Dark and Deepest Red(69)

Alifair follows deep in his feigned trance.

Lala treads over rocks and weeds, throwing out her arms as though demons might tear open her flesh. She puts all her soul into the dance, and hopes it will be enough to scare away their pursuers.

It is not until they are into the trees, out of view of the city gate, that Alifair sets a hand on her arm.

“Lala,” he says.

The name alone startles her. He has never called her that within anyone else’s hearing. Tante Dorenia taught him well not to.

She falls still, quiet enough to feel the watching eyes behind them.

A small crowd stands, not with the look of wanting to catch and kill. More with a blinking patience.

Lala recognizes a few faces.

There are the brother and sister for whom Alifair bought bread.

And Aldessa, the flax farmer’s spinster of a cousin.

The two maid friends who have lived together as long as Lala has been alive, neither of them married.

A few men who hunt together in winter.

A group of women who share a household, claiming to be sisters, but who look as little alike as black willow and birch.

Emich and Roland, two apprentices whose masters once beat them for being found lying together, considered a mercy compared to the loss of an arm each as Li livres de jostice et de plet would have called for.

Two old men and their wives, all of them white-and silver-haired. But neither husband stands with his wife. It is the men who stand near each other, and the women with each other, in a way that makes Lala wonder if the wives have spent more nights in the same bed than with their husbands.

There is Geruscha, with a tiny, hopeful smile on her face.

Henne stands alongside her, clasping her hand.

Lala looks to Alifair, but his face shows the same incomprehension she feels.

“What are you all doing?” Lala asks them. “Why have you come?”

Their bodies part, and Tante Dorenia emerges, proud as a queen. By the way she holds herself, the slight shape of her belly shows.

The sight of Tante, among all these who hold a common thread within their hearts, nearly undoes Lala’s own.

“Did you not hear your own words?” Tante’s smirk is as small and bright as a sickle moon. “We are your legion of demons.”





Rosella


With every feeling that the shoes were cutting into me, with every sense that the glass beads were needles piercing my skin, I remembered that night when I was five. I remembered watching outside the workroom door as that man insisted my abuelo hand over his work for nothing. I remembered my abuela defying him with her best pair of scissors.

I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.

For years, I had run as far from that night as Briar Meadow would let me. I had decided, in that moment, that I would never land there, that I would never let my family be there again, having to wreck what we loved just so it would not be stolen. And with every time I decorated bake sale tables with Graham, I had taken that vow deeper inside me. With every time I dressed like Sylvie, in dove-gray sweaters and black pants as neat as licorice candy, I repeated it. I would never let men like that make me destroy the work of my hands, because, instead, I would learn to pass alongside their daughters.

I had been so sure I could learn the rules that made girls like Piper. I had been so caught up in those rules that I never considered I might one day have to take a pair of scissors in my hands and break them.

And I had worn my fear on my body in shades of red.

But these shoes, the shoes my grandfather had made with his hands, I had stitched back together with my own. They held the history of where we’d come from, villages with air so bad my grandmother said Santa Muerte had to wear a gas mask to get close enough to claim the dead.

They held the work of our hands.

They were as red as our blood.

Words formed in my mouth, sharp and sweet. They were mine, but had the sheen of being a gift I was accepting onto my tongue.

And as I did, the memory of something Emil said flared in my brain.

Something he’d told me in the light of small, petal-colored flames. About being on a bridge with his own grandfather, both of them watching the mirrored triangle of current behind a buoy. How it looked like it was moving even when it was staying still.

That was the thing about staying still, he’d told me, about holding your ground. When there was a current coming at you, if you managed to stay where you were, you left a wake.

The power Strasbourg had over his family was not only in the secrets they made them keep, but in making them think they had to keep so many secrets to begin with. It came in making that girl believe she herself was a living secret, something to be kept in the dark.

Then that girl, that woman in the blue dress, had taken hold of everything a whole city had said about her. She had grasped their whispers and suspicions. She had taken it all in her hands, and used it.

They had declared her a witch, and she’d stayed still, accepted the word, none of them realizing she was sharpening it between her teeth.

I looked at Emil, this boy who’d just told me how hiding from his own family’s history had gotten him nowhere.

I let go of him.

And I danced.

I threw myself between trees, spinning and whirling. I threw my arms toward the moon.

The motion sent pain through my ankles. It made my heart feel hard as a root.

But I danced.