Dark and Deepest Red(74)

I uncrossed my arms, my hand finding his.

A blue spark and a slight shock flitted between my fingers and his.

We both jumped back, laughing at the same time when we realized it was static. Not a trail of ion-dyed flame. Not some dangerous magic that lived in the space between his family’s history and mine. Just our hands meeting in dry, charged air.

Probably, we would settle around each other.

Probably, but maybe not yet.

So for now, we stood next to each other, watching the sky.





Der Streuobstwiese, 1518


The scent of wild roses is still in their hair and clothes when Geruscha wakes them both.

Lala sits up, startled by wondering if a sergeant is at the door of this still-drying wattle and daub.

Then she smells the rosemary and lavender and remembers where they are. Der Streuobstwiese. The meadow orchard that is now their home.

She slides her palm onto Alifair’s shirt. He turns over with a soft moan and sits up. The moon through the oiled paper of the window shows the place on his neck where Lala kissed him hard enough to leave a mark.

Geruscha crouches. “It is your cousin,” she says, and then runs off at the order of an older woman.

“My what?” Lala asks, before snapping into recognition.

Alifair lights the single tallow candle. The light gilds his shoulders as he puts on his boots.

Emich and Roland are following Aldessa’s orders, fetching whatever she asks. Josse prepares water for the blessing.

The birth is more groaning than screaming, her bibio seeming frustrated and put out by the length of the whole matter.

“This child clearly wishes to be born,” she says weakly, “so why not get on with it?”

Henne rubs oil on her belly. Alifair offers to play his Blockfl?te to distract her, a new one, crudely and quickly made from maple wood.

Bibio Dorenia summons Alifair close.

“If you play that blessed thing now,” she whispers, “I will snap it in two.”

Lala gives him a look back to tell him that, for his sake, he is best to leave this part to the women.

With that, he is off to gather water and wood alongside the other men.

Bibio Dorenia begins screaming, and Henne goes out to tell everyone to open chests, untie knots, shoot an arrow into the air, to bless the last moments of the birth.

Bibio Dorenia squeezes Lala’s hand so hard Lala fears it will snap off.

And then, just when Lala thinks her fingers will break, he is there, her cousin, his face new and red as a berry. The first small sapling off their gathering of aspens.

He will grow up among wild pears and wood betony. He will know the many forms love takes.

Josse blesses him with the water, and then Henne does the same, with salt and a dot of honey on his forehead. Bibio Dorenia, Lala knows, will not let go of him until he is baptized, and maybe not even then. She will keep a piece of iron near her bed to protect them both.

“And what will you name him?” Lala asks, dabbing sweat from her bibio’s forehead and hair.

Bibio Dorenia traces her finger over the baby’s small hand. It is the first time Lala can remember seeing her bibio’s wonder as plain and glimmering as a child’s.

“I thought I would name him for your priest who cast us out of the city.” She gives Lala a teasing smile.

Lala tries to call up the man’s Christian name, and flushes with the shame of how she cannot.

Bibio Dorenia laughs.

“Emil,” she says as she bends to her son’s small hand and kisses it. “His name is Emil.”





Strasbourg, 2018


Author’s Note


Yesterday, I flipped through a British issue of Harper’s Bazaar that had been left behind in a lobby and found a spread commemorating the seventieth anniversary of Moira Shearer dancing in the film The Red Shoes. The pages showed Misty Copeland, Isabella Boylston, and Tiler Peck wearing breathtaking gowns and brilliant red shoes, and talking about how vividly the film captures devotion to dance.

Sometimes your obsession with a story follows you even as you’re following it.

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” has enthralled me for as long as it has horrified me. As a young dancer, the idea of becoming possessed with dancing both frightened and thrilled me. It stayed with me, the thought that a woman’s body, and the color she puts on it, could be so powerful and so dangerous.

I knew the cautionary tale the original fairy story was meant to be, a warning to selfish and vain girls.

But I also recognized it as a warning that women—our bodies, our will, the colors we wear and the colors we are—have unimaginable power. Red shoes, I slowly understood, were not only a symbol of the forbidden. Red shoes signified the bright fire of being a girl, a woman, who is unafraid of her own body and what it wants.

If Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” has ever entranced you the way it has me, you’ll probably recognize the references to the original story and its typically stated provenance in the pages of this novel. But long before I wrote a word of this book, I wondered if Andersen might have drawn inspiration from a strange corner of Alsatian history, a fever that plagued the city of Strasbourg in 1518.

Five centuries later, I’m in Strasbourg, where the glint of the canals and the warmth in the air almost lets me imagine this city in the summer of 1518. Because at the moment, my obsession is red shoes not only as a fairy tale but as a point where fairy tale and history intersect. A Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl whose red shoes dance her to death, and the unbelievable but true account of a dancing plague that happened in this city five hundred years ago.