Chapter Thirty-Six
Kolfina
It is a strange thing, to walk through my halls and not have to fight the vines and petals in the wallpaper.
Instead of writhing and reaching like they once did, now they billow and bloom. The walls expand instead of constrict, undulating in time with the slow waves on the shore beneath the cliff.
I no longer feel the cut of thorny vines wrapping around my ankles and pulling me in. I no longer fear being swallowed up by the darkness that lingers behind the walls.
There is something freeing in knowing the truth, I suppose. Memories, as Lord Alilovi? said, are fickle things, and I find myself wondering if they simply wished to be known. If it was not madness that drove the wallpaper to me, but the secrets hidden behind it that refused to stay buried.
Now my home feels much like Lord Macabre’s. The magic I sensed within his walls had not frightened me, not like my own did, and the blood that baptized his house did not feel dangerous or hungry. It felt like warmth. Like life.
And while my little chateau on the cliff feels more like death than life, I think, perhaps, that is how it’s meant to be.
Theodore called me a daughter of Death, afterall, and Lord Alilovi? claimed death to be my domain.
Maybe all I needed was to reach out my hand and accept the gift my sacrifice wrought.
To feel Death’s fingers slotted between mine like grave dirt, and to trust the waves to catch me if ever I should fall again.
Because now the flowers bloom as I walk past, leading Azizi’s father down to the cellar. Now the daisies wave and the posies bow in reverence.
Now the wallpaper welcomes me home.
Yet still, something is missing. Still there is one question I don’t know the answer to: Why?
“Well,” Jonas murmurs as soon as we descend the stairs to the cellar, “he certainly didn’t go half-way did he? It looks as if he carved into every stone.”
He did. I spent days after the cellar’s discovery tracing each and every design, following the patterns and whirls, trying to make sense of every symbol and letter. I counted the number of stones making up the room; I searched for any that might have been left blank. There are none.
Lord Alilovi? follows my trail almost exactly, his fingers hovering over the intricate designs as if afraid to touch them. “It is indeed complicated spellwork. I am surprised he would know it, much less be able to complete it with such accuracy.”
“I thought the de Kleins don’t have magic,” Theodore argues with a frown, still standing on the bottom step of the stairs, unwilling to fully enter the room. “That’s what Lord Macabre said.”
The older man hums, nodding in agreement as he traces the symbols onto the far wall, leaning in until his face is a mere inch away. “And he would be correct. The de Klein family was not born with magic, but that does not mean they cannot use it.”
“For many types of magic,” Jonas continues, “anyone can learn and use it, even humans—though they tend to make more mistakes with it, as they often understand little of what they wield. The Court tries to keep as much out of untrained hands as possible.”
Finally, Lord Alilovi? straightens and turns to face the center of the room where the biggest design is carved. “Your Lord de Klein seems to have not only acquired, but also mastered a spell I’ve not seen in a very long time.”
Hope is a dangerous thing, and yet it builds in my throat as he steps closer to where I stand in the center. I can feel it biting at my tongue, begging me to ask him all the questions I cannot voice, to demand he tell me everything he knows.
Instead, I press my fingertips to my lips, then my chest. A silent plea that the older man answers with a smile.
“There is an old, ah, how would you call it”—he scratches his beard, squinting his eyes in thought—“il vecchio grimorio, a book of spells, that was once housed in the Court Archives. In it was a spell to make one… invisible to Death, so to speak.”
“You mean immortality?” Azizi asks, a frown marred into her pretty face as she watches her father circle the central carving, his arms tucked behind his back and his lips pursed in concentration.
“Humans have been seeking immortality for as long as they have known Death,” Lord Alilovi? answers with a shrug. “Is it so surprising to believe that they have found it at some point?”
Impatient, I reach out for the man, drawing his attention with a cold touch before pointing toward the floor and then myself. “Tell me, please.”
Because what does such a spell have to do with my death? Why would Walden have needed me for it?
Lord Alilovi?’s smile gentles, his eyes softening as he looks down at me. “I am afraid, Lady Kolfina, that this particular spell requires a ritual sacrifice. It is my belief that your widow intended to use you as his final ingredient to complete his ascension to immortality.”
Sacrifice.
All of this—the strange symbols carved into my home, the hidden secrets and lies, my death—so a man could avoid Death.
And the terrible thing is, before I’d met Azizi and Theodore… I cannot say I would blame him for such a thing. To fear death is to be human, and who is to say what comes after? Heaven or Hell? Endless mazes and winding hallways? Nothingness?
Would I have made a similar decision to avoid the torturous purgatory I have been stuck in the past twenty years? Is that not already what I have been doing, possessing the bodies of women that Azizi brings me?
The walls around us begin to buckle, the stones cracking and raining dust onto my hair.
“This version of the spell is modified, however” Lord Alilovi? continues, unaware of the house threatening to collapse around us.
“This symbol here, you see?” He kneels down, pointing to a familiar looking moth in the center circle, just beside the bloody handprint I’d left behind all those years ago.
“The original version of the spell cannot make one truly immortal. It calls for familial blood, and upon completion of the ritual, it draws the sacrifice’s remaining years of life and gives it to the one performing the spell.
The symbol that belongs here serves as that limit, as one cannot draw life where there is none left.
Lord de Klein has replaced it with the crest of our court. ”
Azizi shakes her head, confusion pinched in the ridge of her brow and frustration clicking away at the edge of her jaw. “What does that mean, babbo?”
For the first time tonight, the man’s soft expression falls into something darker, harsher.
It is a subtle thing, his anger. It carves his laugh lines deeper as he thins his lips; it ripples through his jaw as he clenches his teeth.
But it is his eyes that tell the most, the red ring around his pupils growing darker and darker, spreading out through the pink and white like rivers of blood.
Even Jonas looks unsure at the sight, leaning away from his father as slowly as he can, like a prey animal trying not to draw the attention from a wolf.
“There is one rule those of La Cour Macabre hold above all else,” he says quietly, his eyes trailing up from the floor to lock onto mine.
“We do not kill our own, not without due cause. Cases can be made, argued. Permission can be given or forgiveness granted depending on the situation, but to do so knowingly and without remorse is our gravest sin.”
“You think he knew she was a lavandière,” Jonas says.
Pieces begin to fall into place the more his father explains, and I find myself hating the image being painted more and more.
Lord Alilovi? gives me a bittersweet smile and nods.
“I believe so, yes. This symbol, it represents the Night and all those born to it. You were not only born to the Night, but are a daughter of Death as well.” He taps the moth in the center circle again.
“I believe he picked you in the hopes that killing someone in Death’s domain would make the immortality permanent. ”
The air around me grows thick and cold as I glance down at the ring encrusted around my finger. Frigid water begins to seep from the cracks in the walls, soaking into my gown, weighing down my hair.
Theodore shifts on his feet, wariness etched into his features as he glances at the walls. I wonder if he too can see the water. I wonder if he can feel it flooding up to his ankles, can feel the chill sinking into his bones.
“But he failed, yes?” Jonas asks, drawing my attention once more. “He looked older at Zagreus’ party. Older than what I would expect, at the very least.”
The ocean gave her the gift he was trying to steal for himself.
“The spell worked.” Theodore’s voice jolts me from my spiraling thoughts, and when I glance up at him again, I find his pretty brown eyes already locked on mine.
“It worked, but the gift is meant to be given to the one who completes the spell, right? It wasn’t Walden de Klein who made the sacrifice in the end. It was Kolfina.”
I want to argue with him at first. Clearly the spell did not work, as I am still dead, but then I imagine the woman at the bottom of the sea. I imagine the desperate look in her rotten eye as she lifted me back to the surface. I remember her words.
“You live. Perhaps not the way others do, but you live all the same. The ocean has given you a second life, a second chance."
Of course. The ocean could not give her back her body, as it had already been sacrificed to the sandy floor. But what need does immortality have for a body? I may be dead, but I still live.
I live within this house and its walls—in the shifting, creaking floors and the wallpaper flowers that move in the corner of your vision.
I live within the music that trickles out from my attic—in every note that echoes across my tongue as Azizi paints and every story the villagers tell of the songs on the wind.
I glance at Azizi and Theodore, feel them beating inside my chest like two hearts protected behind the cage of my ribs, and I know that I live in them as well.
This second life is not a curse, as I once believed. It is a gift, not stolen from a man I once called husband, but given out of devotion from one ancient lover to another.
It is sacrifice made holy, and I will honor it as the woman on the ocean floor begged me to.
I will live.