Dark and Deepest Red(35)

The woman looks almost disappointed. She dips her head, and the auburn of her hair catches fire by moonlight.

What answer did she hope for?

“We’ve come to pray to Saint Vitus,” Alifair says, standing in front of the extinguished fire. “For the healing of a fever.”

Lala thanks Sara la Kali that the dancers’ shoes have already turned to ash.

The woman steps closer. “Would you pray for my sister?”

“Is she afflicted?” Lala asks.

“Afflicted?” the woman asks.

“With la fièvre de la danse?”

“The what?”

Lala and Alifair blink at each other. So this woman wishes a cure for something else. Who would they pray to? Saint Vitus? Sara la Kali, She who Lala’s heart cannot help crying out to? Both?

But the woman looks so hopeful.

Lala’s understanding comes as a hard pinch.

Of course the woman was disappointed. She saw their small fire and must have hoped it signaled a ritual that would give her prayers more weight.

“Yes,” Lala says. “Of course we will.”

Lala kneels and prays, truly, for this sister she does not know. She can feel Alifair and the woman on either side of her, their fervor bristling against her arms.

The woman prays and weeps with such intensity that she falls asleep in la grotte, collapsing as though at midnight needlework.

Alifair draws one of their blankets over her.

Then he silently gathers up the ashes.

We can’t, Lala mouths, tilting her head toward the woman who has prayed herself into a dream.

Lala gets close enough to Alifair to whisper, “What if she wakes up and sees what we’re doing?”

“We’re not doing it here,” Alifair says.

“The entire point was coming here.” Lala’s whispering sharpens.

Alifair’s eyes find her in the dark. “Trust me.”

His gaze pins her in place, his eyes holding twin moons.

“Come with me,” he says.

For a little while, they retrace the path they took to la grotte. But then Alifair leads them deep into the woods.

“Have I ever told you about aspen trees?” he asks, his voice soft as the rustling of the leaves. “Their roots are all connected.” He holds a branch out of her way. “As though they grow as one tree.”

He holds another branch aside, and the night fills with fluttering green.

A gasp catches in Lala’s throat.

Endless heart-shaped leaves dress a copse of trees.

Alifair stands, and she stops alongside him, watching the uncountable leaves.

“They’re one body,” he says, with the quiet reverence of sharing a secret. “Something can be one tree, and a whole wood.”

Lala breathes the chilled air and imagines the ground under their feet, how the boughs and branches open to a wide spread of shared roots.

With the turn of the breeze, she can smell the warmth of Alifair’s skin.

She snaps herself away from the thought.

Lala should not encourage this in him, the part of him that lives in these woods, and that made him easy for Tante Dorenia to teach. This boy, who speaks the language of these woods, and whose Romanipen she has never seen more sharply.

She cannot love him as long as every touch of her fingers brings suspicion on him. She cannot love him as long as half of Strasbourg whispers about whether she is Romani, and the other half about whether she is a witch.

Lala remembers the woman she saw against the dawn years ago, standing at the crab apple tree, lowering a fever. For that, Strasbourg would call her a witch twice over. Lala knows so much less than that woman, and it feels nothing short of arrogance to hope she might imitate a drabarni’s wisdom. It feels as presumptuous and hopeful as being a little girl trying on her aunt’s skirts, putting on that which is beyond her, that which she has never learned.

But Lala and Alifair offer the ashes to the trees, asking them to take this collective fever. In the streaming of ash from their fingers, she prays the afflicted are spinning for the last time. That they are recovering their senses and halting their dance. That they are stumbling along the stone lanes back to their homes.

The air turns again, and a slight warmth seems to lift from the aspen trunks, as though they are breathing not only with each other but with her.

Lala’s hope grows sharp, both pain and relief at once, like a full breath of winter air.

She has often heard that all things on earth have their celestial mirror in heaven. But here, in these trees, she finds the divine health that stands contrary to the dancing sickness. In Strasbourg, a shared fever drives so many bodies to exhaustion or death. In the afflicted, a shared life and breath means they perish. But in these trees, that same collective breath makes the trees their most alive. She feels them speaking to each other in their roots and in the whisper of their leaves. She feels them sharing water as though from cupped hands. They give to her palms the sense of being each themselves and part of a greater, shared life. These trees are not only the divine opposite of Strasbourg’s fever. They are the glinting mirror of everything Lala does not have, the vitsa she and Tante Dorenia were made to relinquish.

All she has left, the only other trees whose roots she can reach, are her aunt, and this boy. They are why she locks any blight deep inside her own heartwood, so it will never touch them.