Bell Weather (7 page)

Abruptly she was upright and facing them again, her bottom so inflamed it seemed impossible it wasn’t still exposed and being beaten. Nicholas stared at her with no apparent sign of recognition, not a glimmer of apology or violence or pity. His complexion hadn’t warmed. He seemed as delicate as ever, breathing faintly as if he hadn’t raised a finger in exertion.

“Return to your work,” Bell told him.

Nicholas obeyed. Even when he sat and it was safe to steal a glance, he neither looked at her nor paused before resuming with his quill.

Molly’s father led her out and shut the door behind them. They stood in the entrance hall, its skylight shining high above. The fresher air was like another day, a whole different season.

“You bore it well,” Bell said, bending at the waist to see her up close. His eyes were soft, even timid, and his skin looked weathered in the strong illumination. She focused on the wire-stiff bristles in his nose. “You needn’t ask forgiveness now. If Nicholas wishes, we will fit him with an artificial tooth.”

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Molly whimpered.

“Nor I you,” her father replied. “My duty as a parent calls for discipline at times. Do not think I relish it. But punishment can edify, if only you allow it. Every lash can be a lesson, every weal a tiny scripture.” He touched her on the ear and said, “I know that with maturity and governance—self-governance, Molly, and fewer of these incidents and trials—I will one day count myself proud to be your father.” He kissed her on the head and sent her to her room, watching her ascend all thirty of the stairs.

As soon as she was free, Molly hid beneath the covers of her bed, lying on her stomach and imagining herself inside a cave made of snow. Every throb reinforced that Nicholas had struck her. Nicholas, her brother and her best and only friend. How he hated her—he must!—for costing him a tooth. How his aim had never faltered, how his strength had never waned! She heard the birds beyond the window and considered leaping out. Would the fall truly kill her? She would have to hit her head. They would grieve her then, and Nicholas would love her once again.

She stayed within her cave until the door creaked open. It was Nicholas. She knew because he sounded like a ghost.

“You can give me forty more!” she said, throwing off the sheet and turning round to meet him. The agony redoubled when she sat upon her heels.

Her brother smiled more than usual, perhaps to show the gap. The blood looked ferocious on his white silk shirt. His hand was in a fist. She noticed right away because his hands were always delicate, with fingers made for instruments, calligraphy, and scalpels.

“I have something else to give you,” Nicholas said.

He opened his hand. Molly crawled along the bed until her nose was at his palm. In the center, so it seemed, was a tiny shard of porcelain.

“Your tooth,” she said.

“Take it.”

Molly held it with her fingertips.

He kissed her on the crown and said, “Keep it to remember it is
he
who tries to hurt us—as a promise that he won’t have control of us forever.”

“I thought you hated me!” she said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Nicholas told her. “But he will make me punish you again.”

“I’ll be good. I’ll behave.”

He smirked and said, “You won’t.”

Molly sat back, wincing at the pain.

He continued with a look much colder than his words: “Never forget how much I love you, even when I hurt you.”

Molly squeezed the tooth so it bit against her hand.

“I’ll never hurt you again,” she said.

“You will.”

“I won’t!”

“You’ll have to.”

“Why?”

“We’re the strongest people in the world,” Nicholas said, and though his answer seemed ridiculous considering their wounds, she brightened from the inside out and tried to smile.

“We’re stronger than everyone,” she said.

“Except each other.”

“But together—”

“Together,” he said, imbuing the word with confidence and hope, even while his strength kept burning in her welts.

Chapter Six

Molly shut her eyes and sped her horse across the meadow, finally alone and racing from the family’s grand country manor. She rode astride—there was nothing so foolish as a sidesaddle; Lord Bell himself disdained the convention—and felt the power of the beast’s strong charge between her legs. Warm green wind billowed through her hair. The thoroughbred’s musk blended with her sweat and what a glorious stink arose, what a riotous aroma, drenching out the rosewater fragrance of the day. She felt the muscles and the rolling undulations in her body and she might have been a runaway. She might have been a centaur.

Molly rode as often as she could, regardless of the weather, especially in summer when the family left the city for their sprawling country estate. She had taken her first lessons as a child and now, at the age of fourteen, could jump an energetic horse over any sort of obstacle. Her discipline and daring won approval from her father and he encouraged her to ride, especially today with the general paying a visit.

Lord Bell had talked of little else throughout the week. General Graves will be arriving, General Graves will be expecting, we must all of us prepare to be our best before the general.

“Your father’s to be a colonel,” Frances told her several nights ago, when she joined Molly and Nicholas for their customary after-dinner hour.

“He bought a regimental contract,” Nicholas explained. “Now he’ll buy a regiment and lead it overseas.”

“To Floria?” Molly asked. “Are we all going with him?”

“Heavens, no.” Frances laughed. “Unless you wish to fight a war.”

“Against the Rouge?”

“And half the naturals,” Nicholas said.

Dominion over Floria had been contested since the continent’s discovery a hundred years prior. It was a land of fertile mystery, largely unexplored and rife with natural wonders—harbors cloaked in salt; ten-foot snows; native people called the Kraw, who were said to grow from the earth. It was also a land of riches, bursting with timber and marvelous crops. Some believed a panacea might be growing in the forests. Others believed that Floria, undiscovered during John Lumen’s lifetime, was where the resurrected prophet went upon leaving Bruntland.

Three Heraldic countries had established permanent footholds. Solido had claimed an island portion in the south, but the Florian mainland had been split between Bruntland and Rouge, whose centuries-old hostility had flared, in recent years, between the countries’ rival colonies in the distant New World. Floria’s native tribes had chosen sides—the Elkinaki with the Bruntish and the Kraw with the Rouge—and now the fates of all involved would ride upon the outcome.

“Could we lose?” Molly asked.

“Your mother,” Frances said, “is the only thing your father ever lost in all his life.”

And so the general had arrived to speak about the war. Nicholas would meet him, as he always met the barons, earls, admirals, and other dignitaries in their father’s constellation of acquaintances, and Molly—who was rather “too excitable” a spirit—was encouraged, quite emphatically, to ride about the grounds. She had gladly chosen a mount, a stallion named Tremendous, and ridden off the instant the general arrived.

Shadows cooled her face and she finally opened her eyes, slowing to a canter as she turned before the tree line. She had crossed the whole expanse of half a mile fully blind; far across the meadow she could see the distant manor with its barricade of hedges and the sunlight glinting off the glass.

Molly shook her hair and resettled her feet in the stirrups. Tremendous reared and whinnied. Several hundred birds flocked together overhead and made a cloud, ever shifting, like a picture of her life. She closed her eyes once more and galloped back toward the manor. Soon her father would be leaving. He had gone away before, even gone abroad, but never with an army, never to a war. She and Nicholas and Frances would be masters of the home, both here and in the city, for the next few seasons—maybe for a year. Or so she told herself, believing that the war would lumber on. Was it wicked to imagine her father a captive of the Rouge? Anything could happen in a real live war.

Tremendous galloped on. Molly kept her eyes shut and reveled in the dark. The heat had grown thick and they were slicing it apart. She felt the pollen in her mouth and summer spreading wide, the explosion of a million bright blossoms all around her. The meadow went forever—it was better than a dream, how they flew without restraint and hovered off the grass.

She sensed panic in Tremendous, opened her eyes, and saw the hedges. They were thirty feet away and coming up fast and she remembered that they weren’t merely hedges but a wall, five feet of stone with a covering of ivy.

Just beyond stood the manor. Molly held her breath. It was too late to stop and she imagined floating up. Tremendous read her mind and they were perfectly in sync; they were lighter than a lark and sailing off the ground.

*   *   *

Born to wealth and bred to power, Lord Bell was an only child whose parents had been murdered in the peasant uprising of 1730. His father had been a rapacious landlord and had paid the ultimate price for oppressing the tenant farmers on the family’s vast estate.

Lord Bell was more pragmatic. He collected the rents, kept the peace, and earned the farmers’ goodwill despite contempt for their existence. As one of the wealthiest landowners in Bruntland, he commanded more respect than many of the country’s true nobility, and after dabbling in politics and establishing himself within the higher spheres of power, he craved an opportunity for military glory.

This morning he stood in the manor’s sunstruck conservatory, a glass-paneled room with marble floors and luxurious ferns, discussing the war with General Graves.

The general’s regal posture hid the quiver in his jowls, his liver spots, and the frailty that had disappointed Lord Bell on first impression. Now, as the general spoke with the wisdom of experience, fiery of voice and solid as a statue, it was rather like standing in the presence of the king.

“Fort Divine was cowardice,” General Graves said. “An absolute disaster, inexcusable and rash. Food and arms to last a month, and Chesterson surrenders to a hundred savages and half as many Rouge. He claims he had no choice, that Smith abandoned him by staying put in Haverdown, that he preferred to lose a fort rather than see it pounded by artillery. Artillery the Rouge
did not possess.
Their cannons had been mired twenty miles west. By all accounts, the fort was barely nicked, yet Chesterson surrendered our last and best defense of the Switchback and now the Rouge can sail their battleships and bloody fucking pleasure boats halfway to Bloom completely unopposed. He’s been ransomed and relieved of his command and now he’s back in Umber, charming women and children with tales of his adventures. The Kraw should have scalped him,” General Graves declared. “He could have doffed his hair and been the toast of every drawing room in Bruntland.”

He faced the tall, open doors and looked toward the sky, as if the ivied wall alone divided the conservatory from the field of battle three thousand miles away in Floria.

“Though what does it matter?” he continued, so softly that the question might have been rhetorical. He turned to look at Bell with the sun upon his back, like a veteran philosopher exhausted by the light. “I have seventeen grandchildren. The youngest is a fortnight old. His name is Adam—he has his mother’s hair. Yet here I stand despairing of a fort half a world away.”

“The empire—”

“Yes, the empire.” Graves smiled, as if Bell were one of his newly minted progeny: adorably na
ï
ve. “And what if all of Floria becomes New Rouge? I have seen our empire triple in size, and every time it’s grown, so has our expense in life and coin and bloody obligation. I have a manse with fifty servants and a county with a hundred working families, but do I occupy the manse to gather up the rents, or do I gather up the rents to occupy the manse?”

“Every child brings expense,” Bell said.

“Parenting and warring are for younger generations. I leave the diapers to my daughters and the regiments to men like you. But you need to understand we may have lost Floria already.”

“I have studied the maps,” Bell said. “If Fort
É
lan were captured, we would sever—”

“Maps.” Graves sighed. “They never show you swamps and clouds of stinging flies. They never show you war parties, or cowardly sons of whores like Chesterson. And yet for all I know anymore, you may be just the man to save our precious Floria. We need a stroke of will. We need some bloody
spirit
.”

A shadow rose behind him as he said it, gargantuan and filling up the high open doorway.

Bell seized Graves and yanked him to the side; the general’s bony elbow cracked a pane of glass. A horse thundered down, fracturing the tiles, and they cowered from the snorting and the huge rippling flank. Molly sat above them, with her head near the ceiling, and her wild hair and wide dark eyes were so outrageously alive that Bell might have shot her if his pistol were at hand.

“What the devil!” Graves shouted.

Molly dropped the reins. The stallion quieted and clacked more gently on the floor. She rubbed his mane and gracefully dismounted, staring fearfully at Bell until he jostled her aside and reached toward the horse.

The creature pinned its ears and bumped him into Molly. They were trapped against the wall and Bell expected any moment to be kicked, to be bloodied in an avalanche of glass. Molly squeezed free, threw her arms around the horse’s neck, and softened its aggression with a word he couldn’t hear.

“My God,” Graves stammered from the corner of the room. “You might have been killed.”

“I’m fine,” Bell said with barely checked fury.

“
You,
young miss,” Graves corrected, glancing warily at Bell as if his disregard for Molly were an omen of his newly bought command.

Molly answered the general in a tone best described as cavalier, but once again Bell failed to hear what she was saying, distracted as he was by the riot in his mind, and by the time he straightened his coat and calmed the tremor in his limbs, his daughter and General Graves had fallen into rapt conversation.