Dark and Deepest Red(32)

Maybe he could refuse it.





Strasbourg, 1518


The sun is just warming the gray of the city’s stone lanes when Enneleyn meets Lala.

“Is everything all right?” Enneleyn asks, still knotting the silk belt around her kirtle.

They stay close to the face of her father’s home, clinging to its shadow.

Lala presses a blue-dyed ribbon into Enneleyn’s hand.

Enneleyn’s smile lights. “It’s lovely. But why?”

For the turn of a single moment, Lala considers telling her. She nearly speaks the hope that perhaps, if Enneleyn holds this ribbon, whatever cure Lala may manage in Saverne will reach her before the fever can take her.

The thought crumbles and falls, dried as December leaves.

How can Lala tell her the hope she has pinned to this ribbon and two more like it? How could Lala even explain it, the gesture of a ribbon meant to keep the thread between two people?

As kind as Enneleyn has been to her, their friendship suddenly feels hollow in a way that has always been there, but that Lala has tried not to notice.

Enneleyn never offered her friendship to a Romani girl in love with a boy who had to shrug away a girl’s name. Enneleyn’s affection is for the cast-off daughter of Italian nobility.

Enneleyn’s affection is for a girl who does not exist.

Lala settles on saying, “Keep it with you.”

Enneleyn meets the gravity of Lala’s voice with a laugh, soft as the dew in the window boxes. “Oh, Lavinia.”

It is so easy for her to laugh in the midst of this fever. Her life, glazed green as fine tiles, leaves no room for the horror that fills the square.

“Just promise me you will keep it,” is all Lala says.

“Wait,” Enneleyn says. “Are you leaving?”

Lala drops her eyes to the cobbles.

“But you are coming back,” Enneleyn says, her face open and hopeful as a child’s. “Aren’t you?”

Lala folds Enneleyn’s fingers over the blue ribbon. “I promise.”

She leaves the second ribbon beneath Tante’s pillow, the third between Alifair’s straw mattress and the timber bed frame. And then, laden with what she can carry, what will not be missed, she sets off for the rough, forested path through the foothills.

Lala cannot risk the main roads. They are little safer than the woods, and they bring the risk of more suspicious gazes, questions about the brown of her skin, arrest if anyone places her as what she truly is.

After a few hours of traveling rocky ground, the soreness in her feet turns to a deep ache. But there is no helping it. She must stay in shadow, hiding from those who would prey on a girl traveling alone. That means walking the stone-studded earth between trees.

Just for a moment, she cannot help wishing she were a merchant’s daughter, with boats to glide along the Rhein and the Zorn. So many perils of the road are lessened by water.

As the afternoon falls into night, the air cools so quickly she thinks it will grow ice. The green gray of the silver firs steals the last light, and Lala pulls her cloak tighter.

There’s only once she can remember a summer night having such a forbidding chill.

It was years ago, when she and Alifair were still small. It was high summer, as it is tonight. That part Lala knows, because both woad and flax were in bloom. She had gotten away from Tante, so she could stand in the border between the flax fields and a fallow meadow where woad grew wild.

Tante hated when she just stood, staring at the color. “Nothing good comes from being dream eyed,” she would say as she took in the washing from the lines. But whenever Lala could sneak away, she ran to the path between the fields, so narrow that the dirt bore no cart ruts.

She looked out over the land, an ocean of blue to her left, one of yellow to her right, green stems and leaves undergirding each. They seemed painted, the blooms thick and stretching out toward the sky. They seemed the kind of petal lakes that fairies would dance in at night, their small lights hovering over the blue and yellow. It always seemed strange to her, how the woad with its yellow flowers made such blue dye, and how the flax with its sky-colored blossoms made fabric of palest yellow. They seemed to trade colors, like girls exchanging ribbons.

That day, Lala had drawn her cape around her, warming herself against the strange chill of the evening.

The sky darkened all at once, from a blue as rich as the center of the flax flowers to a wet-stone gray.

Lala tilted her face to the sky, hoping for a warm summer rain despite the breath of cold.

The next day, rumor would insist that a frozen goose had fallen out of the sky and taken four days to thaw. On Sunday, the canons would say it was a form of God’s wrath on Strasbourg.

But all Lala knew the instant the sky opened was that the clouds were throwing down hailstones the size of late apples. They pummeled trees and vines and the swaying, bending flowers on either side of the path.

And Lala.

They beat down on her, and she huddled to the ground to cover herself. She spread her hands over the back of her head, pinching her own neck because it all seemed as strange and awful as a nightmare.

The hail kept on, striking her shoulders and rounded back. Lala bit her cheek both to keep from crying and to try to wake herself up.

Lala has never known how he knew, at once, where to look for her. But Alifair appeared, quick as the hail itself. He gathered her up off the ice-covered path and brought her home, shielding her on the way. It was the first time she could remember him ever touching her, and her grip, her arms tight around this boy’s neck, was the first time she could remember touching him.