“No, eh?” Joseph the Gamecock’s voice dripped sarcasm. “I never would have noticed. Why, I thought we’d be moving from Rising Rock on to Ramblerton next week. That is our plan, isn’t it?”

“Sir?” Lieutenant General Bell said, face blank from more than laudanum. He wouldn’t have recognized irony had it pierced him like iron.

“All right, sir,” Roast-Beef William said-he, at least, got the point Joseph was making. “Count Thraxton’s magic flat-out failed. It beat us. Without it, why would our men have run from the top of Proselytizers’ Rise when they could have held off every southron in the world if only they’d stood their ground?”

“Still no excuse for that skedaddle,” Bell said. “No excuse at all. You go forward and you fight like a man. That’s what the gods love.”

You go forward and you fight like a man. Bell had lived by that, and he’d nearly died by it, too. Now I’m in command here, and we’ll try things my way, Joseph thought. If we can make the southrons pay and pay and pay for every foot of ground they take, maybe all their mechanics and artisans and farmers will get sick of fighting us and let us have our own kingdom. It’s the best hope we have, anyhow-we’re not going to drive them away by force of arms.

“I intend to make the enemy come forward and fight like men,” he said. “I intend to make them die like men, too, in the largest numbers I can arrange. Let’s see if they go on backing Avram’s plan to crush us into the dust and free all our blonds from the land after they’ve spent a while bleeding.”

“Not chivalrous,” Bell said.

“I don’t care,” Joseph the Gamecock replied. That brought shock to Lieutenant General Bell’s face despite the laudanum he poured down. Joseph repeated it: “I don’t care-and by all the gods, my friends, that is the truth. I am here to keep the southrons from snuffing out this kingdom. Whether I do that or not matters. How I do it… Who cares?”