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 naïve. “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 Élan 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.
“This is Tremendous,” Molly said.
“I dare say it is!” Graves answered.
Bell approached him to apologize—and drag away his daughter—but he couldn’t find a way around the great wall of horse.
“I was riding with my eyes closed,” Molly told the general.
“With your eyes closed. Remarkable,” Graves said. “That has to be a four-foot wall.”
“Five,” Molly said. “He didn’t even clip it!”
The two of them continued this way for several minutes, even when the horse urinated freely, splattering the tiles with his great black penis. The smell was overpowering, the flow a minor river. Bell stood bristling through the whole conversation, staring at his daughter as his blood pressure rose but failing to communicate his violent displeasure.
“The question now is how to get him out,” Graves said, openly delighted by the strangeness of the problem.
“If we get a running start from the far end of the room,” Molly said, “or better still the hall—”
“The staff will handle the horse,” Bell said.
“Ah, there you are, Bell,” Graves said, acting like he truly had misplaced him. “Your daughter here is quite the flash of fire,” he continued, winking at Molly as if he had just met his eighteenth grandchild.
“General Graves,” Bell said, going so far as to seize the man’s arm and lead him to the door. “I must insist that we continue in the study.”
“I sincerely hope you’ll join us,” Graves said to Molly.
“She will not—”
“Of course she will,” Graves decided, chuckling now at Bell’s apparent temper. “I should like to