Lala arrived at the great dance with burghers’ daughters, instead of with Alifair, precisely to keep his name from scandal. And now here he is, shoving the burgher’s son off Lala.
“Stop,” Lala yells, careful not to say Alifair’s name, in case the burgher’s son does not know it. She does not want to give him an easier path to complaining about a rude apprentice.
But Alifair pushes the burgher’s son back harder, his grip breaking off Lala.
The burgher’s son raises an arm to backhand Alifair.
Alifair does not flinch.
Lala leans forward, ready to grab the threatening arm.
But the far sound of yelling stills the three of them.
Past the stationed guards, Lala catches sight of the carts, sent to Saverne, and now back. She glimpses the last moment of the afflicted resting on the carts, and then the fever drawing them in again.
It takes hold of them. The noise of the great dance—the drums, the fifes, the tambourines—has them spilling forward.
The priests plead with them, begging them to heed the blessing of Saint Vitus. Or so Lala guesses; the saint’s name is all she can catch of their shouting.
Lala stands on her toes, trying to recognize the women.
Cateline, the book binder’s wife.
Frederuna, the barber surgeon’s sister.
And the miller’s younger daughter, the afflicted one, leaping from the cart and toward the great dance.
The music rises to a great shriek of strings and drums, frightening the horses. They rear and startle back. Their terror is so fine-edged Lala can feel it in the air, their nervous reaction not just to the noise but to the trouble that builds in this city and the sky above.
It is into their path that the miller’s daughter crosses before anyone can grab hold of her.
No, worse than into their path.
If she were going into their path, she would miss them, their alarm throwing them backward.
Lala tries to call out to her, warning her. But the noise of the instruments swallows her voice.
The miller’s daughter, in as much confused terror as the horses, ends up between them and the cart.
Another strike of noises rattles the horses further, and one kicks backward.
The force catches the miller’s daughter in the chest, and the life in her ceases, as quickly as her dance.
Rosella
My body felt wrung out, my ankles stretched and sore. But I shoved myself out of bed and into jeans and my coat. I needed to know if any of my friends had some twist of dangerous magic in their own red shoes.
I found them at the drugstore trying out lipsticks. Aubrey and Graham were drawing on each other’s arms with the testers, laughing and shrieking as they went back and forth between evading each other and retaliating.
“These would look perfect on you,” Piper said by way of greeting, and drew comet trails of plum eyeliner and gold shimmer on the back of my hand.
“Piper,” I said.
She set her green eyes on me. By now I had learned not to wither under that stare, or at the sight of her birthday-cake-golden hair that seemed impossibly shiny.
“Is anything”—I glanced at the cinnamon-candy-red pair she wore on her feet—“weird happening with your shoes?”
“Other than me getting along with Mrs. Tamsin?” she asked.
I tried to smile. Even in Piper’s most affectionate moments, her mother was always Mrs. Tamsin or the lady of the house. Never Mom or even Mother.
“Do they”—I grasped for the words—“you know, come off okay?”
“Are we about to have another conversation about arch support?” Piper ruffled my hair, already messier than hers. Always messier than hers. “Because I’ve heard this lecture from Sylvie.”
Aubrey craned her neck around the aisle, her red hair brushing the endcap. “What are you two whispering about?”
“She made out with Emil last night,” Sylvie said, holding a nail polish bottle up to the fluorescents.
Graham snapped her head toward me. “You made out with Hot Pocket?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I said.
“Hot Pocket,” Graham said. “He’s the hottest of the pocket-protector guys.”
“He does not wear a pocket protector,” I said.
“It’s implied.”
“And also,” I said, “worst nickname ever.”
“Um, no.” Aubrey tried a tester lipstick in the mounted mirror. “WD-40? That was the worst.”
“Oh, you earned that one, and you know it,” Graham said. “You squeak whenever you get excited about something.”
Aubrey swiped moss-green eyeshadow onto Graham’s arm. Graham got her back with mustard-blossom yellow.
The overhead lights caught both their red shoes, and they laughed in a way that made me realize, all at once, that they’d be kissing by the end of the week, if they weren’t already.
“Are they…” I whispered to Piper.
“Oh, yeah,” Piper mouthed at me. She bent down a little to whisper, the way she and Graham always did with girls as short as me and Aubrey. “Took them long enough, right?” She straightened up and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, her fingernails flashing purple polish. “What were you talking about before?”
“The shoes,” I said. “Have they”—I hesitated—“done anything to you?”
“They’re doing things to everyone.” Piper tried a shimmer powder on her cheekbone. “You should know that better than anyone after last night.” She grinned.
“I mean,” I tried again. “Does it seem like there’s anything wrong with them?”
Her stare caught me, like the shock of finding my mother’s glass measuring cup hot. Hot glass looks like cold glass, our science teachers were forever warning us.
“Why?” Piper eyed my shoes. “Should it?”
The distance opened between me and these girls I called my friends. Yes, Sylvie had gotten me to stop buying flower-patterned underwear in packs of five at this very drugstore. Yes, Graham had stared enough at me sprinkling chili powder on oranges that I didn’t do it at lunch anymore. Yes, Aubrey had taught me how to take off wine-dark lipstick a minute before getting home. And yes, Piper had made me into a girl who would take a swallow of vanilla extract on a dare, laughing no matter how much it tasted like lighter fluid smelled.
But if anyone knew what the red shoes had done to me the night before, everyone would blame me, not the odd magic lacing the air in town every year. It would be my body, brown and unknowable, that they would consider at fault.
In Briar Meadow, everyone probably thought they were above anything as old-fashioned as suspicions of witchcraft. Here, our magic was small and contained, held within a single week each year. It followed rules set by the light above the reservoir. It stirred us, maybe even unsettled us sometimes, but it didn’t have teeth. And if it was found to have grown teeth, it would be my fault. They would blame me, the suspicions the same even if they considered themselves too forward-thinking to call it witchcraft.
My own skin, my own body, would be the thing that had turned the red shoes vicious. My brown hands stitching them together, that would be what had sharpened them into something deadly.
The rise of Graham and Aubrey’s shared laugh reminded me. Everyone else in red shoes was falling in love, or setting butter and sugar on their tongues.
But my red shoes, the ones I had made by hand, had taken me by my ankles.
If anyone knew, they wouldn’t just blame me. They would blame my family. The stain of it could spoil every pair of shoes they made, not just the red ones.
If my mother wouldn’t even tell people that we went to curanderas for fevers or nightmares, I knew better than to tell anyone this.
“Look.” Piper took my arm and tried a blush on my wrist. “You are making this way too complicated. Do you like Woodlock or not?”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not—”
“Then stop overanalyzing.” She frowned at the ca
rnation pink and shook her head, a declaration as final as a signature. “Who cares if you needed a really fabulous pair of shoes to give you a push?”
Her choice of words made pain flash through my arches.
But I took the out she was offering.
“You’re right.”
“Of course I am,” Piper said.
If I wanted to get myself out of these shoes—without tearing down everything I had done to become one of Briar Meadow’s adored daughters, without wrecking my family’s business—I was on my own.
Strasbourg, 1518
Lala and Alifair dry the woad in the sun, pressing the leaves into boules de cocagnes the size and shape of late-season apples, then pounding them into powder. To so many, it’s a weed, but in skilled hands, the leaves of this yellow-flowering plant produce such brilliant blue it seems a sorcerer’s trick.
They wait for Tante Dorenia to start the dyeing. They don’t dare try on their own.
“You never know what blue the powder will give,” Tante reminds them. “You are both too young to have the touch for it yet.” It takes a different skill, she says, to dye a blue for show than to dye a bottom color for black, or to overdye weld yellow to make green.
At her command, they lower the presoaked garments into the vat.
“Mind the bubbles,” Tante says. “Or you’ll never get an even color.”
The bubbles are always on Lala’s side. Alifair’s hands are too steady.
Alifair keeps the greatest distance from her he can and still hold the cloth. He reads Lala as well as he reads the turning of leaves before rain. He seems to know she wants him to stay away from her, but the fact that he does not know why, and cannot know why, leaves Lala’s heart as heavy as a hailstone.
None of them speaks of Delphine, or the few others who have fallen down dead from this ceaseless dance. Or the miller’s daughter, whose life went out of her the moment she took the weight of the horse’s hoof.
They lie in the cathedral crypt, priests blessing their worn-out bodies and the souls that once dwelled in them.
Tante marks how long to dye the cloth by the length of Hail Marys and paternosters. She knows just how much muttered penance is needed for each shade of blue.
The wet cloth grows heavy in Lala’s hands. She can feel Alifair trying to take more of its weight.
Just as Lala’s arms tremble, Tante says, “Now bring it up.”
The fabric lifts out yellow as the woad’s flowers. Lala and Alifair haul it to the line and flop it over, heavy as a great fish.
Lala blots her hands and forearms on her blue-stained apron, and the three of them stand back. To Lala, this part has always been worth the pulping and the alum fermenting and the grinding. As the air and sun hit the wet cloth, it turns, from that yellow to leaf green, and then to the blue of woad dye. This moment, waiting to see where the shade will settle, has always held the thrill and fear of months.
But there’s no joy in it now, not when Alifair will not even meet her eye. Not when the miller’s son mourns his youngest sister with a cry so haunting it still pierces the air.
And not when the council’s great dance has left the city with more afflicted, not fewer. More dancers than ever crowd the squares; the crier’s announcements can hardly keep up with their numbers. They whirl in the full sun of morning, in the hot, unaired guilds and within the crush of the market walls.
The fifes and horns, the tambourines and drums, only lured more to the terrifying dance, their loved ones watching with pained cries.
All that is left from the council’s great cure is a mess. Refuse from the market and guildhalls scatters the streets. Boots trample ribbons fallen from girls’ hair. Blood from the dancers’ feet mixes with spilled wine.
And an edict from the authorities, that all occasions of dancing in the open should cease until autumn, as though they can command such a thing. Dancing at weddings may be done only with stringed instruments, they say, but leave each to his own conscience to use neither tambourine nor drum.
None of the instruments that most frightened the horses, and sounded the death of the miller’s youngest daughter.
It is too small an effort, far too late.
As they dye and hang the last sheet, Lala’s eyes catch on the road, on figures too far to recognize.
Lala slowly picks out one leaping form from the next.
The figures twirl and throw their arms toward the sun.
They dance.
With deepening horror, Lala watches them draw nearer, and finds features she recognizes. The papermaker’s niece, with her hair the color of wheat stalks. The long limbs of the eel fisher’s daughter.
The cartographer’s young second wife, with her embroidered skirt meant to show off her husband’s wealth. But neither the fine thread nor his coffers have spared her from this.
And following after, their mothers and sisters, reaching out their arms, calling for them, pleading with them to resist the devils within them and with the devils themselves to let them go.
When they cannot catch them, they stand on the road, weeping into their hands.
The dancers jump higher. They strike the ground hard enough to kick up dust. They trample wildflowers on their way, releasing the smell of summer nectar.
The scene bears the haze of a nightmare.
Lala blinks, but the figures stay. Girls Lala grew up alongside now spin toward town.
She runs after them, trying to grasp their arms.
If she cannot keep Strasbourg from looking toward her to cast blame, she must stop the dance itself.
“No,” she yells, as helpless and desperate as if they were cows escaped through a fence. “Be still.”
She would fall to the ground and beg Sara la Kali, even beg the dancers themselves, if she thought it would halt them. Instead, she runs, trying to catch hold of them. But a moment after her fingers meet an arm or shoulder, it slips away. They are too fast, their limbs too sweat-slicked to hold.
Geruscha and Henne stand by the side of the road, hands clasped. They lightly shake their heads, either in horror at the scene or in warning to Lala, that there is no stopping it.
The afflicted girls keep on, dancing toward town.
“Stop!” Now Lala is screaming. “All of you!”
Their faces show no response. They seem not to hear her at all. Even if they wanted to stop, they are helpless against la fièvre.
They seem made to do it. Compelled, either by something outside them, or so deep in their bodies it is written into their marrow.
Worst among their distant faces, halfway between pained and serene, is one Lala recognizes with a start.
The older of the miller’s daughters.
The one surviving after this fever took her younger sister.
Her older brother, the one whose mourning cry still echoes in the air, runs after her. “No!” he shouts after her. “Do not follow your sister into death!”
But at the sight of Lala, he halts.
He stands, and his glare seems enough to singe her skirt.
Lala remembers herself, and twists from under his stare. She starts again with chasing them all. The tanner’s sister. A knot of ploughmen’s daughters.
And the miller’s one surviving daughter. The single living sister of the young man whose gaze now feels as though it is searing her dress.
“Stop!” Lala screams. “Be still!”
But they do not stop. The fever is worlds stronger than any voice or hand in Strasbourg.
Emil
Emil had known that the next time he saw Rosella would, probably, be an inescapable kind of awkward.
But the night before had worn him down so much that he forgot to dread it until the second it happened.
“Hi,” he said, and he hated how wary he sounded.
“Hi,” she said, seeming even more apprehensive than he was.
Well, this was off to a solid start.
Her eyes ticked toward his hands.
He couldn’t help lo
oking down. Even following the same wash procedure he always did, the brown of his knuckles had reddened and paled in a way he couldn’t pass off as coming from the cold air.
Rosella pressed her back teeth together. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” she repeated.
“It’s just acid.”
“Just acid?” she asked. “What were you doing?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” He put his hands in his pockets.
“Emil,” she said, digging through her purse. “That’s a burn. Come here.”
She pulled him over to one of the benches that dotted the center of town, the wood split by months of sun and cold.
When she took her other hand out of her purse, her fingers gripped a tiny glass jar. The label had been ripped off, like it had held something else before.
When she unscrewed the cap, it smelled green and wet, like rain-soaked grass.
“This’ll hurt for a minute but then it should help,” she said.
“You keep that in your purse?” Emil asked.
“I’m a future abuela,” she deadpanned. “I keep everything in my purse.”
He laughed, and the memory of her family, the Oliva house, came back. His own mother and father could only agree on neutrals. Gray and deep beige and ink black. But the Olivas’ house always seemed like it held every color at once. A sofa the red of cranberries. Big fluffy yellow and orange flowers. A blue-green blanket tossed over a grass-bright chair. The dark green carpet that Rosella’s father loved and her mother hated.
Their house was the smell of salt and cinnamon and epazote. It was the windowsill where Rosella and her mother set tiny vases of silver-dollar eucalyptus, which everyone else in this town hated like a weed but that they loved like a favorite flower.
Rosella’s fingers slid over Emil’s hands and wrists. His breath caught, and felt jagged, like cloth snagging.
“Sorry,” she said, mistaking it for pain.
He let her wrong impression stand.
“For what it’s worth,” Emil said, trying not to let the shiver down his neck get into his voice, “this is pretty tame.”
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