Dark and Deepest Red(47)

Perhaps in any other place, such a charge would make her laugh. But here that laugh comes as nothing but a stalled, disbelieving breath.

“Yes,” Lala says, forcing straightness into her back and composure into her voice. “I deny this.”

“The finest physicians in the city have testified before the Council of Twenty-One.” The friar’s voice rises. “They say that there is no reason of body for this madness, that it could only come from the devil himself, and still you deny it?”

She swallows, and it sticks in her throat, dry from saying the same words so many times. She must say the words again, or they will assume the testimony needed to condemn her.

“I deny it,” she says.

“You deny the truth that you were seen bewitching a stream?” the friar asks.

Lala’s throat grows hard as a knot in rope. The suggestion of tampered-with water was the death of so many Jews, what gave the Strasbourgeois the reason they needed to kill a quarter of them, whole families who had done nothing.

All she can say is, “I deny it.”

“Do you deny that you bewitched one of your own friends simply by the grasp of your hand?” the friar asks.

“I never bewitched her,” she says.

She shuts her eyes, knowing, in the same instant, how she has erred. She has strayed from the three words—I deny it—like wandering from a path in a brambled forest.

“Really.” The friar circles. “You visited her in the early morning and not a day later, she is afflicted, and you deny this?”

“I cared about her!” Lala’s eyes flit open. She cannot keep herself from raising her voice. “She was my friend! I would never!”

The council and the physicians chose to exclude the canons when they decided on a great dance. They ignored explanations of divine chastisement, or the arrangement of stars.

But now that tambourines and drums have only spread the affliction, they have given in and brought in a friar. Now that the blood of so many boils over, now that not only women but men fall down in the streets, now that they have lost the Lily of Strasbourg, they must blame someone.

“And did you not try to flee the city to escape justice for your crimes?” the friar asks.

“I did not,” she says.

“Did you not attempt to capture your aunt’s apprentice into your dark service?”

Lala shuts her eyes once more.

“He has nothing to do with me,” she says, each word stinging her lips. “He performs only tasks for my aunt.”

All she has done, all the effort she has made to guard those she cares for, all will be used to damn her.

And, if she does not take care, him.

“There is talk of this plague passing by sight,” the friar says. “Do you know nothing of that, Mademoiselle Blau?”

“I know nothing of it,” she says.

“Families attempt to restrain their loved ones from the dance, but they scream and thrash as though demons rip their hearts in two. And you know nothing of this?”

“I know nothing of it.”

“Music must now be banned because of how it spreads,” the friar says, his voice taunting and proud. “Even the singing of masses for fear that blessed souls will dance toward the altar. Do you feel no guilt, no fear for your immortal soul?”

“I trust my immortal soul to God,” she says, biting back the rest.

And I do not trust it to you or any man like you.

“The faithful of this city fall down dead, and you think God will receive your soul?” the friar asks.

“I trust my immortal soul to God,” she repeats.

“The Dreik?nigsuhr has stopped, and three women swear you have done it with witchcraft. Do you deny this?”

Lala’s back stiffens. “In the name of our Lord, I deny it.”

“You will not confess your pact with the devil?” the friar yells.

Her throat is summer ground now, parched as dust, from her nerves, from thirst, from how long she has been made to speak. Her tongue feels like dried moss in her mouth.

“I have no pact with the devil.” Lala chokes on the words.

“And your consorting with demons?”

“I have had nothing to do with demons.”

“What of the reports that you have been seen in the woods with werewolves and lupine devils?”

A memory pinches, the recollection of the wolves alongside Alifair, how their claws ticking against stones drove away the men who thought she was prey.

“They are lies,” she says.

“And the pitchforks that have gone missing from farms?”

“I know nothing of them.”

“Do you not fly on them with your sisterhood of legion witches?”

“I do not,” Lala says. “I have no such sisters.”

“Four hundred souls dance,” the friar says. “Their hearts and their bodies relent and release their spirits. Just yesterday, fifteen more were afflicted. The spotless of heart now dance as though they are covens of witches. They dance in church and cannot be dissuaded with holy water or the sight of the cross. Whose work but the devil’s?” His yell is so forceful that his spit catches in Lala’s hair.

Lala braces her hands on the wooden seat.

They would not have brought in this friar, not one as young as Sewastian, if he had not been well trained in the Malleus Maleficarum, the book that insists all witches be burned.