The Empress and the Acolyte by Jane Fletcher

Author:Jane Fletcher [Fletcher, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Women Sleuths, Lesbian, General
ISBN: 9781933110608
Google: KSI4AAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1933110600
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2006-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

***

A yellow haze touched the eastern sky, rimmed with the first hint of pink. Dawn was close. Three birds called from the top of a nearby pile of rocks, but they were not songbirds welcoming the new day. The raw complaints of the carrion crows were as cheerless as the icy air, a fitting fanfare for the dead. There was plenty to attract them to this spot.

Tevi stood on the gravel slope and fixed her eyes on the horizon. She remembered a conversation from her early months on the mainland, after the first time she had killed somebody. An older, experienced mercenary had spoken to her, trying to help her through the doubt and guilt.

“At the end, you don’t know what it was about, or what was gained, or where the right and wrong of it lay. You just wake up in the morning, spare a thought for those who can’t, and thank whatever god watches over you.”

The words often came back to her at dawn, especially ones like this, in the aftermath of battle. She walked down to the gravesite, dug wide enough for three. The dead soldiers already lay at the bottom. Two men and a woman, the youngest barely eighteen. Tevi looked at his face. He had trusted her leadership and followed her commands, and now he was dead. Tevi could feel the muscles in her jaw clamping. The guilt was hard to take. The thought that far more would be lying there if she had made the wrong decisions was a poor sop to her conscience.

The rest of the platoon gathered around, shuffling uneasily. The nervous expressions and agitation in their ranks was due to more than grief for the dead. Tevi knew she would need to address the problem very soon, but for now, the funeral came first. The other officers, a junior captain and two lieutenants, stood a short way off, making no attempt to hide their expressions of boredom.

Tevi knew that few commanding officers in Bykoda’s army would bother attending a funeral for common soldiers. Most would consider themselves generous just in allowing time for the troops to deal with their lost comrades in whatever fashion they thought fit. Some would even have ordered the corpses stripped and thrown on the pile of dead trolls.

Tevi would not let the witches’ disdain stop her from doing what was right. She would honour her fallen subordinates. She would even have treated the trolls with respect, except that trolls never showed any reverence for their own dead. Maybe they did not care, or maybe they considered it tactless to draw attention to defeat. In the absence of better information, Tevi could do no more than follow the trolls’ own example and leave their bodies to the crows and foxes.

The soldiers were a different matter. They left behind friends, lovers, and family. They had been her responsibility and she had failed them. To speak over their graves was the least she owed them. They had come from the southwest of the Empire.

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