Dark and Deepest Red(63)

For those minutes, I was any other Briar Meadow girl in a pair of red shoes. Lovesick and brazen, with salt on my lips and fireweed honey on my tongue. My red shoes were mischief instead of wrath. They were defiance and flirtation emerging from a tissue paper–lined box. For this night, I shared the common enchantment of anyone wearing a pair of red Oliva shoes.

I could have told myself I didn’t mean to hold on to Emil as hard as I did, that the intertwining of our limbs was all the fault of the red shoes, that slipping my fingers into his belt loop was more reaction than decision.

But I stayed, and he let me. And when I reached for the top button of his jeans, we were a blur of half questions, clumsy and nervous.

Do you …—and the answer, Yes.

Or, Are you sure? And the same answer, Yes.

And the hesitant, pausing laugh when we both realized neither of us had done this before, so neither of us knew how to lead.

The force of the shoes threw me again, and he held me tighter. His hand, first tentative as it grazed my thigh, now gripped it.

The shoes could possess me, but right now, I could decide what I did with the twirl and bucking of my own body.

He was on top of me, keeping me to this point on the ground.

I found his certainty in that nod, that yes. But with the will of the shoes moving me, I was the one driving this. I led him from underneath him.





Strasbourg, 1518


And so they bring the friar, who has been waiting with the stake at the Pont du Corbeau.

Or, they would, if every soul dancing for Alifair’s life did not bar the way.

Their dance roils and shifts in lines. They gather into packs and then skitter out. They send the watching crowd scurrying in all directions. They block the quay so that startled onlookers cannot escape them.

Along the way are more who either wish to see Alifair free, or wish to see Lala gone from the city walls forever, or both. Lala sets her gaze upon them, and they writhe and scream and beg the good men who hold her to save them from her wickedness.

A few keep her eye a moment longer than they must. A young woman on the bridge winks in a way so small only Lala catches it. An old man near the quay inclines his head toward the sergeant, with a small smile of contempt, before throwing himself into an imitation of the dance.

A brother and sister toss themselves into the canal, pretending the dance has done it to them. They flail as though they are still dancing in the water as a few men scramble to fish them out.

Geruscha and Henne feign falling to the ground as though struck by a marsh light.

Their act is even better than they promised Lala. They could both be on a stage.

Aldessa, the flax farmer’s cousin, sees them both, and a light comes into her eyes. A moment later, she imitates them, feigning tormented dancing.

“Bring someone!” the elder sergeant bellows. “Bring a priest, for God’s sake! Any of them!”

The dancers impede the friar’s progress. They block the canon priests. Lala can see their tall, proud heads bobbing to see past the afflicted.

How odd, that the only holy man who can find his way in, the only one the newly afflicted allow to pass, is the kindhearted priest of l’église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux.

“Here, old man,” the executioner demands.

The elder sergeant grabs Lala by the hair and commands that she stop, but before he can snap her head back, Sewastian, the younger sergeant, eases his grip away.

“I’ll handle her,” Sewastian says. “It is you who should address the priest.”

And so the older sergeant does.

“This woman has the devil in her,” he says. “She afflicts simply by laying eyes upon those she passes.”

The crowd parts before the priest. He gives an exaggerated lowering of his eyes and shaking of his head, as though it pains him to have lost one of his flock. He moves his lips and appears to be praying.

Lala wonders if it is all a performance or if he prays in earnest, perhaps that this will not conclude with Lala and Alifair swallowed by flame and him at the end of a rope.

The elder sergeant waves a hand, and Sewastian pushes Lala forward. He keeps his large palms on her shoulders, and Lala cannot tell if the rhythm she feels in his fingers is her fear or his.

She longs to look back at Alifair so badly it stings her eyes. But Sewastian holds her fast.

“Will her death free us?” the older sergeant asks, and though Lala cannot see his face, she hears the rage and worry in his voice, the way her unruly possession humiliates him in the very streets he has been charged to command.

The priest finishes his prayer, makes a sign of the cross, and lifts his head. “I must gaze into her soul.” He walks forward, the hem of his robe lapping out with each slow step.

Far too slow for the executioner, who says, “Get on with it, old man. We’ll burn her too.”

The priest takes Lala’s chin in his hand, and her heart bends in on itself for how much this feels like Tante, studying her forehead to discern the cause of a fever.

He makes a great show of looking in Lala’s eyes.

Lala twists her longing for Tante into rage. She pretends to wither and writhe beneath the holy man’s gaze. She hisses and throws her head side to side, as much as Sewastian’s grip will let her.

Lala bares her teeth as though the priest’s gaze singes her.

The priest draws away his hand.

“The devil is indeed in this child,” he says, his voice sounding of such heaviness in his heart that Lala wonders if he should have been a player in morality tales. “But if you kill her, her legion will only find another soul to bewitch.”