I couldn’t have cut this one much closer. I focused on my daughter’s voice for a moment, small and sweet—and suddenly I didn’t feel nearly so small. I just felt angry.
The Red King spoke.
Alamaya listened and then said, “You do not speak the true tongue of the ages, wizard, so my lord will use this slave to ensure that understanding exists between us.”
“Radical,” I said. “Wicked cool.”
Alamaya eyed me for a moment. Then she said something to the Red King, apparently conveying the fact that I had obnoxiously used phrasing that was difficult to translate.
He narrowed his eyes.
I mimicked his expression. I didn’t know if he got it, but he sure didn’t like it.
He said something in a short, curt tone.
“My lord demands to know why you are here,” the priestess said.
“Tell him he fucking well knows why I’m here,” I said.
She stared at me in shock. She stammered several times as she translated for me. I don’t know if Ancient Mayan has a word for bleep or if she used it.
The Red King listened, his expression slipping from displeasure into careful neutrality. He stared at me for several moments before he spoke again.
“ ‘I was given a gift by she you know as Duchess Arianna,’ ” the girl translated. “ ‘Are you saying that the gift was wrongfully obtained?’ ”
“Yes,” I said, not looking away from him. “And you know it.” I shook my head. “I’m sick of dancing. Tell him that I’ll kill Arianna for him, take my daughter with me, and leave in peace. Tell him if he does that, it stops being personal. Otherwise, I’m prepared to fight.”
The girl translated, her face once more fearful. When she finished, the Red King burst out laughing. He leaned back against the altar, his mouth wide in a grin, his black eyes utterly unsettling. He spoke a few terse sentences.
“My lord says that he will throw one of your limbs from each door if you lift your hand against him.”
I snorted. “Yes. But I won’t even try to kill him.” I leaned forward, speaking to the Red King, not the girl, and showing him my teeth. “I’ll try to cripple him. Wound him. Weaken him. Ask him if he thinks the death curse of a wizard of the White Council can deal him a wound. Ask him how well he trusts the people on the nearest couple of levels of the pyramid. Ask him if he thinks that they’ll visit and send gifts when they realize he’s been hurt.”
Alamaya spoke in a fearful whisper, earning a sharp word of reproof and a command from the Red King. I guessed at the subject matter: “I don’t want to tell you this, my lord.” “Stupid slave, translate the way I damned well told you to do or I’ll break my foot off in your ass.”
Okay. Maybe not that last part.
Alamaya got on with her unpleasant job, and the words pushed the Red King into a rage. He gritted his teeth, and . . . things moved beneath his skin, shifting and rolling where nothing should have existed that could shift and roll.
I stared at him with one eyebrow lifted and that same wolf smile on my face, waiting for his reaction. He hadn’t been talked to like this in a long time, if ever. He might not have much of a coping mechanism for dealing with it. If he didn’t, I was going to die really horribly.
He did. He mastered himself, but I thought it was close—and it cost the woman on the altar her life.
He spun and slammed the obsidian knife into her right eye with such force that the blade broke off. She arched her body up as much as her restraints allowed and let out a short, choked scream of agony, throwing her head left and right—and then she sort of slowly relaxed into death. One leg kept twitching and moving.
The Red King ran two fingertips through the blood that was seeping from her eye socket. He slipped the fingers into his mouth and shuddered. Then he turned to face me, completely composed again.
I’d seen behavior like that before. It was the mark of an addict scoring a fix and full of contentment that he had a body full of booze or drugs or whatever, and therefore the illusion that he could handle emotional issues more capably.
That . . . explained a lot about how the Red Court had behaved during the war. Hell’s bells, their king was