Dark and Deepest Red(64)

“Then what do we do with her?” The older sergeant’s frustration clips each word.

The priest lifts his head to the sky in holy contemplation, and the executioner swears in impatience.

Each time the priest looks upon Lala, she writhes and shrieks, and Sewastian’s thick fingers dig into her upper arms.

“We may turn to the Word of the Lord for our answers,” the priest says, with weighted patience.

If fright weren’t chilling Lala’s blood, she would enjoy how well the priest is exasperating the other men.

“As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, two men were stricken with demons,” the priest says. “The demons withered beneath the observance of our Lord Jesus. And when He ordered them out, they begged to be cast out into a herd of pigs, who then rushed into a steep lake and died in the water.”

“Get to the point.” Sewastian tightens his grip on Lala. “What do we do with her?”

The priest pauses, an overdone affect of piety gilding his face. “Have you not listened, my son? You must drive her and all her legion into the countryside, as our Lord Jesus cast the demons into the pigs. With great prayer, perhaps Christ in his mercy will send them into a pack of wolves, and neither shall trouble us again.”

He sets an eye on Lala, a reminder of what he told her in the cathedral.

Powerful men may count you as lowly as an animal, Lavinia, but the Lord counts men hating you as a sign of that which is holy within you.

“You must send her out into the countryside, never to pass through the city gate again.” The priest returns his eyes to the two men. “Her and any demons who would follow her. Let them leave these good people and go with her.”





Emil


The fever left them, like both of them had worn it out. It left them for long enough that they fell into a kind of sleep that was so dreamless it felt strange and soft, like the brush of her hair against his cheek.

After, it all seemed like it belonged in the same place as his dreams, this dark-haired girl among the amber trees. This girl he had mistaken for a woman from five hundred years ago, in a place where green oaks stayed in leaf even through hard winters. This girl, a dark silhouette against the fire-colored leaves, the red of her lips so bright it burned into him.

When he woke up, her cheek on his collarbone, her hair fanned over his shoulder, he looked for those same leaves. He looked for trees bright as sodium flames.

Instead, he blinked into daylight, and found a million rounds of flickering green.

The sun had bleached away the forms of the trees he’d grown up under.

What was left was not Briar Meadow’s woods. It wasn’t the road, or the houses beyond, or anything of the town he knew. All of it had blurred away. The night had brightened as fast as a match igniting.

Rosella stirred, the soft noise of waking at the back of her throat.

Both of them squinted into the daylight and those leaves that shivered like green wings.

His eyes adjusted.

The glare came less from the sky and more from around them, like they were in a room whose walls were light.

They followed that light, and the leaves around them went fuzzy at the edges. It happened like the colors of a painting running and then settling into something else. The trunks turned into city walls. The undergrowth hardened to the stone of the quays. The tallest tree became the cathedral spire.

It all held the same charge and apprehension as his dreams. And like his dreams, the haze of sleep both softened and sharpened the edges of things. It smoothed over the slope of canal bridges. It brightened the sun off the water. That single spire looked like a knife piercing the sky.

It all seemed so far from them, like they were watching from the Rhine. But he could not miss the shapes of dresses and tunics, and the smell of dust on the cobbled stones.

The familiarity flickered in his blood. It came with the same recognition as meeting a relative for the first time.

Strasbourg, centuries before he was born.

Emil made out the form of a crowd, a crush of figures mostly in skirts but some in men’s clothes. They threw their arms toward the sky. They each spun to their own rhythm, none of them in time with another.

The understanding caught in his throat at the same time Rosella stopped a gasp in hers.

This was the dancing.

Dozens—hundreds?—of women and a few men casting themselves in time with music no one could hear.

On the quay, among the crush of the crowd, stood a woman—or a girl? She seemed no older than he and Rosella were. She stood in a deep blue dress, her black hair spilling down her back.

The sight of her rang in him so loudly he thought the cathedral bells had sounded the hour. He could map this woman’s blood to his own. He could find traces of her features in old family photos and even in his own face.

He could match her scream to the shape of her mouth and throat and rib cage.

She stood just forward of a young man, his hands bound with heavy rope.

Emil placed them against what he knew of Strasbourg, the vague map that came from seeing his father’s books a hundred times. He registered the reason for the crowd.

Both left him sick.

The young woman and the young man were being paraded along the canals.

They were being led from the Henckerturm, the Tour du Bourreau, the executioner’s tower, to the Pont du Corbeau.

The route of public display before executions.