By Linda Lafferty
"2014 winner Colorado booklet Award - historic Fiction
Each morning within the hour sooner than sunrise, a silent boat launches at the Bosphorous, relocating rapidly into the private a part of the waters midway among Europe and Asia, the place a guy will die…
*The Drowning shield* is the story of the Ottoman princess, Esma Sultan—one of the main robust girls in Ottoman background and in contrast to the other girl within the Islamic international. In a gender reversal of Scheherazade in 1001 Arabian Nights, Esma seduces a special Christian lover every one evening, merely to have him drowned within the morning. The Sultaness's real ardour burns just for the Christian-born soldier charged with accomplishing the brutal nightly dying sentence: her drowning shield, Ivan Postivich.
*The Drowning shield* explores the riddle of Esma—who is right now a assassin and a champion and liberator of women—and the guy who loves her even with her frightening crimes. This textured historic novel, set within the opulence and squalor of Istanbul in 1826, is woven with the complexity and results of love.
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Sample text
But our lovemaking had been very real, and I yet treasured the memory. Nor, I told myself, would I forget this one, for I’d never been inside the vast structure that housed the queen’s wardrobe, that which was not of immediate need and kept at Whitehall Palace. I’d adored Elizabeth of England from the first moment I’d seen her, gorgeously gowned, on a white horse, when I was but eleven and she’d come to visit her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, near my home in Warwickshire. The boy led me round the corner into an alcove hidden from the street.
I asked, for a man as important as Edward Arden in this area owed direct allegiance to Leicester. He shook his head and leaned closer. “More like, he’s foregone it. Leicester’s been as mean as that bear on the tunics. He pesters and prosecutes recusants, and Cousin Edward’s spleen is up over it. ” Recusants were those with Catholic loyalties or leanings. They were recorded and fined if they didn’t attend the Protestant church. In the early days of her reign, the queen had commanded that everyone could keep his conscience private, but since several attempted Catholic plots and rebellions, she’d let her advisors convince her to change her policy.
We seemed to have passed from attire to military materials. As we rounded the next corner, my worst fears leaped at me from the shadows. Within a dimly lit grotto of garments, behind a small portable table sat a man simply but finely attired all in black; his amber eyes shone flatly, like an adder’s. It took me but a moment to realize I knew him—that is, I knew who he was. I had glimpsed him at court the time the players had taken me with them. His hunchback form was unmistakable. For months, the whole city had talked of naught but the bloodless battles between this man and the Earl of Essex.