Dark and Deepest Red(50)

She cannot let this be what takes them.

Whatever Lala must do, she will. She will make her heart into a knot of wood, as true and deep and pure as the blackest ink she and Tante have ever made.

She will let it lead her wherever will save Tante and Alifair.

“I have done it.” She breathes out the words. “All on my own.”

She is losing her life. But the relief of saving Alifair’s and Tante Dorenia’s and her baby’s brings air into her.

The friar looks both satisfied and disappointed, as though he has a hundred more threats he wished to try.

“You confess to these crimes?” he asks.

“I confess to the crime of witchcraft,” she says, her voice growing steady with each word. “Any crimes Alifair has committed are ones I have bewitched him into. Any sin I have brought into my aunt’s house has been of my own wicked, ungrateful soul.”

No matter what becomes of her, Alifair will live, and Tante will live, and he will help her look after her baby.

“I have made a pact with the devil,” she says, as her heart whispers, God forgive me.

Her soul chants, God forgive me for speaking these words, God protect those I love, God and all His angels, please guard them.

“I have bewitched the souls who dance.” Lala’s tears cling to her cheeks. Already, she feels the breath of the flames they will feed her to.

May God take me into His hands, her heart calls out. Whatever they will do with me, return me to my mother and my father.

“I have betrayed the blameless soul of the woman who raised me. I have allowed the devil to tempt me away from the good and holy upbringing she has given me.” Lala lifts her voice, forcing it clear and strong. “And I have ensorcelled Alifair, whose soul was blameless before my corruption. I confess to this all. I confess.”





Emil


Rosella Oliva was still all the bright points he’d kept with him for years.

The rosy maple moth that had ridden home on her shoulder one afternoon, its fuzzy body and feet and powdered wings, the lemon and raspberry colors she’d later tried to match by mixing crayons.

The daffodils that grew in his mother’s yard and that Rosella always loved. The ones with the pink ruffles and darker pink centers. The white-petaled ones with orange middles that Rosella said looked like fried eggs.

The way she asked his mother how she got them to bloom early and late, and when his mother made a joke about cutting out the heart of the town’s fairest maiden, Rosella laughed. She actually laughed.

And tonight, when he found her under the water instead of near it, it seemed wrong, like she’d gotten caught on the wrong side of a mirror. The shape of her drifted under the moon-whitened surface. Her limbs floated in the dark, reflecting the glimmer in the sky like raw opal. Her shoes, ones that should have fallen off her, were bright as blood on her feet.

His history had pulled her into this.

When he went in after her, he tried to keep as much breath in him as he could, bracing so the cold wouldn’t take the air he had.

It needled into his body anyway, both the pain of it and the shock of how freezing the reservoir always got in fall.

The water felt like it had a current, dragging her down. Rosella’s arms had gone limp as pondweed. Her skin looked pale as the spider bite scar she still had on her upper arm.

None of this even seemed like the same reservoir, or the same girl, he knew. He and Rosella had touched hands in this water not in the cold of fall but in the heat of July and August, when the light warmed a layer near the top. They always went farther down together, finding the stark border between that sun-heated water and where it got cold, and how it was always more sudden, more distinct, than they expected.

Right now, it was all cold, a water version of how he’d always imagined space. Frozen and quiet and punctuated only by stars.

He had a good enough grip on her that when she came back to him, he could feel it, the awareness sparking back through her body. He felt it in how she worked them both toward the surface, like she had come back to life enough to follow the moon.

He pulled her up on the bank, and her coughing rasped in the cold air.

“Are you okay?” he asked, reaching for the glasses he’d left in the wild grass. He got them on in time to see her nodding in answer to what he now registered as an incredibly stupid question.

She held on to him, her wet hands gripping his soaked shirt so hard that threads of water ran down his upper arms. How she did it seemed less like she was looking for comfort and more like she was checking him, making sure he was all there. The way she shivered made him feel the cold in a way that went deeper than the reservoir hitting him.

Her coughing quieted into breathing.

“You’re okay,” he said, and he hated how much it sounded like a question. “You’re okay.”

The light overhead warmed.

Rosella tilted her face toward the sky.

A vein of red snaked through the glimmer, fast as a lightning strike.

Rosella tensed, pulling away from Emil.

The glimmer lit her face enough to show her panic as she scrambled to her feet.

“Rosella,” he called after her.

But he didn’t follow her. He let her go.





Strasbourg, 1518


The sergeant leads her out, no doubt toward a stone cell where she will be held until the method of execution is decided.