Dark and Deepest Red(49)

“Do not tell me you have never heard from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” Now the friar’s voice rises. “‘For even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.’”

The words pin her skirt to the floor. She could not run even if the friar were to throw the door wide.

Others in Strasbourg know that Alifair is the kind of boy who was given a girl’s name at birth. They know there is a reason he has never tried to show off his form in the way young men so often try.

Lala should know well enough by now. There are no true secrets in this city, or this world. Not hers. Not Tante’s. Not Alifair’s.

“‘And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman’”—the friar is nearly yelling now—“‘burned in this lust one toward another.’”

Lala shuts her eyes, trying to clear away all before her, the awfulness and the impossibility. Not just this careless damning of men with men and women with women, but how profoundly the friar misunderstands Alifair himself. Lala is a girl. Alifair is a boy. Despite any common features their bodies may possess, to compare them, to call them the same, has always seemed unthinkable.

The friar strolls in front of her. “You are familiar with Li livres de jostice et de plet?”

Lala’s throat feels as though it holds a stone.

Alifair might have gone his whole life without his name being spoken in this room. Yes, some may have known for years, but they must have decided they did not care, so long as he didn’t lure their daughters into the fields. It is the same as how some must have known of Lala’s blood but likely thought little of it, provided she did not seduce their sons with whatever dark charms they imagine brown-armed girls possessing.

But now, now that there is something that someone must be blamed for, there comes a miraculous reemergence of memory. These things, known but nearly forgotten, are brought out and aired like shirts from a trunk.

“Ah,” the friar says. “So you know the treatise. Then you must also know that we keep similar laws here in Strasbourg.”

All this, the threat now crawling toward Alifair, is Lala’s fault. If they hadn’t looked first to her, they might never have looked to him.

“Then you know the penalty for the offense you and your lover commit?” the friar asks.

Offense. Lala almost kicks up from her chair at the word. In this proud country, so many men pay no price for forcing themselves on women. But for a man to want a man, or for a woman to care for a woman, or for a girl like Lala to love a boy who was given a girl’s name at birth, these are all offenses.

“And you know,” the friar says, “that on the first offense, the offender will lose a limb.”

A chill crawls over Lala.

“And on the second, another limb,” the friar says.

Lala sets her back teeth.

“And on the third,” he says, “offenders are to be burned, and all their goods confiscated.”

Lala grips the wooden seat so hard splinters catch in her palms.

“If you do not wish to confess how you have bewitched the souls who dance,” the friar says, “perhaps you would care to discuss your other sins. Or those committed by your aunt’s apprentice.”

No. Alifair’s name cannot be spoken in this room. He is a boy who always dips his fingers into the stoups of holy water and crosses himself. He has never thrown sticks at horses or dogs, or mocked his elders behind their backs.

Which boy in Strasbourg should be mentioned in this room less than Alifair?

“What do you think?” the friar asks, as though musing. “Would you both find it a sign of your love to lose the same limb on the same day? To have the same parts of your bodies taken within the same hour of each other? Tell me, is that romance to such perverted souls as yours?”

Lala pulls at the air for breath but cannot find it.

“I…” Lala chokes out the sound.

They consider him nothing but a peasant with no known parentage. They will wound him without a thought.

“But should you confess the crimes of your own heart”—the friar steps forward, seeming to have thought of an idea—“perhaps we can be merciful enough to let your aunt’s apprentice repent in the dignity of a priest’s confidence.” His tone is almost encouraging, a promise folded in. “Should you confess yourself, we might leave the matter of Alifair’s sin at a private confession.”

Lala cannot think of it, the attic emptied of Alifair. It is as much a shock as if a farmer’s scythe were to shear away the moon. The thought of him hurt or gone gives her a halting start, as though she is skimming her hands over the floor of a dark room and her palm has just caught a needle.

Tante Dorenia, the woman who has been mother and father to Lala since the season she lost both. Alifair, the boy who played his Blockfl?te when she could not sleep, who combed out her hair when Tante lacked the patience.

These two are her family, and she will guard them, against sickness and rumor, against dancing and fever. They have survived plague and pox and sweat, hunger and ice-silvered winters. They have survived tilling their garden plot in seasons when it gave back nothing but thorns and thistles, years when even ploughmen spat those words—dornen und disteln—at the very earth, accusing it for being so willfully barren. They have survived, when the motions of the sky, when the very stars, seemed set against them.