aghavni
—
in which fires become of metaphorical importance—
T
he fires are always drowsy around midnight. Their coals sigh instead of hiss. Their flames gurgle, like a dreaming infant, instead of spit. Sparks die in the hearth's dimming womb, smothered to death before they can mature into yellow locusts and catch, devouring all the velvet curtains, glass-eyed dolls, and pinewood bed frames in their way.
The midnight fires are drowsy because they are dying. Fires, like infants, die of neglect. The stagehands around midnight are too busy tending to the performers (dabbing away sweat, watering down bourbon, patting angelica archangelica onto cheekbones) to stoke them with fresh coals.
So in somber acceptance, they die a slow, quiet death.
Aghavni leans against the oven-warm wall—the Scarab's fires, even neglected, know better than to neglect their duties—and tries to imagine herself melting into it, like taffy. We both know that is not true. Fury, perfumed and pink-haired, toes along the barricade of her composure, pressing at stones to loosen them. A stone wobbles, threatens to give. Your father would not take any risk that would lose me from the Scarab's books.
There is a damp patch seeping through the wallpaper, and it is cold against her heated skin. Pipes run like tree roots through the kitchens and the walls of the stage. One must have sprung a leak. She commends that it has chosen Minya's wall to leak through.
Grinding her shoulder into the damp, Aghavni imagines taffy seeping through the weakness in the mortar. "You have never met my father," she asserts, sweetly. "He's rather fond of taking risks. Livens the blood, he says."
She watches as Minya sweeps invisible dust off her table with a delicate limb. Picking at imperfections only she can see, she thinks, and tries to conjure a tendril, a wisp, a cloud, of reticent empathy for the glittering girl in front of her.
Who then would your father replace me with if I were to go? Surely not you.
The tendril, the wisp, the cloud, picks up its skirts and sweeps grandly out of the room.
(Some part of her has been waiting—baiting—for this. For permission.)
"Surely not me," Aghavni echoes. Her lips part. Her tongue presses against the roof of her mouth, runs along her teeth, settles back down under the covers. There is more coming, she knows. Like the static frizzing the air before a lightning strike, she anticipates.
The fire is not—yet—dead. See the way it pulses, beneath the ashes? A heart, reanimated.
The diamond-eyed dancer's smile zaps life back into blackening coals.
Casually, Minya gestures towards the box on the floor, its reinforced edges bulging outwards like an overripe melon, jewels spilling like stuffing from the suture in its gluttonous belly. Lightly, Minya says: I have these gifts that need taking upstairs to my room. I was thinking you and Danny could do that.
"Oh?" Aghavni pushes away from the wall and feels its heat drain from her like sticky marrow out of crushed bone. The dampness stays. It clings in condensed, icy drops that roll lazily down her shoulder. She steps gingerly towards the box and noses at a winking ruby pin. Red as love. "Your gifts, here?" she says, tilting her head and smiling a little, like she doesn't quite understand.
"I suppose I should do your washing next, too, and fetch you a cup of tea while I wait for your silks to dry," she says. Her tone is as light as Minya's. Lighter. Faerie floss spiked with belladonna. Two wrongs don't make a right, love, Aunt Marianna had said to her once, when she'd grown fond of her enough to allow her into the sitting room. They make you even. Who gives a damn if the world goes blind? Her lips had twisted into a sneer. Marianna was good at those. Her sneers left scars that lingered for months. For a woman, it is better to be blind than disgraced. Better to be feared than loved.
"Poor Danny." She looks towards the door, as if expecting the boy to step through it. Summoned like a genie when his lamp was rubbed. "I would have to let him go, wouldn't I? His services would no longer be needed by you, because you'd have me. Should I move into your room, too? It'd be a tight squeeze, not like in mine. But a maid moves into her mistress' room, not the other way around," she muses. Is that what you wish, Minya? Or shall we be like sisters, share our jewels and pull each other's hair and hate each other only half-seriously?
Smiling, Aghavni lifts the ruby pin to the candlelight and inspects the facets for scratches. Finding none, she pulls her mane from their knots and captures the tumbling curls inside the pin's golden clasp. "There'd be no one to do the account books, though. No one to inspect the caravans, to order new alcohol shipments, to oversee the staff. You know how staff are." She lifts her eyes. The pin clicks into place. "So prone to trouble."
You look tired today Aghavni – have they been working you too hard? Aghavni's smile twists into a sneer (though Aunt Marianna's still has hers beat). Her voice softens like taffy. "They have been working me too hard. Do you know why, Minya?" She steps away from the box and draws closer to the dying fire and its dancer. "Because I keep everything running. Clockwork."
She turns her eyes to the heap of silk scarves on Minya's bed. "I don't mend mine when they tear. I give them away. I suggest you do the same, if you can spare them." Enough. Her facade slips from her skin like water. The end of her sentence snaps like ice cracking. Under the drowsy light of the fire, her face writhes in shadows; she has not slept well in days. Her temper is at its breaking point. Or perhaps she has broken it already.
When Minya whispers August's name like sin, Aghavni's pupils prick to needle-points. She is pleased to discover, when she reaches for it, the freezing heat of her temper coiled inside her like a rattler. Her horn bumps against the dancer's antlers and knocks off a dangling crystal bauble. It falls to the carpeted floor with a dull thump and rolls under the bed.
She spares no eye for it. It is not an accident. Precious few of her actions ever are. "Busy boy he is," she murmurs instead. "Usually, he's scheduled for a spar."
With me.
@Minya // the cattiness though omg
