Dark and Deepest Red(61)

That was the truth he didn’t give her, because he didn’t really know it until now: Why did we stop being friends? Because you understood a part of me I had to pretend didn’t exist.

This time, he would tell her the truth she needed to know, that she wasn’t just wearing red shoes her family had made.

She was wearing five hundred years of history.

Strasbourg had pinned its hope on red shoes to cure the dancing plague.

And now, five hundred years later, it was Rosella’s family who’d made the red shoes enchanting Briar Meadow.

Rosella, the girl who knew him the way few gadje ever would. Rosella, the only girl he’d ever told the names of his family’s vitsi, a girl who spoke the language of brown-skinned saints and food offered to the dead.

She was the girl the red shoes had come for, and that some thread of the dancing plague had come back for.

When he found her, in the tree-darkened shadows, he couldn’t let that fever have her again.

He caught up with her. He set his hand on the waist of her dress and he held her. At first it was a try at keeping her still, so the fever wouldn’t take her.

Instead, it took him with her.





Strasbourg, 1518


Blutgerichtsbarkeit.

Blood justice.

Ius gladii.

The right hand of the sword.

High justice.

Such virtuous words placed on men’s whims for who lives and who dies.

Lala waits in the dim between lanes, folding herself into the shadow of the Tour du Bourreau. She sets her back teeth, hoping it will quiet the rhythm of her heart.

Spectators have gathered along the route, treating a burning as a diversion, a show little different from a tournament or a troupe of famed jongleurs. Merchants show off tunics embroidered with compasses. Grand seigneurs wear their ermine, and sleeves so wide that their servants must take care not to crush them. Hats form a sea of such varied color and shape that it seems fanfare fitting a coronation.

Blood court.

At least that name is halfway honest. Proceedings painted in blood.

Lala’s rage is all that keeps her from withering with grief and fear. Its heat spurs her on.

She peers out, like a girl beneath trees, as though waiting for a royal procession in a forest. Patient as the sort of thief they consider all like her to be.

When the executioner and sergeants lead Alifair out, it is all she can do not to fall to the stone at her feet. He squints into the light, as though bewildered by the existence of the sun. The grime of stone grays not only his cheeks and clothes, but the rope on his wrists. His eyes look not frightened but hardened, and far-off, and she wonders how much of him is left.

She stills her breath.

She waits until they near where she hides, on their procession from the executioner’s tower to the stake waiting for him at the Pont du Corbeau.

When they pass, she emerges, smooth as a darting fox.

She is small and quick enough to slip into the space before them, barring their path.

The sergeants draw back, as though she has appeared from the stone itself.

“You have stolen from me,” she declares, not with grief, but with the cold voice of an affronted queen.

The crowd, gathered to watch a condemned man’s progress to the place of his death, watches her.

The sergeants regard her as though she might be ill, or as though she might burst into dance. Not two lanes over, the afflicted continue with bleeding heels and paled eyes.

Alifair watches her as though he is desperately trying to comprehend her words, as though she has spoken in a language he does not know.

The executioner grunts in a way that shakes his wide shoulders. “Stay off, little girl. Give the men their room to work.”

She stays in their path.

“I demand the return of my demon,” she says.

The last word stings, having to call Alifair the word.

Forgive me, she breathes within her soul, looking at him. I can find no other way.

She turns to those watching, some in clothing dulled by work, some in the fine gowns and hose of the richest merchants.

“I demand return of all my demons,” she tells the crowd.

Their eyes widen. They watch her as though she is possessed.

“Return them to me”—Lala imagines her eyes flaring as candle flame—“or the damnation of this town will be on your heads.”

With this, the pausing crowd draws in a sharper breath, thrilling not just with fear, but with new gossip. They glance down the lanes, where the afflicted dancers throw their limbs.

The executioner grabs her and forces her through the street. “What do we say?” he asks the sergeants. “Shall we have two in a morning?”

They shove her forward so she cannot see Alifair. But she can feel his eyes on her back, the questions he cannot ask. What in the name of heaven and earth are you doing? Why are you doing this?

They lead them both toward the Pont du Corbeau. Maybe by the time they arrive there will be two stakes erected.

Along the way, she notices those whom she has asked for favors, those who either wish her gone from Strasbourg, or who wish life for Alifair.

As the sergeants prod her along, Lala casts her eyes on one, then another, then another, each time a cue. With each sharp turn of her head, each cut of her gaze, they drift into the streets. They toss their bodies about, moaning as though the devil him self has gone into them. They flail and spin. They jump and leap, sending finely gowned women screaming.