mercenary

by Europe's

then dragooned into becoming their camp follower; her mother taken away years before by other mercenaries, to an unknown fate; half her family dead or otherwise destroyed—and all of it, all that horror, simply because Europe's nobility and princes had chosen to quarrel over their competing privileges. The fact that they would shatter Germany and slaughter a fourth of its population in the process did not bother them in the least.
Rebecca was an opponent of that aristocratic regime, true enough, and, along with her husband, had set herself the task of replacing it with a better one. But she simply never felt the sheer hatred that Gretchen did. And knew, perfectly well, that Gretchen would have found nothing charming or gracious about His Eminence, Cardinal Richelieu. She would have simply measured that long and aristocratic neck for a noose.
"Which," Rebecca muttered to herself, "is not perhaps such a bad idea, everything considered."
"What was that?" asked Heinrich.
The major's face exhibited its own serenity. For all his youth—Heinrich was only twenty-four—the former mercenary had already seen more of bloodshed and war's ruin than most soldiers, in most of history's eras, ever saw in a lifetime. Rebecca liked Heinrich, to be h