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First they hurt her, and they went on hurting her for a good while. She’d cried and begged and tried to fight them, and then she’d simply cried. She’d wept until her eyes felt hot and raw and prickly, everything blurry and overbright. She’d lain there, limply, feeling disconnected from her body as it was shoved and manipulated like so much meat, and she wished that she could simply detach entirely, drift away, go somewhere else.

But she could not. And then it was over, this monumental cruelty, and as she and the rest of her terrified family were driven into the squalor of the soldiers’ camp she realized something new, something terrible: that what had been done to her had meant nothing to the soldiers who did it; that they had hurt her and ruined her and violated her will and her ownership of her own body with no more than a thought. They had hurt her, and taken from her, and they wouldn’t even remember her face—grey, puffy, red-eyed, wounded, a war hag and not yet twenty. Her life, her personhood, was disposable. A thing to be used.

I am not a thing to be used.

The thought came from a distance, but it tethered her to the present. And here was Annalise, trembling and small, and Oma, her mouth pressed into a severe line and the set of her shoulders square despite the fear in her eyes, and Hans, his face burning with shame that he hadn’t been able to help her, or Father—that he hadn’t been able to help any of them.

Gretchen Richter wasn’t disposable to them. To them, she was an anchor.

Grudgingly, almost spitefully, Gretchen Richter began to climb back down to Earth, leaving the distant place her mind had wandered to. In the here and now, there were people who needed her. In the here and now, none of the horrors that no doubt waited for her in the soldiers’ camp would draw another tear. She would give these beasts nothing more of herself.

#

In the days to come, Gretchen swiftly realized that not all of her days would as horrific as she’d feared. To the soldiers, the camp followers were largely faceless. For a time, at least, Gretchen and the rest of her family faded into the background, just another set of wan, disoriented refugees drifting along with the tide, doing their best to avoid notice.

Gretchen was the first to realize that avoiding notice entirely wasn’t the best of a set of bad options. Some of the women and girls who’d been taken alongside them turned in on themselves, numbed and dazed by the brutality they’d been subjected to. That weakness made them vulnerable, and in camp life vulnerability was practically an invitation to more pain. Even the more seasoned camp followers avoided them.

She needed more security for herself, for her family. Particularly for Oma, who the soldiers would cast off as too old to be of use if she slowed them down, and for Annalise, who would draw their eyes soon enough.

Trading her body for that security was not as painful as Gretchen had thought it would be. After the trauma they’d subjected her to, lying with the brute named Ludwig was almost dull. An unpleasant but endurable physical act. There was a wall in Gretchen’s mind, as cold and slippery as ice, between the core of who she was and that distasteful necessity.

She would not let it hurt her, no. The thought of who she might have been, who she might have loved if this band of vile mercenary creatures had not reached her town, stung more. Love was, of course, a thing for nobles, but Gretchen had dreamed of it anyways, as a girl.

In the night, when she laid down to sleep with Annalise’s small body curled into hers and Hans’s soft snores beside her, she allowed herself a thought, soft and small and selfish: I wish to be a girl again.

But that was a lie. Girls could be hurt.

#

As the mercenaries moved through Germany, the Richters settled into their new life. For a time, Gretchen tried selfishness. She did her best to shut out the cries of the other camp followers, the weaker ones. She closed her eyes and envisioned that icy wall within her growing colder, stronger, girdling her heart like a fortress. Protecting herself and her family was enough of a task for any powerless young woman, cast out of her old life to drift after a pack of thugs and murderers.

It was the fact that those thugs and murderers had forced that selfishness upon her that rankled. In the end, she went to comfort the first sobbing, crumpled girl purely out of spite. She would not let the mercenaries take her own sense of human decency from her, not along with everything else.

“Are you sure we have enough food for her?” Hans whispered, his face set in the troubled expression he wore more often than not these days.

Gretchen answered him with a look. It was only a glance, really, but there was power in it. Hans wilted before it, flushing, and after that he didn’t comment on the strays she brought in to their little fire.

As days became weeks, their family grew. Gretchen befriended some of the other women claimed by the higher-ranking mercenaries. None were as willing to extend their generosity towards the less fortunate camp followers as Gretchen was, but Gretchen didn’t fault them for it; it was a cruel life, and some people dealt with it by locking the scraps of themselves away.

Gretchen dealt with it by opening her heart. She had no plans for the future, not yet, but she could plan for tomorrow. There was no proper channel for the hatred that surged in her chest when she saw the soldiers about their filthy work, and so Gretchen tucked that aside, for now. She would let it cool, she decided, and harden into some strange metal, and when the opportunity came she would pick it up and drive it into Ludwig’s withered pig’s heart.

No, rage wasn’t enough to sustain her. Generosity was, even when she had precious little to be generous with. The people she cared for drove her on, and she drove them on, chivvying them along with sharp words and even the flat of her hand when the mercenaries marched and the camp followers straggled after them. None of them, particularly the older women and the children, could afford to be seen as a liability.

None of Gretchen’s charges drew the furious attention of the mercenaries on marches. None of Gretchen’s people were deemed too slow to keep up—too slow to keep.

Gretchen did not allow herself to feel pride over that. She did feel a grim sense of accomplishment, rather like the general of a small, vastly outmanned army that had, nevertheless, won a tiny victory.

#

After a time, just as the mass of camp followers became familiar, a network of friends and family rather than a grimy mob of strangers, Gretchen came to know the mercenaries as individuals. Most, mind you, were individuals not worth bothering with. The truly vicious among them, like Ludwig and Diego, were men best avoided whenever possible. Most of the rest were possessed of a kind of low-grade malevolence of the sort wielded by insecure, unpleasant men in large groups the world over. They would have been ordinary men in their old lives, or mostly ordinary.

Some were better. The soldier named Heinrich was one of those. He was not one of the ones who’d hurt her, that first day, and as time passed—as Gretchen kept a sharp eye out, continually assessing and reassessing who among the soldiers was safe—she grudgingly decided that Heinrich quite likely didn’t hurt women at all. In fact, he was polite enough to her when they met.

And they met increasingly often, though it took Gretchen a while to notice the pattern.

At first Heinrich asked her for water, and thanked her when she brought it. Then he stopped by—rarely, never with any regularity—to bring her a little extra bread. Some onions. Carrots. Those visits grew more frequent, and when Gretchen asked why he’d brought her so much Heinrich only waved vaguely at the huddle of camp followers around her fire.

Then, he brought her cured pork. The usual vague wave did not suffice.

“We found some in a farmer’s shed,” Heinrich said, shrugging at Gretchen’s sharp look over the pork. Meat was valuable, and generally reserved for the mercenaries when they came across it.

“You stole it from a farmer’s shed,” Gretchen said. She didn’t know what made her say it. Her suspicion over Heinrich’s motives, maybe. It was a foolish thing to say to a soldier, no matter how kind he’d been to her, and she tensed, steeling herself for the blow. Holding his gaze.

For a moment Heinrich’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t raise his hand. Perhaps he’d been someone like Hans once, or one of the boys who clung to the camp womens’ skirts. For a moment she saw him clearly: just a man, not a beast or a monster, someone she might’ve passed on the street in town in the days when she was just a woman. Just a girl.

“Next time,” Heinrich said, a touch stiffly, “I’ll tell you I bought it.”

Next time.

A few days later, true to his word, Heinrich returned. This time Gretchen didn’t ask where he’d acquired the extra food. She simply took it, divided it neatly up between her people, and was thankful. She did not think of Heinrich when she went to Ludwig—that would taint the thought, smear it with filth that Gretchen could never scrub away—but she did think of him at night, when she slept in the small huddle of camp followers that had become her family and stared up at the sky.

Heinrich. A kind man, and dutiful, and tolerant. Not a dashing hero, but almost a gentleman. Who would he have been, in town? Who would she have been? They were both too young for proper courtship, Gretchen thought, but…perhaps their eyes would have met. Her breath would have quickened, seeing him about. She would have felt warm, almost giddy, her skin flushed and sensitive, so close to love as to be indistinguishable.

Coldly, she considered seducing him. He would be better than Ludwig, infinitely better, but she doubted whether Ludwig would tolerate having his prize snatched away. The man showed little real interest in her, but she was still property to him. Like anything else, he wouldn’t cast her aside until she was broken. Heinrich would have to kill the man to snatch her away.

If Heinrich wouldn’t kill Ludwig for her, then he was of no use to her.

She closed her eyes to the stars. The wall of ice in her chest had quaked. Splintering fractures snaked through it now. Her heart fluttered, a captive bird, and a for a moment Gretchen felt grief seize her, clenching around her, the weight of it unbearable.

I am not a girl, she thought. Reminding herself. I am not a girl, and I am not a thing to be used. And neither was she one of the mercenaries, a person who saw people as things, tools to use towards her own ends. Tools that could be cast aside if they broke.

Slowly, grimly, Gretchen set to work patching that icy wall. When Heinrich came to her again, something soft and watchful in his eyes, Gretchen accepted his offering and withdrew without allowing her hand to brush against his. She did not quite meet his gaze.

Love. A foolish notion. Something for nobles. Something for girls who did not yet understand their true place in the world, or how quickly things could change.

Gretchen Richter would not think of love, then, nor of the future beyond tomorrow. For now, she would save who she could. She would save the last pieces of herself, too, safely behind that wall.

Perhaps someday they would thaw.