Dark and Deepest Red(23)

Those with bells dangling from their belts add to the music, their bodies living tambourines. Some dress as devils or beasts, masks over their eyes. Some whom Lala knows to be wealthy burghers wear ripped clothes, playing at being peasants.

Both the stricken and well dance so hard that sweat drenches their bodies. The unafflicted whirl as if spinning around a bonfire.

With one lapse in attention, Lala loses Enneleyn.

She searches for Enneleyn’s gown, for the white and yellow lilies embroidered onto the field of green, the thread the same shades as the striped lining.

“Enneleyn?” she calls, feeling as lost as a younger sister.

The sound vanishes under the guiterres and citterns, the vielles à roue and lutes. The music is a tangle of fifes and fiddles, the twinkling of flutes mixed with the hard chimes of tambourines.

Lala stands at the edge of the fray, amid the smell of spilled wine, the storm of limbs, the sound of drum and horn.

The afflicted pass through the crowd so perfectly that, at first, Lala can’t pick them out. The sisters of stricken dancers leap alongside them. Men twirl women with so much abandon it seems there is no fever at all, only this great dance. Strong men have been hired not just to haul the drink, but to dance alongside the women, to keep them going.

The only sign of worry is the mothers of the younger girls, chasing after them with brown bread and thinned wine. Each time one collapses, two or three women rush to where she has fallen with water or ale.

All have put on their finest. The ladies who can afford taffeta and damask flaunt their gleam. The burghers wear black underdyed with blue to keep the color fast. Even the poorer Strasbourgeois wear their best hemp and wool, newly dyed with plants and lichen. The color, Lala can tell, has been done cheaply, without mordants or underdye, and will fade within weeks. But for tonight, these skirts and tunics paint the air green and yellow. A few farmers’ daughters even wear lighter shades of woad blue; Tante offers her less intensely hued lots at softer prices, especially to families she likes.

Lala collides with a tall, well-built young man, feeling his solid form before she sees his face. He is both slender and muscled, in a way built more for admiring than work. His slashed sleeves reveal a near-purple fabric beneath.

Lala lifts her eyes, trying to comprehend the strange costume this burgher’s son has chosen.

Another moment makes his dress sickeningly clear.

He has darkened his face and hair with roots and donned a turban of coiled silk, like the young men declaring they are Turks at Carnival.

It makes her want to slap them all in their painted faces.

She looks away, pretending to study the other dancers. She can pick out the afflicted only by the way they leap a little higher and spin out of time from the music.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

She moves her eyes back to his, the green a shade darker than Enneleyn’s dress.

“My costume,” he says. “I would think you would enjoy it. It’s so much like you.”

Now her voice comes. “Pardon?”

He skims his eyes along her hair and dress. “Exotic.”

He nearly purrs the word, and it bucks in her stomach.

Exotic. The word such men use when they want to make dark-eyed women into their mistresses, or rare pale deer into their pets. A word that carries both their thrill and the sense that they are entitled to all that interests them.

Exotic. What Melisende and Agnesona probably say of her and the stories about her being the bastard daughter of some southern Italian nobleman.

Exotic. The word that makes Lala pull out of this man’s hold.

The burgher’s son grabs her arm. “I thought you wanted to get acquainted.” He gives her a smile that is both bright with his wealth and slack from how much he has had to drink. “You did throw yourself toward me, after all.”

Lala shoves him back.

His grip tightens, and Lala can feel the bruises it will leave.

The burgher’s son pulls her close. “Do not think a borrowed dress makes you highborn.”

Lala feels her heartbeat at her throat. She wills Enneleyn to appear, to make some joke about how young men are such brutes, to shame this one away with her smile.

Lala has never been so proud or foolish as to refuse help. Not from Enneleyn. Not from Tante.

Not from Alifair.

But the appearance of Alifair now, with his hair lightened by the summer and his skin tanned by it, makes her nearly as wary as the hold of the burgher’s son.

Lala arrived at the great dance with burghers’ daughters, instead of with Alifair, precisely to keep his name from scandal. And now here he is, shoving the burgher’s son off Lala.

“Stop,” Lala yells, careful not to say Alifair’s name, in case the burgher’s son does not know it. She does not want to give him an easier path to complaining about a rude apprentice.

But Alifair pushes the burgher’s son back harder, his grip breaking off Lala.

The burgher’s son raises an arm to backhand Alifair.

Alifair does not flinch.

Lala leans forward, ready to grab the threatening arm.

But the far sound of yelling stills the three of them.

Past the stationed guards, Lala catches sight of the carts, sent to Saverne, and now back. She glimpses the last moment of the afflicted resting on the carts, and then the fever drawing them in again.

It takes hold of them. The noise of the great dance—the drums, the fifes, the tambourines—has them spilling forward.