sophistry without winning him over. She was free to be frustrated, to be angry with him, to decry his manners and his morals. The knife of her hate was sheathed, though. He mocked her words and ridiculed her chosen causes, but she mocked him back.
She was a changed woman. Deerlings House had made sure of that. She had entered into a wider world, coming of age in some new way. Some nights, over the long, mild winter, she dreamt of the King, of dancing with his warm hand in her own, feeling the fierce fires of the sangreal dancing just beneath his skin. Other nights she was called before him, in all his majesty, not for idle music and entertainment, but to bare her breast to him, to take the searing brand of his touch against her flesh, feeling the soul-shaking jolt of his royal blood as it infused her. She would wake, twined in her bedsheets and drenched in perspiration, convinced that she would find a livid handprint stark against her skin; convinced that she had given herself into his service, that her fate and that of the King’s were now inextricably linked.
*
Then came the day when Emily and Alice rode the buggy into Chalcaster market, only to find the stalls abandoned save for some determined few packing up their wares with the air of women moving on to fresher pastures. By far the bulk of the people there were gathered about the Mayor-Governor’s noticeboard in the centre of the market square, and most of them strangely silent. Emily and Alice slipped amongst the gathering of tradeswomen, market-seller’s wives, town gentlewomen and a few old men and children, until they were close enough to read.
The crowd around them was murmuring, a slow whisper that built gradually into something quite different. The women, for they were almost all women, were reacting with a ripple of horror to the message just posted, a wave of bad news that would carry and carry until every household got to know if it.
‘What is it?’ Alice asked crossly, feeling herself jostled by the crowd. Emily squinted at the tacked-up paper, seeing first the royal seal at the base and only later the words themselves.
Most who stared at the proclamation had no letters, she guessed, and those who could read it had done so and fled, as though the madness contained in those words might be catching, It was catching, she realized, and it would take a terrible toll of all gathered there. Listening to the snippets of rumour and misinformation as the crowd tried to puzzle out what was writ there, she cleared her throat and held her hands up for quiet.
When she had enough of them waiting for her words, and with a heavy, sick feeling within, she read aloud what wiser heads had decreed.
‘BY ORDER of His Majesty, by the grace of God, Luthrian, King of Lascanne, fourth of that name, Lion of Denland, let the following proclamation be enacted in all towns, villages and hamlets of the Kingdom of Lascanne, this fifty fourth day of Winter, Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Eight.
IN ORDER that the war against the regicides and republicans of Denland be concluded at its soonest eventuality so as to thereby release those subjects of Lascanne currently under arms, and;
IN ORDER that the rebellious nation of Denland be subdued forthwith, for which effort a sufficient and large number of soldiers is known to be required, to avoid the threat of further rebellion, and;
For the greater glory and furtherance of the policies of the Kingdom of Lascanne,
IT IS COMMANDED that a further draft of the people of Lascanne be enacted.
So that all households, be they town or country, that have more than one female resident between the ages of fifteen and fifty must, by the First Day of Spring in the Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Nine, render up one such for the glorious service of her country, and, if it be thought fit, to be trained and outfitted as a soldier and put at the disposal of His Majesty’s Armies.’
Below was the seal and the signature of the King, but Emily hardly had eyes for them. Around her, a low moan of fear started up in one throat, and was taken up by the next, and the next. The working women, the wives, the mothers all around her, must feel just as she had done when first she read this. There was now a dreadful weight inside her, below