“Do you want my mate to touch you, scrawny woman?” she asks.
“Stïevesx, my love. So jealous.” Our escort chuckles, shaking his head.
“No, thank you,” I say, biting my tongue.
The woman blocks the door, straightening her back and pushing out her impeccable, large breasts. “Good! My brother does not fuck scrawny short women. Only me. Understand?”
“Brother?!” Niklaus and I blurt out together.
“Let our new guests in, Glinorious.” A command from a soft-spoken male voice comes from the corner of the sitting room.
The woman, Glinorious, bows her head in routine submission, stepping aside for us to enter.
We follow our escort inside, quietly observing the room.
“Hello, nameless guests,” says a red-headed man, moving a heavy chess piece across a board. A Mazonist Brother
The room is a windowless tomb. It’s dim with a few sputtering flames of tallow candles and the orange spit of a hearth so bright, it makes the granite walls sweat. There are heavy wool tapestries on the walls, and meat rafters on the ceilings blackened from the smoke of the poorly ventilated hearth.
The red-headed man waves his hand for us to pick a moth-eaten high-back chair to sit down in. I walk cautiously to a chair with a little more cushion, but as I lower myself, Glinorious tugs my chain and fastens it to the chair.
“They do look sick, don’t you think?” The other Mazonist brother moves a chess piece fashioned from tarnished brass. Some of the pawns appear to be replaced with tiny effigies of prisoners.
“Yes, quite.”
I make note of the massive guards taking their positions on either side of the room. The man holds his finger under an iron sconce in the shape of a maniacal jester face, dripping wax onto his skin like drool.
And I catch Niklaus scanning the weapons on their belt once more, probably mapping a way out of this in case it goes south.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever met the esteemed warriors of the North Vexello Mountains, have you?” One of the brothers lowers his small, circular bifocals to direct his question to Niklaus.
“I have not,” Niklaus says.
“This is Glinorious Blood and Tycraniz Blood. A prestigious family of the most skilled fighters and swordsmen you’ve ever seen. And they are devoted to protecting the Mazonist legacy.”
My yawn is unintentionally loud.
“My point is that if either of you deem it fitting to assassinate me or my brother, the Bloods are worshipped like gods for what they do to traitors. Impaled, but not enough to kill immediately. Then skinned gradually, and dissected until their victim dies a slow, excruciating death. Remember that if you reach for a knife.”
“Point made,” Niklaus says flatly.
“We don’t want to assassinate you,” I note, meeting the lifeless eyes of the brother on the left. “We are here by mistake and want to be released.”
That brother doesn’t turn away from me. His stare is lifeless, pinning me to my chair as though he is weighing my value as livestock at a market. I am not a person sitting in a chair. I am a noise in his sitting room that has caught a brief moment of his attention. But I don’t avert my eyes. I wait until he understands that I am not here to cower.
“Did you know I have a reputation in this dear country I call home?”
That question is for me.
I shrug.
“My people call me superstitious. And it is true. I am.” This Mazonist brother speaks with tone that hangs on the urge to yawn or sigh. He bears a thick, raised scar on his jugular where his own mother tried to kill him when he still lived in Alkadonia.
I am speaking to Maxwell Mazonist.
“My scouts have reported that you are a witch,” Maxwell considers aloud.
I resist the reflex to meeting Niklaus’s eyes. Our conversations were being spied on? How could they know I just told Jack and Sophia this lie to keep our time travel escapades to myself.
