To her surprise, the soldier threw back his head and laughed so hard it seemed he’d split stone and tree with the noise.
“You are too late, little Elsa,” he cried when his laughter was done. “Karen has given herself to God, and God has taken her away.” He snapped his bony fingers and pointed to the middle of the air. It seemed as if the world split open, and Elsa saw the streets of her city. She saw a wagon drawn by a single black horse wearing a black plume. All her brothers and sisters walked behind. In the wagon was a coffin. She knew without knowing how that this was a true thing she saw, and her heart broke in two. The hand that clutched the bow trembled a little
“It was all for nothing, you silly child,” said the soldier while the tears began to run down Elsa’s face. “Give me my bow, and take your doll.” He snapped his fingers again, and Clarissa fell to the ground, nothing more than a doll in a pink dress and ribbons, her feet horribly stained by her naughty mistress who let her go play where she should not. “Go home. Pray on your knees for things that you can understand, and leave the red shoes to me. If you are a good girl, you will never have to see them again.”
Suddenly Elsa felt smaller than she ever had. The music had brought all the world and time into this clearing, and they watched her with the bow held high in a silly game. The red shoes still stood beneath their coating of gore with the hideous stumps of Karen’s abandoned feet thrusting out of them. Karen had not lost her feet. She’d given them away with all her pride. Given them to God, and God had taken them. The old soldier was only doing his duty, like the executioner. She had not understood, because she was a little girl and nothing more. Her hand trembled again.
“No!” she said, stubbornly. “It is not right! It is not a proper story! Give me the red shoes or I will break this bow over my knee.”
“Elsa, Elsa.” The soldier folded his arms and shook his head, just as her father did when he thought she was being silly. “Do you think I need a bow to make music?” He snapped his fingers once more, and the fiddle’s strings trembled, though the instrument lay on the ground. They trembled and they shivered and the music began again. It swirled and looped, catching at Elsa’s mind and tugging at her heels. Beside her, the red shoes began to dance again, hopping and gliding, all the blood making a scarlet train behind them.
Elsa’s arm fell to her side and the bow slipped from her fingers. The music snatched and pushed at her, and she did not know what to do. She looked down at Clarissa with her red stained feet, and felt tears prickle again at her eyes. She had come all this way, and done all these things, and she did not know what to do anymore.
You will put on the shoes, and you will dance, the old woman had said. Elsa swallowed. Her throat was dry as dust. It was the only thing she had not done yet. The only thing, the last thing.
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.