Excerpt: Untitled Fantasy Project '08

On Monday evening, their trunks were full and loaded onto the guards’ carriage, and Klaus and Bess had dinner with the Queen.

“I feel rotten, Mother. You will be all alone until Bess and I are back”, Klaus said around his mouthful of peas. The Queen glared at him to close his mouth, and he did.

“I am Queen. It is to be expected”, she answered simply. “Besides, I shall be very busy, and you shan’t get in my way. You are doing me a favour, Klaus. It is Bess I will find hard to live without.” She winked, and Klaus felt very young. The Queen did not usually show affection, even though Klaus was certain that she loved him and cared for him deeply. The Queen only allowed herself to smile truthfully when she was tired, and had been tired all throughout Klaus’s childhood.

He visited the King, as well, before dinner, and Bess stayed outside, waited for him. It cheered him up, to have her there, ready to smack him across the head and tell him what a weakling he was.

The King wished him luck, and speed, and for him to find Adelaide on a national endeavour. He also made a lurid suggestion about Bess that Klaus thought best to fault the morphine for.

The King had a permanent grin plastered on his face, these days. Klaus knew rationally that the physicians were only giving him this much morphine because his pain had got worse, and yet he could not help but stay on the surface, where he believed that the King was happy, and would likely survive him out of sheer stubbornness.

When Klaus left the King’s quarters, he was shaking his head with a smile.

“It is odd, the morphine”, he said to Bess. “I know he asks for it, but it is very misleading.”

Bess threw an arm around his shoulders and walked with him towards the dining room.

“I would think Father could have procured the crown before his sickness, since he is the one who misplaced the key to begin with”, Klaus said with a snort. “Honestly, it is ironic, the way these things happen. I cannot quite conceive that I would have to track Adelaide down in the middle of November, with the snow already drizzling, when Father was perfectly all right during his holiday in Belgium this summer. We could have included Adelaide in our journey.”

“Oh, but think of the adventures we would miss!” Bess said in an effort to cheer him up. Klaus usually entered every room with a smile, regardless of the circumstances. It was as if he could truly close every door on his troubles, and forget them for a while. Bess’s doors only made her recall things and cry, rather than deal with them directly, which was not conductive to anything positive at all.

“Well, there goes a silver lining”, Klaus began, “although really we will be coloured white when we are done, as truly expensive gold. Frozen. So there might be two silver linings, in all, or three if we count each of us as an individual.”

Bess laughed softly, and kept subtly embracing Klaus along the way. They were climbing the staircase to the dining room when he opened his mouth again, and his voice seemed steadier now, more objective, not unlike your usual Klaus.

“Honestly, I do not understand why the guards will not take his word”, he said, quite bemused by the fact. “He is the King. He could have them executed on imaginary grounds.”

“Not as long as he is sickly and potentially delirious”, answered Bess, applying a bit of pressure to his shoulder and a smile to Klaus’s mood, and then let go of him.

“Right, not then. Marvellous idea that was; who came up with it?” he asked. He was wearing his amused grin now, the one that threatened to snigger and point and possibly throw a few insulting words around, because the world was bad and deserved them. Bess wrinkled her nose pensively.

“I do believe it was your — great-grandfather who processed and archived it”, she answered, “or so the Queen told me.”

“It really was a marvellous idea”, Klaus said as they crossed the high doors.

“So thought the Parliament”, said Bess. The doors slid shut behind them. He accompanied Bess to her chair, pulled it out for her, allowed her to look at him with a rather tickled grin. It might have been the saddest thing, right there, for Bess, that Klaus put up that façade of his and pretended to be baffled, or mad, or mad at how baffling certain issues were. Then he made light of the situation, and eventually the pressure was entirely off, as if he had left it far behind him.

It was that thought, there, that crossed her mind. It was just the one thought, however, fleeting as an idea that you have chewed on for so long you do not care for its taste anymore, and only let it cross your teeth because it is basic groundwork.

This lasted a bare second, however, and then Klaus was genuinely grinning again, announcing “And a marvellous parliament we have, do we not, pet?”, and sitting down himself to wait until the Queen could conclude the day’s meeting.

They were gone on Tuesday, steadily driven up north through stone-covered roads surrounded by the viridian colour of a forest rained on. The morning was bright, early as it was, and they should arrive in Riverbanks before the sun announced it was to set.