Guests scatter ahead of me. An elderly elf couple squeezes into the hedge as I pass, champagne sloshing. Todd from the bridal party drops his glass entirely and just stares, mouth open, at the corridor of destruction behind me. Three walls breached. Straight line. The maze has a scar now, a ragged tunnel punched directly through its center, sap dripping from torn edges, branches twitching and trying to regrow.
"Is that... is heallowedto do that?" Todd asks nobody.
One more wall.
This one is the outer ring. The thickest growth. Six feet of ancient Silverleaf, the root structure visible at the base, gnarled and deep. The maze's backbone. The branches here don't just grip. Theyhit. A limb the width of a baseball bat swings at my head. I catch it. Wrench it sideways. The wood groans and the whole wall shudders.
I dig in. Both arms working. Tearing, ripping, pulling branches out by their roots and hurling them aside. The hedge throws everything it has. Thorns, vines, a cloud of silver pollen that burns my eyes. I squint through it. Keep pulling. My dress shirt is destroyed. The armor-silk beneath holds but barely, seams straining, the living fabric writhing against my skin in sympathy with the thrashing hedge.
The wall thins. Light bleeds through.
One final pull. A branch thick as my thigh comes free with a crack that echoes across the entire grounds.
The opening is ragged and enormous. Sap rains down like a bioluminescent waterfall. I step through onto manicured grass.
The practice putting green. Pristine. Moon-bright.
Mark stands at the far edge, backed against a white fence, tie askew. His eyes are locked on the hole in the maze. On the glowing sap dripping from my hands. On the thorns still embedded in my forearms.
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
"I was just talking to her," he says.
I pull a three-inch thorn from my palm and flick it into the grass at his feet.
The distance between us is thirty feet. I close it in eight strides.
Mark does what every man with bad instincts does. He tries to talk.
"Look, buddy, I don't know what she told you, but Magnolia and I have history, okay? We go way back. I was just checking in on her. Old friends. That's all it was."
Twenty feet.
"She's... she's clearly going through something right now, dating a..." He gestures vaguely at all of me. "And I just wanted to make sure she was doing okay. As a friend."
Ten feet.
"You can't just destroy a heritage Silverleaf maze, man. That's... that's a felony. I think. Todd's dad is a lawyer, he would know."
Five feet.
Mark hits the low stone wall bordering the putting green and realizes, with the specific wide-eyed understanding of prey, that there is nowhere left to go. The wall is waist-high. Decorative. Old limestone blocks mortared together by elven groundskeepers a century ago to frame the ninth hole.
Mark's hands come up. Palms out. The universal signal.
"Okay. Okay, let's just... let's be cool about this. Be rational. We're adults."
I am very rational. Rationality is the foundation of every successful contract. Emotion clouds tactical judgment. A mercenary who operates on anger makes mistakes, takes unnecessary risks, dies in a ditch over something personal when he should be collecting payment and moving to the next job.
My hands reach for his lapels.
The blue suit fabric bunches in my fists. Cheap stitching. Mass-produced. The kind of suit that comes off a rack in a department store and thinks it's tailored because the salesperson pinned the back with two clips. The seams strain immediately under the pressure of my grip.
I lift.
Mark's feet leave the ground. Three inches. His dress shoes dangle. One loafer slips halfway off his heel. His hands grab my wrists but can't close around them. Not even close. My forearms are thicker than his biceps. His fingers scrabble uselessly against sap-slicked skin and embedded thorns.
His back lies next to the limestone. I hold him there, pinned like a butterfly in a collector's case, and lean in close enough that he can count every scar on my face.
