After he put the laudanum bottle away, Bell waited. He remembered the strange, almost floating sensation he’d got from laudanum when he first started taking it: as if he were drifting away from the body that still suffered. No more. Now laudanum was as much a part of his life as ale was part of a farmer’s.

Little by little, the anguish receded in the dead arm and the missing leg, the leg that didn’t seem to know it was missing. Bell sighed with relief. Laudanum didn’t fuzz his wits any more, or make him sleepy. He was sure of that. He was just as sure he would have had trouble thinking without it. The few times the healers had run short of the drug-the north didn’t have enough of anything it needed, except men who despised King Avram-he’d suffered not only from his dreadful wounds but from the even more dreadful effects of giving up laudanum.

He shuddered. He didn’t like to think about that. As long as he had the drug, he was still… at least the shadow of a fighting man. So what if he couldn’t bear a shield? So what if his stump was too short to let him sit a unicorn unless he was tied to the saddle? He was still a general, and a general who’d kept the surviving chunks of the Army of Franklin intact despite everything Hesmucet’s superior force had done to destroy them. He still had bold soldiers, and he could still strike a savage blow. He could-and he intended to.

That sentry stuck his head into the pavilion. “I beg your pardon, sir, but Brigadier Patrick would like a moment of your time, if you have it to spare.”

“Of course,” Bell said expansively. As the laudanum made him feel better about the world, how could he refuse?