Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Alifair darts ahead, keeping hidden among the blackthorn.

  Lala hears the horses’ steps moments before they appear.

  And moments before she understands that Alifair has erred.

  The horses have not kept to the road.

  They ride between the trees, trampling the wild angelica.

  Then they stop.

  Lala sneaks through the trees until she sees them.

  Fine, tall stallions, ridden by two men in velvet-adorned tunics. Embroidery and gold embossing declare their families’ crests, and fur-lined mantles drape their shoulders, of no use in the summer but to display their wealth.

  These are the sort of men who consider the woods theirs, and who so often have the force of law on their side. They are the kind who could have had Alifair lashed if they’d caught him scavenging fallen branches in winter. They are ones who would see Lala’s skin and hair, and pin the word exotic to her, a bright flag they would chase for sport.

  These are the same kind of men who thought her a deer, and would have little guilt over slaying her and discovering her to be a woman.

  Except there are no wolves this time. The daylight has driven them into hiding.

  “And look what we have found,” one of them says. “A feral boy de la forêt.”

  “Out here all on your own?” the other asks, in mincing imitation of concern.

  “Stay with the ox,” Lala whispers to Petrissa.

  “Lavinia,” Petrissa warns her. “You can’t.”

  “Keep back,” Lala tells her, and then runs between the trees.

  Alifair catches the sound of her steps before she reaches the clearing, his head turning just enough to meet her eyes through the trees.

  He shakes his head, so slightly the men on horseback might not notice.

  She does not slow.

  His chest falls, his eyes shutting.

  Not relief.

  The settling resignation of something going even worse than it was.

  In a moment more, she is close enough for the two men to see.

  How quickly and easily they come down from their horses shows their youth, and their leers show the sense of place they have no doubt learned from their fathers.

  They do not care how clearly Lala and Alifair see their faces. They show off their pride and power like the embroidery on their doublets, silver as just-minted groschen.

  Nothing Lala and Alifair say against them would ever be believed.

  “Mais non, not on your own.” With a breath of amusement, the fairer haired of the two steps forward. “She goes with you?” He glances at Alifair. “Let’s see how well you share.”

  Alifair pitches forward after him.

  The second man shoves Alifair away.

  Lala casts herself at the fair-haired one, but he bats her to the side. With each throw of their fists, the men pen them in, backing them toward a stand of trees.

  That fair hair is now askew, matching the rage in the man’s eyes. “I’ve had servants whipped for far less.”

  The fair-haired man lunges forward, the other raising a fist toward Alifair.

  Then, like a celestial body descending from heaven, a dark round comes down on the second man’s head.

  It is so strange and miraculous, it seems a new moon is swinging downward from the sky.

  The man tumbles like a felled tree.

  The fair-haired man turns.

  The dark moon arcs once more and catches him in the temple.

  He falls, revealing the woman who holds the black moon.

  An iron pan, the long arm gripped in both her hands.

  The woman looks near Petrissa’s age, with similar delicate lines around her eyes. But the colors of her are each different. Black hair instead of auburn. Brown skin instead of Petrissa’s pale that has gone pink in the sun.

  Instead of small, fragile-looking features, hers more closely resemble Tante’s.

  And Lala’s own.

  The woman stands with her feet far enough apart to plant her, still holding the iron pan. She wears a plain blouse with skirts of linen and lace, the sort of clothes that are familiar only because Lala knows she cannot wear them.

  The ends of Lala’s hair prickle with the sense that there are others in the woods behind her. It is far different than her worry over the men in fine tunics. More a familiar comfort, as when Tante moves around the wattle and daub when she thinks Lala is asleep.

  Alifair looks between Lala and the woman. In his face, she sees the first flare of recognition, before she has it herself.

  They know her.

  Lala remembers her, one of the women Tante helped leave Strasbourg.

  Then Lala recalls the colors and layers of her skirts, the yellow and black. She pictures her hands on the crab apple tree, and wonders if the woman can sense the touch of aspen bark on Lala’s palms.

  The oath Lala swore for the bailiff comes back to her, like a bitter root in her mouth.

  Lala wants to say something to acknowledge the unseen threads between this woman and herself.

  But all that rears up in her is the sense that they must both survive.

  Lala casts her eyes down at the men, their finery even more absurd in the undergrowth. Fallen branches snag the velvet and fur. Their puffed sleeves have bunched as though the air has gone out of them.

  Each still breathes, but they will at least wake with headaches to rival their longest nights of drink.

  She looks again to the woman.

  The woman speaks a few words, in the Rromanès that Lala never learned. She heard the sounds from the families who stayed in Tante’s house, and now they flit past her again. She loses them like the bloom off a dandelion.

  Lala says the only words she has on her lips.

  “Take their horses,” she breathes, her voice sounding as small as a child’s.

  The woman’s eyes dull for a moment, as though her heart has broken a little that they cannot exchange a few words in a common language.

  “Go now,” Lala says.

  Then the light comes back into them, as though the woman realizes that they have.

  It is the only one they have left, the small, quiet language of vanquishing over men who can wreck and ruin, and still show their faces in daylight.

  Rosella

  From the window of my room, I could see a corner of the glimmer, like catching the edge of some glittering cloth.

  Spotting the glimmer was its own sport around Briar Meadow. We looked for slices of it between buildings in town. Graham and Aubrey rode their bikes to the tallest hill, watching it loom over them as they sped down. My mother and father and I crowded at this window late at night, counting the seconds between each time the trembling light shifted.

  Right now, it wasn’t so much the glimmer I was looking for as a flash of color within that wavering light, a heart of red. Something to explain the shoes sealed to my feet, and the dance they dragged me into. A dance that had led me to the centerline of the highway, to the edge of the rocks above the reservoir.

  And to turn my back on Emil Woodlock and run, like we were strangers.

  I knew it was there, that heart of red. My attention would wander, I would look away for just a second, and that wash of color would flash at the corner of my vision. But whenever I looked back, all I found was that edge of the glimmer, its thick sugaring of stars.

  “What is it, mija?” My mother’s voice came from the doorway.

  I sat up straight. “Just looking.”

  “Really.” She quirked a perfectly penciled eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, shrugged. I meant it as some universal gesture of I’m fine, nothing to see here. But even as I did it, I could feel how forced it must have looked.

  My mother perched on my bed. “You can tell me.”

  I wasn’t telling her, or my father, anything. It didn’t matter what the shoes tried to do to me. My mother and father would tear open the sky, the glimmer itself, to help me, until everyone was so frighten
ed of us that they would never buy another pair of Oliva shoes.

  If anyone knew, I would bear the contempt of the whole town, and so would my family. Red shoes would no longer hold the lore of making daughters fall in love and mothers sing from second-story windows. And Briar Meadow would hold it against me, against us, that I had spoiled something about red shoes. I would have ruined the joy of them, for everyone.

  “Whatever it is,” my mother said, standing up and smoothing a hand over my hair, “it won’t last. Nothing this time of year ever does.” She paused at the doorway. “You want tea? I’ll make tea.”

  I pushed myself off the windowsill, her words ringing through me. “What did you say?”

  “I asked if you wanted tea.”

  “No, before that.”

  Her smile was mostly assuring, but tinted with sympathy, as lightly as the way she added cinnamon to coffee. “I know it’s probably strange for you, everything this year with our shoes,” she said. “It probably feels like everyone’s talking about us, but they’re really not. They’re too busy with their own lives. And even if they weren’t, nothing that comes with the glimmer stays. Remember that.”

  Hope streaked through me, bright and fast as a comet.

  Since Emil had pulled me back—and God knew how much he’d seen—I’d burrowed into my own embarrassment, trying to hide under it.

  But my mother was right.

  Nothing that came with the glimmer ever lasted.

  No one had been able to drive off the coywolves. No one had been able to stop things disappearing into the ground a few years ago, house keys and dropped necklaces absorbing into the earth like they were water. But when the light over the reservoir faded, the coywolves left our houses and shoes alone. When that ribbon of light dimmed, the ground gave back the lost things.

  I didn’t have to find some way to pry the shoes off my feet.

  All I had to do was outlast them.

  I went to the calendar my mother had tacked up on my wall.

  I knew how to learn rules. I had done it with my friends. Ironing my hair. Fluffing peony-pink blush onto my birch-brown cheeks. Letting them shape my eyebrows, even though letting gringas near me with tweezers was sacrilege in my family.

  My friends had taught me to carry tote bags or an oversized purse instead of a backpack, how to take off the glitter polish without wrecking my nails, how to put in a tampon, which my mother had thought was self-explanatory (she never needed manuals for kitchen appliances either).

  I had learned to lessen the differences between them and me, so it would be a little less noticeable that I was brown where they were pale. I was autumn colors while they were the cream and blush of spring. Jeans and skirts might have tightened around my thighs and butt instead of lying as flat as theirs did, but I could wear the same kind of chandelier earrings they did.

  If I could learn all of that, I could learn the rules of the red shoes. I could survive them until Briar Meadow took back its magic like it did every year.

  First, stay away from the reservoir, or the glimmer, until the night we knew it would fade.

  Second, don’t try to pry the shoes, cut them, or tear them off my own feet. As much as I wanted to claw them away, I knew better now. They had danced me out of my own house last night, taking revenge for that seam ripper. I had to leave the red shoes alone. I had to bear them until the end of the week.

  I counted the few calendar squares until then, until the day the glimmer faded every year.

  If I followed the rules of the red shoes, I would last those few days until they let me go, instead of paying every price that came with someone finding out.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  “And here is where I leave you.” Petrissa halts the ox. “Mind yourselves on the road, and may God lead you safe.”

  “And you,” Alifair says with a dip of his head.

  He and Lala climb down from the cart.

  Lala grasps Petrissa’s hand. “I will pray for your sister,” she whispers.

  The woman’s throat tightens, and Lala knows her nod is as much answer as she has.

  Lala and Alifair walk on, Lala’s heart held too tight to watch Petrissa and her well-loved ox disappear.

  The air around them smells of Alifair, the smell she has always thought of as his. Oak leaves and wood. Dust caught in beams of sunlight. The clean growing smell she imagines as the scent of beech trees, a perfume given to him by the place he was born and that he carries on his skin still.

  The summer stretches the light of each day. Even beneath the yew boughs, in the early evening, the gold has not yet cooled to blue. The space between branches glows like the flame on a wick.

  Every few steps, she cannot help glancing over to him, his silhouette among the delicate cutouts of leaves and branches. The green brown of his eyes turns gold by the falling sun.

  Tell me something about it, she used to ask. Where you’re from.

  Most of the time, he gave her a single detail. My father could carve a dozen wooden leaves in an afternoon. My mother had eyes like juniper berries. Green and brown and purple all at once.

  Somewhere with aspen trees, he once said.

  Alifair, this boy with as much of a life before Strasbourg as Tante and Lala. This boy, with his heart so fearless that there is room for endless mercy. So many in Strasbourg know his kindness. The poor brother and sister he has often brought fish or a basket of apples. An exhausted mother whose children he helps sleep with the music of his pearwood Blockflöte. An old woman he visited every day until she died.

  The stir of something proprietary rises up in Lala. She has felt the breath of it before. But now it is a current, bracing and strong as river water, though she knows she has no right to feel it. He had parents once, and a homeland outside of Alsace; he does not belong to their plot yellowed by woad flowers. And it was Tante who took him into their household, turned him from a boy gathering milk thistles from wattle fences, a boy who risked beating and arrest every time he foraged for acorns, into one who knew a trade.

  Lala has no claim on him.

  “If you’re going to look at me, look at me,” Alifair says now, his eyes still forward.

  A cord of heat runs through Lala’s heart.

  “I wasn’t,” she says.

  He nods once, his gaze still ahead.

  “I know how your friends talk of me,” he says. “That I am nothing but your aunt’s worker. That I am some changeling who came out of the beech trees. That I am beneath you. I hear all of it. Even though they think I don’t.” He gives a resigned laugh. “They think their own servants can’t hear them.”

  The heat spreads like a fire catching. How much he has gotten wrong would be funny if it were not a briar around her heart.

  “So what were you doing with me?” he asks. “Dulling your boredom until someone else came along?”

  That heat bursts open in her.

  “My boredom?” She stops. “You think I am bored?”

  The rise of her voice quiets him.

  “You think I’ve ever thought you were beneath me?” she asks. “Do you think I wanted to be near anyone but you? Everything I’ve done has been out of fear for you and Tante. All of it.”

  “And you think your aunt and I don’t know how to look after ourselves?”

  “I have already been taken to the bailiff once,” Lala says, her voice thinning so quickly she doesn’t need to try at a whisper.

  Alifair’s eyes widen, just for a moment, before he wrests back control of his expression.

  “All the talk about me,” Lala says. “Did you think it started from nothing?”

  “This city invents reasons to blame people,” Alifair says. “You know that. Especially anyone like you and your aunt.”

  So Alifair has been observant enough to know that powerful men cast suspicion on brown-skinned women, but not enough to realize they may cast it on him next.

  “All I have wanted is for you both to be safe,” Lala says.

  “So you pu
sh me away yet keep staring at me,” he says.

  Lala shakes her head, a knot building in her throat. “It’s all I can have of you.”

  He holds his jaw tight. His anger carves and refines him. It brings out angles in his face that both unnerve Lala and that she cannot help finding beautiful. And it is that beauty, the unfamiliar look of him, that roots her to where she stands, in the grassy light between beech and chestnut trees.

  “If you want to look at me,” he says again, “then go on, look at me.”

  He shrugs away his tunic.

  Lala glances forward and back on the path. “Alifair.” They are veiled only by the yews. Madness has taken Strasbourg, not only in la fièvre but in those who think the color red causes it, in her aunt sharing a bed with the flax farmer, in Alifair showing himself to these trees.

  Alifair has always been careful. He wears such loose-fitting garments, his shift and shirt hanging from his body, to turn the impression of him into that of a more solid boy, a little stout even, instead of suggesting the true shape of him. His chemise and tunic leave so much room between the hemp and his skin that in winter the cold air finds its way between, his stomach chilled as an axe blade.

  Next he removes his shirt, leaving nothing but the cloths bound across his chest. “Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.”

  He stands, steady as a hunter’s aim.

  “Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.”

  The sight of him, his bare shoulders and arms in the half daylight, stuns her silent. He binds himself down, the effect of which makes him seem broad-chested beneath his clothes. His hips keep the hose up, but without the length of the tunic, it is more obvious, to her at least, how he stuffs extra cloth into the plain fabric of his trousers, to hide what is not there.

  Lala’s fingers have never wanted more to find their way past that cloth.

  “But do not act as though I am some pathetic, lovesick boy while your eyes stay on me,” he says, each word with a sharp point. “I will not let you have both anymore. If you do not want me, then deny me. All of me.”

  She tells her mouth to speak the words. She gives the command again, as though her tongue is a stubborn horse.