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Kaspias plops down in a stone seat beside Maxwell, stretching his arms in boredom, kicking his heavy boots on top of the table.
“Are you going to ask us to sit?” Ruth’s small voice practically echoes across the high ceilings.
The brothers turn their heads eerily slowly, and they look Ruth over, assessing her posture, her sharply pointed shoulders, her curly brown hair. It feels like an entire minute passes us.
“She looks—”
“—familiar, I know. How very odd. Kind of makes you think—”
“But that’s absurd. That would mean…” Malcolm trails off.
“Not that we’re not enjoying the show of a slow descent into a shared delusion, but can we get to the point of this invitation?” Dessin stares at them, unblinking.
“Please.” Maxwell gestures to the table of open seats. “Ruth was right. We should have asked our guests to sit.”
I cock my head to peek at Ruth. She looks entirely freaked out and just as confused as the rest of us.
Servants appear behind us, dressed in giant cloaks with hoods that completely shadow their faces. Like tall, silent grim reapers. They sit us down, unlatch our chains from each other’s necks, and reposition the chain to a hook on the table in front of us. I’m sitting directly across from Dessin, nearly touching shoulders with Kaspias. Warrose is on my left, with Ruth sitting across from him. Niles is next to Ruth, facing Marilynn.
“Isn’t this nice? So civil of two warring countries to sit down for a nice meal. Now, what were you saying about our unimpressiveness, Dessin?” Maxwell purrs softly, eyes fixed on the meat in front of him.
“You may call me Patient Thirteen,” Dessin says without a sliver of emotion. “It’s who the dead refer to me as in Dementia. And it’s who the soon-to-be-dead will refer to me as here.”
I hold my breath. Straight to the point.
Malcolm opens his wrinkled, old mouth to retaliate but is swiftly cut off.
“And by unimpressive, I mean, two brothers were exiled for their extremist views from Alkadon, the greatest country in the world. They were forced to leave their riches, status, their names blacked out from history, and their power and lineage extinguished. And what have they become from this shame? Rulers of a country of desert and infertile land. Leaders that torture babies, animals, and mothers. Tyrants that resemble toddlers stomping their feet and crying out to the rest of the world that they’re somehow bigger and better for being too cowardly to pick on someone their own size. How am I doing so far?”
Warrose lets out a breath of surprised laughter. And I can’t help but grin, open-mouthed and suppressing my own laugh.
“Well, shit,” Niles utters.
“You hear that, Maxwell? He knows it all. The young man believes in the information his captors told him. Believes in false history like an arrogant little puppet!” The old man rises from his seat to lean toward Dessin, elbows shaking as he supports his weight.
“Am I wrong? Then educate me,” Dessin challenges.
“Would it make a difference? You are clearly a passionate patriot of Demechnef.”
Dessin smiles, though it doesn’t touch his eyes. “Quite the opposite. I think both countries are shit.”
Each servant leans around us to supply our plates with food, pouring us wine, and adjusting our napkins across our laps. Their spindly fingers are covered in thin, translucent skin and blue, protruding veins.
Niles reaches his hand out to lift his fork, but Dessin cuts him a glare that could stop anyone dead in their tracks.
“No one eats,” Dessin mouths.
The Mazonist Brothers exchange a charmed look. “We wouldn’t poison our guests. It’s perfectly safe.”
Is it? I consider going into the void to check. Tracing back over their previous actions.
“Then why can I smell black rose of the well? You tried to cover it up with…” He cocks his head forward to get a better whiff of the steam. “Cilantro and onion. You didn’t think you’d get away with it, did you?”
“What’s black rose of the well?” I ask.
“We’ve done no such thing,” Malcolm says in offense, placing a hand over his chest.
“A plant that extracts the truth when ingested,” Dessin replies without looking away from the Mazonist Brothers.
