Elms's Arc

Chapter 11 of 3

The room past the gold door was long and dim. Elms expected a man. Instead she found a shelf. A row of severed heads stared back at her, each one a different face, each one set like a specimen. She knew why they were there before he spoke. He wanted her to look. He wanted to start talking before she could act. "The last one still smiles," a voice said. Her maker sat in a chair beyond the shelf. Six years had not changed him. He was the man who took her life at fourteen. "I kept them because each one thought he knew me. Like you think you know me, Elms." Her name in his mouth undid something. She had planned this moment a thousand times. In each version she stayed cold. Now her hands shook. He stood and came closer, slow, easy, as if she were still a girl at his table. "You were going to be a dancer," he said. "You told me that the first night. You cried and I let you cry. I know you better than anyone left alive." He nodded at the heads. "They heard me out. You should too." That was the trap. He wanted her to listen. He wanted the talk to soften her, the way it had softened these dead men into trophies. If she let his voice find the old grooves in her, she would freeze, and he would win without lifting a hand. So she did not answer. She did not let him finish. She drew the knife she had carried north for six years and crossed the floor while he was still speaking. His mouth kept moving. Some word about her mother. She drove the blade into his chest before the word was done. His eyes went wide, surprised, as if he had never believed she could refuse the conversation. He had always won with words. He had never learned what to do when no one waited for them. He dropped to his knees. Blood spread dark across his shirt. Elms knelt with him and pressed her palm to the wound. His blood ran warm over her fingers, and his memories came. She saw the heirloom. She saw her clan's stolen heirloom in his hands, saw him pass it to a buyer she did not know, a buyer in a far room. He had already sold it. The handoff downstairs tonight was only payment. The thing she came to reclaim was gone, carried off to someone else. Her maker died with his mouth open and nothing in it. Elms stayed kneeling in his blood. She had killed the man she hunted. She had the deed in her coat. But the heirloom had slipped past her, into another's hands, and now she knew only the shape of his face. Boots hit the stairs below. The guards had learned the trick. Elms stood, wiped the knife, and turned toward the sound.