absurdly glad Nyx did not ask who she was talking to.
The terraces stepped down into gardens. There the chefs were. Aurora saw them first by their aprons, white and long, and then by their movements. Dozens of them, moving in lines between raised beds as dark and rich as chocolate. They chopped and turned and stirred and tasted from spoons they lifted with solemn care, and lifted again, and again, their faces placid and unfocused, as if listening to music through a wall . One of them, a woman with a burn scar along her forearm and hair tied back in a practical knot, lifted a crate of the lantern apples and set it down in the exact same place, over and over, her hands never shaking.
Helbound, Aurora thought, and the word landed because Isolde had let it slip earlier in another context and because it fit the man's uniform she had seen that morning , or something like it, the sort of coat a kitchen porter would wear in London before he signed something he did not understand.
Nyx drifted closer, a shadow among the wardens of light, and one chef looked up. She looked straight through them, smiled with a mouth that had not decided to smile, and held out a spoon.
"Rory," Isolde said, very quietly, and put her hand, light as air, on Aurora's sleeve. "The fed ask only to feed."
Aurora stepped back. The chef's arm stayed outstretched. The spoon held something pale and steaming. Her own hunger surged toward it so hard her knees loosened, and some other part of her, the cool, fast part that had learned to reroute a delivery through a road closure in her head, understood exactly what would happen if she leaned in. She turned her face into the vines instead and breathed in until the sweetness made her dizzy.
"Not hungry," she said, loudly, to the chef and to herself. "Never hungry for mystery meat."
The chef lowered the spoon. Her smile stayed. She went back to setting down the crate.
The gardens gave way to stone. It had been beautiful once, that was obvious even under the vines. A broad amphitheatre cut into the warm hillside, columns of pale marble banded with gold, their capitals choked with grape vines whose leaves were shot through with veins of something bright. Steps ran down to a long hall built into the hill, its doors open, its arch too tall for any human need. Everything here was too much. Too tall, too ripe, too sweet, too warm. The excess was not in the amount of food. It was in the air, in the light, in the way the stone itself seemed to sweat perfume.
From the hall came the music, clearer now, and laughter. The laughter was the worst sound yet, because it was almost right. It had the shape of people enjoying themselves and none of the breath behind it.
As Aurora descended the steps, a tendril uncurled from a column. It was green and glossy at the base and paler at the tip, and it moved with purpose. It did not go for her or for Isolde. It went for Nyx, where the shadow of them thinned and rippled on the marble , and it wound around their ankle as if to pull them down into the ground and keep them there, a permanent shade for a permanent garden.
Nyx made a sound like paper tearing. Their form flickered , solid and then barely there, and the tendril tightened.
Aurora did not think. She drew the blade. Moonsilver came free of its sheath with a cold so sharp it hurt her palm, slender and leaf shaped, and the faint luminescence it carried in moonlight showed here as a pale line against the amber, as if it remembered a different sky. The cold was a relief against the heat. She cut.
The blade went through the tendril as if through a ward, clean and silent. The vine parted and spat clear syrup and recoiled, whipping back to the column. Somewhere high up, something in the hall stopped mid note.
Nyx steadied. "Thank you," they whispered, and it sounded steadier too. "It wanted a shadow to grow in."
"It can grow in the light," Aurora said, and sheathed the blade with hands that were shaking only a little. The cold lingered on her skin. "We're not staying for dinner."
Isolde was already at the threshold of the hall, where the amber light fell across a floor of inlaid stone. She did not step inside. The wildflowers of the grove had followed them, she realised, tiny sprigs pressed into the hems of her coat and Isolde's dress, white and yellow, impossible in this heat. Isolde crouched, and again left no print in the dust that had gathered on the marble , dust that should have been trampled by feasts.
Inside the hall, long tables stretched into the amber gloom , set for hundreds. Platters steamed. Pyramids of fruit were stacked to the ceiling. A roast the size of a small boat turned slowly over a pit that gave no smoke. The air inside was hotter still and smelled of cinnamon and honey and decay underneath, sweet and forgotten. Everything was untouched. Nothing had been eaten . Everything was ready to be.
Aurora stood at the entrance with the pendant burning against her throat and the blade cold at her hip and her hair damp against her neck, and thought of the garden behind them, the chefs setting down the same crate, the apples glowing with light that was never used.
The music began again. The laughter began again, from the far end of the hall where no one sat.
Isolde looked into that long room and her pale lavender eyes reflected the tables and the steam and did not blink.
"We have come in at the beginning of the meal," she said in a riddle that was not a riddle at all. "And the meal, Rory, is always ourselves, if we sit."