Spirits and distilled poppy juice: fire and night going down his throat together. After a little while, he grunted softly and said, “Ahhh!” The pain didn’t disappear; it never disappeared. But it receded, or, more accurately, he floated away from it. The laudanum didn’t make him sleepy, as it did with many men. If anything, it left him more awake than ever. But it did make him slow, so that he often had to grope for a word or an idea.

All around him, the Army of Franklin’s encampment bubbled like a pot left unwatched on a cookfire. A squadron of unicorns trotted off toward the south. A column of men tramped away, heading southeast. Joseph the Gamecock was doing everything he could to hold back General Hesmucet’s bigger army.

Everything he could to hold it back, yes. Lieutenant General Bell muttered something his bushy beard and mustaches fortunately swallowed. He’d never been one for hanging back. He wanted to go at the enemy, not try to keep him away from a city. What kind of war was that?

Joseph’s kind of war: he answered his own question. He muttered again, rather louder. A sentry gave him an odd look. He glowered back. The man dropped his eyes.

His aide-de-camp, a dour major named Zibeon, came up to him and asked, “What do you need, sir?”

Now there was a question with a multitude of possible answers. A new leg was the first that sprang to Bell’s mind. An arm that works followed almost at once. Not far behind ran a way to banish pain without slowing my wits to a crawl. And, outdistanced by those three but still galloping hard, came a command due my station.

But Zibeon couldn’t give him any of those things. The first two would have taken a miracle from the gods, and the gods doled out miracles in niggardly wise these days. The third would have taken a miracle among the healers-more likely, but not much. As for the fourth, that lay in King Geoffrey’s hands. Lieutenant General Bell found himself not altogether without hope there.