Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 60

“Well, if it isn’t the de Chartres bastard
child,” she says. Her voice is very soft and
very young, with a note like silver bells in the
back.
He lifts one of his eyebrows, and the
expression is too mature for his face as well.
Her word choice strikes him as very odd. But
she herself, with all of her distracting hair
gathered back from her face and her day
dress as black as death, also strikes him as
very odd.
His voice has not cracked yet, so it also
sounds very young. “And in the company of
Satan’s newest successor, no less,” he says.
His lips curve while hers purse with
irritation. It is a very mild emotion, but an
emotion nonetheless.
She presents him with the back of her
head, piled heavily with an arrangement
of bright curls, but he can see the pout she
shows the snow-powdered ground. He grins.
They are much more fitting expressions.
1901
He is still rubbing his eyes when he
descends the steps into the kitchen. It smells
of burning gas, hot steam, and bacon. All
gloriously back noted by coffee.
“Good morning, Elga,” he mumbles over
the sizzling and the sound of thick dark
salvation splashing into a cup.
The short, round maid turns from the stove
to look at him. Her accent powers over the

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appliances and the cooking, “Good morning,
Mister de Chartres.” Her nose does a funny
thing as she watches him add ten spoons full
of sugar to his coffee. When he doesn’t spit
it out, she returns to the children’s breakfast.

“Good morning, Elga”
He makes his way through the first cup
and pours a second (twelve spoons full of
sugar this time) before he wanders over
to the table. It is overlapped with maps
and pins and trailing pieces of color-coded
thread. Somewhere on the cool stone floor
there is a broken compass. He sits, and finds
a sliver of space between the maps for his
coffee cup. Thick paper rustles as he shifts it,
interrupting the cluttered noise of carriages
and clock towers that bleed into the house.
The map he had not finished last night is
completely illegible, a pile of pins clustered
right on top of Prague’s largest cathedral,
many colors of thread tangled into a nonclever knot below. He sighs and reaches for
his coffee.
“You were working on that until late, no?”
Elga asks, pulling a fresh batch of croissants
from the oven.
“Yes, and it shows,” he snorts, taking one
from the sheet. It puffs steam and butter
smell as he breaks it open. “We have an
extremely uncooperative diplomat in this
area. It’s beginning to look like we’ll need to
invade.” A lump of butter is slathered on the
croissant before he tears off a piece to eat.
It tastes like soft, melting gluttony.