Dark and Deepest Red(51)

The sight of Alifair stills her, even with the men at her back.

She is sure that, in this moment, she imagines him. To know she will never again touch this boy, never again brush her lips against his neck or feel his hands pushing up her skirt, cracks her heart in two. She longs even for the simplest tasks, the ones she hated, but that she would perform for a lifetime if only she could do them with him, and with Tante looking on. Grinding the oak galls. Weeding the vegetable patch. Hanging the heavy, just-dyed fabric over the line, watching it turn from yellow to green to blue.

Alongside him are the friar and a canon priest, each looking proud, accomplished, as though Alifair is a stag they have hunted and caught.

Have they brought him to confess already? And should they not be taking him to the church?

Rage rises up in her, and she wonders if she has been a fool to believe they would take her confession and be lenient with him.

She keeps up her posture, as though her soul has been unburdened by her admission. She hopes she will pass close enough to Alifair to whisper, Tell them I bewitched you. Tell them I am a daughter of the devil.

“Come,” the canon says to Alifair, urging him on.

Lala’s eyes adjust to the light, and she catches the pain in Alifair’s face.

“May I speak to her?” he asks.

The bailiff hesitates.

“Please,” he says, the word plain. “It will ready my soul for confession.”

“One motion of the devil,” the priest warns.

Motion of the devil? Alifair stands here, ready to confess to lusts of the heart and sins of the body, and they think the devil is in him?

Alifair steps forward, the sergeant moving toward the door as though he might run, and neither the prim, well-adorned canon nor the friar can be trusted to stop him.

“I am sorry, Mademoiselle Blau,” Alifair says in an upright, formal way.

Lala knows at once it is for the benefit of the men listening.

“I am sorry I brought the devil into your house after your aunt so kindly took me in,” he says. “You both deserved better gratitude.” He glances at the other men, sweeping them into his words. “I am sorry that my wickedness has brought such a fever on Strasbourg, and such pain to you and your aunt.”

The sting of the words grows worse the more she grasps them.

“What?” she asks, barely a breath.

Alifair straightens. “And I am sorry that I bedeviled you into confessing,” he declares, loud enough for the men to hear.

In one strike of cold horror, she realizes what he is doing.

“No,” she says, the word rasping.

“No,” she says again, louder, finding her voice this time.

She grabs his sleeve and pulls him close.

He winces, and only then does she remember the wasp stings.

She adjusts her grip. “You cannot do this.”

“Your aunt needs you,” he says through clenched teeth to keep the words quiet. “Her child will need you.”

The understanding that Alifair knows of the baby stills her, but only for a moment.

“You cannot give yourself up,” she says.

“They would have taken me eventually,” he says, his face so weary he looks like a life-worn man, instead of a young one just out of being a boy. “They accepted it when I was a child, but I am older now. If they would not pardon La Pucelle d’Orléans, do you think they would pardon me?”

The common name for Jeanne d’Arc presses at Lala’s throat. A greater soldier than any other on the battlefield, and they burned her for wearing a man’s tunic and hose.

Lala grabs Alifair tighter. “I will deny whatever you say.”

He gives her a sad smile. “I led them to a grave digger in Riquewihr. He remembers me taking the earth from your mother and father’s graves. He will swear he witnessed me troubling the dead.”

Riquewihr.

The stones beneath Lala seem as though they are giving, as though she will be swallowed into the ground.

Alifair had seen Lala’s sleeplessness, and she had confessed the fear that her parents’ souls were not at rest. She and Tante had not fulfilled the death traditions, fearing to be driven out in the middle of the night, or worse, simply for being Romnia. So Alifair had stolen away in the dark, gone to the hills outside Riquewihr, taken the earth from their graves. He had brought it back for her to give to the water, one year at a time.

He had done this for her, for the repose of her parents’ souls, and now all Lala can imagine is how it must look to these priests. A boy they think immoral, and he has been witnessed meddling with the dead. The priests will fall into accusations of witchcraft as easily as they do into their feather beds.

“You protected me,” he whispers. “Let me do the same for you.”

“Why?” Lala breathes.

Alifair presses his lips together, dampening his dry mouth. “The day the hail came.”

Lala is pulled back into that afternoon that faded into an early evening, the cold and sting of the hailstones on her back, the warmth of Alifair as he picked her up off the path. The memory rises up from under the smell on Alifair’s skin, the salt of sweat, the petal and wood of common hazel.

She did not realize he remembered.

“I went out as soon as the sky began to darken,” he says, with a smile both small and sad. “I knew where you would be. The way I knew what you would do today.”