Dark and Deepest Red(29)

Each time Lala breathes, she discovers there is more to lose.

“Lala,” Tante says.

Lala looks up.

“Who is one who goes to town and stays there?” Tante says.

Lala shakes her head, to say she does not know this one.

“A road,” her aunt says.

An idea flares within Lala, and catches fire.

Any blame cast toward Lala will stain not only her, but Alifair, and Tante, and now Tante’s child. And the dancers cannot be made to stop, so it is the affliction itself that must be stanched.

If it will take a cure to the fever to spare them all from being blamed, Lala will defy the laws of the earth and the heavens to see it end.

She will defy even the dead.





Rosella


I snuck into the workroom, slipping into this world whose colors shifted every time I crossed the threshold. Tonight it was heeled shoes the gold of saffron threads. Slippers that looked made of olive leaves. Beading as delicate as hoarfrost.

If the shoes sealed to my feet were made by my abuelo and taken apart by my abuela, then maybe, somewhere in their things, was something that could help me pry them off.

On a high shelf sat my abuela’s sewing box, the top upholstered in worn cloth. I took it down, setting it on the floor and kneeling in front of it. It held the things my parents no longer used, but couldn’t even think about throwing out. Needles still holding the last of thread dye lots. A moss-green measuring tape gone brittle with age. Bits of my grandparents’ favorite velvets and satins. Old tea tins filled with straight pins.

A seam ripper.

My eyes caught on its point, still gleaming silver even after years untouched.

The workroom door creaked open.

I whirled around.

“What are you doing down there?” my father asked.

With my hands in the sewing box, and the red shoes glinting on my feet, I almost, almost thought of telling him.

But every way I could explain felt like these needles, sharp, and so easily dropped and lost. How would I tell him that I had sewn these beautiful shoes back together, and this was what had come of it, a terrifying fever dream?

And what could my father do for me? I was the one who had done this. I had made Briar Meadow’s magic flinty and dangerous. My hands, my body, had turned the gentle enchantment of red shoes to a bitter spell.

The thought of disgracing my family, and their craft, was a deeper ache than the soreness in my tendons. My great-grandparents had worked to get out of the maquiladoras. They had learned this trade in the poison air from the blowdown stacks, from fingertips lost to equipment that never got kept up, palms stained with burning varnish. They had gotten out, and they had turned all of it into their craft.

Everything my family had worked for. If anyone found out about my red shoes, I would ruin it all.

“Nothing.” I shut the sewing box. “It’s silly.”

My father opened the woven top of the basket. “It’s not silly.” He took one of the beads rattling around in the top tray and looped it onto a length of indigo thread. “I miss them too.”

He gave my red shoes a pained glance.

“Especially this year,” he said, with a sad smile that cracked my heart in two.

I said nothing, and then I bristled under the lie of my own silence.

I would have to come back for that seam ripper later, in the dark, while my parents slept.

My father tied the bead onto my neck. In the hollow of my collarbone, it looked like a rose hip.

It grew heavy with the weight of lying to my own father, about his own parents.





Strasbourg, 1518


As she approaches la cathédrale in the early dawn, she prays into her hands. Not just into her palms and fingers, but into three blue ribbons cupped in the hollow.

Until she reaches the cave of Saint Vitus, these dyed ribbons, laced with her prayers, are all the protection she can leave for those she loves.

The thought of the forested road to Saverne casts a shiver onto her back. But she must go. The stares of Strasbourg’s wives, the piercing gaze of the miller’s son, drive her on. If she cannot stop la fièvre de la danse, there is only so long before she, and Alifair, and Tante will be blamed for it.

Tante, with her baby growing inside her.

As Lala steps through the cathedral’s heavy door and into the nave, her stomach both hollows with awe and roils in revulsion. The vaulted stone of the ceilings seems to reach heaven itself. The stained glass looks like rainbows woven together. The gilded pulpit gleams with the same gold from which the city mint stamps coins.

Geld und gut. Gold and goods. It is a song that men hold dearer on their tongues than any prayer or communion host. All this, built off the wealth of wine and grains, off the profit of the cannon foundries, and off the backs of those so poor they sell their last seed to pay their taxes.

All this, built on marsh, so soft that wooden piles had to be driven deep into the earth and then tipped with iron just so the ground could support the weight of the stone.

Lala passes the Dreik?nigsuhr, the Three Kings Clock of iron and gilded copper. She stares with wonder at the wooden rooster that, at appointed times, spreads his wings and opens his beak to reveal a clockwork tongue. The astrolabe dials and the carillon of bells always seemed like a kind of forbidding magic.

The astrolabe. A reminder that the Strasbourgeois consider each illness to correspond to a configuration in the sky.