Dark and Deepest Red(38)

Alifair looks between Lala and the woman. In his face, she sees the first flare of recognition, before she has it herself.

They know her.

Lala remembers her, one of the women Tante helped leave Strasbourg.

Then Lala recalls the colors and layers of her skirts, the yellow and black. She pictures her hands on the crab apple tree, and wonders if the woman can sense the touch of aspen bark on Lala’s palms.

The oath Lala swore for the bailiff comes back to her, like a bitter root in her mouth.

Lala wants to say something to acknowledge the unseen threads between this woman and herself.

But all that rears up in her is the sense that they must both survive.

Lala casts her eyes down at the men, their finery even more absurd in the undergrowth. Fallen branches snag the velvet and fur. Their puffed sleeves have bunched as though the air has gone out of them.

Each still breathes, but they will at least wake with headaches to rival their longest nights of drink.

She looks again to the woman.

The woman speaks a few words, in the Rromanès that Lala never learned. She heard the sounds from the families who stayed in Tante’s house, and now they flit past her again. She loses them like the bloom off a dandelion.

Lala says the only words she has on her lips.

“Take their horses,” she breathes, her voice sounding as small as a child’s.

The woman’s eyes dull for a moment, as though her heart has broken a little that they cannot exchange a few words in a common language.

“Go now,” Lala says.

Then the light comes back into them, as though the woman realizes that they have.

It is the only one they have left, the small, quiet language of vanquishing over men who can wreck and ruin, and still show their faces in daylight.





Rosella


From the window of my room, I could see a corner of the glimmer, like catching the edge of some glittering cloth.

Spotting the glimmer was its own sport around Briar Meadow. We looked for slices of it between buildings in town. Graham and Aubrey rode their bikes to the tallest hill, watching it loom over them as they sped down. My mother and father and I crowded at this window late at night, counting the seconds between each time the trembling light shifted.

Right now, it wasn’t so much the glimmer I was looking for as a flash of color within that wavering light, a heart of red. Something to explain the shoes sealed to my feet, and the dance they dragged me into. A dance that had led me to the centerline of the highway, to the edge of the rocks above the reservoir.

And to turn my back on Emil Woodlock and run, like we were strangers.

I knew it was there, that heart of red. My attention would wander, I would look away for just a second, and that wash of color would flash at the corner of my vision. But whenever I looked back, all I found was that edge of the glimmer, its thick sugaring of stars.

“What is it, mija?” My mother’s voice came from the doorway.

I sat up straight. “Just looking.”

“Really.” She quirked a perfectly penciled eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head, shrugged. I meant it as some universal gesture of I’m fine, nothing to see here. But even as I did it, I could feel how forced it must have looked.

My mother perched on my bed. “You can tell me.”

I wasn’t telling her, or my father, anything. It didn’t matter what the shoes tried to do to me. My mother and father would tear open the sky, the glimmer itself, to help me, until everyone was so frightened of us that they would never buy another pair of Oliva shoes.

If anyone knew, I would bear the contempt of the whole town, and so would my family. Red shoes would no longer hold the lore of making daughters fall in love and mothers sing from second-story windows. And Briar Meadow would hold it against me, against us, that I had spoiled something about red shoes. I would have ruined the joy of them, for everyone.

“Whatever it is,” my mother said, standing up and smoothing a hand over my hair, “it won’t last. Nothing this time of year ever does.” She paused at the doorway. “You want tea? I’ll make tea.”

I pushed myself off the windowsill, her words ringing through me. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you wanted tea.”

“No, before that.”

Her smile was mostly assuring, but tinted with sympathy, as lightly as the way she added cinnamon to coffee. “I know it’s probably strange for you, everything this year with our shoes,” she said. “It probably feels like everyone’s talking about us, but they’re really not. They’re too busy with their own lives. And even if they weren’t, nothing that comes with the glimmer stays. Remember that.”

Hope streaked through me, bright and fast as a comet.

Since Emil had pulled me back—and God knew how much he’d seen—I’d burrowed into my own embarrassment, trying to hide under it.

But my mother was right.

Nothing that came with the glimmer ever lasted.

No one had been able to drive off the coywolves. No one had been able to stop things disappearing into the ground a few years ago, house keys and dropped necklaces absorbing into the earth like they were water. But when the light over the reservoir faded, the coywolves left our houses and shoes alone. When that ribbon of light dimmed, the ground gave back the lost things.