Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  I was a falling-star streak of blood red.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Alifair adds kindling to the fire.

  He still does not speak to her, and has not spoken since he appeared, bringing the wolves with him.

  She cannot work out whether they followed him, or he followed them. They walked alongside each other in a way that was both vigilant and familiar.

  Lala breaks what they have gathered into pieces. “How did you find me?”

  “I could guess where you were going.”

  “And why did you come?”

  He prods the fire. “Because whatever you may believe, your aunt and I aren’t so stupid as to let you go all the way to Saverne and back on your own.”

  Even with the sharp edge to his voice, she thinks again of the hail.

  He guarded her then, taking the bruises of those falling stones of ice so she wouldn’t.

  It is her turn to guard him now. The stain of suspicion that dyes the edges of her skirt mars him every time she touches him.

  She must put an end to it.

  She imagines her heart as a hailstone, fallen from the sky, hard and cold and the size of her own fist.

  “I don’t love you,” she says.

  The words are held up by her memory of the bailiff’s questions, and the thought of Alifair being brought to that room. What would they ask him, this boy who was paler than Lala and Tante, but who many still think is some unknowable child from the deepest shadows of the Schwarzwald?

  Alifair flinches, as though at the memory of a slap.

  She keeps that flinch from staying on her skin. She braces her heart into being nothing but handfuls of frost.

  “I know,” he says.

  How easily he believes her should give her relief. But his quick acceptance makes her crueler.

  “You are my aunt’s apprentice,” she says. “That is all you are to me.”

  He draws in air through barely parted lips.

  She knows him enough to know this is one of the ways he steadies himself.

  He gets to his feet, taking his knife for more kindling. “Your aunt has been good to me. I do as she says. I followed you for her, not for myself.”

  And again, they fall into silence.

  It is there, in that quiet, that they remain while they sleep, on and beneath the coarse wool blankets. It is there they remain the next day, as they walk the miles beneath the maple and beech.

  She has always had the small suspicion that he is a little more German than French. Of course, in Strasbourg, most everyone is some German and some French. Except for the way Alifair pronounces his As, his French could pass for the language he has spoken all his life. It is only the small things Lala knows to listen for, the low trilling of the vowels, like the buzz of a hummingbird’s wings.

  But the way he walks the forest, sure and fearless, makes her all the more certain that he came from the Schwarzwald. He warns her of roots that might trip her. He changes their path when he senses wolves or men on horseback, or when he thinks they might find mushrooms or wild sorrel. He marks their route by the way the wind has molded the soft yellow clouds of smoke bush trees. He hears the whisper of water so early she does not even know what they are following until he leads them to a stream.

  It makes her watch him all the more, seeing him in this landscape with which he shares a common language. She studies the way he kneels alongside water, dipping his hand in and bringing it to his mouth.

  She cannot love him, not now, not until la fièvre passes. Until it does, any tie to her is a danger to him.

  These very things that made her fall in love with him, the things that make him understand her and Tante better than anyone else in Strasbourg, are the things that might damn him.

  In Strasbourg, in the crowded lanes within the city walls, he has always been as out of place as Lala and Tante are among gadje. It is up to Lala to make sure no one takes more notice than they already have.

  The silence between them thickens in the last miles before Saverne. But when they approach la grotte Saint-Vit, the flinted quiet settles, like the surface of a pond. Near the rock mouth of the chapel, forbidding in the moonlight, it becomes something sacred, and true.

  Alifair builds the smallest fire he can that will burn the bloodied scraps of the dancers’ shoes. The flames swallow the tattered fabric.

  As they wait for the ashes to cool, they kneel before the painted wood images of the Virgin and Child.

  Lala tries to offer well-ordered prayers to Saint Vitus. But within moments, she loses hold of her own thoughts, and her desperate heart cries out to Sara la Kali.

  Let this leave us.

  Sara la Kali, She who protects, who cures sickness, who turns bibaxt into luck and life. The gadje do not recognize Her as a saint, but they have made up stories that make Her fierce heart and dark form more acceptable to them.

  Please. Let this leave us.

  Sara la Kali, to whom Lala prays in church, for whom she lights candles in the transepts, letting any who watch think she is worshipping some distant, paler saint.

  Her eyes still shut, Lala hears Alifair stirring the ashes. It is a mild rushing sound, him checking for embers. It softens the edges of the quiet.

  Please, Lala asks, with the raw hope of a child. Let this leave us.

  She has never wished more for a statue of Sara la Kali, so she could lay flowers at Her feet, so she could lay before Her the garments of the afflicted and beg Her help.

  “What are you burning?” A woman’s voice startles Lala out of her prayer.

  Alifair stops, his hands pausing.

  Lala scrambles to her feet, and Alifair rises from where he crouches, both of them ready.

  A woman’s face appears from the dark, her pale expression stricken.

  Lala stares, but her vision at night has never been as sharp as Alifair’s.

  Alifair reads the woman quickly. “She’s alone,” he says, not whispering, but in a low enough voice that the woman will not hear.

  The woman is better dressed than Lala would expect of a woman traveling on her own. Not damask or a silk bliaud, but a well-dyed overdress.

  “Nothing,” Lala says so firmly it sounds an insult. “We only wish to stay warm.”

  The woman looks almost disappointed. She dips her head, and the auburn of her hair catches fire by moonlight.

  What answer did she hope for?

  “We’ve come to pray to Saint Vitus,” Alifair says, standing in front of the extinguished fire. “For the healing of a fever.”

  Lala thanks Sara la Kali that the dancers’ shoes have already turned to ash.

  The woman steps closer. “Would you pray for my sister?”

  “Is she afflicted?” Lala asks.

  “Afflicted?” the woman asks.

  “With la fièvre de la danse?”

  “The what?”

  Lala and Alifair blink at each other. So this woman wishes a cure for something else. Who would they pray to? Saint Vitus? Sara la Kali, She who Lala’s heart cannot help crying out to? Both?

  But the woman looks so hopeful.

  Lala’s understanding comes as a hard pinch.

  Of course the woman was disappointed. She saw their small fire and must have hoped it signaled a ritual that would give her prayers more weight.

  “Yes,” Lala says. “Of course we will.”

  Lala kneels and prays, truly, for this sister she does not know. She can feel Alifair and the woman on either side of her, their fervor bristling against her arms.

  The woman prays and weeps with such intensity that she falls asleep in la grotte, collapsing as though at midnight needlework.

  Alifair draws one of their blankets over her.

  Then he silently gathers up the ashes.

  We can’t, Lala mouths, tilting her head toward the woman who has prayed herself into a dream.

  Lala gets close enough to Alifair to whisper, “What if she wakes up and sees what we’re doing?”

  “We�
��re not doing it here,” Alifair says.

  “The entire point was coming here.” Lala’s whispering sharpens.

  Alifair’s eyes find her in the dark. “Trust me.”

  His gaze pins her in place, his eyes holding twin moons.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  For a little while, they retrace the path they took to la grotte. But then Alifair leads them deep into the woods.

  “Have I ever told you about aspen trees?” he asks, his voice soft as the rustling of the leaves. “Their roots are all connected.” He holds a branch out of her way. “As though they grow as one tree.”

  He holds another branch aside, and the night fills with fluttering green.

  A gasp catches in Lala’s throat.

  Endless heart-shaped leaves dress a copse of trees.

  Alifair stands, and she stops alongside him, watching the uncountable leaves.

  “They’re one body,” he says, with the quiet reverence of sharing a secret. “Something can be one tree, and a whole wood.”

  Lala breathes the chilled air and imagines the ground under their feet, how the boughs and branches open to a wide spread of shared roots.

  With the turn of the breeze, she can smell the warmth of Alifair’s skin.

  She snaps herself away from the thought.

  Lala should not encourage this in him, the part of him that lives in these woods, and that made him easy for Tante Dorenia to teach. This boy, who speaks the language of these woods, and whose Romanipen she has never seen more sharply.

  She cannot love him as long as every touch of her fingers brings suspicion on him. She cannot love him as long as half of Strasbourg whispers about whether she is Romani, and the other half about whether she is a witch.

  Lala remembers the woman she saw against the dawn years ago, standing at the crab apple tree, lowering a fever. For that, Strasbourg would call her a witch twice over. Lala knows so much less than that woman, and it feels nothing short of arrogance to hope she might imitate a drabarni’s wisdom. It feels as presumptuous and hopeful as being a little girl trying on her aunt’s skirts, putting on that which is beyond her, that which she has never learned.

  But Lala and Alifair offer the ashes to the trees, asking them to take this collective fever. In the streaming of ash from their fingers, she prays the afflicted are spinning for the last time. That they are recovering their senses and halting their dance. That they are stumbling along the stone lanes back to their homes.

  The air turns again, and a slight warmth seems to lift from the aspen trunks, as though they are breathing not only with each other but with her.

  Lala’s hope grows sharp, both pain and relief at once, like a full breath of winter air.

  She has often heard that all things on earth have their celestial mirror in heaven. But here, in these trees, she finds the divine health that stands contrary to the dancing sickness. In Strasbourg, a shared fever drives so many bodies to exhaustion or death. In the afflicted, a shared life and breath means they perish. But in these trees, that same collective breath makes the trees their most alive. She feels them speaking to each other in their roots and in the whisper of their leaves. She feels them sharing water as though from cupped hands. They give to her palms the sense of being each themselves and part of a greater, shared life. These trees are not only the divine opposite of Strasbourg’s fever. They are the glinting mirror of everything Lala does not have, the vitsa she and Tante Dorenia were made to relinquish.

  All she has left, the only other trees whose roots she can reach, are her aunt, and this boy. They are why she locks any blight deep inside her own heartwood, so it will never touch them.

  Lala breathes in the memory of the woman at the crab apple tree, and her hands act without her thinking.

  She reaches for Alifair’s and sets them on the aspen’s trunk. Her palms lie against the backs of his hands, both of them speaking to these trees as one.

  Emil

  The moon and the glimmer milked up the surface of the reservoir. Flickers of movement stirred the fog.

  The movement was too high and spindly to be a bear or a wolf. A deer, maybe. He kept his approach slow in case he was right. One crackle of branches underfoot, and the deer would bolt.

  He came closer, and what he’d thought was a deer’s body resolved into human limbs, hands and hips. What he’d thought were antlers were arms.

  They drew forward from the fog.

  A girl, spinning through the dark, dancing along the rock ledge.

  His dreams bled into the scene in front of him. The thread of being awake, all chilled air and silhouette, tangled with the heat and features of his nightmares. They ran together like paint.

  The girl’s features emerged from the fog. Dark, full hair. Brown skin. And though he couldn’t make out the specific features of her face, he caught the gleam of her eyes, the bright flash of terror as she flew.

  The girl, the woman, from five centuries earlier. The one who was a little bit his blood.

  His father had told him the thinnest details of la fièvre de la danse, the strange dancing plague his ancestors witnessed five hundred years ago, because the thinnest details were all Emil would listen to. Until now, he had never considered that any of them might have gotten caught up in the fever, and danced.

  Maybe this girl had. If there was evidence in the disintegrating papers his parents had tracked down, they wouldn’t have told Emil, because he’d made clear he didn’t want to know.

  But here she was, come to life in these woods.

  A ghost, wearing jeans.

  That last detail would have made him laugh.

  Except that she was getting closer to the edge.

  In one half second, she looked like she was thinking of throwing herself down to the rocks below. In the next, she looked like she was skipping along the ledge, letting chance decide if she’d go over. And in the next, Emil found a mismatch between her upper body and her legs, like she was fighting the motion of her own feet.

  Like the dance itself was compelling her toward the edge.

  He went for her without thinking. Only in a small space at the back of his mind did he wonder if he had imagined her, and if she would vanish the moment he touched her.

  She wavered at the farthest edge, her arms out like she was trying to balance and stop herself from going over.

  Just as her center of gravity seemed to incline toward the reservoir below, he caught her arm.

  “Hey.” He pulled her away from the edge.

  She didn’t vanish.

  She was a living girl, and she fell into him, her breath hard against his chest.

  He drew her back farther, putting space between them and the ledge.

  Her breath still came loud as the rustle of voles in the underbrush.

  He cringed at the thought of looking at her, this ghost come to life so completely she had a body. Would it be like looking at some sister he didn’t have? Like looking at old photos of his mother? Would he recognize his own features in her face?

  But she was already looking at him. He could feel her stare on his forehead, hotter than her breath on his collarbone.

  Emil lifted his eyes.

  The colors he expected were there. The winter-brush-field brown of her skin, made darker in this light. The coarse black of her hair. Her eyes as deep as wet earth.

  But the mismatch between the girl he expected and the girl he saw, how she did look familiar but in the wrong way, it shorted out something, like one Christmas bulb going out and the rest going with it.

  Emil’s brain was too full, too muddled with his dreams and everything in front of him, the confusion of wondering if he was asleep, the fast bridging of five hundred years. He felt those five centuries condensing in him, like the stars that fit a world’s worth of heat and light in the volume of a teaspoon.

  So when he heard Rosella Oliva’s sharp breath in, when he felt their shared startle of recognition, he didn’t have enough of himself back to say anything.
He lost his grasp on all the things he was trying to keep in his brain. So when she stared at him, eyes so big the white caught the glimmer, and then ran, he couldn’t even think fast enough to go after her.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  In the morning, the woman—Petrissa—insists on taking them as far as she can toward Strasbourg on her way to Rheinau. She insists in a way that speaks of some small protectiveness toward them. As young as she looked under the moon, daylight shows the creasing at the corners of her eyes, and Lala can guess she either has, or has lost, children near Lala’s and Alifair’s age.

  “My sister,” Petrissa says after a few silent miles.

  Lala has been so lulled by the oxcart’s rhythm, and the way Petrissa murmurs to the animal, that to hear the woman speak to her startles her.

  “She has fits,” Petrissa says. She does not look at Lala. She keeps her eyes on the wood-shaded path before them. “The priests say she is possessed, but I do not believe it. And as long as I do not believe it, they will not pray for her, not truly.”

  “So you went to the shrine,” Lala says. “To do it yourself.”

  Petrissa gives what Lala guesses is the best smile she can manage. It is still pitifully small.

  “You asked what we were doing with the fire,” Lala says. “I fear I did not give you the answer you hoped for.”

  Now the smile falls. “Each time my sister comes back from her fits, she remembers less and trembles more. God forgive me, if I thought it would spare her, I would try anything. I would ask the devil himself for his prayers.”

  Lala should rush to judge this woman. She understands that she should. But the fierce love Lala has known herself—for Alifair, for Tante, for the baby she has not even met, for the families whose voices brushed the beams inside their house—only makes Petrissa’s words sound in her own heart.

  Lala is grasping for something to say when Alifair jumps down from the cart.

  “Stay back,” he says, in a whisper so loud it becomes a hiss.

  Petrissa halts the ox, murmuring to him like a skittish child and then asking, “What is it?”

  “Just stop and stay where you are.”