Dark and Deepest Red(41)

She wasn’t dancing.

She was screaming.

The sound broke above the dancing over stone and panicked murmurs and the accusing shouts, like one of his mother’s planted bulbs pushing up through hard ground. It came with the salt smell of blood and death. It carried a weight he could almost feel on his own back.

Blame.

This city held her at fault for the dancing plague before them.

Emil startled awake, breathing hard, a question opening in him.

The force of that blame, blame this girl had borne, lay thick on his skin.

He reached for his glasses. Even placing himself in the dark room, with the familiarity of his bed and his desk and his books, it stayed.

The question twisted into its own answer.

There was more to what happened in Strasbourg than some passing story in his family’s history.

And whatever it was, it was reaching across five centuries to grab hold of him.





Strasbourg, 1518


Lala wakes to realize Alifair is not beside her.

She sits up, shrugging her shoulders to unknot them.

Through the raw-beam light, she finds the shape of him, carved against the morning. The sun finds seams in the leaves and gilds the brown of his hair.

She stands beneath the oak he has climbed.

“What are you doing?” she asks, a laugh in her half-asleep voice.

He reaches for a fat oak gall. “Your aunt will like these.”

“And I would like to see you come down before you break your neck.”

He smiles.

As he does, his hand moves, so slightly that Lala would miss it if not for the change in shadow.

She realizes it is a false move only a moment before the first wasp stings.

Alifair flinches, and that flinch stirs the others.

The wasps that have always seemed to treat him as a brother now turn on him. It is as though they are waking up, another stinging, then a third and fourth.

“Come down,” Lala yells, and once he does, she pulls him away from the tree.

The wasps’ buzz heats the air.

It is a thread of noise that feels like a warning.

She packs up their things and leads him the distance to home, where she and Tante can apply honey and cider vinegar to his stings, then lavender and calendula. Maybe wild thyme, the same as Tante puts on burns from splattering oil.

And still, the sound of the wasps’ buzz seems to follow them.

She leads him toward the berry brambles and courgette plots of their rented land.

Before Tante’s threshold, the smell of blood draws her up short.

At first, she recoils from the tangled, bloody mess. At first, she thinks it is an animal’s afterbirth, as was left in front of Isentrud’s home. The uncleanness of it seems as though it is already touching her skin, reaching out like fingers.

As Lala draws closer, she distinguishes reedy leaves and stalks.

Wood betony, and blood. Someone has taken handfuls of the purple-flowering plant, meant to protect against witches, and soaked them in an animal’s blood. The flowers and stalks have taken it up, turning to pulp. It looks like something that came from a living thing’s body, not just plant but animal, even human. The gadje who put it there may not have known she would reel back from how marime the spilled blood is, how unclean no matter the source. But it is no less awful for their ignorance.

Thick ropes of horror and disgust braid together with Lala’s rage.

She gives them only the space of one breath.

Lala takes Alifair by the shoulders and points him toward the door. “Go inside. Show my aunt your stings.”

He blinks at her, more dazed than she has ever seen him.

She tries to smile. “Show her the oak galls you brought her. She will love them.” She gives him as gentle a push toward the door as she can.

And then she runs.





Rosella


Emil’s house was a language I had almost forgotten, a few words coming back at a time. The French blue of the painted siding. The way his parents insisted I call them by their first names, because when I tried calling either of them Dr. Woodlock, Julien waved a hand and said, “I don’t know which of us you’re talking to, use our names.”

There was the tree I once helped Emil and Julien pick plums off, so Yvette could show me the perfect way she arranged fruit in a clafoutis. And Yvette’s petit four daffodils in the side yard, the flowers soft and pink as cotton candy; five falls ago, they all burst into out-of-season bloom in the middle of October.

Then there was the hissing ball of fur Emil insisted on calling a cat.

“Gerta,” Emil said in his most calming voice when he came to the door. “Don’t hiss at our guests, okay?”

Gerta scampered off.

“She’s in one of her moods,” Emil said.

“Isn’t she always?” I asked.

“Good memory.”

Gerta, the cutest, fluffiest, most misogynistic cat in Briar Meadow. She had come out of the woods the year the forest cats appeared, with a ruff of orange-gold fur at her neck and a pissed-off affect that only calmed when Emil, then a little boy, gathered her up and talked to her. Yvette had named her for Maria Margaretha Kirch, who charted the paths of Saturn and Venus in the eighteenth century.

Of course, a cat named for a feminist astronomer had turned out to hate other women. All except Yvette Woodlock herself.