Brilliancy [Black Butler]

『4. His Courage, Faked』

   vocab needed for this chapter:

        brilliancy; ((hey look, it's the title)) good game of chess, usually with many unexpected moves that shock the opponent.

        check; direct attack of the king, or almost to checkmate. basically in prime position for the opposing player to win.

        checkmate; ((this should be fairly obvious, but i'll explain it anyway))  player's king is in check, the player who's king is in check loses, and checkmate is initiated.

        『4. His Courage, Faked』

        Alice awoke the next morning to a loud crash she could hear from where her head was shoved underneath a fluffy white pillow. Then, almost as if in harmony with the symphony of crashes, the smell of smoke wafted underneath the shut door of the small girl's room. If this was the way of testing the new maids, the girl swore she was going to seriously maim someone. It smelled like a fire, exactly how Baldroy tried to make dinner yesterday, with his flamethrower.

        After muttering a string of curses, she slowly let her body sit up and let her feet fall to the colder carpeted floor. It was too early for the cook's shenanigans. Honestly, if she was getting fed up after only dealing with him for a day how could Sebastian, a person whom of which she'd guessed to be very impatient, deal with them for almost two years. While Earl Phantomhive bored her to death with the lecture about behavior in the manor, she had gotten a lengthy speech on it's history. This manor had only been around for two to three years, an exact replica of the first one which, not to Alice's shock, collapsed in a house fire.

        He's such a stupid open book. Did his mother and father teach him no sense of privacy? her brow furrowed at the thought of the snooty holier-than-thou Earl. He was short, not to mention in need of walking stick which Alice had seen him tote around earlier when he almost collapsed with laughter at the scene of Sebastian playing games with their previous guest. When Alice asked what happened to Mr. Damiano, all she'd received from the currently one-eyed boy was a chorus of chuckles. Whatever had happened to the ruddy faced man, it was surely amusing to Phantomhive and Sebastian.

        She still hadn't gotten used to the fact that as a Phantomhive maid, she received more sleep than the average assassin did. So that is why she stumbled out of bed that very morning and onto her hands and knees. Either that or her legs were growing weak, but that was impossible. As an assassin, she'd run around for ages, always poised on the edge of the crime scene or the possible crime scene with her eyes narrowed and her back hunched.

        While the lack of sleep that she had usually received did clog her mind, so did thoughts of the crash. What had caused it? Assuming it was one of the servants, maybe Mey-Rin, dropping something or attempting to spice up the manor. She had learned from Sebastian on their walk back down the hallway to the Earl that if the manor was quiet, the servants were gone. Or it was suspicious silence, as he explained one time where it was very quiet and he walked into the kitchen to find Mey-Rin and Bard busily trying to replace the marvelous tea-set they'd broken just minutes before.

        While she grappled around for a candle and a match, she heard a voice, like a snake's, hiss, "Alice." Which confused her even more because the voice wasn't of any pitch she had heard before. It sounded male, but not like the servants she'd hired back at the Hall estate. Her mind was turning blank and it bothered Alice. Her mind was always full of realizations and was never clean of thoughts.

        As she was fumbling to find a light, she wondered who would be standing there hiding in the shadowy corner of her large room. What she'd originally visioned was a man, a middle aged one just like the venomous male from the brothel the other night. His eyes bulging, his teeth are yellow crooked stubs, his face is pale except for a few ruddy patches, and his lips are covered in foam like one of those rabid dogs Alice had witnessed at Houndsworth on a holiday.