Now he’d broken himself doing it. His features still showed traces of their old good looks, but ravaged by pain and blurred by the heroic doses of laudanum he guzzled to try to dull it. “Does the medicine do you any good?” Joseph inquired.

Bell shrugged with his right shoulder only; his left arm would not answer. “Some,” he said. “Without it, I should be quite mad. As things are, I think I am only… somewhat mad.” His chuckle was wintry. “I have to take ever more of it to win some small relief. But my mind is clear.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Joseph said. He didn’t fully believe it. Laudanum blurred thought as well as pain. But it did so more in some men than in others. Though he carried scars of his own, he didn’t like to think about what Lieutenant General Bell had become. To hide his own unease, he went on, “Roast-Beef William and I were just talking about our chances of holding the southrons away from Marthasville this campaigning season.”

“We had better do it,” Bell said in his dragging tones. Laudanum was probably to blame for that, too, but he’d reached the right answer here. Joseph was in no doubt of it whatsoever. His wing commander continued, “The southrons humiliated us at Sentry Peak and Proselytizers’ Rise. We have to keep them out of Marthasville or we become a laughingstock.”

That wasn’t the reason Joseph the Gamecock wanted to keep General Hesmucet’s army out of Marthasville, or Roast-Beef William, either, but Bell wasn’t necessarily wrong. Joseph said, “By what I hear, we humiliated ourselves at Proselytizers’ Rise.”

“I wouldn’t know, sir, not firsthand,” Bell replied. “I was, ah, trying to get used to being lopsided, you might say.” Joseph nodded, trying not to stare at the pinned-up leg of Bell’s blue pantaloons.

“I believe you’re correct, sir,” Roast-Beef William said. “Count Thraxton’s spell did not work as he’d hoped it might.”