Dark and Deepest Red(53)

“You’re the one who said it never lasts,” I said. “That it always leaves with the glimmer.”

“This is different,” my mother said.

“How?” I asked. “All I have to do is wait until it’s over. Like every other year.”

“Wait?” my mother asked. “Wait while those things”—I had never seen her regard our family’s work with such disdain, such suspicion—“drive you to do what, next?”

“They’re my shoes.”

The words came out without me deciding to speak them.

“What?” my mother asked.

“I sewed them,” I said.

I couldn’t tell her the rest, the awful scene with the debutante’s father, the scissors, the pieces I saved for years.

“So before you let half the town know there’s something wrong with what we do, what I’ve done,” I said, “let me try something.”

“What?” my mother asked, her voice rising as she threw a blanket across my back. “If you can’t even cut them off, what else is there?”

Emil had shown up at the reservoir twice. Twice, he had pulled me back from the shoes’ grasp. He knew something about the glimmer this year, about the odd magic tinting Briar Meadow. I could see it in the wear of his face. Whatever had come for me had left some trace on him.

I had to risk whatever he would think of me, whatever might come with him not believing me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can think of someone who might.”





Strasbourg, 1518


Weak around death.

It was a polite phrase Enneleyn used to use to explain why Lala and Tante and Alifair never came to executions. They did not gather for hangings or beheadings or lashings. They did not even attend when the sword itself was the spectacle; a nobleman’s sentence would sometimes command a skilled executioner from across the Vogesen, bringing death with one graceful stroke of his blade.

It has always been difficult to see death as entertainment when the next on the stage could so easily be any of the three of them.

Now, watching them stand Alifair to hear his sentence, is the first time Lala and Tante have ever joined the waiting crowd.

Alifair does not look up. He does not lift his eyes to see the faces gathered in la Place Broglie. He keeps his gaze on the wooden slats at his feet.

The sight of his dirt-grayed shirt, his eyes ringed with sleeplessness, his face that shows he is plunged so deeply into resignation that he has no room for fear. It is all so awful that for a moment, Lala drifts away from it.

Her drifting away begins with thoughts of when she would sneak up the ladder and into his bed. She would crawl under the blanket with him when it was cold.

Then one spring, when the ice wore off the trees and the branches were breaking into bloom, she kept climbing the ladder. She did it even when the weather grew too mild to feign a chill.

Sometimes, when the scent of blossoms in the air left them drunk, they pretended they were night courting, like the sons and daughters of wealthy burghers.

Amid these comes another memory, one that tears away the center of her heart.

Last year. The sweating sickness.

First it came for Tante.

“The bloody English sweat,” Tante panted from her bed. “We have survived famine and ice and buboes and pox, but this will be the death of us, curse it all.”

She ordered both Lala and Alifair out of the house, so they would not catch it. She ordered them to the flax farmer, who offered them his straw-covered barn until they proved well enough to enter the house.

They did not go.

Tante raged at them, covered in sweat, weak in her bed, and still they did not go.

Lala pleaded with God and Sara la Kali to save Tante. She fell to her knees before the crab apple tree, begging it to take her aunt’s fever.

Alifair carried in water from currents upstream from the city walls, free from the lye and blood of the market and abattoir.

Tante accepted only a few sips, the pain of swallowing overtaking how thirsty she was.

Lala offered her feverfew and brown bread.

She would not take it.

She panted in her sleep. Sweat poured from her body, and Lala changed the sheets as often as she could dry them, doing what she could when they soaked through to the straw.

Alifair, by favor and what little money he had, obtained enough almonds to make a milk by steaming them in hot water. He strained it through cheesecloth to make it easier to swallow.

Tante took only a few sips. But Lala is still convinced the day she did was the day she tipped away from death and toward life.

It was also the day the sweating sickness came for Alifair.

It overtook him so quickly he could not get up the ladder, falling off the second rung. Lala caught him and put him on her bed, and he was already too weak to protest.

Tante proved as ruthless in her efforts for this boy as she had been in so much else. She did not accept his refusal of feverfew; she compelled him to drink. She procured, in ways Lala still could not guess, water from the spring of Saint Odilia and earth from the grave of Saint Aurelia.

She soaked halved lemons in hot water because he would not eat, would not take sauerkraut or garlic, and this was the only of the baxtale xajmata she could get into him. He needed every auspicious food he could swallow, as much as he needed their prayers to Sara la Kali.