Dark and Deepest Red(71)

Tante Dorenia, who Lala can now call Bibio out loud. She can call her Aunt in the language her mother and father would have given her little pieces of, like bits of bread and honey.

They find greens and wild horseradish in the woods, blackberries and acorns, mushrooms that Lala brushes dirt from and that Bibio Dorenia inspects. They sleep outside in the summer warmth, though already Lala thinks of autumn, especially for her bibio’s child. Some of them have family in the villages and plains, who might let them sleep in attics or barns. Some have allies in Strasbourg, who bring belongings from their abandoned homes; when these go missing, it is further counted as witchcraft or sorcery.

“We will make our living selling rare things,” Bibio Dorenia tells them all as her belly grows and the season deepens. “Beautiful dyes like our woad. Violet champignons from beneath the pine trees. Baskets woven of unboiled branches. Marchpane jewels.” She nods to the boy who was a baker’s apprentice. “Liqueurs we make ourselves. Delicate fruits like golden plums.” She smiles at Geruscha, who has always had a hand for the more temperamental trees. “We will make ourselves a town that seems crafted so much of magic it will sound as a dream to any who speak of it.”

They thrill to her as though she is an enchantress spinning a story.

When Lala was a little girl, her bibio used to tell her of an ancient people, die Ph?nizier, known for their skill in navigating by the stars and for tinting glass. From rock and sea snail shells, they made dye as violet as the twilight sky, and no one dared attack their ships, for they were the only ones who knew how to craft purple rich enough for a king.

Lala does not know if it is true. But she must believe it now, when her bibio tells the story again. They will be a place of purple, an outpost of the rare, so others will think twice before harming them.

They are still looking for where they will stop for autumn when her bibio wakes Lala and Alifair early, and leads them to a meadow fringed with aspen trees.

“You both like them so much, why not?” Bibio Dorenia spreads her hands toward the winking green leaves.

Lala looks around, fearing hunters or guards rushing from the woods. “This is a lord’s pasturage.”

“It is.” Her bibio casts a proud look over the meadow. “He rather likes the idea of having a fairyland on his estate. That, and the things we will make, will be our greatest power.”

“So we’re to be figures in his menagerie,” Alifair says, sounding more worried than indignant.

“Perhaps we would be,” her bibio says. “If our keeper was not the greatest peacock of all.”

Alifair shakes his head, uncomprehending.

Bibio Dorenia lifts her eyebrows at them both. “He is a lord in affrèrement with his best knight.”

Alifair’s wry laugh sounds as a whisper, a breath through the trees.

Bibio Dorenia presses her lips together into a small smile. “Un pain, un vin, et une bourse.”

One bread, one wine, and one purse.

Affrèrement. The bond of brotherhood that allows two men to live together under blessing of the law. Lala has heard the word, but it has always seemed a myth to her.

Perhaps it is because it is a luxury conferred more upon lords than journeymen.

“It is, of course,” Bibio Dorenia says with exaggerated piety, “a spiritual bond, no more.” Then she breaks into that smile again. “He will let us live here for first chance to buy the finest of anything we grow or make.”

Lala shakes her head, marveling. How has she done it? How has a Romni with no husband and a growing belly waltzed into the graces of a lord in the woods and pastures of the Black Forest?

With the question comes the answer.

The same way Bibio Dorenia made herself into dyer of the most coveted ink and blue in Strasbourg, at an age little older than Lala is now. The same way she guarded Lala in a country that forbade their very blood.

She has a will and a heart as shining and deep as iron gall ink.





Emil


In his dreams, the air smelled of salt and cloth, of stone and the water skimming by the quays.

But instead of la fièvre, instead of the screaming, there was the quiet beneath the aspen trees. There was the boy from the Pont du Corbeau, the one with lighter hair. He wore a clean tunic and shirt, his wrists free from the rope Emil had last seen on him.

Not a boy. A man, Emil realized with a longer look.

Then there was the girl, the woman, Emil’s relative. Her features looked softened at the edges, as though the centuries were a veil between them.

She wore that same blue dress, but with her night-black hair crowned with flowers that let off their smell of fruit and sugar.

He could barely take the impact of her, this woman who lived five hundred years before him, whose soul was its own lantern.

In his dream, she kissed him on the temple, and her touch was both chill and heat, the way stars burned hot but existed in the cold of the sky.

He took the weight of her blessing, and she walked into the aspen trees, her skirt trailing across the undergrowth.

The man waiting for her offered his hand. She took it, the light of her warming at his touch.

Emil couldn’t hear what they were saying as they faded into the trees. All he could catch were the bright laughs and low voices of a girl and a boy walking home together.

He woke up to the feeling that he wasn’t alone in being awake. He followed it downstairs, to where his father had a half dozen books open on the kitchen table. His usual method, where Emil’s mother instead kept neat stacks of tabbed pages.