Dark and Deepest Red(34)

Even with the sharp edge to his voice, she thinks again of the hail.

He guarded her then, taking the bruises of those falling stones of ice so she wouldn’t.

It is her turn to guard him now. The stain of suspicion that dyes the edges of her skirt mars him every time she touches him.

She must put an end to it.

She imagines her heart as a hailstone, fallen from the sky, hard and cold and the size of her own fist.

“I don’t love you,” she says.

The words are held up by her memory of the bailiff’s questions, and the thought of Alifair being brought to that room. What would they ask him, this boy who was paler than Lala and Tante, but who many still think is some unknowable child from the deepest shadows of the Schwarzwald?

Alifair flinches, as though at the memory of a slap.

She keeps that flinch from staying on her skin. She braces her heart into being nothing but handfuls of frost.

“I know,” he says.

How easily he believes her should give her relief. But his quick acceptance makes her crueler.

“You are my aunt’s apprentice,” she says. “That is all you are to me.”

He draws in air through barely parted lips.

She knows him enough to know this is one of the ways he steadies himself.

He gets to his feet, taking his knife for more kindling. “Your aunt has been good to me. I do as she says. I followed you for her, not for myself.”

And again, they fall into silence.

It is there, in that quiet, that they remain while they sleep, on and beneath the coarse wool blankets. It is there they remain the next day, as they walk the miles beneath the maple and beech.

She has always had the small suspicion that he is a little more German than French. Of course, in Strasbourg, most everyone is some German and some French. Except for the way Alifair pronounces his As, his French could pass for the language he has spoken all his life. It is only the small things Lala knows to listen for, the low trilling of the vowels, like the buzz of a hummingbird’s wings.

But the way he walks the forest, sure and fearless, makes her all the more certain that he came from the Schwarzwald. He warns her of roots that might trip her. He changes their path when he senses wolves or men on horseback, or when he thinks they might find mushrooms or wild sorrel. He marks their route by the way the wind has molded the soft yellow clouds of smoke bush trees. He hears the whisper of water so early she does not even know what they are following until he leads them to a stream.

It makes her watch him all the more, seeing him in this landscape with which he shares a common language. She studies the way he kneels alongside water, dipping his hand in and bringing it to his mouth.

She cannot love him, not now, not until la fièvre passes. Until it does, any tie to her is a danger to him.

These very things that made her fall in love with him, the things that make him understand her and Tante better than anyone else in Strasbourg, are the things that might damn him.

In Strasbourg, in the crowded lanes within the city walls, he has always been as out of place as Lala and Tante are among gadje. It is up to Lala to make sure no one takes more notice than they already have.

The silence between them thickens in the last miles before Saverne. But when they approach la grotte Saint-Vit, the flinted quiet settles, like the surface of a pond. Near the rock mouth of the chapel, forbidding in the moonlight, it becomes something sacred, and true.

Alifair builds the smallest fire he can that will burn the bloodied scraps of the dancers’ shoes. The flames swallow the tattered fabric.

As they wait for the ashes to cool, they kneel before the painted wood images of the Virgin and Child.

Lala tries to offer well-ordered prayers to Saint Vitus. But within moments, she loses hold of her own thoughts, and her desperate heart cries out to Sara la Kali.

Let this leave us.

Sara la Kali, She who protects, who cures sickness, who turns bibaxt into luck and life. The gadje do not recognize Her as a saint, but they have made up stories that make Her fierce heart and dark form more acceptable to them.

Please. Let this leave us.

Sara la Kali, to whom Lala prays in church, for whom she lights candles in the transepts, letting any who watch think she is worshipping some distant, paler saint.

Her eyes still shut, Lala hears Alifair stirring the ashes. It is a mild rushing sound, him checking for embers. It softens the edges of the quiet.

Please, Lala asks, with the raw hope of a child. Let this leave us.

She has never wished more for a statue of Sara la Kali, so she could lay flowers at Her feet, so she could lay before Her the garments of the afflicted and beg Her help.

“What are you burning?” A woman’s voice startles Lala out of her prayer.

Alifair stops, his hands pausing.

Lala scrambles to her feet, and Alifair rises from where he crouches, both of them ready.

A woman’s face appears from the dark, her pale expression stricken.

Lala stares, but her vision at night has never been as sharp as Alifair’s.

Alifair reads the woman quickly. “She’s alone,” he says, not whispering, but in a low enough voice that the woman will not hear.

The woman is better dressed than Lala would expect of a woman traveling on her own. Not damask or a silk bliaud, but a well-dyed overdress.

“Nothing,” Lala says so firmly it sounds an insult. “We only wish to stay warm.”