Dark and Deepest Red(25)

But if anyone knew what the red shoes had done to me the night before, everyone would blame me, not the odd magic lacing the air in town every year. It would be my body, brown and unknowable, that they would consider at fault.

In Briar Meadow, everyone probably thought they were above anything as old-fashioned as suspicions of witchcraft. Here, our magic was small and contained, held within a single week each year. It followed rules set by the light above the res ervoir. It stirred us, maybe even unsettled us sometimes, but it didn’t have teeth. And if it was found to have grown teeth, it would be my fault. They would blame me, the suspicions the same even if they considered themselves too forward-thinking to call it witchcraft.

My own skin, my own body, would be the thing that had turned the red shoes vicious. My brown hands stitching them together, that would be what had sharpened them into something deadly.

The rise of Graham and Aubrey’s shared laugh reminded me. Everyone else in red shoes was falling in love, or setting butter and sugar on their tongues.

But my red shoes, the ones I had made by hand, had taken me by my ankles.

If anyone knew, they wouldn’t just blame me. They would blame my family. The stain of it could spoil every pair of shoes they made, not just the red ones.

If my mother wouldn’t even tell people that we went to curanderas for fevers or nightmares, I knew better than to tell anyone this.

“Look.” Piper took my arm and tried a blush on my wrist. “You are making this way too complicated. Do you like Woodlock or not?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not—”

“Then stop overanalyzing.” She frowned at the carnation pink and shook her head, a declaration as final as a signature. “Who cares if you needed a really fabulous pair of shoes to give you a push?”

Her choice of words made pain flash through my arches.

But I took the out she was offering.

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am,” Piper said.

If I wanted to get myself out of these shoes—without tearing down everything I had done to become one of Briar Meadow’s adored daughters, without wrecking my family’s business—I was on my own.





Strasbourg, 1518


Lala and Alifair dry the woad in the sun, pressing the leaves into boules de cocagnes the size and shape of late-season apples, then pounding them into powder. To so many, it’s a weed, but in skilled hands, the leaves of this yellow-flowering plant produce such brilliant blue it seems a sorcerer’s trick.

They wait for Tante Dorenia to start the dyeing. They don’t dare try on their own.

“You never know what blue the powder will give,” Tante reminds them. “You are both too young to have the touch for it yet.” It takes a different skill, she says, to dye a blue for show than to dye a bottom color for black, or to overdye weld yellow to make green.

At her command, they lower the presoaked garments into the vat.

“Mind the bubbles,” Tante says. “Or you’ll never get an even color.”

The bubbles are always on Lala’s side. Alifair’s hands are too steady.

Alifair keeps the greatest distance from her he can and still hold the cloth. He reads Lala as well as he reads the turning of leaves before rain. He seems to know she wants him to stay away from her, but the fact that he does not know why, and cannot know why, leaves Lala’s heart as heavy as a hailstone.

None of them speaks of Delphine, or the few others who have fallen down dead from this ceaseless dance. Or the miller’s daughter, whose life went out of her the moment she took the weight of the horse’s hoof.

They lie in the cathedral crypt, priests blessing their worn-out bodies and the souls that once dwelled in them.

Tante marks how long to dye the cloth by the length of Hail Marys and paternosters. She knows just how much muttered penance is needed for each shade of blue.

The wet cloth grows heavy in Lala’s hands. She can feel Alifair trying to take more of its weight.

Just as Lala’s arms tremble, Tante says, “Now bring it up.”

The fabric lifts out yellow as the woad’s flowers. Lala and Alifair haul it to the line and flop it over, heavy as a great fish.

Lala blots her hands and forearms on her blue-stained apron, and the three of them stand back. To Lala, this part has always been worth the pulping and the alum fermenting and the grinding. As the air and sun hit the wet cloth, it turns, from that yellow to leaf green, and then to the blue of woad dye. This moment, waiting to see where the shade will settle, has always held the thrill and fear of months.

But there’s no joy in it now, not when Alifair will not even meet her eye. Not when the miller’s son mourns his youngest sister with a cry so haunting it still pierces the air.

And not when the council’s great dance has left the city with more afflicted, not fewer. More dancers than ever crowd the squares; the crier’s announcements can hardly keep up with their numbers. They whirl in the full sun of morning, in the hot, unaired guilds and within the crush of the market walls.

The fifes and horns, the tambourines and drums, only lured more to the terrifying dance, their loved ones watching with pained cries.

All that is left from the council’s great cure is a mess. Refuse from the market and guildhalls scatters the streets. Boots trample ribbons fallen from girls’ hair. Blood from the dancers’ feet mixes with spilled wine.