Page 3 of Prior Claim
He moved past the black column base, coming to the end of the hall, and turned right, finding himself face to face with a colossal statue of King Tutankhamun. The ancient pharaoh rose up above all the other artifacts, his colors dulled by time, like Sevastyan himself.
He stopped and waved at the cases surrounding himself and Ellisandre. “Someday, someone will look at me through glass, like this. There’ll be a little plaque.” He made a gesture in front of himself as if he were framing a piece of writing with his fingers. “Recovered in Prague, considered to have been burned on the funeral pyre of a neo-European deity of war. Site abandoned early twenty-first century.”
Ellisandre’s breath stopped. Sevastyan stared straight ahead. He couldn’t—wouldn’t look.
“Which god?” Ellisandre’s voice was tight.
“Does it matter if they have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Name withheld. This one took offerings in lebkuchen and Amaretto.”
Ellisandre absorbed his words without flinching or looking. Then, when he said nothing else, they walked toward the colossal pharaoh. Sevastyan stayed where he was, feet pinned to the floor in anger.
Ellisandre’s gloved hand flexed just beyond the hem of their brown sleeve. A slow curl of long fingers, a familiar order. Come.
He closed his eyes, his chest already leaning forward, his feet still stuck to the floor. He’d known this would truly hurt. It was worse than he’d hoped.
Wide brown eyes brimming with tears, hands curled in his shirt. Burn marks on a beautiful cheek.
There was a reason he’d broken the silence and called out to the deity of war who had chosen death and rebirth over his service.
He followed Ellisandre past the pharaoh toward the bodies and caskets of the dead, the mummies encased beyond, frozen in time. Except they had not been left in peace, in quiet. Their graves had been ripped open, their wrapped bodies laid out on display, each layer of their burials set out for all to see. “Who gave you the damned right?”
Ellisandre turned their head ever so slightly toward him under the brim of their wide maroon hat. “You.”
He looked away. Ten years had not taken away Ellisandre’s bluntness. Perhaps they had magnified it.
Ellisandre studied a dark statue of a falcon, from the temple of the god Horus. “You didn’t come to worship at the feet of something dead. Speak.”
“And if I had?”
“You wouldn’t be angry.” Ellisandre met his gaze. “You’d be lost.”
Sevastyan let Ellisandre see his nostrils flare, for just a moment.
They tilted their head beneath the wide-brimmed hat. “No, I misspoke. You, Bal, are lost. But not the rest of you.”
Sevastyan’s chest clenched. This was not how he wanted to hear that name again. It was precious. Sacred. Short for Baldhr, for everything that he had ceased to be when his god and goddess in one had gone down to Hel in a battle fit for the greatest of Valhalla.
“You and me, Vast, the two of us betrayed Bal. But you . . .” Ellisandre turned away as if to study an explanation on the wall. “You and I both know I owned only part of you. For the rest, there was prior claim.”
“I would have been there.”
“Prior claim, Vast.” Ellisandre swept their chin back and forth in stately denial. “You had your oaths. And I made mine.”
Speaking wasn’t bringing balm to the wounds that had been seeping for a decade.
Ellisandre gazed at him, those gray eyes deep pools of calm above a battlefield of endings, an incarnation of the Morrigan. “You’re not free, Vast.”
This was not land on which he could stand. He had to find some semblance of the road he’d planned to tread. He stared back at Ellisandre. “Nor you. Your friends shield something the Merchari mean to have.”
Not something. Someone. A commodity to the Merchari. He didn’t have to close his eyes to smell the room and see Gang Junseo kneeling in all his madness amidst the ruin of an alcohol and blood drenched fate.
At least Gang Junseo hadn’t been kneeling in fire. Not like Rei.
Sevastyan
