Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The water felt like it had a current, dragging her down. Rosella’s arms had gone limp as pondweed. Her skin looked pale as the spider bite scar she still had on her upper arm.

  None of this even seemed like the same reservoir, or the same girl, he knew. He and Rosella had touched hands in this water not in the cold of fall but in the heat of July and August, when the light warmed a layer near the top. They always went farther down together, finding the stark border between that sun-heated water and where it got cold, and how it was always more sudden, more distinct, than they expected.

  Right now, it was all cold, a water version of how he’d always imagined space. Frozen and quiet and punctuated only by stars.

  He had a good enough grip on her that when she came back to him, he could feel it, the awareness sparking back through her body. He felt it in how she worked them both toward the surface, like she had come back to life enough to follow the moon.

  He pulled her up on the bank, and her coughing rasped in the cold air.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, reaching for the glasses he’d left in the wild grass. He got them on in time to see her nodding in answer to what he now registered as an incredibly stupid question.

  She held on to him, her wet hands gripping his soaked shirt so hard that threads of water ran down his upper arms. How she did it seemed less like she was looking for comfort and more like she was checking him, making sure he was all there. The way she shivered made him feel the cold in a way that went deeper than the reservoir hitting him.

  Her coughing quieted into breathing.

  “You’re okay,” he said, and he hated how much it sounded like a question. “You’re okay.”

  The light overhead warmed.

  Rosella tilted her face toward the sky.

  A vein of red snaked through the glimmer, fast as a lightning strike.

  Rosella tensed, pulling away from Emil.

  The glimmer lit her face enough to show her panic as she scrambled to her feet.

  “Rosella,” he called after her.

  But he didn’t follow her. He let her go.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The sergeant leads her out, no doubt toward a stone cell where she will be held until the method of execution is decided.

  The sight of Alifair stills her, even with the men at her back.

  She is sure that, in this moment, she imagines him. To know she will never again touch this boy, never again brush her lips against his neck or feel his hands pushing up her skirt, cracks her heart in two. She longs even for the simplest tasks, the ones she hated, but that she would perform for a lifetime if only she could do them with him, and with Tante looking on. Grinding the oak galls. Weeding the vegetable patch. Hanging the heavy, just-dyed fabric over the line, watching it turn from yellow to green to blue.

  Alongside him are the friar and a canon priest, each looking proud, accomplished, as though Alifair is a stag they have hunted and caught.

  Have they brought him to confess already? And should they not be taking him to the church?

  Rage rises up in her, and she wonders if she has been a fool to believe they would take her confession and be lenient with him.

  She keeps up her posture, as though her soul has been unburdened by her admission. She hopes she will pass close enough to Alifair to whisper, Tell them I bewitched you. Tell them I am a daughter of the devil.

  “Come,” the canon says to Alifair, urging him on.

  Lala’s eyes adjust to the light, and she catches the pain in Alifair’s face.

  “May I speak to her?” he asks.

  The bailiff hesitates.

  “Please,” he says, the word plain. “It will ready my soul for confession.”

  “One motion of the devil,” the priest warns.

  Motion of the devil? Alifair stands here, ready to confess to lusts of the heart and sins of the body, and they think the devil is in him?

  Alifair steps forward, the sergeant moving toward the door as though he might run, and neither the prim, well-adorned canon nor the friar can be trusted to stop him.

  “I am sorry, Mademoiselle Blau,” Alifair says in an upright, formal way.

  Lala knows at once it is for the benefit of the men listening.

  “I am sorry I brought the devil into your house after your aunt so kindly took me in,” he says. “You both deserved better gratitude.” He glances at the other men, sweeping them into his words. “I am sorry that my wickedness has brought such a fever on Strasbourg, and such pain to you and your aunt.”

  The sting of the words grows worse the more she grasps them.

  “What?” she asks, barely a breath.

  Alifair straightens. “And I am sorry that I bedeviled you into confessing,” he declares, loud enough for the men to hear.

  In one strike of cold horror, she realizes what he is doing.

  “No,” she says, the word rasping.

  “No,” she says again, louder, finding her voice this time.

  She grabs his sleeve and pulls him close.

  He winces, and only then does she remember the wasp stings.

  She adjusts her grip. “You cannot do this.”

  “Your aunt needs you,” he says through clenched teeth to keep the words quiet. “Her child will need you.”

  The understanding that Alifair knows of the baby stills her, but only for a moment.

  “You cannot give yourself up,” she says.

  “They would have taken me eventually,” he says, his face so weary he looks like a life-worn man, instead of a young one just out of being a boy. “They accepted it when I was a child, but I am older now. If they would not pardon La Pucelle d’Orléans, do you think they would pardon me?”

  The common name for Jeanne d’Arc presses at Lala’s throat. A greater soldier than any other on the battlefield, and they burned her for wearing a man’s tunic and hose.

  Lala grabs Alifair tighter. “I will deny whatever you say.”

  He gives her a sad smile. “I led them to a grave digger in Riquewihr. He remembers me taking the earth from your mother and father’s graves. He will swear he witnessed me troubling the dead.”

  Riquewihr.

  The stones beneath Lala seem as though they are giving, as though she will be swallowed into the ground.

  Alifair had seen Lala’s sleeplessness, and she had confessed the fear that her parents’ souls were not at rest. She and Tante had not fulfilled the death traditions, fearing to be driven out in the middle of the night, or worse, simply for being Romnia. So Alifair had stolen away in the dark, gone to the hills outside Riquewihr, taken the earth from their graves. He had brought it back for her to give to the water, one year at a time.

  He had done this for her, for the repose of her parents’ souls, and now all Lala can imagine is how it must look to these priests. A boy they think immoral, and he has been witnessed meddling with the dead. The priests will fall into accusations of witchcraft as easily as they do into their feather beds.

  “You protected me,” he whispers. “Let me do the same for you.”

  “Why?” Lala breathes.

  Alifair presses his lips together, dampening his dry mouth. “The day the hail came.”

  Lala is pulled back into that afternoon that faded into an early evening, the cold and sting of the hailstones on her back, the warmth of Alifair as he picked her up off the path. The memory rises up from under the smell on Alifair’s skin, the salt of sweat, the petal and wood of common hazel.

  She did not realize he remembered.

  “I went out as soon as the sky began to darken,” he says, with a smile both small and sad. “I knew where you would be. The way I knew what you would do today.”

  Her skin feels covered in the hailstones’ chill.

  “How could you do this?” she asks, the words bursting from her lips so hard they sound angry.

  “Lavinia,” the canon says. “Contain yourself.” He grips her upper arm, pulling her back from Alifair, this boy whose face holds so
much pain and so much relief.

  “Your anger is a human impulse,” the friar says, both of them misplacing the center of her rage.

  “Resist your baser instincts,” the canon adds.

  “Justice will be served,” the friar says, as though an hour earlier he was not smirking over having gotten a confession from Lala. “You will leave it to us and to God.”

  To us and to God.

  Of course these men place their own power first.

  The sergeants take Alifair, binding his wrists with heavy rope as Lala screams. She screams after him, and the friar and canon continue their urging, still convinced it is her rage at Alifair that gives her such a voice.

  She keeps screaming, and they think nothing of it but that she is a woman wailing over the deeds of a demon-filled boy.

  She screams, loud enough that she hopes it rattles la cathédrale’s single spire.

  She wishes it to echo over Alsace, to the Vogesen, and to the Black Forest.

  She bids it to Paris and Rome, into the souls of kings and emperors, to every man who makes the law of a land he has never bent to touch.

  She commands it to carry across a thousand years.

  She wills it to reach the very ears of God, so He will know what men on this earth do in His name.

  Rosella

  Whatever hope I had that my parents would still be asleep withered when I saw the living room light on.

  I crossed my arms against the feeling that all the water on me was turning to ice. I had to brace myself to walk through the front door.

  My mother stood just inside.

  She took in my soaked clothes. “Where have you been?”

  “I’m fine, Mamá,” I said, dragging myself and my damp pajama pants toward the stairs.

  She eyed the red shoes, the fabric a little darker from being wet. The candy-apple sheen they had in daylight looked deep and slicked as blood.

  “Take those off,” she said.

  Her voice came as forbidding as I’d ever heard it.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know all your friends are wearing them,” she said. “I know they make you feel like you can do anything you want. But the things you’ve been doing, they’re not you. Sneaking out. And this.” She gestured at the water dripping off me.

  “Mom,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what were you doing?” Her voice rose, more panicked than angry, and that just made me feel worse. “Was it some kind of dare? Something those girls told you to do?”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Take them off,” she said, sounding as scared as she was stern.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Take them off.” She hit each word.

  I withered under her stare, until two breathed words slipped out of me:

  “I can’t.”

  An odd expression flashed over my mother’s face, an uncomprehending panic.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” she asked.

  I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the block.

  My mother followed.

  I moved it toward my own feet.

  My mother gasped. “Rosella, no.”

  But I was already dragging it across the fabric.

  A seam opened, and my mother breathed in as though she might scream.

  Then the seam closed, like a wound healing in seconds.

  She stared at me, her fear of my own recklessness shifting toward the red cloth on my feet.

  A stricken look tinted her features. All this fear, without her even knowing that they had been making me dance.

  I slid the knife back into the block.

  Her face hardened.

  Not anger.

  Resolve.

  “We’ll call your cousins,” she said.

  “Mom.”

  She cast her eyes to the floor. “Every curandera we know.”

  “Mamá,” I said.

  “Every one that everyone else knows, we’ll ask them all. And all the priests.”

  “Mamá,” I said.

  This time, I landed on the word hard enough to stop her.

  She and my father would rip apart this town trying to help me. They wouldn’t care who found out. By the time they were done, everyone would think of our shoes as more murderous than beautiful.

  One cursed pair could gut our family’s business. All of it would fall away. The peacock and plums and bronzes that painted our workroom. The indigos and flame yellows and oranges that dyed our lives. I had learned the seasons by what colors we sewed. Pastels for the spring, grays and ice blues for winter. Clusters of beads like lilac blossoms. The moss green that made me think of wood fairies.

  We would lose all the months by colors.

  It would ruin us.

  Everything my great-grandparents had worked for, the years they’d endured in the maquiladoras, the factories where they were paid pennies for each seam, where their blood darkened the metal corners of the equipment, all of it would turn to ashes.

  All the whispered magic of Oliva shoes would turn to poison.

  “You’re the one who said it never lasts,” I said. “That it always leaves with the glimmer.”

  “This is different,” my mother said.

  “How?” I asked. “All I have to do is wait until it’s over. Like every other year.”

  “Wait?” my mother asked. “Wait while those things”—I had never seen her regard our family’s work with such disdain, such suspicion—“drive you to do what, next?”

  “They’re my shoes.”

  The words came out without me deciding to speak them.

  “What?” my mother asked.

  “I sewed them,” I said.

  I couldn’t tell her the rest, the awful scene with the debutante’s father, the scissors, the pieces I saved for years.

  “So before you let half the town know there’s something wrong with what we do, what I’ve done,” I said, “let me try something.”

  “What?” my mother asked, her voice rising as she threw a blanket across my back. “If you can’t even cut them off, what else is there?”

  Emil had shown up at the reservoir twice. Twice, he had pulled me back from the shoes’ grasp. He knew something about the glimmer this year, about the odd magic tinting Briar Meadow. I could see it in the wear of his face. Whatever had come for me had left some trace on him.

  I had to risk whatever he would think of me, whatever might come with him not believing me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I can think of someone who might.”

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Weak around death.

  It was a polite phrase Enneleyn used to use to explain why Lala and Tante and Alifair never came to executions. They did not gather for hangings or beheadings or lashings. They did not even attend when the sword itself was the spectacle; a nobleman’s sentence would sometimes command a skilled executioner from across the Vogesen, bringing death with one graceful stroke of his blade.

  It has always been difficult to see death as entertainment when the next on the stage could so easily be any of the three of them.

  Now, watching them stand Alifair to hear his sentence, is the first time Lala and Tante have ever joined the waiting crowd.

  Alifair does not look up. He does not lift his eyes to see the faces gathered in la Place Broglie. He keeps his gaze on the wooden slats at his feet.

  The sight of his dirt-grayed shirt, his eyes ringed with sleeplessness, his face that shows he is plunged so deeply into resignation that he has no room for fear. It is all so awful that for a moment, Lala drifts away from it.

  Her drifting away begins with thoughts of when she would sneak up the ladder and into his bed. She would crawl under the blanket with him when it was cold.

  Then one spring, when the ice wore off the trees and the branches were breaking into bloom, she kept climbing the ladder. She did it even when the weather grew too mild to feign a chill.

  Sometimes, when the sce
nt of blossoms in the air left them drunk, they pretended they were night courting, like the sons and daughters of wealthy burghers.

  Amid these comes another memory, one that tears away the center of her heart.

  Last year. The sweating sickness.

  First it came for Tante.

  “The bloody English sweat,” Tante panted from her bed. “We have survived famine and ice and buboes and pox, but this will be the death of us, curse it all.”

  She ordered both Lala and Alifair out of the house, so they would not catch it. She ordered them to the flax farmer, who offered them his straw-covered barn until they proved well enough to enter the house.

  They did not go.

  Tante raged at them, covered in sweat, weak in her bed, and still they did not go.

  Lala pleaded with God and Sara la Kali to save Tante. She fell to her knees before the crab apple tree, begging it to take her aunt’s fever.

  Alifair carried in water from currents upstream from the city walls, free from the lye and blood of the market and abattoir.

  Tante accepted only a few sips, the pain of swallowing overtaking how thirsty she was.

  Lala offered her feverfew and brown bread.

  She would not take it.

  She panted in her sleep. Sweat poured from her body, and Lala changed the sheets as often as she could dry them, doing what she could when they soaked through to the straw.

  Alifair, by favor and what little money he had, obtained enough almonds to make a milk by steaming them in hot water. He strained it through cheesecloth to make it easier to swallow.

  Tante took only a few sips. But Lala is still convinced the day she did was the day she tipped away from death and toward life.

  It was also the day the sweating sickness came for Alifair.

  It overtook him so quickly he could not get up the ladder, falling off the second rung. Lala caught him and put him on her bed, and he was already too weak to protest.

  Tante proved as ruthless in her efforts for this boy as she had been in so much else. She did not accept his refusal of feverfew; she compelled him to drink. She procured, in ways Lala still could not guess, water from the spring of Saint Odilia and earth from the grave of Saint Aurelia.