“You know.” His father’s eyes drifted toward the floor. “You can’t go where you want to go without knowing where you’ve been.”
Emil’s back tensed.
The burning of ancestors’ vardos. Words stricken from their vocabulary. Being forced from villages, or fleeing in the dark fold of midnight, because there was so often a relative who could feel the threat coming before anyone else, like smelling snow in the air. Fighting back with iron shards and pipes and whatever there was to be found when there was no warning, and there were the old and the small to protect.
What he’d put up with in Briar Meadow—the ignorant questions, the word gypsy said in a way that felt like it was sticking to his skin, the pointed looks whenever something went missing—it was so small compared to what those before him had endured. But that made him more, not less, ashamed of it. He couldn’t help thinking of it as some kind of failing on his part.
Outside of this house, he couldn’t be who he was. He’d known that since the day his parents got that call home. But the more he knew about his family, the harder it was to leave his Romanipen behind every morning.
“I know where we’ve been,” Emil said. He started up the stairs, saying, more to himself than his father, “and I kind of wish I didn’t.”
Strasbourg, 1518
At daybreak, Lala burns the wooden box, turning to ash the last of her parents’ belongings.
She watches the wood crumble, the shade of the oak trees dulling the flames’ gold. She offers a prayer of thanks to Sara la Kali, She who watches over Lala and Tante and all like them.
Once the embers have gone as dark as her hair, Lala draws away from the wattle fence.
Alifair is up in the oak trees. He never flinches, not even when wasps crawl along his wrists.
He slips a hand between their buzzing clouds to reach the darkest oak galls. They whir around him but never sting, even as he steals the growths they have laid their eggs inside.
Ever since the day Alifair first appeared in their crab apple tree, this has seemed as much a kind of magic as Tante knowing how long to keep linen in the woad dye. The wasps do not mind him, for some reason as unknown as where he came from. Both his French and his German carry a slight accent, like two kinds of grain mixing in a sieve, so no one can guess which side of the Zorn or the Rhein he was born on.
When she catches his eye, they share a nod, a signal they know as well as each other’s hands.
Within minutes, he is down from the tree, she has set aside the bay in her apron, and they meet behind the cellar door.
Lala pulls him to the stone wall. He throws his hands to it, bracing as she presses her palms into his back. His mouth tastes like the lovage he chews after each meal, like parsley but sweeter.
Lala has never asked him whether that first kiss was because they had both gotten older, or because he had grown less skittish about his own body, a body that once tethered him to the girl’s name he was given when he was born.
Now Lala knows not only the facts of his body but the landscape of it. She knows where there is more and less of him. She knows where he is both muscled and soft, full-hipped and full-chested, strong in the shoulders and back. The strips of binding cloth beneath his shirt give him the appearance of a heavier man, rather than one laden with a girl’s name at birth.
Lala hears footsteps coming in from the lane, and goes still.
“I should go,” Lala says, almost moaning it, eyes still shut.
“Later,” he whispers, the word coming as a breath against her neck.
Lala squints from the cellar into the light, looking for a stout form—Geruscha—and a second figure with a tight-woven bun, the seldom-talking Henne.
For months, Lala held her breath over the two of them, fearful that any day the magistrate’s men would come to Tante’s door on the report of these two girls. But their efforts at friendship have only persisted, despite the frosted politeness Lala offers them (cold, so as not to encourage them, but cordial, so as not to offend these two girls who saw her with the woman in the dikhle).
Lala shields her eyes from the sun’s glare.
The approaching figure does not turn toward the back garden, but takes the crabgrass-roughened path to the door.
Not Geruscha. Not Henne.
A man.
Lala distinguishes the colors of his garb, white and black.
Her heart quickens.
The robe and cape of a Dominican friar, one trained to root out witchcraft.
Alifair is alongside her, his approach quiet as a moth’s.
They listen at the weather-warped door.
They hear the friar’s voice, his greeting to Tante Dorenia. His words, however polite, cannot veil the contempt in his tone, his disdain for the fact that Tante is a businesswoman, never married, trading in the richest black and deepest blue.
Lala cannot catch all the words, but hears enough to make out a name, a phrase, a stretch of time.
Delphine.
She has been missing.
Two nights and a day.
Delphine.
The woman whose silhouette Lala and Alifair glimpsed just beyond the trees.
The woman they saw dancing.
Lala feels Alifair’s shadow incline forward.
“Alifair,” she says.
“We saw her,” he whispers. “What if we can be of help?”
She takes hold of his arm. “And don’t you think he will wonder what cause we had to be out in the thick of night?”
“I won’t tell him about that,” he says. “And I’ll leave you out of it. No one will even know you were there.”
As though that is any comfort. One word to the magistrate that Alifair was the last to see Delphine, and to see her dancing like some wild spirit at that, and they’ll blame him for it. He’ll be brought to the scaffold or the stake before he finishes his testimony. The rumors that he appeared out of the woods like some fairy’s child will not help.
Lala grips his arm tighter. “Please.”
Alifair looks at her, his eyes turning to flint, his jaw hardening.
He shrugs off her hold, and nods.
Lala knows him well enough to recognize this not as agreeing, but as relenting.
He is simply giving in.
Rosella
In Briar Meadow, our small, loosely gathered set of houses bounded in by woods and highway, the glimmers were as much a part of our calendar as the seasons. But I was the only one always dreading another year of blood on rosebushes, and all the slashed cloth and scattered beads that might come with it.
It never came.
Not when I was eight, when daughters who’d given their mothers nothing but silence for months suddenly wanted to spill their hearts out over late-night freezer cake. Not when I was eleven, when congregation members who, according to their choir director, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket” sang like angels. Not even two years ago, when the glimmer brought Mexican coywolves out of the woods; cute as puppies, they had an annoying talent for getting into houses—even ones where all the doors and windows were locked—and chewing on the nicest shoes they could find.
By the time I turned sixteen, I had almost forgotten to dread the glimmer, so I wasn’t even thinking about it when the red shoes started appearing around town. They showed up on sofas and bedroom floors. Instead of resting in attic trunks, or on the high shelves where they’d been stored, they appeared in the open, as though airing themselves out. They were found propped up in corners, heels against baseboards, toes resting on carpet. Or in cupboards, with broom bristles grazing their delicate beading. Mothers stumbled over them in hallways, pausing to yell to their daughters to pick up their things before realizing the red shoes on the floor had been wrapped away in tissue paper for years.