Dark and Deepest Red(68)

They will both need their hands free to fight, though she has little idea what they will fight with. Especially when she must pretend she needs no further weapon than the demons she commands.

She works the knot loose. Alifair knows well enough to keep his hands before him, so the crowd at their backs will not catch what she has done.

She keeps her hands back from clasping his and tending to the raw, reddened skin encircling each wrist.

There will be time for pressing witch hazel and lavender to his skin only if they live to this evening.

Lala holds her throat tight, understanding that any crowd that follows could mean to kill them the moment they are too far for the priest to witness.

She holds the rope in her hands. She keeps it. It will be the one weapon they have.





Emil


It was in the second of Rosella almost crumpling to her knees that he understood. He registered what he should have considered days ago.

The red shoes weren’t just a sign of a fever trying to take her.

That fever lived in the red shoes themselves.

Rosella looked at him, her breath held in her throat.

“This is never going to end,” she said, the words barely audible.

The guilt landed on him, like that feeling of a palm on his shoulder.

Maybe, if he and Rosella had never met, none of it would have happened. The bitter ashes of his dreams turning to live embers. A pair of red shoes becoming as deadly as they were beautiful.

Maybe it had to be both of them, him and Rosella sparking against each other like the iron and flint his five-hundred-years-ago relatives would have held in their hands.

There was Rosella, the daughter of a family who crafted red shoes famous with the suggestion of magic. Red shoes that came with the hint of something scandalous that only made Briar Meadow love them more, and that the men who ruled sixteenth-century Alsace would have hated.

There was a scrap of history Rosella didn’t know, and that Emil had just learned—the red shoes meant to cure la fièvre de la danse.

And there was Emil, descended from a girl who made herself into a witch to save the boy she loved. For just long enough to survive, she had transformed herself into the brazen demon everyone thought her to be.

Together, these things flared and lit, like raw sodium in water.

Commended back into the hands of the devil for the blessing and good of the people, who now live free from the demons who once plagued them.

Since his father had told him those words, Emil had repeated them over and over in his head.

Of course Strasbourg assumed his five-centuries-ago relative was telling the truth when she confessed, with such venom in her voice. Of course they wouldn’t consider that she might have done it to save a man’s life, and her own.

She had taken what everyone else had put on her, and she had made it hers. They had held a knife to her back, and she had twisted it from their hands without them even noticing.

Rosella’s eyes fell to the ground. “I thought…” She trailed off.

Emil held on to her. She returned his grip, keeping herself standing.

He knew what she thought. He saw it in the pain in her face, her fear over how that fever still wasn’t letting her go.

Probably, she thought she’d been pulled into this for no reason except that this year’s glimmer had touched every pair of red shoes her family made. She probably thought this only went as far as figuring out something about his family, about la fièvre de la danse, about a city held in some frightening plague five hundred years ago.

But this was just as much about her as it was about the Olivas, the same as how it had been as much about him as about his family.

It had to be.

Emil had never quite turned his back on his family’s history. He never could. But he’d stopped looking right at it. It became a set of stars just off the side of his vision. And going that long without looking straight at it had made it little more to him than a cautionary tale. It was a warning of everything people were capable of, all the reasons his grandfather had told him to keep his heart open but his hands ready.

He’d thought that if he ever looked back, he’d get stuck there. But the past had come for him anyway, because there were things it wanted him to know.

And there was something it wanted Rosella to know, something he would never be able to get at because it didn’t belong to him.

She had to, because it was hers.

Emil said Rosella’s name in a way sure enough that it brought her eyes back to him.

“Everything that happened to my family, I stayed as far away from it as I possibly could,” he said. “I didn’t want to look at it, at any of it, because I was afraid of it. I never would’ve admitted that to my dad, not in a million years, but that’s what it was. I was afraid of it.”

He caught her elbows in his palms, keeping her up.

He held her gaze. “So what are you afraid of?”

This time, when her expression shifted, it was all the flame colors at once.





Strasbourg, 1518


“Do not look back,” Alifair whispers to her, knowing any gaze will provoke them. It will make those who follow see them as prey all the more.

Lala knows no other way to frighten them off than to give them the spectacle they wish.

She screams and runs off the road, dancing this way and that, never in a straight line, not even for a few steps.