She straightened her shoulders and stuck out her chin. “Soldier, soldier!” she cried out as loudly as she could. “Give me the red shoes!”
The soldier laughed again, a low chuckle that made the ground tremble. He raised his hand and the fiddle strings stilled and the world was so silent that her ears rang.
“Little Elsa, Little Elsa,” the soldier said, and his voice was a wolf’s growl. “Give me a dance.”
Elsa crossed the clearing to the red shoes that waited still in the silent world. She lifted them from Karen’s feet. The blood smeared all over her hands. The feet lay on the forest floor, white and forlorn, ridiculous things without their owner. But the thing begun could not be stopped, and Elsa stepped into the red shoes. It seemed the world swept ’round her, and for a moment she saw the shoes as they had been, the gleaming red satin and embroidery and shining gold heels. She saw what Karen had loved, the love of beauty, of something that was her very own, and for that she had been taken away to die.
“Such pretty shoes!” laughed the soldier in his low, dark chuckle. “They fit so tightly when you dance!”
He did not move his hand, he did not blink, but the fiddle strings shivered and the music began again. The red shoes, weeping out the remnants of Karen’s blood, began to move, taking Elsa’s feet, and the whole of Elsa, with them.
Elsa danced.
She turned and swayed, she kicked up high and spun. She held out her arms for the partner who was not there. She danced, and the blood-Karen’s blood, the shoes’ blood-ran down and darkened the forest floor. She saw herself, a skeleton in rags dancing through the dark forest and up the streets of the town so that people shut their windows against her and murmured prayers as they would against a ghost. She saw her mother weeping by the fire for her daughter whom she thought dead.
The soldier laughed, and the music drawn down from the sky and up from the roots of the world played on, and in her mind she heard the weeping of the shoes.
Her legs were already tired, and tears threatened. The soldier laughed, and his voice was the crows’ voices. The music played harder, twirling her around and pulling all the breath from her lungs. But the blood in the shoes, Karen’s blood, slipped between her stockings and the shoes-and the shoe did not cleave yet. Not yet. She had a moment, a moment only and she had to do something.
The shoes whirled her around again, and she saw the bow where it lay beside Clarissa. She saw Clarissa’s button eyes gleaming, up black as those of the old woman in the woods. She thought she saw the ghosts looking on, she thought she saw Karen, dancing all alone, lost in the darkness, her only hope the axe and death.
Dancing alone.
Dancing alone to music that she could not hear but that would not ever stop.
Little Elsa, Little Elsa, give me a dance!
The shoes did not yet hold her, not all the way, not quite.
She had two steps that were her own, two, three, one more, enough to cross the clearing and grasp the soldier’s crabbed hand with her little bloody one.
“Soldier, soldier!” Elsa cried out. “Here is your dance!”
The blood stuck his hand fast to hers, and the dance that swirled around her pulled him to his feet, catching him up in its current and drawing him in. Elsa snatched at his other hand and held it up.
Father was a clergyman, but he did not fear the dance as some did. Elsa knew the schottiche and the polka. Elsa knew jig and reel. Elsa also knew the dances that every child knows, the twirling and the jumping, the high laughter that comes from moving fast and free. All these dances Elsa danced, holding tight to the soldier’s hard, calloused hands while he gaped at her, moving clumsily in his tall black boots. But he couldn’t stop. The blood held them together. While she danced, he must dance.
“Let me go!” he screamed.
“How can I let you go?” Elsa asked as she skipped round the clearing, swinging their arms. “I am only a foolish little girl who does not understand. How can I be stronger than all the dances you know and the red shoes you’ve put on my feet?”
The soldier threw back his head and howled until the smoky clouds shook. Elsa twirled them around, the music and the roar of her blood singing in her ears. She did not try to stop. She danced him up the line and down again, and he howled once more, and she spun them around. Her breath was going. She was so tired. She must dance. She must not falter. For while she danced, he must dance, and he knew it. He had asked for this dance that they now danced together, little girl and red-bearded man.
His dance, her dance.
His choice, her choice, and all the music of the world to spin them ’round.
“Take the shoes!” he cried out. “Take them! I give them to you, only let me go!”
With that, all the strings on the fiddle broke at once, a terrible, twisting cacophony that knocked Elsa backwards. She fell onto the earth, skidding through the leaves until she rolled to a stop beside Clarissa and the bow. Her feet were still. She heard the crows calling to one another, but she heard no music and she heard no weeping, and the soldier scowled at her and snatched up his broken-stringed fiddle and was gone.
After a little time, Elsa picked up the bow and her doll. Wearing the red shoes, she walked from the clearing to the path. The hump-shouldered woman waited there, her black eyes shining. Elsa had no more food, so she gave the old woman the fiddle bow. The old woman laughed loud to receive it and lifted Elsa onto her humped back and carried her from the woods to the executioner’s house. The executioner met her at the door and embraced her with his strong arms. He gave her soup and black bread and water to wash herself with and walked her home.
Her mother and father scolded her and wept over her. Mother bleached Clarissa’s feet white again, and Father bought her a new pair of black shoes and made her learn twelve whole psalms and stay inside for two weeks.
When she was allowed out again, Elsa wore the red shoes to church, and the lions smiled at her, and the angel fluttered his wings and lifted his nose in the air. But in the shadows Elsa saw Karen, clothed in white as the angel was. Karen stood on her own feet and smiled.
After that, Elsa did not wear the red shoes except for dancing, and when she danced she felt as if their freedom poured out over the world as a blessing, like music, like love.
When she could dance no more, Elsa gave the red shoes to her daughter, and she to hers.
And that, Elsa knew, was a proper story.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kevin J. Anderson has more than twenty million books in print in thirty languages, including Dune novels written with Brian Herbert, Star Wars and X-Files novels, and a collaboration with Dean Koontz. He just finished the sixth book in his epic space opera, “The Saga of Seven Suns.” He and his wife, Rebecca Moesta, have written numerous bestselling and award-winning young adult novels. An avid hiker, Anderson dictates his fiction into a microcassette recorder. Research has taken him to the deserts of Morocco, the cloud forests of Ecuador, Inca ruins in the Andes, Maya temples in the Yucatán, the NORAD complex, NASAs Vehicle Assembly Building, a Minuteman III missile silo, the aircraft carrier Nimitz, the Pacific Stock Exchange, a plutonium plant at Los Alamos, and FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. He also, occasionally, stays home and works on his manuscripts. Visit his websites at: www.wordfire.com and www.dunenovels.com.
Science Fiction/Fantasy author Linda P. Baker’s internationally published novels are The Irda and Tears of the Night Sky, with Nancy Varian Berberick. Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies, including Dragons of Krynn, The New Amazons, and Time Twisters. Linda credits her mother, Lena, and sister, Lisa, for the genesis of “The Opposite of Solid,” because they reinfected Linda and her husband, Larry, with the auction bug, begetting the question: “What if I bought something at an auction that…?”