Roxanne DeMarco's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

The dress lay open on Selene's table, and the pin at its collar had begun to hum. Roxanne watched the stones brighten, dark red to warm red. Lady Moon stood at the threshold, unable to cross the salt. Selene had named her price. Free the trapped name, and own it. A leash on the woman who had led Roxanne here. Roxanne had come to break a chain, not forge one. "I won't buy her freedom by handing you her leash," Roxanne said. "There has to be another way to pay you." Selene did not look up from the collar. "There isn't. The knot answers to my hand. My hand costs the name." "Then name something else." Roxanne set her bag on the table. "I run a shop of old dresses. Real ones. I can bring you anything you want." "I want the moon back where I set it," Selene said. "Can your shop bring me that?" She traced the last symbol. "No. So I take the name." Roxanne understood then. Selene moved the moon with her own hands, every night, and never rested. She wanted a servant she could bind and forget. Lady Moon, walking the dead for a hundred years, was that servant. The price was not payment. It was the whole point. "No," Roxanne said. Selene's flat blue eyes lifted. "No?" "I won't trade one prison for another." Roxanne folded the dress shut over the humming pin. The stones dimmed under the cloth. "Keep your hand. Her name stays trapped. I'll find it another home before I give it to you." Selene stood very still. "You leave with nothing." "I leave with her name still hers," Roxanne said. "That's not nothing." Lady Moon watched from the doorway, and something moved across her gray face. Not relief. Roxanne had refused the one hand that could free her, and closed that door for good. Selene stepped back and let the lamp gutter. "The maker's hand is dead. Mine is the last of the lineage. There is no third." She said it plainly, the way she shut down every topic. "You walk out that door, no one frees that name. Not ever." "I know," Roxanne said. Her stomach turned as she said it. "I'll untie the rest myself. The diagram shows how. Every dead name but hers goes home." She gathered the wrapped dress and stepped over the salt into the cold outside. Lady Moon came with her, drifting free of the threshold now. "You gave up the only key," Lady Moon said. "I gave up her key," Roxanne said. "Not the last one. If lineage frees a name, then somewhere there's another line, another taught hand." She looked back at the dark house, moons carved above its door. "I just have to find who else learned these knots. And why the maker's still didn't die with her." Behind them the door closed on its own. The pin under the cloth had gone quiet, and the dress felt colder in her arms than before.