Dark and Deepest Red(44)

I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

“Sometimes you have to stay still.” He looked at me, the brown of his eyes as dark as his hair. “You have to work to stay where you are. Sometimes if you want to move things around you, you have to do everything you can to stay still.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He turned the flame the bright yellow of a field daffodil. “I mean we should’ve stayed friends.”

Our eyes stayed on each other long enough that I felt the heat of it on my shoulders.

I felt caught between kissing him and telling him, two equally impulsive and probably disastrous possibilities.

I didn’t mind didn’t mean I should try it again. I didn’t mind could have meant he was writing it off as an aberration, a shift in a gravitational field, the color of a rare bird, a strange result of this year filled with red shoes.

And telling Emil the truth, telling this boy who held science and logic as close as a first language, made even less sense than telling my parents. He wouldn’t believe it anyway. He’d probably just think I was stupid and reckless, or susceptible to the suggestion of magic that all red shoes held this year. He’d think I’d fallen under some shared hysteria, or conversion disorder, like the girls we’d read about in history class, the ones who seemed possessed during the Salem witch trials. Briar Meadow’s magic probably wouldn’t even be real to him if it weren’t for Gerta.

When Emil looked at me, my skin felt like glass to him, like he could see everything inside.

“Try this one,” he said, and handed me a vial and a stick, our fingers brushing again.

The powder turned the flame as red as cherry candy, as red as blood or berries, and any thought I had of telling Emil the truth burned up with it.





Strasbourg, 1518


Lala’s chest sears from running, but she does not stop.

Gall nuts, her aunt taught her, begin in the spring, when a wasp punctures an oak tree to make a home for its eggs in the soft, young buds.

The tree, quite understandably, protests, forming the galls around the holes the wasp has made.

When something living senses the presence of something new and venomous, it closes it off.

The spire of pink sandstone looms high over Strasbourg’s tiled roofs and country churches, a crown of blush-hued stone. The light from the morning is still cool, silvering la cathédrale’s single tower. The rose window catches the sun, knives of perfect white pointing at the flower in the center, strokes of lapis blue, harvest-warm leaves inlaid among sea colors. The cathedral seems enormous as a mountain but delicate as if it were carved from alabaster. It is the guide by which Lala first learned her way from Tante’s house to the city.

Where Lala would expect wings and soft rustling sounds, she hears, instead, voices, and the hard pounding of steps.

Lala rushes through a narrow lane until it opens onto the cathedral square.

Instead of the usual flock of birds, the square holds as many bodies.

Instead of the horned larks with their yellow heads and pristine brown backs, the bodies here leap and flail. They turn and jump.

They dance.

This is more than the familiar sweep of skirts. Cassocks mix with the spin of kirtles. Priests chase after them, canons calling out orders. Some urge them to rest, in the name of our Lord. Others demand their confession. Others still yell at the dancers, or, if they can grab hold of them, scream down their throats. “I order the devil from you. I command the demons to leave you.” Some try to grasp the dancers and shake them out of it, but they only whirl away.

Lala’s understanding feels like a thumb pressed to her throat.

It is not just cassocks and dresses in the fray.

It is a sprinkling of tunics and hose.

Men.

Lala does as fast a count as she can manage, trying to keep up with their furious movements.

At least twenty men.

Thirty.

More.

There are so many dancers she cannot count them.

Dozens.

More than dozens.

A hundred.

Two hundred.

The stone beneath Lala’s feet seems as though it is crumbling.

Lala has faced death to see the end of this fever, Alifair alongside her.

But now it rages all the fiercer, wrathful as a fire across dry fields.

Lala weaves through Strasbourg’s streets. She rushes past the dancers who flail and throw themselves about. Past those with red-rimmed eyes. Past the mothers who fear for their children.

Past two weeping girls who tend to a cousin, collapsed from the dance.

Past Melisende and Agnesona, their heads still veiled in fine scarves.

Their eyes follow Lala. They do not greet her.

A noblewoman and her attendants pass between them. Her dyed leather shoes kick up a stripe of color.

Blue.

Lala stands, staring even after the noblewoman passes.

A familiar scrap of fabric.

A ribbon dyed with Tante’s woad blue.

A ribbon Lala prayed into, and then gave to a friend.

A ribbon now trampled into Strasbourg’s cobblestones.

Enneleyn.

“Lavinia Blau?” The voice comes with a man’s broad shadow.

Two sergeants pause before her.

She lifts her face to them, and all she can ask is, “Where is Enneleyn?”

“If you will come with us, Mademoiselle Blau,” the elder one says.