Chapter Two
Kolfina
Her name is Lady Azizi Nikolania Alilovi?, according to the postage on her shipping crates, though sometimes she signs her letters ' Azizi Darling'.
She sends a lot of them her first few days in my home.
Letters. I do not know the names of those she sends them to, and I do not read them—for even if she does not know I'm here, it feels too much like a breach of trust to do so—but I suspect they are letters of arrival announcing her safe passage from wherever it was she came from.
Those first few days are filled with letters, each sealed with the signet around her little finger, and then passed off to Mr. Allard to be taken down to the village to post.
Then it is only a matter of her settling in.
Lady Azizi Alilovi? is a quiet house guest, I come to learn.
She haunts my halls the same as I do—silent, contemplative, as if she is unsure if she truly exists within them or not.
She explores each room and mumbles plans to herself about where to put her belongings, about which things remaining in my home she will keep or be rid of.
She overtakes the back library, laying out a pale, paint-spattered cloth and setting an easel and stool upon it, directing delivery men to store her painter’s cabinet next to the strange, red-stone table she had placed in the far corner of the room.
And she decorates, instructing her steward as he hangs paintings on every inch of my hallway walls.
Portraits of beautiful people I have never seen or known.
Great landscapes of places I have never traveled.
Still lifes of jewels that glitter in the light and fabrics that look soft to the touch.
Each signed with a simple ‘A. Alilovi?’ at the bottom corner.
They are her own works, I surmise, but I cannot help thinking that they are nothing more than paintings meant to be looked at, not meant to be seen. No, those paintings Azizi hides away in the empty parlor beside her chosen bed chambers.
I told myself the Lady Azizi’s private chambers were to remain off limits when she first moved in, but when I see Mr. Allard wheel a large painting box into the next room over, my curiosity grows too large to deny, and I watch as Azizi unboxes and hangs these paintings herself, refusing even the older servant to be in the room while she does so.
It does not take me long to understand why.
Azizi Alilovi? may paint portraits, but Azizi Darling paints death.
Dark, empty woodscapes with beasts hidden between the trees, the bones of their prey scattered across the forest floor and slowly growing with moss and weeds.
A woman's chest pried open and gaping, the jagged edges of her ribs ripping through her blood-stained bodice.
A yawning maw of hungry teeth, dripping with crimson life and choked with hands that claw and scrape for freedom.
The sharp off-white of shattered bone backdropped by great swaths of reds and blacks.
The small gallery grows crowded with them, and though they are terrifying, something in me finds them lovely.
I see them in the morning light that peeks through the window curtains, and I watch the branches on the trees sway above a fresh new carcass.
I smell the mold growing and hear the blood dripping as if the paint is alive.
I watch a darkened figure standing in the woods, all elongated limbs and vine-like hair, shaped with shadow that curls above its head like antlers.
Black eyes glint with moonlight when I lift my hand and wave.
The figure waves back.
Sometimes, when I stare too long, the vines in the wallpaper begin to creep across the heavy frames and invade the image.
The peonies begin to grow between the cracks in the ribs, and the daisies bloom from under the clawing hands—petals prying up fingernails and stems choking the beasts in the woods.
I fear I may lose myself in them completely one day.
I wonder if Azizi has lost herself in them already.
It takes a week before she is settled enough to make use of my library-turned-studio, posting herself in front of an easel, a large pad of empty parchment set upon it just waiting to be used.
Charcoal stains her fingers as she works, and I cannot help but bear a moment of pity for Mr. Allard, as I imagine it to be incredibly difficult to get out of her clothing.
She holes herself away almost entirely, only allowing herself breaks when her fingers grow too stiff to work with. Even her rest is interrupted with mad bouts of inspiration which send her right back to her easel again. Still, the sketch on Azizi’s easel remains unfinished.
It is, I assume, meant to be a portrait of a woman.
The sketch of her stretches across the entire page, her chin tilted slightly upward and the ruffled neckline of her gown settled low on her otherwise bare shoulders.
Her collarbones are sharp cliffs and her throat a long expanse of pale skin, but it is when she gets to the face that Lady Azizi begins to lose herself, I think.
Her eyes glaze over and her hand moves with a feverish speed, the charcoal pinched between her fingers acting as a scalpel as she carves the woman from chin to breast, weaving vines and roots through the core of her.
With every sharp cut of her charcoal blade, the once-simple sketch is transformed into a gruesome portraiture of death and decay.
She never quite manages to finish it. Each version of this sketched woman is the same—her chin tilted, her throat torn wide open, gore and viscera pooling in the cavernous wounds and framed by perfect bloodstained curls.
From within the deadly expanse of her throat and chest, flowers begin to poke through, petals smudged into existence by Azizi’s charcoal covered thumb, stems wound around muscle and bone with her steady hand.
Yet still, the woman remains faceless, and when Azizi wakes from wherever it is she goes when she loses that control, she tears the sketch from her pad to cast aside, and she begins again.
I recognize it, that look—that madness. It is the same that overcomes me when my own music takes hold and refuses to let go. As if the Muses themselves have plucked her from this house and dunked her in their own waters to watch her drown.
This sketch is the closest she has gotten to completion so far.
I watch her hunch over her newest draft with determination, painstakingly curling her stick of coal around the curve of a lip, pushing a smudge of blush across a cheek.
Then she reaches the eyes, and no matter how tightly she grips her coal, or how many times she presses the tip against the parchment, she cannot continue.
She lets out a growl of frustration, casting her hand across the page until the woman's face is no more than a smudge of blurry memory. A layer of ash from which beauty may one day grow, if she lets it.
I wonder what it means. I wonder who the woman is and why Azizi has found the need to sketch her with such loving despair.
And it is loving, I have noticed. Azizi wields her charcoal as a conductor wields his baton—confident and poised, with a touch of wildness in her eyes.
Despite her dour choice of subjects, Azizi draws with such hopeless abandon that I yearn to know how she might look when she is actually painting, yearn to know what it would be like to be one of her subjects.
How would she paint me, if I sat before her and posed?
Would she paint me as I was—my hair in perfect ringlets and draped across my shoulders like a shawl, my cheeks rosy and hips plump?
Or would she paint me as I am? Would she cast her eye upon me and see the calcified heart inside my chest and the garden that itches at my skin and threatens to devour me whole?
I stand before her easel and imagine myself as one of her paintings.
Imagine being hung against the dark floral patterns of my walls, tucked away in her secret little room, a gilded frame set around me.
I imagine myself frozen in oil paints, clawing my way out from the thorns of the garden I am eternally trapped in, flower petals spilling from my lips, my teeth and tongue stained with blood.
I imagine my throat and chest carved open like the woman in her sketches so she can work on the roots and the peonies that constrict around my organs.
I want to suffocate in the paint she’d drench me in.
The boy shows up at the end of the week with a knock, the sound echoing loudly through my still and quiet home.
Or perhaps boy is the wrong word, since he looks well past the age of twenty when Mr. Allard opens the door and welcomes him in.
He looks boyish, though, with his fluffy black curls and a nose that flattens like a button at the end.
His shirt and vest are too loose and the cuffs of his trousers too dirty, but there is a spark of bright curiosity in him when he enters, staring wide-eyed up at the tall ceilings and grand stairs.
He does not cross himself like the other villagers did, nor does he look frightened when the door creaks shut behind him and Mr. Allard urges him to remain in the foyer as he fetches Lady Azizi.
To his credit, the boy stays where he’s bid, though his curiosity has him wandering the lightly decorated foyer to observe the tamer paintings Azizi has hung on the walls and the various plinths scattered around the room.
Most of them are empty right now, waiting for the rest of the décor to be unpacked, but a few have been put to work displaying various pieces of art—miniature paintings, a vase here and there, a few sculptures.