Dark and Deepest Red(18)

Sewastian looks among them, as though he cannot tell them apart. As though they do not look as different as any six girls in Strasbourg. Geruscha, with her pretty but serious features and rush-colored hair. Henne, with her tan forehead and her chignon so tight it seems to pull at her face. Melisende and Agnesona, who, with their covered heads, have only pale green eyes to give color to their faces. Enneleyn, with her linen-flax hair.

And Lala, in all her shades of brown.

“Lavinia Blau,” Sewastian says.

Her own name lands with a stone’s weight.

Lala swallows, and steps forward.





Emil


It was stranger than the year bats hovered over backyards, fluttering alongside hummingbirds in the half dark before sunrise and after sunset. Stranger than the year that points of light, like the embers off a sparkler, drifted around houses where babies would soon be born.

Tonight, Rosella Oliva had kissed him. It was as much unexpected magic as anything that ever came to Briar Meadow.

He could feel the oddness of the season in the night air. It held the bitter tang of ashes, and the clean cold of the sky. The bright eye of the almost-full moon winked between clouds, like it knew he could still taste her lip gloss on his mouth.

That was what he wanted to hold with him as he fell asleep.

Instead, he dreamed of a time centuries earlier. He dreamed of the corner of Alsace, where his family lived five hundred years ago. The stone bridges and towers, the shuttered windows overlooking the canals, the city walls that shortened the daylight hours.

And the fever his father had told him about a long time ago, the plague of uncontrollable dancing, stranger than anything that had ever happened in Briar Meadow. In his dreams, he could hear their steps striking the stone. He could smell the dust they were kicking up, and the blood on their heels.

He could catch the smallest glimpse of a dark-haired, brown-skinned girl, and the salt-sting of her horror as she watched it all.

When he woke, sitting up fast and breathing hard, the feeling didn’t leave him. Ancestors whose names he didn’t know seemed to rise and fill the dark. Their calls sounded like the far-off shriek of the wind. Their fear came so sharp he thought they were dragging him back across five hundred years.

He slowed his breath.

Yes, he still had his Romanipen. That meant knowing his family’s dead a little better than most gadje knew theirs. But ever since that day he’d listened on the stairs, he’d stayed clear of his parents trying to tell him about their family’s history. If it got into him, it could spill out of him again, like those things he never should have said at school.

He couldn’t tell what he didn’t know. And he didn’t know their names, the name of this girl, because he hadn’t let his father tell him.





Strasbourg, 1518


The bailiff is a man more imposing in posture than body, but the sight of him still makes Lala’s neck tighten.

“It is no secret that this town has fallen under a sort of madness,” he says, gesturing at a plain wooden chair.

As she lowers herself, her spirit feels as though it is drifting from her body.

The room is small, sun streaming in from a single window, high and narrow.

In the center stands a table upon which a hundred men and women have probably signed confessions they could not even read.

“Whenever such afflictions reveal themselves,” the bailiff says, “there are always rumors.”

Lala shuts her eyes, bracing for the charge of witchcraft, for the entrance of the friar who will extract her confession.

The bailiff walks back and forth, his fine, heavy boots sounding his steps. When he stops, he looks at her and says, “There are those who whisper that you are not true Strasbourgeois. And neither is your aunt.”

Lala’s stomach turns over.

It is not just her.

It is Tante Dorenia with her.

Lala cannot help it; she turns over her hands on her lap, her fingers still blue-green from the woad dye.

Richest blue from those yellow and green plants. Perfect black from the oak galls. To Strasbourg’s finest merchants, such color must seem a kind of alchemy. Magic in fine blue and ink black.

And in the hands of two women, it will be called witchcraft.

“The magistrate,” the bailiff says, “has no wish for this matter to continue, but only to see it resolved.”

At the word magistrate, Lala’s heart feels brittle as an icicle.

She will be blamed for la fièvre. She will be drowned, or hanged, or burned. She cannot stop herself from imagining the chill of the water, the tightening of the rope, the vicious teeth of the flames.

And Tante. The thought of her bibio being dragged to the stake or gallows leaves her breathless.

She opens her mouth to confess, to keep Tante Dorenia out of it, when the bailiff speaks again.

“As you know,” he says, “it has been some time since we have forbidden die Zigeuner within our city walls.”

Lala’s heart stops, pivots, turns.

The words bring the echo of a common law, not just here but throughout Alsace and far past the Vogesen. The one that chased her and Tante from Riquewihr, and so many other families from their homes.

Wer Zigeuner sch?digt, frevelt nicht.

Whoever harms a Gypsy commits no crime.

These few words remind Lala of what she has known her whole life: that gadje will get away with killing their men and burning their houses. And the law provides generous room for it.