Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The priest finishes his prayer, makes a sign of the cross, and lifts his head. “I must gaze into her soul.” He walks forward, the hem of his robe lapping out with each slow step.

  Far too slow for the executioner, who says, “Get on with it, old man. We’ll burn her too.”

  The priest takes Lala’s chin in his hand, and her heart bends in on itself for how much this feels like Tante, studying her forehead to discern the cause of a fever.

  He makes a great show of looking in Lala’s eyes.

  Lala twists her longing for Tante into rage. She pretends to wither and writhe beneath the holy man’s gaze. She hisses and throws her head side to side, as much as Sewastian’s grip will let her.

  Lala bares her teeth as though the priest’s gaze singes her.

  The priest draws away his hand.

  “The devil is indeed in this child,” he says, his voice sounding of such heaviness in his heart that Lala wonders if he should have been a player in morality tales. “But if you kill her, her legion will only find another soul to bewitch.”

  “Then what do we do with her?” The older sergeant’s frustration clips each word.

  The priest lifts his head to the sky in holy contemplation, and the executioner swears in impatience.

  Each time the priest looks upon Lala, she writhes and shrieks, and Sewastian’s thick fingers dig into her upper arms.

  “We may turn to the Word of the Lord for our answers,” the priest says, with weighted patience.

  If fright weren’t chilling Lala’s blood, she would enjoy how well the priest is exasperating the other men.

  “As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, two men were stricken with demons,” the priest says. “The demons withered beneath the observance of our Lord Jesus. And when He ordered them out, they begged to be cast out into a herd of pigs, who then rushed into a steep lake and died in the water.”

  “Get to the point.” Sewastian tightens his grip on Lala. “What do we do with her?”

  The priest pauses, an overdone affect of piety gilding his face. “Have you not listened, my son? You must drive her and all her legion into the countryside, as our Lord Jesus cast the demons into the pigs. With great prayer, perhaps Christ in his mercy will send them into a pack of wolves, and neither shall trouble us again.”

  He sets an eye on Lala, a reminder of what he told her in the cathedral.

  Powerful men may count you as lowly as an animal, Lavinia, but the Lord counts men hating you as a sign of that which is holy within you.

  “You must send her out into the countryside, never to pass through the city gate again.” The priest returns his eyes to the two men. “Her and any demons who would follow her. Let them leave these good people and go with her.”

  Emil

  The fever left them, like both of them had worn it out. It left them for long enough that they fell into a kind of sleep that was so dreamless it felt strange and soft, like the brush of her hair against his cheek.

  After, it all seemed like it belonged in the same place as his dreams, this dark-haired girl among the amber trees. This girl he had mistaken for a woman from five hundred years ago, in a place where green oaks stayed in leaf even through hard winters. This girl, a dark silhouette against the fire-colored leaves, the red of her lips so bright it burned into him.

  When he woke up, her cheek on his collarbone, her hair fanned over his shoulder, he looked for those same leaves. He looked for trees bright as sodium flames.

  Instead, he blinked into daylight, and found a million rounds of flickering green.

  The sun had bleached away the forms of the trees he’d grown up under.

  What was left was not Briar Meadow’s woods. It wasn’t the road, or the houses beyond, or anything of the town he knew. All of it had blurred away. The night had brightened as fast as a match igniting.

  Rosella stirred, the soft noise of waking at the back of her throat.

  Both of them squinted into the daylight and those leaves that shivered like green wings.

  His eyes adjusted.

  The glare came less from the sky and more from around them, like they were in a room whose walls were light.

  They followed that light, and the leaves around them went fuzzy at the edges. It happened like the colors of a painting running and then settling into something else. The trunks turned into city walls. The undergrowth hardened to the stone of the quays. The tallest tree became the cathedral spire.

  It all held the same charge and apprehension as his dreams. And like his dreams, the haze of sleep both softened and sharpened the edges of things. It smoothed over the slope of canal bridges. It brightened the sun off the water. That single spire looked like a knife piercing the sky.

  It all seemed so far from them, like they were watching from the Rhine. But he could not miss the shapes of dresses and tunics, and the smell of dust on the cobbled stones.

  The familiarity flickered in his blood. It came with the same recognition as meeting a relative for the first time.

  Strasbourg, centuries before he was born.

  Emil made out the form of a crowd, a crush of figures mostly in skirts but some in men’s clothes. They threw their arms toward the sky. They each spun to their own rhythm, none of them in time with another.

  The understanding caught in his throat at the same time Rosella stopped a gasp in hers.

  This was the dancing.

  Dozens—hundreds?—of women and a few men casting themselves in time with music no one could hear.

  On the quay, among the crush of the crowd, stood a woman—or a girl? She seemed no older than he and Rosella were. She stood in a deep blue dress, her black hair spilling down her back.

  The sight of her rang in him so loudly he thought the cathedral bells had sounded the hour. He could map this woman’s blood to his own. He could find traces of her features in old family photos and even in his own face.

  He could match her scream to the shape of her mouth and throat and rib cage.

  She stood just forward of a young man, his hands bound with heavy rope.

  Emil placed them against what he knew of Strasbourg, the vague map that came from seeing his father’s books a hundred times. He registered the reason for the crowd.

  Both left him sick.

  The young woman and the young man were being paraded along the canals.

  They were being led from the Henckerturm, the Tour du Bourreau, the executioner’s tower, to the Pont du Corbeau.

  The route of public display before executions.

  Men surrounded them. One holding the young woman still. Two on either side of the young man, one of them probably an executioner.

  Executioner. A misnomer for a man whose job in medieval Strasbourg was not only to kill but to torment, torture, plague until the moment of death.

  And one more man, a far shorter one, this one in priest’s garb. But why would he be here? Why would he not be waiting at the Pont du Corbeau to give them confession before their deaths?

  Fear lit the young man’s and the young woman’s eyes.

  But something else came with it.

  A hard set to the young man’s.

  A defiance in the young woman’s, a vicious will.

  A look as though, if they were going to burn her and this young man, she was going to burn the city down with them.

  Emil had no way to know, but in the next moment, the woman flinched in a way he swore was from feeling Emil’s watch on her back.

  She turned her gaze, as much as she could. For a second, he thought maybe she saw him.

  Then the priest commanded her attention again.

  The cathedral’s high stained glass threw deep blue down to where they stood.

  Emil looked down at Rosella’s shoes, turned purple in the blue light.

  Rosella didn’t know what his mother had told him. The red shoes at Saverne. The dyed cloth crafted into dozens or hundreds of pairs. How they were meant to cure the fever.

  How history had grabbed
hold of her.

  From the way she stared at the scene in front of them, her breath held still on her tongue, he thought she understood. The weight of his own rage seemed shared between their bodies, his grief over this girl and boy about to die, who had already died.

  Emil wanted to set a dozen colors of fire to the bridge so everyone else would scatter in wonder and horror, and they would live.

  But no one saw them except his relative. They were really here no more than he was in the history that played through his dreams.

  There was no crossing the wide river of five hundred years between him and this boy and girl about to die. No altering what had already been.

  All there was, was watching.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The priest casts pronouncements with more certainty than Lala has ever heard from this humble man.

  Any who follow her are the legion of the devil within her. If they are saints possessed, they will return when the demons have left them.

  The canon priests’ rage is bright as their jeweled rings.

  But the dancers block them from reaching Lala and the sergeants.

  They watch, but can do nothing.

  “We do not make deals with the devil’s children,” the friar calls out.

  “Burn her,” a canon priest shouts, his head bobbing to see between the dancers.

  Lala’s heart pleats, folding in her bristling terror that they will kill her rather than bargain with demons.

  The newest dancers move in a wave, their leaping bodies barring the way as they call out for the priest to help them, to free them from the devils within them.

  The canon priests step back, hesitation and scorn in their eyes. Of course, they must think, those possessed by demons would insulate their demon queen. Of course her legion would not want the canon priests reaching her.

  The chorus rises, sharp and sudden and miraculous as an appearance of the Virgin. More voices sound than Lala and Geruscha and Henne could have begged to join.

  Make her leave us, they shout.

  Do it, please.

  Save us.

  A few words come in voices Lala knows.

  Melisende and Agnesona cast their arms to heaven, shrieking. They wail and dance with such fervor that their circlets and veils fall away, their red hair tumbling about their shoulders. Agnesona throws herself on the ground, writhing and turning.

  Melisende, and Agnesona, and Lala. All three of them missing the girl who was their anchoring point, like the center jewel in a brooch.

  The sisters turn themselves into a chaos of tormented limbs and pained voices.

  Please, they beg, their words overlapping. Cast her out and her demons with her. Please. Make them leave this city!

  The canons hold fearful sneers on their faces.

  “Get on with it,” one yells over the dancers’ heads.

  “Fulfill your office,” another adds, “before she curses them all.”

  “Please,” the kind priest says, glancing at Alifair, seeding so much desperation into his voice that Lala would believe him as an entertainer in a king’s court. “Perhaps he can still be saved with prayer and confession. Perhaps we need not lose him.”

  It is a performance so beautiful Lala could kiss the ground at the priest’s feet.

  Lala’s heart catches to see the skittishness in Alifair’s face, the way he shudders at these voices because he does not realize she has bid them. She wants nothing but to kiss his eyelashes and brush his hair with her fingers. It is an ache as deep as the soreness between her hips each month.

  But Lala hardens her voice, the way she imagines a sorceress in a fairy story would. “My demon prince will follow only me.”

  Confusion dims Alifair’s features as he takes in the oddness of her speech.

  “You need not follow, young man,” the priest says, making a fine act of his pleading.

  Lala tips her head down slowly, opening her eyes to Alifair, to try to tell him, Trust me, you must trust me.

  His shoulders settle, and Lala breathes with the hope that he understands.

  He draws toward her, leading with his chest, as though she is pulling him by the rib cage.

  She takes hold of him, one hand at his back, the other at his collarbone as though she commands his heart.

  She steals him, like tearing a pearl from a rich woman’s throat, and the priest cries out his feigned grief.

  Alifair tilts his head back at her touch, as though she bewitches him. His hair smells of the salt from his sweat and the rope that binds his wrists. But it smells also, still, of hazel and bay. The wind over fields of flax and woad.

  “What have you done?” he whispers.

  “We are aspen trees, you and I,” she whispers back, her voice soft even as she keeps her face hard, to look as though she is issuing a command to her apprentice demon. “You cannot tear our fates apart, even to save me.”

  Alifair’s smile is more like a breath, small and momentary, and it is broken by the hard interruption of shouting voices.

  “Take her oath,” a canon priest yells.

  “Do it now,” another shouts.

  “Resist the demons within you,” the kind priest begs Alifair, a last performance. “You need not go with her.”

  “Come off it,” the executioner says, a tremble in his rough voice. Now even he believes that Lala may damn all in the city. “You heard them. Do something.”

  The priest gives his best look of defeat before raising his head.

  “Be gone from us,” he tells Lala. “You and all your legion.”

  Lala draws breath from the sergeants’ fear, the executioner’s fear, the fear of the gathered crowd, those caught between wanting to run and wanting to learn what will become of this scene.

  “I will curse you all,” she says, thinking of her heart turning to live embers. “Lay a hand on me or mine, and I will curse you all even in my death.”

  The priest grabs her hand, pulling her away from Alifair. He casts sad eyes to Alifair, the look of a grieving shepherd.

  He sets Lala’s hand on the Bible.

  “Swear on our Lord’s Word that you will be gone from us,” the priest says, “or may His wrath cast you into the sea of darkness.”

  Lala hisses and writhes as though the touch of the book burns her.

  The priest holds her hand fast. “Swear you will not harm another of these souls.”

  She tosses her head, whipping her hair into her face.

  “Enter the city gates again,” the executioner says—even now he must have his word—“and flames will be the last sight you ever know.”

  “Give the oath,” the priest says, “or your hand will stay upon this holy book until the Lord’s return.”

  Lala glares up at him.

  “I swear it,” she says through gritted teeth. “And I swear it on pain of a thousand devils.” She spits the words at the crowd around her. “I will take my legion with me and I will keep them from this wretched place.”

  The crowd gasps at the words.

  The priest remains steady. It is a shimmering moment, one that will probably make him a canon should he want the office.

  “Then by God and by His saints and angels,” the priest says, “I hereby banish you, the demon living within our Lavinia, the demon who torments our Alifair, and all yours who here afflict.”

  Rosella

  The girl in the blue dress looked so much like Emil that I knew, even before I saw the recognition in his face. They belonged to each other in a way that crossed five hundred years.

  She had hair more like his or mine than the oil-shined coifs of women in the crowd, and she wore it loose instead of braided or covered. The heat and her own sweat had fluffed it, what my hair used to look like by noon before I started carrying a brush like Piper taught me to. She had skin and eyes so close to Emil’s that they looked like colors she had passed down to him.

  She was already beautiful, even through the far lens of all those centuries. On top of a cream underdr
ess she had on a dress as deep blue as an autumn sky, a color she wore as well as if she’d been born in it.

  But the defiance in her eyes could have singed the hems of her captors’ sleeves. And it gave her a raw gleam; I couldn’t look at her long without feeling the sting of that brightness.

  It had frightened the proud men enough that they loosened their hold.

  Then, with a last look between her and Emil, with the act of her seeing him, truly seeing him, all of it vanished. The bridges and the water and the towering cathedral spire whirled around us, as though we were dancing again.

  It spun down into a single still point, and we were back in the dark trees, back in a town and time we knew as well as our own bodies.

  “She didn’t die,” Emil said, his hands on my upper arms like he was trying to keep me warm. “They didn’t die,” he said, breathing the words more than saying them.

  “They didn’t die,” I said, half confirmation, half echo.

  I wanted Emil to find his next breath in that space, the possibility that this girl, and the boy she had loved enough to take with her, had survived.

  The cloud cover between the trees was iris-petal blue. The season was sloping down toward winter, toward bright snow and silver icicles. It was always that moment, between one season and the next, when we let that year’s glimmer go. It would fade, and everything would settle.

  Briar Meadow stirred around us, flickering with the moment of this season’s strange magic leaving us.

  We knew, by now, that we had to let go of any magic that got caught in the boughs of our trees. We had watched crescent moons that burned as bright as full ones dim again, like candle wicks catching and then settling. We had waited for grandfathers to stop consulting crows on the morning weather report, and the crows to stop answering back. We saw mothers and daughters who’d spent nights on roofs trying to count every star climb down and back into upstairs windows.

  Briar Meadow had spent years learning to let go. If you tried to hold on to something past its season, it turned on you. Coywolf pups bit. A reservoir that had been warm enough to swim in froze over. Fireflies caught in jars blew the glass apart with their heat.