Dark and Deepest Red(66)

He draws toward her, leading with his chest, as though she is pulling him by the rib cage.

She takes hold of him, one hand at his back, the other at his collarbone as though she commands his heart.

She steals him, like tearing a pearl from a rich woman’s throat, and the priest cries out his feigned grief.

Alifair tilts his head back at her touch, as though she bewitches him. His hair smells of the salt from his sweat and the rope that binds his wrists. But it smells also, still, of hazel and bay. The wind over fields of flax and woad.

“What have you done?” he whispers.

“We are aspen trees, you and I,” she whispers back, her voice soft even as she keeps her face hard, to look as though she is issuing a command to her apprentice demon. “You cannot tear our fates apart, even to save me.”

Alifair’s smile is more like a breath, small and momentary, and it is broken by the hard interruption of shouting voices.

“Take her oath,” a canon priest yells.

“Do it now,” another shouts.

“Resist the demons within you,” the kind priest begs Alifair, a last performance. “You need not go with her.”

“Come off it,” the executioner says, a tremble in his rough voice. Now even he believes that Lala may damn all in the city. “You heard them. Do something.”

The priest gives his best look of defeat before raising his head.

“Be gone from us,” he tells Lala. “You and all your legion.”

Lala draws breath from the sergeants’ fear, the executioner’s fear, the fear of the gathered crowd, those caught between wanting to run and wanting to learn what will become of this scene.

“I will curse you all,” she says, thinking of her heart turning to live embers. “Lay a hand on me or mine, and I will curse you all even in my death.”

The priest grabs her hand, pulling her away from Alifair. He casts sad eyes to Alifair, the look of a grieving shepherd.

He sets Lala’s hand on the Bible.

“Swear on our Lord’s Word that you will be gone from us,” the priest says, “or may His wrath cast you into the sea of darkness.”

Lala hisses and writhes as though the touch of the book burns her.

The priest holds her hand fast. “Swear you will not harm another of these souls.”

She tosses her head, whipping her hair into her face.

“Enter the city gates again,” the executioner says—even now he must have his word—“and flames will be the last sight you ever know.”

“Give the oath,” the priest says, “or your hand will stay upon this holy book until the Lord’s return.”

Lala glares up at him.

“I swear it,” she says through gritted teeth. “And I swear it on pain of a thousand devils.” She spits the words at the crowd around her. “I will take my legion with me and I will keep them from this wretched place.”

The crowd gasps at the words.

The priest remains steady. It is a shimmering moment, one that will probably make him a canon should he want the office.

“Then by God and by His saints and angels,” the priest says, “I hereby banish you, the demon living within our Lavinia, the demon who torments our Alifair, and all yours who here afflict.”





Rosella


The girl in the blue dress looked so much like Emil that I knew, even before I saw the recognition in his face. They belonged to each other in a way that crossed five hundred years.

She had hair more like his or mine than the oil-shined coifs of women in the crowd, and she wore it loose instead of braided or covered. The heat and her own sweat had fluffed it, what my hair used to look like by noon before I started carrying a brush like Piper taught me to. She had skin and eyes so close to Emil’s that they looked like colors she had passed down to him.

She was already beautiful, even through the far lens of all those centuries. On top of a cream underdress she had on a dress as deep blue as an autumn sky, a color she wore as well as if she’d been born in it.

But the defiance in her eyes could have singed the hems of her captors’ sleeves. And it gave her a raw gleam; I couldn’t look at her long without feeling the sting of that brightness.

It had frightened the proud men enough that they loosened their hold.

Then, with a last look between her and Emil, with the act of her seeing him, truly seeing him, all of it vanished. The bridges and the water and the towering cathedral spire whirled around us, as though we were dancing again.

It spun down into a single still point, and we were back in the dark trees, back in a town and time we knew as well as our own bodies.

“She didn’t die,” Emil said, his hands on my upper arms like he was trying to keep me warm. “They didn’t die,” he said, breathing the words more than saying them.

“They didn’t die,” I said, half confirmation, half echo.

I wanted Emil to find his next breath in that space, the possibility that this girl, and the boy she had loved enough to take with her, had survived.

The cloud cover between the trees was iris-petal blue. The season was sloping down toward winter, toward bright snow and silver icicles. It was always that moment, between one season and the next, when we let that year’s glimmer go. It would fade, and everything would settle.