the Red.
That was when the arguments started between Mary and Tubal.
Emily could barely remember the details now of what had been said. Looking back, all those words seemed just to have been grease on the wheels that had taken Tubal away from them. She had never thought of him as a grand patriot: a religious man, yes, and an industrious worker at his printer’s business in town. A soldier, though? Dark, wry Tubal Salander? Surely some mistake. And indeed, he had not seemed possessed of that fire to sign up that young Rodric had shown, who had tried twice to take the King’s coin despite being a year too young.
There had been something else eating Tubal right then. He had always been the man who seemed to know what was coming: when the weather would change, when prices would rise and fall. He heard things; he spoke to travellers and had odd sources of information.
And so Tubal took much of the money he had so diligently saved, and he sank it into a lieutenant’s badge. And he wept when the time came to leave his wife and son, but he marched off anyway. And everyone cheered as the new recruits and their bought-and-sold officers marched away to the training camps. Alice cheered, and Rodric cheered, though he complained bitterly that the war would be over before he was old enough to join up. But Emily and Mary did not cheer, and little Francis cried in Mary’s arms, a thin, high wail that cut across all the jubilation and enthusiasm of the rest.
Never mind, people had said to the hollow-eyed Mary. The war will be done soon. For all the rumour that the Lascanne army had been pushed back to near the border, these new recruits would tip the balance. How could those opportunistic brigands of Denland stand against the true men of Lascanne?
In the year after that there was a host of men’s jobs and tasks which went undone unless the women and the boys set to them. There were shortages, because the sea had become a hunting ground of warships, and the merchantmen could not get through. There were panics about spies and revolutionaries. In the capital, men were executed for plotting against the King. At the border itself, the war dug in, with neither side able to break the other’s lines, but both constantly trying.
And towards the end of summer the notices had gone up in Chalcaster market square, and all across the land. They were couched in many comforting words: yes, the war was being won; yes, victory was on the very horizon, only just out of reach. And, because of that, the King needed more from his loyal subjects. The King reluctantly, and because the Denlanders must be defeated if anyone was to sleep safely, required all men to give themselves into his service. Boys from the age of fifteen, men to the age of fifty, they were all required to present themselves to do the King’s will. Those with valuable skills would work and craft, forge and fit, to furnish materiel for the war. But most would simply march, because the Denlanders fought with the desperation of cornered animals and the weeds of their revolution must be uprooted entirely, lest they sprout anew.
Rodric had not been fifteen, not then, although men from amongst Emily’s servants had been taken. Rodric had fretted and kicked his heels and daydreamed of muskets and uniforms for the scant last months of his fourteenth year, while Emily had prayed for the end of the war.
And then Rodric had turned fifteen, and the sergeants had come again to find those boys whom time had delivered into their hands. And Emily had done all she could to prevent it, but she was just one woman, and the war was vast and fierce and it would not stop for her.
*
She was very young in her dream: barely more than a child. It was a false-waking dream, as it always was. She had started from sleep and looked around the bedroom she had shared with Alice back then. A noise had woken her, but only her.
Memories banished from everyday life were keen and clear in this dream. She remembered the hard, bitter feel around the house that centred on their father. He had spent a long time struggling with the world – born a gentleman with a grand old family name to support, and eaten away at by a succession of gnawing failures. Lost