Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  That shift in expression nearly drags Lala to the floor. She has always known Tante cared about Alifair. But the grief in her face now makes plain how much she loves him, as she would a brother or nephew.

  Lala sinks onto a stool. “What has happened to this place?”

  “Nothing that has not been happening for hundreds of years,” Tante says, and the breaking in her voice makes it sound younger than Lala has ever heard it. “Those who dance just make it plain. Men tell their wives to be pure in the sight of God but then beat them and force them and show them less regard than their dogs. We lie sick in our beds while the wealthiest demand that the physicians see them first so that they don’t bring our dirt across their thresholds.”

  Her voice grows bitter and cruel.

  “Our roofs cave in while the councils debate if the cathedral needs another small fortune of gold.” Tante tosses her hands, as though there is no helping it. “We endure cold and hunger while rich men take our tithes, swearing they’re for the poor and for work of the Lord. Then they turn around and buy marble for their houses and silk for their mistresses.” She releases a bitter laugh. “And they’re the ones meant to commend us into heaven. Our spirits depend on baptism from them.”

  Lala cannot see tears in Tante’s eyes, but she can hear them.

  “And then they marvel when the bodies of their flock speak the truth their mouths cannot.” Tante kicks at the frayed edge of a rush. “If the devil has hold of anyone, it’s the men at their high posts, not those who dance.”

  Lala folds Tante’s words and her rage into her body. How she wishes God would show Himself enough that the canons understood their part in all this, how their hearts have become as unyielding as the jewels on their fingers.

  And now the wattle and daub speaks of Alifair’s absence. Gall nuts swell and rot on the tree. The woad grows at hard angles like briar, as though it knows. The attic stays quiet. The straw goes undisturbed.

  “This won’t end.” Lala doubles over, resting against her thighs. “They’ll go looking for demons no matter who they’ve killed.”

  “Those who go looking for demons always find them,” Tante says. “Even in angels.”

  Tante’s words raise Lala upright.

  They brighten and deepen, like the light and air turning woad dye from yellow green to blue.

  The riddle comes to her, one that would be at home amid her father’s garude lava.

  How can a witch who is not a witch become one yet remain not one?

  And with it, the answer.

  If angels could be counted as demons, so could anyone.

  So could she.

  She has feared it for so long, never before considering how she might use it.

  “Lala?” Tante asks as Lala moves toward the door.

  “Rest,” Lala says. “If you won’t for you, then for your child.”

  “Where are you going?” Tante asks.

  “Church,” Lala says, letting Tante assume she will beg masses for Alifair’s soul.

  Lala runs to l’Église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux.

  She finds it empty save for Geruscha and Henne, on their knees before a transept altar.

  Lala has no will in her to be exasperated.

  At the sound of Lala’s footsteps, Geruscha and Henne look up, casting her pained, watery glances before returning to their prayers.

  The kind priest emerges from the shadows. Even from across the church she can see his grief in the stoop of his back.

  “They have been praying for him since dawn,” he says quietly enough that it will not echo. “And yesterday all before nightfall.”

  Lala glances back at their bowed heads.

  Her friends have all made their retreat. Agnesona. Melisende. The merchants’ daughters who once greeted her in the lane. They recoil from the taint of witchcraft. They see it on Lala like brambles caught in her hair. So why these two pray for Alifair as though he is their brother is as far a mystery to Lala as the path of the stars. She wants to take them by the shoulders and ask why they do not give up on her.

  “Oh, Lavinia,” the priest says, his eyes rimmed red from the salt of tears. “You live in a place that has fallen so deeply into madness, they think dancing is their greatest folly.”

  He says it with such apology, as though a gift he wished to give her has broken in his palms.

  Lala draws him back into the shadows, so no one, not even Geruscha and Henne, will hear.

  “I want to save him,” she says. “And I think I might have a way to try, but I will need you in order to do it, even though you will never bless the means.”

  A light comes back to the priest’s face. Not a smile. Nowhere near. But hope.

  “Let us see about that,” he says in a low voice, “shall we?”

  So Lala speaks the words. She speaks them in the Lord’s dwelling, expecting at any moment to either burst into flames or for the priest to order her to confession.

  The priest only lifts his chin, considering, and then nods.

  His nod feels as though it carries the thunder of angels.

  He glances toward Geruscha and Henne. “Tell them,” he says.

  “No,” Lala says.

  “They will want to help you,” the priest says, firmer this time.

  She lowers her speech to a whisper. “I can’t.”

  But Geruscha and Henne have already risen from their knees.

  The priest motions between them, as though to say to Lala, Well?

  Lala’s voice feels choked with the memory of them appearing in the lane four years ago.

  Their glances flit between each other, not settling. It is so quiet their breaths echo.

  The silence wears down Lala first. Her tongue loosens with a bitter “Why do you care what happens to him? Why have you ever cared what happened to me, or him, or my aunt?”

  She regrets it instantly.

  She waits for the pain or anger in their faces.

  “I love her,” Henne says, so calmly that for a moment Lala does not know who she speaks of.

  Then Geruscha lowers her gaze to her feet.

  “As well you should,” Lala says, trying not to sound impatient. “She is your friend, isn’t she?” Geruscha and Henne have been the best of friends for years. It would be a great pity if there was no love between them.

  “No,” Henne says, her voice deeper, heavier now. “I love her.”

  Her emphasis on the word love is so great Lala feels the weight of it in her hands.

  Now Geruscha’s cheeks flush, so brightly it is visible even in the dim light of the church.

  The meaning blooms in Lala.

  Four years of understanding blooms in her.

  The reason they placed Lala and her aunt as Romnia, and still offered her friendship so fervently.

  The reason they have cared so deeply about Lala, and now about Alifair.

  Lala and Alifair are not the only ones who have feared Li livres de jostice et de plet, who have lived with the threat of it like a knife at their backs.

  If the friar knew, he would surely declare Geruscha and Henne to have violated the natural law of God.

  Lala’s eyes flash to the priest, and then back to Henne. Does she realize what she has said in front of him?

  But the priest’s face shows neither shock nor judgment.

  Lala’s heart feels heavy as a river stone.

  How many have known about her and Tante, about Alifair, and loved them still? What friendship has her fear made her disregard?

  It breaks Lala open.

  She tells them her last desperate plan. It seems to spill from her lips all in one moment.

  Henne and Geruscha agree before Lala has even gotten all the words out.

  Then, there is everyone else.

  Alifair has never made a spectacle of his kindness, so it falls to Lala to remember who has shown him gratitude. The brother and sister to whom he has given bread. The exhausted mother whose children he has kept entertained with stories of fairies from the
Schwarzwald, so she can nurse her baby and steal a little rest. The homesick families comforted by songs from his Blockflöte.

  Some, like Geruscha and Henne, say yes before Lala can finish her plea.

  Others fear Lala, thinking she is a witch or worrying they will be thought one if seen with her. They withdraw into their doorways, clutching sprigs of angelica.

  To them, she promises that, should they help, they will never set eyes on her again. She will never near their threshold as long as they and their children live.

  That, it seems, is all they need to hear.

  Strasbourg considers the burning of an innocent man to be a kind of show.

  If there is to be any chance of saving him, Lala will have to give them a better one.

  Rosella

  On a first-grade field trip, Mrs. Woodlock told our class her version of Cinderella, the one that involved the stepsisters cutting off portions of their feet to fit the enchanted slipper. Five girls burst into tears, one after the other, and as they wailed Emil’s mother looked over at him as though asking her son for some explanation of these tiny, fragile women who sat in front of her.

  But when those girls cried, I laughed.

  I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think the stepsisters’ blood inside the glass slipper was funny. And I tried to press a hand over my mouth, the way I’d seen my mother do in church when the oldest members of the choir fell asleep.

  My laughing would not stop. It flew out of me like wings.

  Emil’s eyes had flashed over to me, the hint of a surprised smile on his always-serious face, as though he thought I was fearless, and brazen.

  But I had laughed because his mother’s story didn’t sound real. It sounded like something meant to be laughed at. The prince in the story sounded so boring—so beside the point, like the whole fairy tale could have happened without him—that to imagine the stepsisters giving up parts of their bodies for him seemed like a joke. A test. Like Emil’s mother wanted to know how gullible we were.

  When I laughed, some of the boys and two other girls did too.

  But I was the only one the teacher told to sit on the bench during recess the next day.

  Emil sat with me. He didn’t say anything or cast me any kind of sympathetic look. He didn’t look at me at all. I would have thought he was waiting for a bus, or about to read a book, but no buses ran on that side of the school, and he didn’t have anything with him. He just sat with me, quiet, hands folded together like he was in a church pew.

  When the teacher came over, wanting to object somehow, Emil just looked up at her. His face showed polite attention, but also dared her to find fault with him and me sitting in silence on opposite sides of a wooden bench.

  That was the start of Emil and me, a gruesome fairy tale. He had been raised on them.

  And now he had just told me another one, one even I couldn’t laugh at.

  An awful fairy tale that was worse for being true.

  A small anger spun and grew in me.

  “You knew,” I said, more clarifying than accusing. “This whole time, you knew.”

  Emil opened his mouth, but hesitated.

  I waited for my anger to wear down, like a rock tumbled through an ocean. But it just got slicker, harder to hold on to. It slipped from my hands and sank so deep I couldn’t have brought it back up if I wanted to. I couldn’t even see it anymore. I couldn’t place the center of my rage. I just felt the weight of it, somewhere down in those depths.

  I had spent this week wondering what in me was so dangerous, so thick with dark magic, that my family’s own work turned against me. I had wondered what made me the one girl who transformed the shimmering spell of red shoes into something terrifying.

  Now I caught the edge of it, that anger I couldn’t place.

  Realizing that Emil had held all this back, I saw every difference between his family and mine.

  His parents were both professors, and my family was two generations away from the maquiladoras. My great-grandparents had worked shifts soldering circuit boards. At my age, my abuela had lost two of her fingertips in punch presses. She had been born in a village whose air and water was so thick with styrene that sometimes her sisters could not remember their own names. They whispered the chemical’s name—estireno—with the dread of mentioning some fierce demon or vengeful saint. My great-grandfather would get headaches so bad he would bang his head on the wall. My great-aunt had died when she was nineteen, selling hairpins and chewing gum because she couldn’t work fast enough for the factories.

  I had worried that I had wrecked everything they had worked for, that I had disgraced all they had survived, with nothing but my own hands.

  I never considered that maybe it wasn’t just me, and my hands.

  Because Emil hadn’t told me.

  He had seen me dancing along the rocks above the reservoir, and he hadn’t told me. He had pulled me out of the water, and he hadn’t told me.

  “And you didn’t think maybe this was something you should’ve mentioned earlier,” I said, more statement than question.

  “What if I had?” he asked. “What could you have done? It was five hundred years ago. What would telling you have done other than scare you?”

  “I spent this whole time thinking you wouldn’t believe me. But if you’d said something…” I faltered. I scrambled to find what I was saying again. “You didn’t even need to tell me it was your family. You could have just told me this was something that happened.”

  “But it is my family.” His voice rose again. “You wanted me to tell you like it was just facts out of a book? Guess what? I can’t. Because five hundred years ago, my relatives lived this. Telling you meant telling you something about us, about me, about what’s in my blood. Do you even get that?”

  Our breathing went hard enough that I could hear both mine and his, a little off rhythm.

  My anger now felt like something I was closing, like one of Emil’s reactions burning itself out.

  “You wanted us to stay away from each other?” I said. “Done.”

  Strasbourg, 1518

  She waits until Tante Dorenia is asleep, then she opens the wooden trunk.

  She lifts out a blue dress, deep as an autumn sky, and a clean shift. The underdress is plain, but so new it is nearly ivory. It looks as clouds against the blue.

  Lala remembers dyeing the cloth, the batch coming out such a perfect shade that Tante could not bear to part with it. She told Lala she would wear it on her wedding day.

  The feeling of a stone in Lala’s stomach warns her that she may not live to see her wedding day, so she will wear this today, this perfect blue.

  If Strasbourg demands a show, she must costume herself.

  Next, she ties two pouches to her waist.

  They weigh against her bare thighs, hidden by her skirt. In their depths, she hides a few things that will fit.

  A small amount of money. A handful of dried sphagnum for the next time she bleeds. The tincture of safflower Tante gave her, so she may pretty her lips and cheeks should she need to charm a man. A pot of fine woad powder, blue as the deepest stretch of the Rhein. A jar of good iron gall ink.

  If she survives this, she will find a way to make up the worth to her aunt.

  Tante Dorenia’s snore, a roaring, unsettling thing on the nights it has kept Lala from sleeping, now sounds of a music she will miss. Enneleyn used to say, without shame, that the prettiest women had the loudest snores. The thought of losing this one weighs deep in Lala’s stomach.

  She presses a light kiss onto her sleeping aunt’s forehead, glossed with summer heat and the strain of her growing child. Tante smells of the garden, of all that Lala will miss. Of wild thyme and tansy, of yarrow and feverfew, of figs and cornelian cherries drying in the sun.

  She kisses her palm and then rests it against her aunt’s belly, to say goodbye to the cousin she will never meet.

  She turns her back only once. She cannot bear to do it a second time.

  On h
er way toward the city, she says goodbye to all these things that have watched her pass from little girl to reckless, heartbroken woman.

  The blossoming woad, the yellow flowers of the plant that yield such blue dye.

  The flax in bloom, the sky-colored petals making the field seem a mirror for the heavens.

  The places that grew beneath her hands, and that grew her.

  Emil

  “A fire, Emil?” his mother asked.

  Emil breathed out. “Please stop saying it like that. It sounds like you think I set it. Anyway, it’s out. I got it all cleaned up this afternoon.”

  She set the first aid kit on the kitchen table. “What is going on with you?”

  “Nothing. This season is just getting to me.”

  His mother eyed the floor. “I don’t see a pair of red shoes on your feet.”

  He gave a tired laugh. “And yet.”

  Gerta rubbed her face against the table leg and then went for the hem of Emil’s jeans.

  Gerta, one of the few signs of Briar Meadow’s falls that had stayed.

  His mother gestured for his arm, with the kind of brusque insistence that left no room for objection.

  She smoothed antibiotic jelly onto the side of his forearm. “It’s so strange, isn’t it?”

  Emil tried not to suck air in through his teeth. “What is?”

  “In Strasbourg,” she said. “All those years ago.”

  Her eyes flashed between his face and his arm a couple of times, as though waiting for him to remember something. It came with an expression he knew well, one that said, Don’t you know this? I could have sworn I told you this.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a shake of her head. “I still forget sometimes you don’t want to hear about these things.”

  He caught his mother’s eye. “I want to hear about these things.”

  The words came out flat, but with enough weight that his mother’s expression turned.

  “Red shoes were supposed to help cure the dancing plague,” she said. “And look at what they’re doing now. Everyone in red shoes falling in love, driving faster, cooking with more salt and spice. What would the sixteenth-century church think of our little town?”