Read Online Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney - Free Book Online Page A

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