A new year, a new story

This one comes as something of a relief, given what a difficult birth the previous story (the story formerly known as “White Bride, Black Bride, Raven-girl, Hare”, which became “Flight”) had.

“The Chosen Girl” springs from a dream I had when we were travelling in the UK last May, and is seems it’s had enough time to percolate to something approaching a tale that can be told. Here is a first draft sample:

The Chosen Girl

By Angela Slatter

I have lost three sisters and four brothers to the mines, and two sisters more to the manor house.

We are populous due to our father’s tendency for taking new wives, sometimes before the old one is done, and his proclivity for procreation. Indeed, if his efficiency as Superintendant of the Mines had not been enough, his very fecundity would have been enough garner him special standing in our Lord and Lady’s favour. Such standing, however, does not protect his offspring from their fates.

I am fifteen now and tomorrow is the day of my choosing – not a day I choose, but the one on which I am chosen. Down to the gold mines where in a few years, if I am not killed or maimed in a cave-in or other accident, I will begin to cough up bright dust spattered with blood and expire in the hospice surrounded by similarly slow-choking folk. Or up to the great manor house, the Hall, to serve at our Lord and Lady’s pleasure for who knows how long a tenure?

I brush my hair, one hundred strokes, to make sure it shines and I will not be found wanting. I rub my face with the cream that was my mother’s; comfrey and rose to soften and plump, with a little lemon balm to lighten so I will be as pale as a winter moon. When I wake, I will use eyebright to ensure my gaze is as clear as the Honeydaughter Stream before it runs into the mines and comes out wrong, as steady and blue as the crystal that hangs around the Steward’s neck. I will not pinch my cheeks to add colour, but I will bite gently at my lips, carmine them a little, so it seems as if all life is concentrated there.

I finish my preparations and climb into the wide bed I have not had to share for a year, not since April when up the manor house. My sister was apprehensive but confident on her last night – if one can be both simultaneously – she believed she would please our Lord and Lady and that the Steward would see this, and she was right. Her body was found, eight months to the day, laid out neatly on the great flat stone in the centre of the town square. She’d had a good run by then compared to others, like our sister Sophie, who’d lasted by two.

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