Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The stone steps seemed chilled with death. She can feel it through her stockings and shoes. By the time she reaches the last, her toes feel like frozen buds on a hazel branch.

  The candle’s light shows vaulted stone in smaller proportion than in the sanctuary above. With each step farther in, she expects the smell of rot and death, and it is there, the seeping stench of decay. But every other smell is a surprise. The earth and spice of oakum, myrrh, incense. The bite of white wine and balsam rubbed onto the bodies. The herbs stuffed into their throats.

  She does not look at their shrouds, thin enough to show their features. She does not lift the candle enough to light them. Not just because she does not want to see if their eyes have swollen back open. But because she does not want to be one of the many gawking at them in death. These bodies lie on stone for the priests to pray over, for the physicians to speculate over, for any powerful man to gaze upon as though they were strange insects.

  She looks only at their feet, and only long enough to take the bloodied shreds of their shoes, the best she can think of to bring to the shrine at Saverne.

  Saverne. She must succeed where even priests failed.

  Lala only wishes it did not mean facing the bodies of the dead.

  Their souls have left them, leaving their corpses as hollow as rinds.

  She holds her breath as she pours out a portion of honey wine before the bodies, an offering she hopes will be enough to guard her, to make sure she does not bring the bibaxt of these dead home with her. There is little Tante and Alifair need less than another measure of bad luck.

  Lala pauses at the miller’s younger daughter. Even before Lala reaches for what remains of her shoes, she glimpses the bruising on the girl’s ankles, purpling the pale skin. There is not enough left of her hose to conceal it.

  She does it so lightly, her breath tight in her chest, hoping that if she does not stir the air, perhaps she will not disturb the dead.

  A pair of large hands takes hold of Lala.

  The candle falls. The moment before it darkens, it lights the face of the miller’s son.

  The torn shoes tumble from Lala’s hands.

  The miller’s son shoves her against the stone wall. “So you’ve come to torment her further.”

  “I never did anything to her.” Lala gasps the words.

  The miller’s son holds a wide hand to her throat. “Then why is she dead?”

  He is little older than her, younger even than Alifair, but grief has left him as ragged and aged as his father.

  He grips Lala’s throat so hard she feels the pulse in his hands meeting the one in her neck.

  “Your sister,” Lala chokes out. “I want to help.”

  His hands tighten, and pain gathers in her forehead.

  “There is no helping her now,” he says, pushing into her harder with each word. “And you dare disturb her.”

  The pressure is great enough that she cannot keep her eyes open. “Only to see if there might be help for others, including your sister who still lives and dances.”

  His grip does not relent. “And what is it you would do for her?”

  “I want to bless her soul at Saverne,” she says with what little breath she has.

  “Bless?” he says. “Is that what you call your deeds?”

  “I want this to end.” She shouts it, as well as she can.

  “The priests brought three dozen to Saverne and it cured nothing,” he says, fairly spitting the town name at her. “How many high masses? How many turns about the altar? And nothing. What would you do that they could not?”

  “Anything I can.” She tries to scream it. At first, it comes out so quiet she can barely hear her own words. But the scream blooms within her. It is a desperate will to keep the blame of this fever from landing at the door of those she loves. “Anything I must. Even if it means surrendering my own soul.”

  Her head feels as though it is fogging over, her thoughts disappearing into mist.

  The hands drop her.

  “Then go,” he says.

  She grabs at the wall behind her to keep from falling, coughing to get her breath back.

  “Use every dark scheme to save her,” he says. “I do not care if you must offer your flesh for demons to tear to pieces.”

  Lala swallows, twisting beneath this new understanding.

  She has done nothing to convince him she is no witch.

  All she has done is convince him that she will offer her wicked deeds to spare his sister.

  He has taken the promise of her efforts as a vow to cure la fièvre.

  “You say you will surrender your own soul.” The miller’s son shoves the pieces of tattered shoes into her hands. “Save those who still live, or you may have the chance to make good on your word.”

  The threat wears a veil thinner than a funeral shroud.

  If she fails, this man will stand ready to accuse her.

  Emil

  “You’re banning me from my own lab?” Emil asked.

  “I am doing no such thing,” his mother said. “I am simply insisting that you get some sleep before handling chemicals.”

  He braced against the memory of the dreams he couldn’t shrug off, the girl with the same black hair and brown skin as so many of his relatives, witnessing that strange fever.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “I saw your hands, Emil.”

  On reflex, he slipped them into his pockets.

  His mother put a palm to his cheek. “You look terrible.”

  “And you’ve clearly been reading the school pamphlets about self-esteem.”

  “Sleep.” His mother held up the key to the old garden shed. “Then you get this back.”

  “What am I, five?”

  “This is not punishment,” his mother said, already on her way out of the room. “It’s precaution.”

  Emil sulked into the kitchen.

  He had no idea how his mother heard him drinking from a cupped palm at the sink, but she did.

  “Use a glass,” she said, appearing and setting one down on the counter.

  He shut off the tap and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  She narrowed her eyes. “You enjoy irritating me, don’t you?”

  He wiped the back of his hand on his jeans. “Immensely.”

  “I brought you into this world,” she said, sweeping down the hall. “I can end your existence in it.”

  Emil slumped onto the sofa and called Aidan.

  “Sorry,” Aidan said, almost in the same breath as answering. “Your mother’s recruited me. I’m not supposed to enable your insomnia.”

  Emil swore silently. He didn’t know what was more humiliating: the fact that his mother called his friends or that they went along with pretty much whatever she asked.

  “And don’t even try Luke,” Aidan said. “Or Eddie. He’s with Eddie.” Awkwardness flooded Aidan’s voice. “Luke, I mean. Luke’s with Eddie.”

  “With as in…”

  “Yes, as in.”

  Emil laughed. No wonder Luke wanted to go out to see the glimmer. “Took them long enough.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Aidan said.

  “Sorry, you’re breaking up.”

  “Sure I am,” Aidan said. “See you when you’re allowed out again.”

  “I am allowed out,” Emil said. “I’m just not allowed in my own—”

  But Aidan had already hung up.

  Emil breathed out.

  If his friends were busy—with each other or with being traitors—and his own mother wouldn’t let him at his own lab bench, he was going back out to the reservoir. Whatever restlessness the glimmer had given him, whatever it had sown into his dreams, maybe he could give it back.

  Maybe he could refuse it.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The sun is just warming the gray of the city’s stone lanes when Enneleyn meets Lala.

  “Is everything all right?” Enneleyn asks, still knotting the silk belt around her kirtle. />
  They stay close to the face of her father’s home, clinging to its shadow.

  Lala presses a blue-dyed ribbon into Enneleyn’s hand.

  Enneleyn’s smile lights. “It’s lovely. But why?”

  For the turn of a single moment, Lala considers telling her. She nearly speaks the hope that perhaps, if Enneleyn holds this ribbon, whatever cure Lala may manage in Saverne will reach her before the fever can take her.

  The thought crumbles and falls, dried as December leaves.

  How can Lala tell her the hope she has pinned to this ribbon and two more like it? How could Lala even explain it, the gesture of a ribbon meant to keep the thread between two people?

  As kind as Enneleyn has been to her, their friendship suddenly feels hollow in a way that has always been there, but that Lala has tried not to notice.

  Enneleyn never offered her friendship to a Romani girl in love with a boy who had to shrug away a girl’s name. Enneleyn’s affection is for the cast-off daughter of Italian nobility.

  Enneleyn’s affection is for a girl who does not exist.

  Lala settles on saying, “Keep it with you.”

  Enneleyn meets the gravity of Lala’s voice with a laugh, soft as the dew in the window boxes. “Oh, Lavinia.”

  It is so easy for her to laugh in the midst of this fever. Her life, glazed green as fine tiles, leaves no room for the horror that fills the square.

  “Just promise me you will keep it,” is all Lala says.

  “Wait,” Enneleyn says. “Are you leaving?”

  Lala drops her eyes to the cobbles.

  “But you are coming back,” Enneleyn says, her face open and hopeful as a child’s. “Aren’t you?”

  Lala folds Enneleyn’s fingers over the blue ribbon. “I promise.”

  She leaves the second ribbon beneath Tante’s pillow, the third between Alifair’s straw mattress and the timber bed frame. And then, laden with what she can carry, what will not be missed, she sets off for the rough, forested path through the foothills.

  Lala cannot risk the main roads. They are little safer than the woods, and they bring the risk of more suspicious gazes, questions about the brown of her skin, arrest if anyone places her as what she truly is.

  After a few hours of traveling rocky ground, the soreness in her feet turns to a deep ache. But there is no helping it. She must stay in shadow, hiding from those who would prey on a girl traveling alone. That means walking the stone-studded earth between trees.

  Just for a moment, she cannot help wishing she were a merchant’s daughter, with boats to glide along the Rhein and the Zorn. So many perils of the road are lessened by water.

  As the afternoon falls into night, the air cools so quickly she thinks it will grow ice. The green gray of the silver firs steals the last light, and Lala pulls her cloak tighter.

  There’s only once she can remember a summer night having such a forbidding chill.

  It was years ago, when she and Alifair were still small. It was high summer, as it is tonight. That part Lala knows, because both woad and flax were in bloom. She had gotten away from Tante, so she could stand in the border between the flax fields and a fallow meadow where woad grew wild.

  Tante hated when she just stood, staring at the color. “Nothing good comes from being dream eyed,” she would say as she took in the washing from the lines. But whenever Lala could sneak away, she ran to the path between the fields, so narrow that the dirt bore no cart ruts.

  She looked out over the land, an ocean of blue to her left, one of yellow to her right, green stems and leaves undergirding each. They seemed painted, the blooms thick and stretching out toward the sky. They seemed the kind of petal lakes that fairies would dance in at night, their small lights hovering over the blue and yellow. It always seemed strange to her, how the woad with its yellow flowers made such blue dye, and how the flax with its sky-colored blossoms made fabric of palest yellow. They seemed to trade colors, like girls exchanging ribbons.

  That day, Lala had drawn her cape around her, warming herself against the strange chill of the evening.

  The sky darkened all at once, from a blue as rich as the center of the flax flowers to a wet-stone gray.

  Lala tilted her face to the sky, hoping for a warm summer rain despite the breath of cold.

  The next day, rumor would insist that a frozen goose had fallen out of the sky and taken four days to thaw. On Sunday, the canons would say it was a form of God’s wrath on Strasbourg.

  But all Lala knew the instant the sky opened was that the clouds were throwing down hailstones the size of late apples. They pummeled trees and vines and the swaying, bending flowers on either side of the path.

  And Lala.

  They beat down on her, and she huddled to the ground to cover herself. She spread her hands over the back of her head, pinching her own neck because it all seemed as strange and awful as a nightmare.

  The hail kept on, striking her shoulders and rounded back. Lala bit her cheek both to keep from crying and to try to wake herself up.

  Lala has never known how he knew, at once, where to look for her. But Alifair appeared, quick as the hail itself. He gathered her up off the ice-covered path and brought her home, shielding her on the way. It was the first time she could remember him ever touching her, and her grip, her arms tight around this boy’s neck, was the first time she could remember touching him.

  At the memory, her skin feels cold as hail. But she walks on. She cannot stop for the night, not yet. And she dares not light a candle so soon, both in case the journey is longer than she expects and in case its flare announces her to brigands roaming the woods.

  And the noble sons from nearby estates.

  When Lala hears the crunch of footsteps in the undergrowth, it is both of these that she thinks of. The thieves who would lift her skirts to make sure she isn’t hiding anything they might steal. And the young heirs on horseback, hunting both women and stags, who would ignore her pockets but lift her skirts anyway.

  “I see something,” a man’s voice says. Not a warning. A hope. A light fills his voice.

  He steadies his horse.

  Lala’s breath turns to a living thing in her throat, a bird caught in an attic.

  “Where?” another man asks, bringing his mount to a stop.

  The horses’ hooves quiet.

  Lala’s heart grows into a hard knot.

  Hunters.

  They have the refined, cheerful cadences of highborn men who kill for sport, not food.

  She stays still.

  But of course they will expect their prey to stay still. A fawn, or yearling bear.

  There is no good in announcing herself as a woman. To such men, she would simply become prey of a different kind.

  The dark undergrowth seems to move. Forms emerge closer to the ground, sinewy bodies on four legs. The fur at the points of their ears glints silver.

  The animals have coats as deep and beautiful as the best ink she has ever made. Their teeth clatter in their jaws, and their eyes glow like alder leaves in full sun.

  Their gait sounds in the dark, eyes shining through the trees.

  “Wolves,” one of the men says. Fear chases the joy from his voice.

  The wolves’ frightening beauty halts Lala’s breath. But the way they come, steady and slow, lets her meet them with the calm of old friends. She is like the old stories Tante has told her about sailors who both love and fear the ocean. These wolves hold the awe and wonder of endless blue waves.

  “Go,” the other man says, and they drive on their horses. “There’s a pack of them.”

  From the elm and oak darkness, the wolves show themselves, one muscled frame at a time.

  And with them, a boy who was born with a map of the woods on his heart, a boy who seemed to appear from the branches of a crab apple tree years ago.

  Rosella

  Once I heard the click of my parents turning off lamps, I snuck back down to the workroom.

  I traced my fingers along t
he shoes my parents were working on, kept on wooden forms to hold their shapes. A peridot-green set meant for a dance recital. A pair for a wedding, the candlelight satin an exact match to the bride’s gown. A third in royal blue, a cross between a dancing shoe and a vintage heel. Two almost-identical pairs, one deep yellow, one the orange of marigolds, were flecked with bright yellow beads that looked like they were glowing, pairs a mother bought her daughters for Diwali.

  And red ones. Always a few pairs of red shoes. Especially this year.

  I stood on tiptoes on a chair, feeling around for the seam ripper without taking down the sewing box.

  This was how I would end this. Like my grandparents, I would tear apart the work of my own hands.

  I went at the red shoes, driving the seam ripper into the veins along the vamp and side quarters. I hooked it into any thread loop I could find along the casing and the wings.

  With each pull of the seam ripper, I thought I could feel it, the tearing apart of these shoes mapped onto my own body.

  I kept on. I went at them harder. I found every seam I’d made myself, every place I’d sewn the red cloth back together, and I dragged the seam ripper through the stitches.

  But with the next pull of the metal hook, a shock of new pain struck me, like I was tearing the seams of my own heart. The inside of me was ripping into shreds.

  And within that bloom of pain, the shoes sparked back to life.

  They felt like hands beneath my feet, pushing me off the ground, turning me, driving me out of the workroom.

  I thought they would throw me into the back door, until the wind’s own hands seemed to swing it open. The air outside howled and tore at the tree branches.

  The red shoes drove me out into the night, and the world blurred into the smell of highway and far-off fields.

  They dragged me farther away, my heart tight as a knot of thread.

  My hair whipped into my face. By the time I cleared it, the far light over my parents’ front steps had disappeared behind me, quiet and quick as a sleight of hand.

  The shoes kept going, pulling me over the ground like a child’s doll.

  I was that music box ballerina, made for twirling.