Page 131 of Bitter Burn
I didn’t need it anymore, and neither did anyone else.
But as I lay in the hospital bed, my broken rib shrieking whenever I dared too deep a breath, Tristan and Isolde collapsed into rumbled, behoodied piles in the vinyl recliners nearby, I allowed myself a twinge of sadness. I missed it already, my expensive sanctum, the wickedness and the sins and the sinners themselves. It had been built as a tool, as a fortress to spit in the face of my enemy, but I had grown to love it for its own sake. For the power and pleasure thrumming through its rooms, pulsing under the glass ceiling of its hall. For Dinah and Goran and Nat and Andrea and Ms. Lim and Evander and Arjun and Christopher and—and Jago.
And Sedge.
One morning, after a final blood transfusion and me shooing Tristan and Isolde back to Blanche’s for a shower, Nimue came in wearing a flowing dress and her hair in two long braids. Thin silver chains glinted from the braids, matching the small key hanging just below her collarbone and a necklace with a sword pendant just below that. Looking at her in the daylight, you’d never recognize Lady Anguish, in her suits or sharp smiles.
Nimue sat in a recliner facing the bed, gave all my medical equipment a skimming glance, and asked, “So. Will you build it again?”
There could be no question as to what she meant. “You’re the full owner of the club, Nimue,” I answered tiredly. “The choice is yours, not mine.”
“Then I’ll leave it as a ruin and pocket the insurance money.” A pause. “How does that make you feel?”
I thought about it a moment and then closed my eyes. “Fucked up. Relieved. Lost.”
When I opened my eyes again, she was giving me a fond smile. “Lost is the best place to be found, Sea Hound. Especially for those two to find you.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Before she left, she pulled a slender yellow book from her pocket and set it in my lap. “It’s a good thing you put this in the safe,” she said, standing up. “It would have burned in the fire otherwise.”
It was hard explaining things to the staff, especially Dinah, who’d loved Lyonesse even more than I had. I gave her everything I could, every contact I had, seed money, my blessing, for her to start her own club. Goran and Nat would go with her, as would Ms. Lim. Andrea had decided to step away from DC altogether, and after she leaked the florilegium to the press, she took a job at Armorica, something like what she did at Lyonesse but more like an actual treasurer this time. Kayden wouldn’t have to look at his spreadsheets after all.
Not one of us mentioned Sedge when we spoke. The bodies of Father Adam Wray and Veronica Ramos had been recovered from underneath the club, and Veronica had been taken home by her grieving sister, but no one had come to claim my assistant. He had been so many people—Father Adam, Sedge, the Scales—but in the end, he had no one. Any anger we might have felt for him was tarnished by pity and made brittle by the answers we’d never get.
The florilegium worked, however. By the time I was deemed well enough to be fussed over in a place that didn’t have whiteboards on the walls, the revelation that a number of notable people counted themselves members of a secret society whose ultimate aim seemed to be war and mayhem had rocked the news. As had the concurrent revelation that the secret society was, in fact, quite made up. Every single person who had joined Ys had joined thinking they were being inducted into a centuries-old consortium of power and intrigue, an edgier version of the Freemasons or the Illuminati, when in reality, they were joining a troupe of the easily fooled and ridiculously rich, anyone with enough access or enough money to turn Cashel’s stratagems into reality. Ys had never been the mysterious, exclusive guild of the most special among us but instead the opus of a clever cleric who understood the allure of secrets and the finer touches of marketing. It had been a Ponzi scheme, where the currency in question was influence and persuasion, and the payday was Mortimer Cashel in red shoes.
The press ate it up.
Embry finally had the leverage he needed to clean house, as did anyone who suddenly found themselves either above or adjacent to these self-important dipshits, and soon anyone who was in the florilegium was being fired, investigated, shunned, or all three.
It meant, among many other things, that Cara Sims was finally safe enough to leave the shelter I’d offered her. She went home to her mother, and after so many years apart, they finally made peace.
As for us, Tristan, Isolde, and I spent a single day at Blanche’s before I looked at the two of them and asked, “Have you ever seen Cornwall in March?”
We were at Morois the next day. Two weeks after that, Isolde and I were sitting under a hazel tree while Tristan and Petitcrieu played fetch, and there was an expression of such poignant longing on her face that it pressed on my still-bruised heart until I couldn’t breathe for it hurting so much.
“We can stay, Isolde,” I said.
She looked at me with a kind of hope that I’d never seen on her face before, not once, not in all the fucked-up years I’d known her.
“We don’t have to leave?”
Birdsong was a trill above us, and the newly formed bluebells were a carpet below.
“No,” I told her. “We don’t have to leave.”
Her smile was the first kiss of sunrise over the horizon: life-giving and pure.
A few months after we decided to stay, I took a delivery. Tristan and Isolde had gone for a walk, and so I was alone when I signed for Sedge’s ashes and then carried the package to the family graveyard afterward. I knelt on the damp grass and opened the box to see a smaller cardboard container inside.
It depressed me: the flimsy container and the plastic bag around it. The Priority Mail Express box hastily sealed with crooked strips of packing tape. It sounded strange, even to me, that I felt like my almost-murderer deserved better, but I supposed that I did feel that way. I didn’t want Sedge to sit on a shelf for a year because the city interred him anonymously with the other unclaimed ashes. I didn’t want the version of the priest who’d come to Lyonesse and had wished he'd found it sooner to go forgotten.
I wanted to remember.
I transferred the container to a small wooden box, and then I spent the afternoon burying it in front of the headstone I’d had made—the only headstone in the graveyard from this century.
It was not at all the first body I’d buried. But I hoped it would be my last.
