Dark and Deepest Red(39)

I didn’t have to find some way to pry the shoes off my feet.

All I had to do was outlast them.

I went to the calendar my mother had tacked up on my wall.

I knew how to learn rules. I had done it with my friends. Ironing my hair. Fluffing peony-pink blush onto my birch-brown cheeks. Letting them shape my eyebrows, even though letting gringas near me with tweezers was sacrilege in my family.

My friends had taught me to carry tote bags or an oversized purse instead of a backpack, how to take off the glitter polish without wrecking my nails, how to put in a tampon, which my mother had thought was self-explanatory (she never needed manuals for kitchen appliances either).

I had learned to lessen the differences between them and me, so it would be a little less noticeable that I was brown where they were pale. I was autumn colors while they were the cream and blush of spring. Jeans and skirts might have tightened around my thighs and butt instead of lying as flat as theirs did, but I could wear the same kind of chandelier earrings they did.

If I could learn all of that, I could learn the rules of the red shoes. I could survive them until Briar Meadow took back its magic like it did every year.

First, stay away from the reservoir, or the glimmer, until the night we knew it would fade.

Second, don’t try to pry the shoes, cut them, or tear them off my own feet. As much as I wanted to claw them away, I knew better now. They had danced me out of my own house last night, taking revenge for that seam ripper. I had to leave the red shoes alone. I had to bear them until the end of the week.

I counted the few calendar squares until then, until the day the glimmer faded every year.

If I followed the rules of the red shoes, I would last those few days until they let me go, instead of paying every price that came with someone finding out.





Strasbourg, 1518


“And here is where I leave you.” Petrissa halts the ox. “Mind yourselves on the road, and may God lead you safe.”

“And you,” Alifair says with a dip of his head.

He and Lala climb down from the cart.

Lala grasps Petrissa’s hand. “I will pray for your sister,” she whispers.

The woman’s throat tightens, and Lala knows her nod is as much answer as she has.

Lala and Alifair walk on, Lala’s heart held too tight to watch Petrissa and her well-loved ox disappear.

The air around them smells of Alifair, the smell she has always thought of as his. Oak leaves and wood. Dust caught in beams of sunlight. The clean growing smell she imagines as the scent of beech trees, a perfume given to him by the place he was born and that he carries on his skin still.

The summer stretches the light of each day. Even beneath the yew boughs, in the early evening, the gold has not yet cooled to blue. The space between branches glows like the flame on a wick.

Every few steps, she cannot help glancing over to him, his silhouette among the delicate cutouts of leaves and branches. The green brown of his eyes turns gold by the falling sun.

Tell me something about it, she used to ask. Where you’re from.

Most of the time, he gave her a single detail. My father could carve a dozen wooden leaves in an afternoon. My mother had eyes like juniper berries. Green and brown and purple all at once.

Somewhere with aspen trees, he once said.

Alifair, this boy with as much of a life before Strasbourg as Tante and Lala. This boy, with his heart so fearless that there is room for endless mercy. So many in Strasbourg know his kindness. The poor brother and sister he has often brought fish or a basket of apples. An exhausted mother whose children he helps sleep with the music of his pearwood Blockfl?te. An old woman he visited every day until she died.

The stir of something proprietary rises up in Lala. She has felt the breath of it before. But now it is a current, bracing and strong as river water, though she knows she has no right to feel it. He had parents once, and a homeland outside of Alsace; he does not belong to their plot yellowed by woad flowers. And it was Tante who took him into their household, turned him from a boy gathering milk thistles from wattle fences, a boy who risked beating and arrest every time he foraged for acorns, into one who knew a trade.

Lala has no claim on him.

“If you’re going to look at me, look at me,” Alifair says now, his eyes still forward.

A cord of heat runs through Lala’s heart.

“I wasn’t,” she says.

He nods once, his gaze still ahead.

“I know how your friends talk of me,” he says. “That I am nothing but your aunt’s worker. That I am some changeling who came out of the beech trees. That I am beneath you. I hear all of it. Even though they think I don’t.” He gives a resigned laugh. “They think their own servants can’t hear them.”

The heat spreads like a fire catching. How much he has gotten wrong would be funny if it were not a briar around her heart.

“So what were you doing with me?” he asks. “Dulling your boredom until someone else came along?”

That heat bursts open in her.

“My boredom?” She stops. “You think I am bored?”

The rise of her voice quiets him.

“You think I’ve ever thought you were beneath me?” she asks. “Do you think I wanted to be near anyone but you? Everything I’ve done has been out of fear for you and Tante. All of it.”

“And you think your aunt and I don’t know how to look after ourselves?”