Chapter Nineteen #2
What will father think when he sees the ruin I have become? What will Jonas think? He has been so supportive, so encouraging. It is only because of him that I have managed to pick up my brush again at all, and now… Now all his work and worry has been for nothing.
“Why? What have I done?”
“It’s okay, you can just paint another—”
A wicked laugh tears its way out of my throat, or maybe it is a sob. I cannot think long enough to differentiate the two. I cannot care enough to bother trying.
“What use is it?” I ask the shadows. They are cold against my skin, frantically brushing my hair away from my face, pressing into my cheeks and my eyes and my ribs. “What use is it when my hands—my hands—”
One of the dark shapes shifts in front of me, wavering and solidifying to something almost familiar. “Your hands? What’s wrong with your hands, Azizi?”
The shadow reaches out for me, fingers just barely brushing my still-sizzling wrists. I flinch back before I can think better of it, crashing into the desk behind me, its contents rattling dangerously as it settles.
My father’s voice is silent now, but that heat remains, low and burning in the back of my skull.
My fingertips tingle with phantom nerves; tears threaten to fall from my lashes, casting the room awash in splotches of muddy watercolour.
The other voice—one so strange and new and yet so achingly familiar—continues speaking, though I cannot hear the words.
A piano plays in the distance, too loud and too soft all at once, a haunting song dancing across its back.
“Why won’t you stop it? Why won’t you just let me try? I can do it, I swear I can—”
“Try what? What are you trying to do? Azizi, please. You’re worrying us—”
“Just stop it!”
Porcelain cracks and shatters as it hits the floor, the sound echoing like thunder in the sudden silence of the studio. At first, I do not know what it is—my own sanity, perhaps, fragile as it is, finally breaking—then I see the blue flowers and white shards at my feet.
What have I done?
Small hands come into view a moment later, tugging lightly at my shoulders to turn me away from the mess.
My eyes struggle to focus, my vision swimming around me like whirls of paint before solidifying into a familiar, freckled face.
Another figure forms just behind his shoulder, sunlit curls framing her worried eyes.
“Theodore. Kolfina.” I reach out and cradle his cheeks in my melted hands. The skin from my wrists begins to stretch and warp, slowly shifting over exposed bones and reforming muscle between trembling fingers. “You’ve come back.”
Theodore’s brow pinches together as he takes my hands in his.
They reform quicker in his grasp, my palms tingling with new-found warmth.
“We’ve been here,” he says quietly. “You locked the studio so I couldn’t come in.
Mr. Allard said you do it a lot, but we’ve been worried…
Kolfina has been checking in on you, but when we heard something fall I made Mr. Allard unlock the door. What happened?”
What happened? My mind is still too fuzzy to focus, my mouth dry and parched. When was the last time I ate? How long has it been since I locked them out?
“Azizi?”
“My father wrote to me. He sent me a gift,” I tell him, though the words feel like molasses on my tongue.
My eyes fall on the shattered porcelain bust, grief a vicious, acidic thing in my throat.
“I wanted to make something for him in return. To show him I could still paint, but they wouldn’t come out right.
I tried again. And again. Nothing satisfied him, so he—he took my hands.
He said I do not deserve them if I do not know how to use them. ”
The expression on Theodore’s face is a complicated one, a mixture of horror and confusion and despair. Kolfina’s is simpler, more familiar, though I wish it wasn’t.
Understanding.
She steps forward, brushes her fingers along the top of my hand.
I can almost feel her, that frosty air that sends shivers down my spine fighting with the warmth of life that floods through Theodore’s veins.
They are death and life, decay and growth.
And I am something in the middle, neither living nor dead, neither growing nor decaying. Stagnant, still.
Another cool breeze draws my attention back to our joined hands.
Theodore runs his thumbs over my paint-stained knuckles, squeezes my fingers in a rhythm that matches his breaths.
Kolfina draws nonsensical designs in the frost she creates atop my skin, such a stark difference from the flames that consumed me what felt like only seconds ago.
My heart no longer beats, but I imagine it slowing now. Calming as I let them both soothe me. Like a lullaby sung to a wild beast in the hopes that it will cease its rampaging and fall asleep.
The madness still lingers, shadows waltzing around the room with every flicker of candlelight. But it is easier to focus on something still, on the two beautiful monsters before me who are doing their best to hold my broken pieces together.
“Your hands are as lovely as always,” Theodore finally says, bowing slightly to press a kiss to each of my knuckles, his lips wet and warm against my skin. “And we can fix your father’s gift. I’ll send Mr. Allard to the village for some glue, and we’ll help you piece it back together.”
I shake my head, knowing it isn’t just the bust that has me twisted up inside.
“I’ve disappointed him,” I say. Those old newspapers flood to my mind, the faces of all the people in that gallery staring at me like I am something to be frightened of.
“I’ve disappointed him, and I cannot even bring myself to write him back. ”
Theodore hums. “I don’t think he could ever be disappointed in you. Not with the way you’ve spoken about him before. But you don’t need to force yourself into writing him, or into painting something for him. He would understand, I think. And when you’re ready, I can help you pen something.”
“Oh.” It’s less a word than a simple sound escaping my lips, an admittance of defeat. The acceptance that I am delicate on my own, easily broken. “Thank you.”
Part of me still feels unmoored, despite both of my anchors now standing before me, free from shadow and madness.
Perhaps Theodore can sense that, as he gently guides me back to my stool and sits me down, a smile on his face that I might have called pitying if it was on anyone else.
But Theodore understands, as does Kolfina, so I can feel nothing but soft admiration for that little smile he gifts to me.
“I think,” Theodore begins, his fingers soothing over mine nervously, “that perhaps we should all get out of the house for a bit. I know you came here to get away from things, but isolation in excess is dangerous for the mind.”
He is right of course. The past few days have only served to remind me of the year I spent locked away in my townhouse back home—refusing visitors, the pile of discarded canvases building in the corner, paint caked across my shaking hands as I struggle to even hold a brush.
It is the exact reason Jonas convinced me to leave the city, to get away and try something new.
It is why I bought this home in the first place.
“And what did you have in mind?” I ask him, forcing myself to focus on the warmth of his hands in mine and the cool brush of air against my neck as Kolfina plays with my hair. “A trip to the city?”
Theodore shakes his head, teeth sinking into his bottom lip as his fingers tighten around mine.
“Actually… There is a festival being held in the village next week. It’s a harvest festival, just an old tradition the village has kept up since its founding.
I—um—I was hoping the two of you could attend with me.
Kolfina and I have been practicing her possession, and everyone is dead curious about the new noblewoman who moved into the haunted mansion on the hill.
Perhaps it will be good for all of us? If you’d like to, of course!
It wouldn’t be as grand as the events you’re probably used to, but—”
“Theodore.”
The boy stutters to a stop, his cheeks bright red with embarrassment. “You’re right, perhaps this isn’t the best time to ask. You’ve just been terribly stressed lately, and I thought… well, I thought it would be nice.”
“Sweet boy,” I mutter, brushing my fingers across his cheek before pulling him into a soft kiss. “I think it a lovely idea. I’ve no stomach for the city right now anyways. Though I fear if we do not visit soon, my brother might be likely to kick down the door to drag me out.”
“Oh! Well, wonderful!” he exclaims. “Perhaps it will be a good way to introduce you and Kolfina to society again without all the expectations that come with the um… the more elite sides of it.”
He glances at Kolfina with a hopeful smile, and though her cheeks are dusted a soft, rosy coral, there is an excitement in her eyes that glitters like the evening sun across the ocean’s surface.
“And,” he continues, that smile turning into a crooked little grin when he looks at me again, “you’ll get to see me make a fool of myself when the musicians come out. I’ve always found it impossible not to join the dancing when I’ve a few drinks in me, though I’m abysmal at it.”
That finally draws a laugh out of me, and I pull him down into another kiss. “Well now, that I would love to see.”
Perhaps I am delicate on my own, so easily broken by careless hands. But Theodore’s hands are steady when they slip through my hair and pull me closer, and Kolfina’s hands are sweet as they trace flowers across my bare shoulders and back.
I am delicate, but I am no longer on my own.