Dark and Deepest Red(14)

Years ago, they would both go down so far that there was no light, because neither of them wanted to be the first to move back toward the surface. That was everything down there, deciding your own distance from the sun, letting it go and then finding it again. Fingertips brushing each other’s skin in ways you could pretend never happened once you came up for air.

It was dark enough now to pretend none of this was happening either.

Except now Rosella kissed him. Hard, in a way so lacking in hesitation that it would go with him into his dreams.

His first out-of-nowhere thought was that his glasses got in the way less than he’d always thought they would. But it burned out and faded as she ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, and pressed the other against his back.

Maybe the glimmer came every year. But something this year caught on the air. It was bitter as smoke, and sweet as the raw crystals of honey. It was a current arcing between them. It was the moment that turned a solution from one color to the next, amber to red, fast as a blink. It was the slight change in chemistry that let algae blooms grow on the ocean, bright as a tide of gas flames.

And he couldn’t be sure, not with his eyes closed, but for a second, he could have sworn he caught the glimmer above them flashing as red as Rosella’s shoes.





Strasbourg, 1518


“Help me with this,” Tante says, dragging the wooden table.

Lala takes the other side. “What are you doing?”

Tante conducts it toward the door like a battering ram at a fortress gate, and Lala has no choice but to trot backward.

“Just until we’re done with the chopping,” Tante says.

“We prepare vegetables out of doors now?” Lala asks, keeping the table from crashing into the frame. Sometimes the house seems so brittle that a stubborn enough cow could knock it over.

“It’s the raw garlic and leeks,” Tante says, setting down her side in the grass. “The smell is making me ill.”

“You always loved that smell,” Lala says.

She brings her aunt a handful of dried cherries, to settle the stomach.

“Do you want parsley?” Lala asks. “To chew on.”

“No, I do not want parsley,” Tante snaps.

Lala cannot blame her aunt for her foul mood. The summer is so deep and harsh it seems molten, as though the air might spark and catch. It is the kind of blazing July that will not soften until September. The back of Lala’s neck is damp where her hair falls against it. A dew of sweat is forever beading Alifair’s forehead.

They have almost finished with the onions and carrots when they see the women traveling the lane.

Lala dries her leek-damp hands on her apron and nears the path.

Among what little passing talk she can distinguish—mentions of the canon priests, of heaven and hell, of a blaze of light brought by a falling star outside Ensisheim—one word rises above the others.

Possessed.

The word flares inside Lala’s chest. It brings with it the buzzing sense of a warning, the sounds that come a moment before wasps swarm.

And then a name, a name that must haunt Alifair’s dreams.

Delphine.

Lala runs to catch up, her guilt like pebbles in her shoes.

“Lavinia,” Tante calls down the lane.

But Lala does not stop. None of them stop.

She follows the dirt road until Strasbourg proper rises from the fields and forest. The city walls cast their shadows. The roofs and gables of the wealthy Strasbourgeois top the crowded lanes. The spires of churches pierce the blue, and the single tower of the cathedral soars toward the clouds.

The women in the square move so quickly that Lala cannot count them.

Skirts of wool and linen and hemp fly out from hopping legs. Fine embroidered skirts wilt in the heat, as though the very flowers stitched into the cloth are dying away. Coifs and wimples soak through with sweat. They dance, joyless, on bleeding feet and twisted ankles.

Already their hose has torn. Already their shoes are thinning, damp with sweat and the fluid of blisters. The blood of the barefoot paints the stone.

Mothers turn their daughters’ faces away, worried that a glance might afflict them, like the old plagues so easily spread they passed with a look. A few fathers stand their sons to watch, lecturing them about the evils of immoral women.

The relatives of these women, some highborn, some no wealthier than Lala and Tante, make snatching tries at grabbing their loved ones from the fray. But the force of this dance makes the women too quick, their paths too strong. And if they are caught for more than a few moments, they scream as though the hold is burning them.

Lala catches the breath of that word. It carries on the murmuring voices of the crowd.

Possessed.

It seems the only word to explain it, how a few of the most godly women within the city walls have been afflicted with this strange dance. Cateline, the book binder’s wife, who offered milk to a journeyman’s infant son; the mother’s breasts were dry until a month after she gave birth, and they could not afford to hire a nurse. Frederuna, whose knees bleed from nights of saying paternosters. Berchte and Brida, the sisters who bake bread for those who cannot afford it.

And Delphine.

There she is, spinning at the center.

Delphine, a woman thought strange for how she knots her apron strings when nervous, but a woman seen in mass as often as any wife in Strasbourg.