Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “I never bewitched her,” she says.

  She shuts her eyes, knowing, in the same instant, how she has erred. She has strayed from the three words—I deny it—like wandering from a path in a brambled forest.

  “Really.” The friar circles. “You visited her in the early morning and not a day later, she is afflicted, and you deny this?”

  “I cared about her!” Lala’s eyes flit open. She cannot keep herself from raising her voice. “She was my friend! I would never!”

  The council and the physicians chose to exclude the canons when they decided on a great dance. They ignored explanations of divine chastisement, or the arrangement of stars.

  But now that tambourines and drums have only spread the affliction, they have given in and brought in a friar. Now that the blood of so many boils over, now that not only women but men fall down in the streets, now that they have lost the Lily of Strasbourg, they must blame someone.

  “And did you not try to flee the city to escape justice for your crimes?” the friar asks.

  “I did not,” she says.

  “Did you not attempt to capture your aunt’s apprentice into your dark service?”

  Lala shuts her eyes once more.

  “He has nothing to do with me,” she says, each word stinging her lips. “He performs only tasks for my aunt.”

  All she has done, all the effort she has made to guard those she cares for, all will be used to damn her.

  And, if she does not take care, him.

  “There is talk of this plague passing by sight,” the friar says. “Do you know nothing of that, Mademoiselle Blau?”

  “I know nothing of it,” she says.

  “Families attempt to restrain their loved ones from the dance, but they scream and thrash as though demons rip their hearts in two. And you know nothing of this?”

  “I know nothing of it.”

  “Music must now be banned because of how it spreads,” the friar says, his voice taunting and proud. “Even the singing of masses for fear that blessed souls will dance toward the altar. Do you feel no guilt, no fear for your immortal soul?”

  “I trust my immortal soul to God,” she says, biting back the rest.

  And I do not trust it to you or any man like you.

  “The faithful of this city fall down dead, and you think God will receive your soul?” the friar asks.

  “I trust my immortal soul to God,” she repeats.

  “The Dreikönigsuhr has stopped, and three women swear you have done it with witchcraft. Do you deny this?”

  Lala’s back stiffens. “In the name of our Lord, I deny it.”

  “You will not confess your pact with the devil?” the friar yells.

  Her throat is summer ground now, parched as dust, from her nerves, from thirst, from how long she has been made to speak. Her tongue feels like dried moss in her mouth.

  “I have no pact with the devil.” Lala chokes on the words.

  “And your consorting with demons?”

  “I have had nothing to do with demons.”

  “What of the reports that you have been seen in the woods with werewolves and lupine devils?”

  A memory pinches, the recollection of the wolves alongside Alifair, how their claws ticking against stones drove away the men who thought she was prey.

  “They are lies,” she says.

  “And the pitchforks that have gone missing from farms?”

  “I know nothing of them.”

  “Do you not fly on them with your sisterhood of legion witches?”

  “I do not,” Lala says. “I have no such sisters.”

  “Four hundred souls dance,” the friar says. “Their hearts and their bodies relent and release their spirits. Just yesterday, fifteen more were afflicted. The spotless of heart now dance as though they are covens of witches. They dance in church and cannot be dissuaded with holy water or the sight of the cross. Whose work but the devil’s?” His yell is so forceful that his spit catches in Lala’s hair.

  Lala braces her hands on the wooden seat.

  They would not have brought in this friar, not one as young as Sewastian, if he had not been well trained in the Malleus Maleficarum, the book that insists all witches be burned.

  And because he is young, he is eager to show his skill and his wrath, like a young snake cutting its teeth.

  Lala holds her tongue tight in her mouth.

  The whole town is gripped by fear and frenzy, and if she says a further wrong word, she will pay for it.

  Rosella

  All I had to do was follow their rules. All I had to do was survive them for a few more days.

  But that night, I slept through the red shoes bucking to life. I slept through them pulling me into the woods, while I dreamed of my body turning to starbursts of blood-red beads.

  I dreamed of the night turning into everything my family’s shoes looked like. The crushed-jewel embroidery. The heels that seemed crafted out of icicles or poured gold. The dancing slippers that appeared woven from moonlight and stitched with threads of spun sugar.

  The red shoes dragged me through brambles and briars that tore at my pajama pants and my legs. They dragged me down the embankment, rocks cutting my ankles as I dreamed of the air turning to water. I ran but the water slowed me, like I was running on the bed of a river, my limbs cutting through the current.

  I didn’t wake up until my body hit the reservoir, the chill as hard as packed snow.

  The dancing stayed in me. It stayed in me even as fighting for the surface took what little breath I had.

  It stayed as the red shoes took me under, the cold like handfuls of knives. The motion of my legs became treading, the only way I could fight.

  I had a few seconds of being all the way awake.

  But in those few seconds, a scream caught in my throat, not just because the shoes were taking me under, but because they had made me silent in the first place.

  The reason I couldn’t have told my mother and father about them was not only because it could ruin us, but because I could never confess what I had done. I had turned my grandfather’s beautiful work, and my grandmother’s defiance, into this. I had failed my family. My hands had failed them. All they had worked for over generations, I had twisted into poison the moment I picked up a needle and thread.

  The scream of all this built in my throat, and died without breath to give it sound.

  I had barely shaken out of sleep when the lack of air blurred my brain, and the shoes took me under again.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The friar circles her. “Perhaps you have been taught by your aunt. A fellow witch?”

  Lala closes her eyes again. “No.”

  Now the friar stands behind her. “Perhaps she has not taught you the way of God, and has invited the devil into your house.”

  “No,” Lala says, the start of a sob weakening the word. Now it sounds almost a plea. Not Tante. Not her baby.

  “Do you deny the witchcraft in your very house?” the friar asks. “Have you and your aunt not spent the Sabbath concocting poisons?”

  “Never.”

  “Are you not both among the legion witches?”

  “We are not.”

  “Do you not hold maleficia in your hearts?”

  “We do not.”

  The friar sighs. “Must we trouble the Bishop von Hohenstein with this matter? Draw him from his palace?” The man’s breath comes hot on the back of her neck, and he lowers his voice. “If so, perhaps we will have to break the joints of both you and your aunt and see if we can uncover the witchcraft in your very bodies.”

  “No,” Lala says, and the words cracks in two. If she speaks a single word more out of place, she and Tante Dorenia will be declared witches. The magistrates will chatter among themselves to decide their fate. They will ponder hanging them as traitors against the city, or burning them to be sure their wicked hearts have become ash.

  Lala lowers her head, sobbing taking her.

  They have tort
ured peasant rebels for wanting nothing more than bags of seed and relief from their usurers. What will they do to women they call witches?

  The friar bends lower. “Dozens dead or dying, falling down from exhaustion, their bodies giving out, and you cry only when we threaten yours?”

  Lala watches the stones at her feet.

  The friar straightens back to standing. “It is, of course, not entirely your fault.” He takes a more relaxed posture. “Women are born with weaker minds, more susceptible to demon possession.”

  Lala does not protest. If him thinking her weak or stupid will save her and Tante, she will let him.

  “So let us speak of other things,” the friar says.

  Lala would breathe, if she did not know this to be a trap. He will make her feel safe, absolved, then trip her into a confession.

  “You have other crimes, Lavinia,” the friar says to her back. “Let us not pretend you were blameless before.”

  Lala clenches, bracing for talk of her and Tante being Romnia.

  “You have committed sins of the flesh.” The friar’s voice falls almost to a whisper. “You and your aunt’s apprentice have lain together.”

  Lala stays still enough that she cannot breathe. She waits for the friar to go on, praying that the only sin he will assign her is bedding a man outside of marriage.

  “You must know that for you to lie with each other is against the natural law of God,” the friar says.

  The natural law of God.

  Lala feels as though the floor beneath her has broken open and she has fallen into canal water.

  “Do not tell me you have never heard from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” Now the friar’s voice rises. “‘For even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.’”

  The words pin her skirt to the floor. She could not run even if the friar were to throw the door wide.

  Others in Strasbourg know that Alifair is the kind of boy who was given a girl’s name at birth. They know there is a reason he has never tried to show off his form in the way young men so often try.

  Lala should know well enough by now. There are no true secrets in this city, or this world. Not hers. Not Tante’s. Not Alifair’s.

  “‘And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman’”—the friar is nearly yelling now—“‘burned in this lust one toward another.’”

  Lala shuts her eyes, trying to clear away all before her, the awfulness and the impossibility. Not just this careless damning of men with men and women with women, but how profoundly the friar misunderstands Alifair himself. Lala is a girl. Alifair is a boy. Despite any common features their bodies may possess, to compare them, to call them the same, has always seemed unthinkable.

  The friar strolls in front of her. “You are familiar with Li livres de jostice et de plet?”

  Lala’s throat feels as though it holds a stone.

  Alifair might have gone his whole life without his name being spoken in this room. Yes, some may have known for years, but they must have decided they did not care, so long as he didn’t lure their daughters into the fields. It is the same as how some must have known of Lala’s blood but likely thought little of it, provided she did not seduce their sons with whatever dark charms they imagine brown-armed girls possessing.

  But now, now that there is something that someone must be blamed for, there comes a miraculous reemergence of memory. These things, known but nearly forgotten, are brought out and aired like shirts from a trunk.

  “Ah,” the friar says. “So you know the treatise. Then you must also know that we keep similar laws here in Strasbourg.”

  All this, the threat now crawling toward Alifair, is Lala’s fault. If they hadn’t looked first to her, they might never have looked to him.

  “Then you know the penalty for the offense you and your lover commit?” the friar asks.

  Offense. Lala almost kicks up from her chair at the word. In this proud country, so many men pay no price for forcing themselves on women. But for a man to want a man, or for a woman to care for a woman, or for a girl like Lala to love a boy who was given a girl’s name at birth, these are all offenses.

  “And you know,” the friar says, “that on the first offense, the offender will lose a limb.”

  A chill crawls over Lala.

  “And on the second, another limb,” the friar says.

  Lala sets her back teeth.

  “And on the third,” he says, “offenders are to be burned, and all their goods confiscated.”

  Lala grips the wooden seat so hard splinters catch in her palms.

  “If you do not wish to confess how you have bewitched the souls who dance,” the friar says, “perhaps you would care to discuss your other sins. Or those committed by your aunt’s apprentice.”

  No. Alifair’s name cannot be spoken in this room. He is a boy who always dips his fingers into the stoups of holy water and crosses himself. He has never thrown sticks at horses or dogs, or mocked his elders behind their backs.

  Which boy in Strasbourg should be mentioned in this room less than Alifair?

  “What do you think?” the friar asks, as though musing. “Would you both find it a sign of your love to lose the same limb on the same day? To have the same parts of your bodies taken within the same hour of each other? Tell me, is that romance to such perverted souls as yours?”

  Lala pulls at the air for breath but cannot find it.

  “I…” Lala chokes out the sound.

  They consider him nothing but a peasant with no known parentage. They will wound him without a thought.

  “But should you confess the crimes of your own heart”—the friar steps forward, seeming to have thought of an idea—“perhaps we can be merciful enough to let your aunt’s apprentice repent in the dignity of a priest’s confidence.” His tone is almost encouraging, a promise folded in. “Should you confess yourself, we might leave the matter of Alifair’s sin at a private confession.”

  Lala cannot think of it, the attic emptied of Alifair. It is as much a shock as if a farmer’s scythe were to shear away the moon. The thought of him hurt or gone gives her a halting start, as though she is skimming her hands over the floor of a dark room and her palm has just caught a needle.

  Tante Dorenia, the woman who has been mother and father to Lala since the season she lost both. Alifair, the boy who played his Blockflöte when she could not sleep, who combed out her hair when Tante lacked the patience.

  These two are her family, and she will guard them, against sickness and rumor, against dancing and fever. They have survived plague and pox and sweat, hunger and ice-silvered winters. They have survived tilling their garden plot in seasons when it gave back nothing but thorns and thistles, years when even ploughmen spat those words—dornen und disteln—at the very earth, accusing it for being so willfully barren. They have survived, when the motions of the sky, when the very stars, seemed set against them.

  She cannot let this be what takes them.

  Whatever Lala must do, she will. She will make her heart into a knot of wood, as true and deep and pure as the blackest ink she and Tante have ever made.

  She will let it lead her wherever will save Tante and Alifair.

  “I have done it.” She breathes out the words. “All on my own.”

  She is losing her life. But the relief of saving Alifair’s and Tante Dorenia’s and her baby’s brings air into her.

  The friar looks both satisfied and disappointed, as though he has a hundred more threats he wished to try.

  “You confess to these crimes?” he asks.

  “I confess to the crime of witchcraft,” she says, her voice growing steady with each word. “Any crimes Alifair has committed are ones I have bewitched him into. Any sin I have brought into my aunt’s house has been of my own wicked, ungrateful soul.”

  No matter what becomes of her, Alifair will live, and Tante will live, and he will help her look after her baby.

  “I have made a pact with t
he devil,” she says, as her heart whispers, God forgive me.

  Her soul chants, God forgive me for speaking these words, God protect those I love, God and all His angels, please guard them.

  “I have bewitched the souls who dance.” Lala’s tears cling to her cheeks. Already, she feels the breath of the flames they will feed her to.

  May God take me into His hands, her heart calls out. Whatever they will do with me, return me to my mother and my father.

  “I have betrayed the blameless soul of the woman who raised me. I have allowed the devil to tempt me away from the good and holy upbringing she has given me.” Lala lifts her voice, forcing it clear and strong. “And I have ensorcelled Alifair, whose soul was blameless before my corruption. I confess to this all. I confess.”

  Emil

  Rosella Oliva was still all the bright points he’d kept with him for years.

  The rosy maple moth that had ridden home on her shoulder one afternoon, its fuzzy body and feet and powdered wings, the lemon and raspberry colors she’d later tried to match by mixing crayons.

  The daffodils that grew in his mother’s yard and that Rosella always loved. The ones with the pink ruffles and darker pink centers. The white-petaled ones with orange middles that Rosella said looked like fried eggs.

  The way she asked his mother how she got them to bloom early and late, and when his mother made a joke about cutting out the heart of the town’s fairest maiden, Rosella laughed. She actually laughed.

  And tonight, when he found her under the water instead of near it, it seemed wrong, like she’d gotten caught on the wrong side of a mirror. The shape of her drifted under the moon-whitened surface. Her limbs floated in the dark, reflecting the glimmer in the sky like raw opal. Her shoes, ones that should have fallen off her, were bright as blood on her feet.

  His history had pulled her into this.

  When he went in after her, he tried to keep as much breath in him as he could, bracing so the cold wouldn’t take the air he had.

  It needled into his body anyway, both the pain of it and the shock of how freezing the reservoir always got in fall.