“It was destroyed.” His lips twitched.
I leaned closer, staring at the line of his lips. “You didn’t. You sacked the whole city? After you picked a fight with him?”
“Me?” He pretended to be offended—I could tell by the grin he was suppressing. “I won, and he tried to cheat me out of my reward. In fact, the whole city was a den of cheats, thieves, and liars. I thought the witches had learned their lesson with Atlantis. How was I supposed to know he had made the city with magic and his death would destroy it?”
“Wait.” I held out my hand. “Atlantis was real?”
Instead of just helping to get me another cotton swab, he took my hand, first kissing my wrist right above the glo
ve before giving me the cotton. “Though it was before my time, my grandfather, lived to see it fall, and some of his drawings from his visit still exist. It existed mostly as Plato described it—in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just southwest of the country now known as Morocco. Is it still known as Morocco? Last I remembered, they were at the beginning of Rif War.”
He spoke and asked all of that with such ease that I couldn’t speak. It hit me again just how old he was that his grandfather was living through an event no other historian remembered. He had lived during the invention of gunpowder, the First Crusade—no all of the crusades, Genghis Khan, the Declaration of Magna Carta, The Great Famine, Dante’s writing and finishing the Divine Comedy, The Hundred Years War, The Black Death, The Great Schism, the Fall of Constantinople, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and that was just the middle ages.
“Druella?” he asked softly.
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “It just hit me how old you are. How much you must know that the rest of us don’t. Oh, and Morocco still exists. They gained independence in 1956.”
He made a face of disappointment.
“What?”
“I’ve lost a wager. I didn’t think the Spanish or French would be able to hold on to them for so long.”
“With who?”
“One of my brothers.”
“You have brothers? Still living?”
“I am sure they are still alive.” He replied. “I pity the person who tries to take their lives.”
I wanted to ask more about his family, but I steered us back to the original topic—the painting. Looking back at the king who was quite short and had his hand on a… “Is he holding a skull?”
He looked and nodded. “His first wife. He loved her a great deal, he refused to bury her, and had her carried wherever he went.”
“And that was normal?” I shuddered.
His eyebrow raised. “It was a city of Wiccans. What would be normal?”
Good question. “So, what was the reward that you just had to have enough to destroy this city?”
“I didn’t mean to destroy it,” he muttered and then leaned back in his chair. “The reward for defeating the bewitched beast of King Hyllus was to become the new king. Obviously, King Hyllus never planned to allow that to happen. If the Wiccans can’t have it, then they destroy it. It is their way.”
I laughed. Oh, I couldn’t stop laughing. “You came for death and instead trigged it on everyone else? Oh, that’s horrible to laugh at, but it’s like a Monty Python skit. For some reason, I see a city exploding in the background as you hobble onto your next destination alive and well.”
“I’m pleased you find it so amusing, but I do not know what a Monty Python skit is.” He stared at me. “Also, I did not hobble anywhere on anything.”
“King Theseus of Hylluspolis…haha…sorry.” I put my hand over my mouth and took a deep breath.
“I enjoy your laughter.” He smiled at me. “It is beautiful.”
“I haven’t laughed like this in a long time,” I confessed but didn’t want to get sappy. “I’m shocked it’s not too loud or rude for your delicate ears.”
“I have already adjusted to it,” he teased back and spoke a bit more seriously. “I want to adjust more to you because I enjoy this. Talking to you.”
Me too.
“Not about everything apparently.” My smile fell as I thought about what had happened earlier.