Dark and Deepest Red(36)

Lala breathes in the memory of the woman at the crab apple tree, and her hands act without her thinking.

She reaches for Alifair’s and sets them on the aspen’s trunk. Her palms lie against the backs of his hands, both of them speaking to these trees as one.





Emil


The moon and the glimmer milked up the surface of the reservoir. Flickers of movement stirred the fog.

The movement was too high and spindly to be a bear or a wolf. A deer, maybe. He kept his approach slow in case he was right. One crackle of branches underfoot, and the deer would bolt.

He came closer, and what he’d thought was a deer’s body resolved into human limbs, hands and hips. What he’d thought were antlers were arms.

They drew forward from the fog.

A girl, spinning through the dark, dancing along the rock ledge.

His dreams bled into the scene in front of him. The thread of being awake, all chilled air and silhouette, tangled with the heat and features of his nightmares. They ran together like paint.

The girl’s features emerged from the fog. Dark, full hair. Brown skin. And though he couldn’t make out the specific features of her face, he caught the gleam of her eyes, the bright flash of terror as she flew.

The girl, the woman, from five centuries earlier. The one who was a little bit his blood.

His father had told him the thinnest details of la fièvre de la danse, the strange dancing plague his ancestors witnessed five hundred years ago, because the thinnest details were all Emil would listen to. Until now, he had never considered that any of them might have gotten caught up in the fever, and danced.

Maybe this girl had. If there was evidence in the disintegrating papers his parents had tracked down, they wouldn’t have told Emil, because he’d made clear he didn’t want to know.

But here she was, come to life in these woods.

A ghost, wearing jeans.

That last detail would have made him laugh.

Except that she was getting closer to the edge.

In one half second, she looked like she was thinking of throwing herself down to the rocks below. In the next, she looked like she was skipping along the ledge, letting chance decide if she’d go over. And in the next, Emil found a mismatch between her upper body and her legs, like she was fighting the motion of her own feet.

Like the dance itself was compelling her toward the edge.

He went for her without thinking. Only in a small space at the back of his mind did he wonder if he had imagined her, and if she would vanish the moment he touched her.

She wavered at the farthest edge, her arms out like she was trying to balance and stop herself from going over.

Just as her center of gravity seemed to incline toward the reservoir below, he caught her arm.

“Hey.” He pulled her away from the edge.

She didn’t vanish.

She was a living girl, and she fell into him, her breath hard against his chest.

He drew her back farther, putting space between them and the ledge.

Her breath still came loud as the rustle of voles in the underbrush.

He cringed at the thought of looking at her, this ghost come to life so completely she had a body. Would it be like looking at some sister he didn’t have? Like looking at old photos of his mother? Would he recognize his own features in her face?

But she was already looking at him. He could feel her stare on his forehead, hotter than her breath on his collarbone.

Emil lifted his eyes.

The colors he expected were there. The winter-brush-field brown of her skin, made darker in this light. The coarse black of her hair. Her eyes as deep as wet earth.

But the mismatch between the girl he expected and the girl he saw, how she did look familiar but in the wrong way, it shorted out something, like one Christmas bulb going out and the rest going with it.

Emil’s brain was too full, too muddled with his dreams and everything in front of him, the confusion of wondering if he was asleep, the fast bridging of five hundred years. He felt those five centuries condensing in him, like the stars that fit a world’s worth of heat and light in the volume of a teaspoon.

So when he heard Rosella Oliva’s sharp breath in, when he felt their shared startle of recognition, he didn’t have enough of himself back to say anything. He lost his grasp on all the things he was trying to keep in his brain. So when she stared at him, eyes so big the white caught the glimmer, and then ran, he couldn’t even think fast enough to go after her.





Strasbourg, 1518


In the morning, the woman—Petrissa—insists on taking them as far as she can toward Strasbourg on her way to Rheinau. She insists in a way that speaks of some small protectiveness toward them. As young as she looked under the moon, daylight shows the creasing at the corners of her eyes, and Lala can guess she either has, or has lost, children near Lala’s and Alifair’s age.

“My sister,” Petrissa says after a few silent miles.

Lala has been so lulled by the oxcart’s rhythm, and the way Petrissa murmurs to the animal, that to hear the woman speak to her startles her.

“She has fits,” Petrissa says. She does not look at Lala. She keeps her eyes on the wood-shaded path before them. “The priests say she is possessed, but I do not believe it. And as long as I do not believe it, they will not pray for her, not truly.”

“So you went to the shrine,” Lala says. “To do it yourself.”