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