take her hand and congratulate her. Merchants would stop haggling when she came by, and smile at her. Shopkeepers would give her things and refuse to accept payment, poor as everyone was these days. Once a man had approached her, a little drunk, and told her, ‘I am with you, if you do it. Say the word and all my family will back you.’ Another time, Northway had taken her to a restaurant one evening, newly reopened, and the owner had refused to take any money from her. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘fought at the Levant.’ His son had died at the Levant, yet still he idolized her.
She was a hero. She had cause to wonder precisely what Doctor Lam had said about her, and how it had changed in the telling before it reached Chalcaster, but she was known as the last commander of Lascanne, the one who had not been defeated. Why her and not Tubal, she could not say. Was it her birth? Perhaps it was more heroic for this honour to go to a woman. Perhaps the odds defied seemed greater that way. Nobody seemed to remember that the Levant forces had surrendered. Everyone knew how they had stood out to the very end.
She made no attempt to correct them. She wanted to. She wanted to stand in the market square and shout out the truth so loud that it would be heard in Denland itself. Each time she was tempted to curse down some well-wisher, to brush off some well-meant gesture, she instead looked in their eyes. There was hope there, hope flowering because she was the sun that looked upon it. Lascanne was short of heroes now, and she gave them something of their pride back, just by her walking the streets.
There were Denlander soldiers everywhere, of course. It almost seemed that there was one on every street corner, save that she knew they moved constantly to keep an eye on her, or perhaps to protect Mr Northway They were cautious about her, deferential even, and in time she realized that they, too, held her in high esteem, almost in awe. She was the Lascanne warrior queen who had never been beaten. She was the merciful commander who had saved their own comrades’ lives by not prolonging the fight to the bitter end: life and death in one frail body. She wondered if, in an earlier age, there would be cults and mystery sects arising out of her footsteps. She seemed to have become something that she herself could not control.
*
This morning she lay in bed, watching the sun creep through the shutters piece by piece like an army escorted by its scouts. Below stairs, she could hear the sounds of the house as it readied itself for the day ahead. Cook was getting a fire started and complaining to Jenna. Grant was outside cutting wood. Mary and Poldry would be scratching little marks against the meagre household accounts, and making a list of what they might need from neighbours or from the town. It amazed her that the purpose of all this industry was not to gain something, to win or to keep something, but simply to go one more day before the whole circle turned and put them back in their starting places again. It’s not war that’s hard, but life.
She felt the tension in herself, still. Thirty days of peace had done nothing to remove it from her. She put her hand out to touch the butt of the pistol and its cool metal reassured her. No matter what, she would keep herself armed. Let the Denlanders come; let rebellion set its fires. She would be ready.
Then Jenna screamed from downstairs and she found the gun automatically in her hand, her body halfway out of bed without her ordering it.
She slid her feet to the bedroom floor, listening to the commotion below. Jenna and Cook were shouting at someone, loud enough to drown any reply, and soon Emily heard Alice’s voice joining in as well. She could not make out the words, but some visitor was trying to impose on them and they were having none of it.
And then came Grant’s gruff bark, and a pause, and a murmur as the newcomer explained himself. Emily edged over to the window and pushed the shutters ajar a little, but by then the visitor had been let inside and she could see nothing.
She began dressing hurriedly in her white uniform breeches and shirt,