Victory of Eagles

Chapter 1

THE BREEDING GROUNDS were called Pen Y Fan, after the hard, jagged slash of the mountain at their heart, like an ax-blade, rimed with ice along its edge and rising barren over the moorlands: a cold, wet Welsh autumn already, coming on towards winter, and the other dragons sleepy and remote, uninterested in anything but their meals. There were a few hundred of them scattered throughout the grounds, mostly established in caves or on rocky ledges, wherever they could fit themselves; nothing of comfort or even order provided for them, except the feedings, and the mowed-bare strip of dirt around the borders, where torches were lit at night to mark the lines past which they might not go, with the town-lights glimmering in the distance, cheerful and forbidden.

Temeraire had hunted out and cleared a large cavern, on his arrival, to sleep in; but it would be damp, no matter what he did in the way of lining it with grass, or flapping his wings to move the air, which in any case did not suit his instinctive notions of dignity: much better to endure every unpleasantness with stoic patience, although that was not very satisfying when no-one would appreciate the effort. The other dragons certainly did not.

He was quite sure he and Laurence had done as they ought, in taking the cure to France, and no-one sensible could disagree; but just in case, Temeraire had steeled himself to meet with either disapproval or contempt, and he had worked out several very fine arguments in his defense. Most important, of course, it was just a cowardly, sneaking way of fighting: if the Government wished to beat Napoleon, they ought to fight him directly, and not make his dragons sick to try to make him easy to defeat; as if British dragons could not beat French dragons, without cheating. “And not only that,” he added, “but it would not be only the French dragons who died: our friends from Prussia who are imprisoned in their breeding grounds would also have got sick, and perhaps it might even have gone so far as China; and that would be like stealing someone else’s food, even when you are not hungry; or breaking their eggs.”

He made this impressive speech to the wall of his cave, as practice: they had refused to give him his sand-table, and he had no-one of his crew to jot it down for him, either; he did not have Laurence, who would have helped him work out just what to say. So he repeated the arguments over to himself quietly, instead, so he should not forget them. And if these should not suffice to persuade, he thought, he might point out that after all, he had brought the cure back, in the first place: he and Laurence, with Maximus and Lily and the rest of their formation, and if anyone had a right to say where it should be shared out, they did: no-one would even have known of it if Temeraire had not contrived to be sick in Africa, where the mushrooms which cured it grew.

He might have saved the trouble. No-one accused him of anything, nor, as he had privately, a little wistfully, thought just barely possible, hailed him as a hero; because they did not care.

The older dragons, not feral but retired, were a little curious about the latest developments in the war, but only distantly, more inclined to tell over their own battles of earlier wars; and the rest had plenty of indignation over the recent epidemic, but only in a provincial way. They cared that they and their own fellows had sickened and died; they cared that the cure had taken so long to reach them; but it did not mean anything to them that dragons in France had also been ill, or that the disease would have spread, killing thousands, if Temeraire and Laurence had not taken over the cure; they also did not care that the Lords of the Admiralty had called it treason, and sentenced Laurence to die.

They had nothing to care for. They were fed, and there was enough for everyone. If the shelter was not pleasant, it was no worse than what even the retired dragons were used to, from the days of their active service; they had none of them even heard of a pavilion, or thought they might be made more comfortable than they were. No-one ever molested an egg; the grounds-keepers would take them away, but with infinite care, in waggons lined with straw, hot-water bottles, and woolen blankets in the wintertime; and they would bring back reports until the eggs were hatched and no more of anyone’s concern; so everyone knew the eggs were safe in their hands; safer, even, than keeping them oneself, so even the dragons who had not cared to take a captain themselves, at all, would often as not hand over their own eggs. They could not go flying very far, because they were fed at no set time but randomly, from day to day, so if one went away out of ear-shot of the bells, one was likely to come too late, and go hungry all the day. So there was no larger society, no intercourse with the other breeding grounds or with the coverts, except when some other dragon came from afar, to mate; even that was arranged for them. Instead they sat, willing prisoners in their own territory, Temeraire thought bitterly; he would never have endured it if not for Laurence, only for Laurence, who would surely be put to death at once if Temeraire did not obey.

He held himself aloof from their society at first. There was his cave to be arranged: despite its fine prospect it had been left vacant for being inconveniently shallow, and he was rather crammed in; but there was a much larger chamber beyond, visible through holes in the back wall, which he gradually opened up with the slow and cautious use of his roar. Slower, even, than perhaps necessary—he was very willing to have the task consume several days. The cave had then to be cleared of debris, old gnawed bones and inconvenient boulders, which he scraped out painstakingly even from the corners too small for him to lie in, for neatness’ sake; and he found a few rough boulders in the valley and used them to grind the cave walls a little smoother, by dragging them back and forth, throwing up a great cloud of dust.

It made him sneeze, but he kept on; he was not going to live in a raw untidy hole. He knocked down stalactites from the ceiling, and beat protrusions flat into the floor, and when he was satisfied, he arranged along the sides of what was now his antechamber, with careful nudges of his talons, some attractive rocks and old, dead tree-branches, twisted and bleached white, which he had collected from the woods and ravines. He would have liked a pond and a fountain, but he could not see how to bring the water up, or how to make it run when he had got it there, so he settled for picking out a promontory on Llyn y Fan Fawr which jutted into the lake, and considering it also his own.

To finish he carved the characters of his name into the cliff face by the entrance, and also in English, although the letter R gave him some difficulty and came out looking rather like the reversed numeral 4; then he was done with that, and routine crept up and devoured his days. To rise, when the sun came in at the cave-mouth; to take a little exercise, to nap, to rise again when the herdsmen rang the bell, to eat, then to nap and to exercise again, and then back to sleep; and that was the end of the day, there was nothing more. He hunted for himself, once, and so did not go to the daily feeding; later that day one of the small dragons brought up the grounds-master, Mr. Lloyd, and a surgeon, to be sure that he was not ill; and they lectured him on poaching sternly enough to make him uneasy for Laurence’s sake.

For all that, Lloyd did not think of him as a traitor, either; did not think enough of him to consider him one. The grounds-master only cared about his charges so far as they all stayed inside the borders, and ate, and mated; he recognized neither dignity nor stoicism, and anything which Temeraire did out of the ordinary was only a bit of fussing. “Come now, we have a fresh lady Anglewing visiting to-day,” Lloyd would say, jocularly, “quite a nice little piece; we will have a fine evening, eh? Perhaps we would like a bite of veal, first? Yes, we would, I am sure,” providing the responses with the questions, so Temeraire had nothing to do but sit and listen; and as Lloyd was a little hard of hearing, if Temeraire did try to say, “No, I would rather have some venison, and you might roast it first,” he was sure to be ignored.

It was almost enough to put one off making eggs, and in any case Temeraire was growing uncomfortably sure that his mother would not have approved in the least, how often they wished him to try, and how indiscriminately. Lien would certainly have sniffed in the most insulting way. It was not the fault of the female dragons sent to visit him, they were all very pleasant, but most of them had never managed an egg before, and some had never even been in a real battle or done anything interesting at all. So then they were embarrassed, as they did not have any suitable present for him which might have made up for it; and it was not as though he could pretend that he was not a very remarkable dragon, even if he liked to. Which he did not, very much, although he would have tried for Bellusa, a poor young Malachite Reaper without a single action to her name, sent by the Admiralty from Edinburgh, who miserably offered him a small knotted rug, which was all her confused captain would afford: it might have made a blanket for Temeraire’s largest talon.

“It is very handsome,” Temeraire said awkwardly, “and so cleverly done; I admire the colors very much,” and tried to drape it carefully over a small rock, by the entrance, but the gesture only made her look more wretched, and she burst out, “Oh, I do beg your pardon; he wouldn’t understand in the least, and thought I meant I would not like to, and then he said—” and she stopped abruptly in even worse confusion; so Temeraire was sure that whatever her captain had said, it had not been at all nice. It was as painful as could be, and he had not even the satisfaction of delivering one of his cherished retorts, because it was not as though she herself had said anything rude. So he did not much want to, but he obliged anyway. He was determined he would be patient, and quiet, in all things; he would not cause any trouble. He would be perfectly good.

Temeraire did not let himself think very much about Laurence; he did not trust himself. It was hard to endure the perpetual sensation of deep unease, almost overpowering, when he thought how he did not know how Laurence was, what his condition might be. Temeraire was sure to know every moment where his breastplate was, and his small gold chain, these being in his own possession; his talon-sheaths had been left with Emily, and he was quite certain she was to be trusted to keep them safe. Ordinarily he would have trusted Laurence, too, to keep himself safe; at least, if he were not proposing to do something dangerous for no very good reason, which he was sadly given to, on occasion; but the circumstances were not what they ought to be, and it had been so very long. The Admiralty had promised that so long as he behaved, Laurence would not be hanged, but they were not to be trusted, not at all. Temeraire resolved twice a week that he should go to Dover at once, to London—only to make inquiries, to see they had not, only to be sure—but unwanted reason always asserted itself before he had even set out. He must not do anything which should persuade the Government he was unmanageable, and therefore Laurence of no use to them. He must be as complaisant and accommodating as ever he might.

It was a resolution already sorely tried by the end of his third week, when Lloyd brought him a visitor, admonishing the gentleman loudly, “Remember now, not to upset the dear creature, but to speak nice and slow and gentle, like to a horse,” infuriating enough, even before the gentleman was named to him as one Reverend Daniel Salcombe.

“Oh, you,” Temeraire said, which made that gentleman look aback, “yes, I know perfectly well who you are; I have read your very stupid letter to the Royal Society, and I suppose you are come to see me behave like a parrot, or a dog.”

Salcombe stammered excuses, but it was plainly the case; he began laboriously to read to Temeraire off a prepared list of questions, something quite nonsensical about predestination, but Temeraire would have none of it. “Pray be quiet; Saint Augustine explained it much better than you, and it still did not make any sense even then. Anyway, I am not going to perform for you, like a circus animal. I really cannot be bothered to speak to anyone so uneducated he has not read the Analects,” he added, guiltily excepting Laurence, in the back of his mind; but then Laurence did not set himself up as a scholar, and write insulting letters about people he did not know. “And as for dragons not understanding mathematics, I am sure I know more of it than do you.”

He scratched out with his claw a triangle, in the dirt, and labeled the two shorter sides. “There; tell me the length of the third, and then you may talk; otherwise, go away, and stop pretending you know anything about dragons.”

The simple diagramme had perplexed several gentlemen, when Temeraire had put it to them at a party in the London covert, rather disillusioning Temeraire as to the general understanding of mathematics among men. The Reverend Salcombe evidently had not paid much attention to that part of his education, either, for he stared, and colored up to his mostly bare pate, and turned to Lloyd furiously, saying, “You have put the creature up to this, I suppose! You prepared the remarks—” The unlikelihood of this accusation striking him, perhaps, as soon as he had made it to Lloyd’s gaping, uncomprehending face, he immediately amended, “They were given you, by someone, and you fed them to him, to embarrass me—”

“I never, sir,” Lloyd protested, to no avail, and it annoyed Temeraire so much that he nearly indulged himself in a small, a very small roar; but in the last moment he exercised great restraint, and only growled. Salcombe fled hastily all the same, Lloyd running after him, calling anxiously for the loss of his tip: he had been paid, then, to let Salcombe come and gawk at Temeraire, as though he really were a circus animal; and Temeraire was only sorry he had not roared, or better yet thrown them both in the lake.

And then his temper faded, and he drooped. He thought, too late, that perhaps he ought to have talked to Salcombe, after all. Lloyd would not read to him, or even tell him anything of the world at all, even if Temeraire asked slowly and clearly enough to be understood, but only said maddeningly, “Now, let’s not be worrying ourselves about such things, no sense in getting worked up.” Salcombe, however ignorant, had wished to have a conversation; and he might yet have been prevailed upon to read him something from the latest Proceedings, or a newspaper—oh, what Temeraire would have done for a newspaper!

All this time the heavy-weight dragons had been finishing their own dinners; the largest, a big Regal Copper, spat out a well-chewed grey and bloodstained ball of fleece, belched tremendously, and lifted away for his cave. His departure cleared a wide space of the field, and now the rest came in a rush, middle-weights and light-weights and the smaller courier-weight beasts landing in to take their own share of the sheep and cattle, calling to one another noisily. Temeraire did not move, but only hunched himself a little deeper while they squabbled and played around him, and did not look up even when one, a middle-weight with narrow blue-green legs, set herself directly before him to eat, crunching loudly upon sheep bones.

“I have been considering the matter,” she informed him, after a little while, around a mouthful, “and in all cases, where the angle is ninety degrees, as I suppose you meant to draw it, the length of the longest side must be a number which, multiplied by itself, is equal to the lengths of the two shorter sides, each multiplied by themselves, added.” She swallowed noisily, and licked her chops clean. “Quite an interesting little observation; how did you come to make it?”

“I never,” Temeraire muttered. “It is the Pythagorean theorem; everyone knows it who is educated. Laurence taught it me,” he added, by way of making himself even more miserable.

“Hmh,” the other dragon said, rather haughtily, and flew away.

But she reappeared at Temeraire’s cave the next morning, uninvited, and poked him awake with her nose, saying, “Perhaps you would be interested to learn that there is a formula which I have invented, which can invariably calculate the power of any sum; what does Pythagoras have to say to that.”

“You never invented it,” Temeraire said, irritable at having been woken up early, with so empty a day to be faced. “That is the binomial theorem, Yang Hui made it a very long time ago,” and he put his head under his wing and tried to lose himself again in sleep.

He thought that would be all, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon landed beside him bristling and announced in a furious rush, her words nearly tumbling over one another in the attempt to get them out, “There, I have just worked out something quite new: the prime number coming in a particular position, for instance the tenth prime, is always very near the value of that position, multiplied by the exponent one must put on the number p to get that same value—the number p,” she added, “being a very curious number, which I have also discovered, and named after myself—”

“Certainly not,” Temeraire said, rousing with comfortable contempt, when he had made sense of what she was talking about. “That is e, and you are talking of the natural logarithm, and as for the rest, about prime numbers, it is all nonsense; only consider the prime fifteen—” and then he paused, working out the value in his head.

“You see,” she said, triumphantly, and after working out another two dozen examples, Temeraire was forced to admit the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.

“And you needn’t tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,” the other dragon added, chest puffed out hugely, “or Yang Hui, because I have inquired, and no-one has ever heard of either of them; they do not live in any of the coverts or breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. I thought as much; who ever heard of a dragon named anything like Yang Hui; nonsense.”

Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough, in the moment, to forget how dreadfully bored he was, and so he was less inclined to take offense. “He is not a dragon, either of them,” he said, “and they are both dead anyway, for years and years; Pythagoras was a Greek, and Yang Hui was from China.”

“Then how do you know they invented it?” she demanded, suspiciously.

“Laurence read it me,” Temeraire said. “Where did you learn any of it, if not out of books?”

“I worked it out myself,” the dragon said. “There is nothing much else to do, here.”

Her name was Perscitia. She was an experimental cross-breed of a Malachite Reaper and a light-weight Pascal’s Blue, who had come out rather larger, slower, and more nervous than the breeders had hoped; and her coloring was not ideal for any sort of camouflage: the body and wings mostly bright blue and streaked with shades of pale green, with widely scattered spines along her back. She was not very old, either, unlike most of the once-harnessed dragons in the breeding grounds: she had given up her captain. “Well,” Perscitia said, “I did not mind my captain, he showed me how to do equations, when I was small, but I do not see any use in going to war, and getting oneself shot at or clawed up, for no reason which anyone could explain to me. And, when I would not fight, he did not much want me anymore,” a statement airily delivered, but Perscitia avoided Temeraire’s eyes, making it.

“If you mean formation-fighting, I do not blame you; it is very tiresome,” Temeraire said. “They do not approve of me in China,” he added, to be sympathetic, “because I do fight: Celestials are not supposed to.”

“China must be a very fine place,” Perscitia said, wistfully, and Temeraire was by no means inclined to disagree; he thought sadly that if only Laurence had been willing, they might now be together in Peking, perhaps strolling in the gardens of the Summer Palace again; he had not had the chance to see it in autumn.

And then he paused, and abruptly raising his head he said, “You say you made inquiries: what do you mean by that? You cannot have gone out.”

“Of course not,” Perscitia said. “I gave Moncey half my dinner, and he went to Brecon for me and put the question out on the courier circuit; this morning he went again, and the word was in no-one had ever heard of anybody by those names.”

“Oh—” Temeraire said, his ruff rising, “oh, pray; who is Moncey? I will give him anything he likes, if only he can find out where Laurence is; he may have all my dinner, for a week.”

Moncey was a Winchester, who had slipped the leash and eeled right out the door of the barn where he had hatched, past a candidate he did not care for, and so made his escape from the Corps. He had been coaxed eventually into the breeding grounds, more by the promise of company than anything else, being a gregarious creature. Small and dark purplish, he looked like any other Winchester at a distance, and excited no comment if either seen abroad or absent from the daily feeding; and as long as his missed meals were properly compensated for, he was very willing to oblige.

“Hm, how about you give me one of those cows, the nice fat sort they save for you special, when you are mating,” Moncey said. “I would like to give Laculla a proper treat,” he added, exultingly.

“Highway robbery,” Perscitia said indignantly, but Temeraire did not care at all; he was learning in any case to hate the taste of the cows, when it meant yet another miserably awkward evening session, and nodded on the bargain.

“But no promises, mind,” Moncey cautioned. “I’ll put it about, no fears, but it’ll be as many as a few weeks to hear back, if you want it sorted out proper to all the coverts, and to Ireland, and even so maybe no-one will have heard anything.”

“There is sure to have been word,” Temeraire said, low, “if he is dead.”

THE BALL CAME in down through the ship’s bows and crashed recklessly the length of the lower deck, the drumroll of its passage preceding it with castanets of splinters raining against the walls for accompaniment. The young Marine guarding the brig had been trembling since the call to go to quarters had sounded above; a mingling, Laurence thought, of anxiety and the desire to be doing something, and the frustration at being kept at so useless and miserable a post: a sentiment he shared from his still more useless place within the cell. The ball seemed only to be rolling at a leisurely pace by the time it approached the brig, and offered a first opportunity; the Marine had put out his foot to stop it before Laurence could say a word.

He had seen much the same impulse have much the same result on other battlefields: the ball took off the better part of the foot and continued unperturbed into and through the metal grating, skewing the door off its top hinge and finally embedding itself two inches deep into the solid oak wall of the ship, there remaining. Laurence pushed the crazily swinging door open and climbed out of the brig, taking off his neckcloth to tie the Marine’s foot; the young man was staring amazed at the bloody stump, and needed a little coaxing to limp along to the orlop. “A clean shot; I am sure the rest will come off nicely,” Laurence said for comfort, and left him to the surgeons; the steady roar of cannon-fire was going on overhead.

He went up the stern ladderway and plunged into the confusion of the gundeck: daylight shining in from her east-pointed bows, through jagged gaping holes, and making a glittering cloud of the smoke and dust kicked up from the cannon. Roaring Martha had jumped her tackling, and five men were fighting to hold her wedged against the roll of the ship long enough to get her secure again; at any moment the gun might go running wild across the deck, crushing men and perhaps smashing through the side. “There girl, hold fast, hold fast—” The captain of the gun-crew was speaking to her like a skittish horse, his hands wincing away from the barrel, smoking-hot; one side of his face was bristling with splinters standing out like hedgehog spines.

In the smoke, in the red light, no one knew Laurence; he was only another pair of hands. He had his flight gloves still in his coat pocket; he clapped on to the metal with them and pushed her by the mouth of the barrel, his palms stinging even through the thick leather, and with a final thump she heaved over into the grooves again. The men tied her down and then stood around her trembling like well-run horses, panting and sweating.

There was no return firing, no calls passed along from the quarterdeck, no ship in view through the gunport. The ship was griping furiously where Laurence put his hand on the side, a sort of low moaning complaint as if she were trying to go too close to the wind, and water was glubbing in a curious way against her sides: a sound wholly unfamiliar, and he knew this ship. He had served on Goliath four years in her midshipmen’s mess as a boy, as lieutenant for another two and at the Battle of the Nile; he would have said he could recognize every note of her voice.

He put his head out the porthole and saw the enemy crossing their bows and turning to come about for another pass: a frigate only, a beautiful trim thirty-six-gun ship which could have thrown not half of Goliath’s broadside; an absurd combat on the face of it, and he could not understand why they had not turned to rake her across the stern. Instead there was only a little grumbling from the bow-chasers above, not much reply to be making. Looking forward along the ship, he saw that she had been pierced by an enormous harpoon sticking through her side, as if she were a whale. The end inside the ship had several ingeniously curved barbs, which had been jerked sharply back to dig into the wood; and the cable at the harpoon’s other end swung grandly up and up and up, into the air, where two enormous heavy-weight dragons were holding on to it: an older Parnassian, likely traded to France during an earlier peacetime, and a Grand Chevalier.

It was not the only harpoon: three more cable-lines dangled down from their grip to the bow, and another two from the stern, that Laurence could see. The dragons were too far aloft for him to make out the details, with the ship’s motion underneath him, but the cables were somehow laced into their harnesses, and merely by flying together and pulling, they were pivoting the ship’s head into the wind: all her sails must have been taken aback, and the dragons were too far aloft for round-shot to reach them. One of them sneezed from the action of the frantically speaking pepper guns, but they had only to beat their wings a little more to get away from the pepper, hauling the ship along while they did it.

“Axes, axes,” the lieutenant was shouting, with a clattering of iron as the bosun’s mates came spilling weapons across the floor: hand-axes, cutlasses, knives. The men snatched them up and began to reach out the portholes to try and hack the ship free, but the harpoons were two foot long from the hook, and the ropes had enough slackness to give no good purchase to their efforts. Someone would have to climb out of a porthole to saw at them: open and exposed against the hull of the ship, with the frigate coming around again.

No-one moved to go, at first; then Laurence reached out and took a short cutlass, sharpened, from the heap. The lieutenant looked into his face and knew him, but said nothing. Turning to the porthole, Laurence worked his shoulders through and pulled himself out, many hands quickly coming beneath his feet to support him and the lieutenant calling again; shortly a rope was flung down to him from the deck above, so he could brace himself against the hull. Many faces were peering over at him anxiously: strangers; then another man came sliding down over the rail, and another, to work on the other harpoons.

Laurence began the grim effort of sawing away at the cable, strands going one at a time; the rope was cable-laid, three hawsers of three strands, well-wormed and thick as a man’s wrist and parceled in canvas, and meanwhile he made a bright target against the ship’s paintwork for the guns of the frigate. If he were killed, the embarrassment of his hanging would at least be spared his family. He was only alive now to be a chain round Temeraire’s neck, until the Admiralty should decide the dragon pacified enough by age and habit that Laurence might be dispensed with and his sentence carried out; and that might be years, long years, mouldering in gaol or in the bowels of a ship.

It was not a purposeful thought, no guilty intention; it only crossed his mind involuntarily, while he worked. He had his back to the ocean and could not see anything of the frigate or the larger battle beyond: his horizon was the splintered paint of Goliath’s side, lacquered shine made rough by splinters and salt, and the cold sea was climbing up her hull and spraying his back. Distant roars of cannon-fire spoke, but Goliath had let her guns fall silent, saving her powder and shot for when they should be of some use. The loudest noises in his ears were the grunts and effort of the men hanging nearby, sawing at their own harpoon-lines. Then one of them gave a startled yell and let go his rope, falling away into the churning ocean; a small darting courier-beast, a Chasseur-Vocifère, was plunging at the side of the ship with another harpoon.

The beast held it something like a jouster in a medieval tournament, with the butt rigged awkwardly into a cup attached to its harness, for support, and two men on its back bracing the rig. The harpoon thumped dully against the ship’s side, near to where Laurence hung, and the dragon’s tail slapped a wash of salt water up into his face, heavy stinging thickness in his nostrils and dripping down the back of his throat as he choked it out. The dragon lunged away again even as the Marines fired off a furious volley, trailing the harpoon on its line behind it: the barb had not bitten deep enough to penetrate. The hull was pockmarked with the dents of earlier attempts, a good dozen for each planted harpoon marring her spit-and-polish paintwork.

Laurence wiped salt from his face against his arm and shouted, “Keep working, man, damn you,” at the other seaman still hanging near him. The first rope of his own cable was gone at last, tough fibres fraying away from the cutlass edge and fanning out like a broom; he began on the second, rapidly, although the blade was going dull.

The frigate was still there to harass them, and he could not help but look around at the roar of cannon so nearby. A ball came whistling across the water, skipping two, three times along the wave-tops, like a stone thrown by a boy. It looked as though it came straight for him, an illusion: the whole ship groaned as the ball punched in at the bows, and splinters flew like a sudden blizzard out of the open portholes. They peppered Laurence’s legs, stinging like a flock of bees, and his stockings were quickly wet with blood. He clung on to the harpoon arm and kept sawing; the frigate was still firing, broadside rolling on, and the round-shot hurtled at them again and again, a sickening deep sway to Goliath’s motion now as she took the pounding.

He had to hand the cutlass back in and shout for a fresh to get through the last strand; then at last the cable was cut loose and swinging away free, and they pulled him back in; he staggered when he tried to stand, and went to his knees slipping in blood: stockings laddered and soaked through red; his best breeches, still the same ones he had worn for the trial, were pierced and spotted. He was helped to sit against the wall, and turned the cutlass on his own shirt for bandages to tie up the worst of the gashes; no-one could be spared to help him to the surgeons. The other harpoons had been cut; they were moving at last, coming around; and all the crews were fixed by their guns, savage in the dim red glow penetrating, teeth bared and mazed with blood from cracked lips and gums, faces black with sweat and grime, ready to take vengeance.

A loud pattering like rain or hailstones came suddenly down: small bombs with short fuses dropped by the French dragons, flashes like lightning visible through the boards of the deck; some rolled down through the ladderways and burst in the gundeck, hot flash-powder smoke and the burning glare of pyrotechnics, painful to the eyes; then they hove around in view of the frigate and the order came down to fire, fire.

There was nothing for a long moment but the mindless fury of the ship’s guns going: impossible to think in that roaring din, smoke and hellish fire in her bowels choking away all reason. Laurence reached up for the porthole when they had paused, and hauled himself up to look. The French frigate was reeling away under the pounding, her foremast down and hulled below the water-line, so each wave slapping away poured into her.

There was no cheering. Past the retreating frigate, the breadth of the Channel spread open before them, and all the great ships of the blockade, entangled and harassed just as they had been. The Aboukir and the mighty Sultan, seventy-four guns, were near enough to recognize: cables rising up to three and four dragons, French heavy-weights and middle-weights industriously tugging every which way. The ships were firing steadily but uselessly, clouds of smoke that did not reach the dragons above.

And between them, half-a-dozen French ships-of-the-line, come out of harbor at last, were stately going by, escort to an enormous flotilla. A hundred and more, barges and fishing-boats and even rafts in lateen rig, all of them crammed with soldiers, the wind at their backs and the tide carrying them towards the shore, tricolors streaming proudly from their bows towards England.

With the Navy paralyzed, only the dragons of the Corps were left to stop the advance. But the French warships were firing regularly into the air above the flotilla: something like pepper, in vaster quantities than could have been afforded of spice, and burning. Red spark fragments glowed like fireflies against the black smoke-cloud which hung over the boats, shielding them from aerial attack. One of the transport boats was near enough that Laurence saw the men had their faces covered with wet kerchiefs and rags, or huddled under oilcloth sheets. The British dragons made desperate attempts to dive, but recoiled from the clouds, and had instead to fling down bombs from too great a height: ten splashing into the wide ocean for every one which came near enough to make a wave against a ship’s hull. The smaller French dragons harried them, too, flying back and forth and jeering in shrill voices. There were so many of them, Laurence had never seen so many: wheeling almost like birds, clustering and breaking apart, offering no easy target to the British dragons in their stately formations.

One great Regal Copper might have been Maximus: red and orange and yellow against the blue sky, at the head of a formation with Yellow Reapers in two lines to his either wing, but Laurence did not see Lily. The Regal roared, audible faintly even over the distance, and bulled his formation through a dozen French light-weights to come at a great French warship: flames bloomed from her sails as the bombs at last hit, but when the formation rose away again, one of the Reapers was streaming crimson from its belly and another was listing. A handful of British frigates, too, were valiantly trying to dash past the French ships to come at the transports: with some little success, but they were under heavy fire, and if they sank a dozen boats, half the men were pulled aboard others, so close were the little transports to one another.

“Every man to his gun,” the lieutenant said sharply. Goliath was turning to go after the transports. She would be passing between Majestueux and Héros, a broadside of nearly three tons between them. Laurence felt it when her sails caught the wind properly again: the ship leaping forward like an eager racehorse held too long. She had made all sail. He touched his leg: the blood had stopped flowing, he thought. He limped back to an empty place at a gun.

Outside, the first transports were already hurtling themselves onward to the shore, light-weight dragons wheeling above to shield them while they ran artillery onto the ground, and one soldier rammed the standard into the dirt, the golden eagle atop catching fire with the sunlight: Napoleon had landed in England at last.

Chapter 2

THE QUESTION SENT OUT, Temeraire found it was almost worse to have the prospect of an answer; to know that there was an answer, and that it would reach him soon. Before, the world itself had been undecided, if Laurence was still in it: he might as easily be alive as not, and so long as Temeraire did not know otherwise, Laurence was alive at least in part, which was almost all which could be hoped for: the news at best would only be that he was still imprisoned. As the day crept onward, Temeraire began to feel certainty was a weak reward to repay the risk of receiving the dreadful contrary answer, a possibility which Temeraire could not bear to envision: a great blankness engulfed him if he tried, like a grey sky full of clouds above and below, fog all around.

He wanted distraction badly, and there was none, except to talk to Perscitia; which was at least interesting, if from time to time infuriating also. Perscitia liked to think herself a great genius, and she was certainly unusually clever even if she could not quite grasp the notion of writing; occasionally, to Temeraire’s discomfiture, she would leap quite far ahead, and come out with some strange notion, which was in none of the books Temeraire had read, but which could not at all be disproved or quarreled with.

But she was so jealous of her discoveries that she flew into a temper when Temeraire could inform her that any of them had been made before, and she was resentful of the hierarchy of the breeding grounds, which as she saw it denied her the just deserts of her brilliance. Because of her middling size, she had to make do with an inconvenient poky clearing down in the moorlands, of which she complained endlessly—no prospect and little more than an overhang to shelter from the rain.

“So why do you not take a better?” Temeraire said, exasperated. “There are several very nice, directly over there, in the cliff face; you would be much more comfortable there, I am sure.”

“One does not like to be quarrelsome,” Perscitia said, evasive and entirely false: she liked very well to be quarrelsome, and Temeraire did not understand what that had to do with taking an empty cave, either; but at least it diverted the subject.

The only event of note was that it rained for a week without stopping, with a steady driving wind behind it which came in to all the cave-mouths and permeated the ground, and made everyone perfectly miserable; Temeraire was very glad of his antechamber, where he could shake off the water and dry before retreating to the comfort of his larger chamber. Several of the smallest dragons, courier-weights living in the hollows by the river, were flooded out of their homes entirely; sorry for their muddy and bedraggled state, Temeraire invited them to stop in his cavern, while the rain continued, so long as they first washed off the mud. They were loud with appreciation for his arrangements, gratifyingly, and a few days later, while he was brooding anxious and solitary once again over Laurence, a shadow crossed over the mouth of his cave.

It was the big Regal Copper, Requiescat; he ducked in through the antechamber and came into Temeraire’s main chamber, uninvited, and gazed around the room with a pleased air, nodding, and said, “It is just as nice as they said.”

“Thank you,” Temeraire said, thawed a little by the compliment, although he did not much want company, just then; and then he remembered he must be polite. “Will you sit down? I am sorry I cannot offer you tea.”

“Tea?” Requiescat said, but absently, not expecting an answer; he was poking his nose into the corners of the cave, even putting his tongue out to smell them, Temeraire saw indignantly, as if he were at home; Temeraire’s ruff began to try to bristle.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, stiffly, “I am afraid you have found me unprepared for guests,” which he thought was a clever way of hinting that Requiescat might go away again, any time he chose.

But the Regal Copper did not take the hint; or at any rate he did not choose to go, but instead settled himself comfortably along the back of the cave and said, “Well, old fellow, I am afraid we will have to swap.”

“Swap?” Temeraire said, puzzled, until he divined that Requiescat meant caves. “I do not want your cave,” adding hastily, “not that it is not very nice, I am sure; but I have just got this one arranged to suit me.”

“This one is much bigger now,” Requiescat explained, or by his tone thought he was explaining, “and it is much nicer in the wet; mine,” he added regretfully, “has been full of puddles, all this week; wet clear through to the back.”

“Then I can hardly see why I would change,” Temeraire said, still more baffled, and then he sat up, outraged and astonished, and let his ruff spread fully as it had so wanted to do. “Why, you are a damned scrub,” he said. “How dare you come here, and behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge? I never saw anything so sly in my life; it is the sort of thing Lien would do, I suppose,” he added, cuttingly, “and you may get out at once; if you want my cave you may try and take it; I will meet you anytime you like: now, or at dawn tomorrow.”

“Now, now, let us not get excited,” Requiescat said pacifyingly. “I can see you are a young fellow, right enough. A challenge, really! It is nothing of the sort; I am the most peaceable fellow in the world, and I do not want to fight anyone. I am sorry if I was ham-handed about it. It is not that I want to take your cave, you see—” Temeraire did not see, in the least. “—it is a question of appearances. Here you are a month, with the nicest cave, and you nowhere the biggest, either.” Requiescat preened his own side, a little; certainly he outweighed any dragon Temeraire had seen but Maximus and Laetificat. “We have our own little ways here, of arranging things to keep everyone comfortable. No-one wants any fighting to cut up our peace, not when there is no need; it would be a nasty-tempered sort of fellow who would get to fighting over one cave versus another, both of them large and handsome enough for anyone; but distinctions must be preserved.”

“Stuff,” Temeraire said. “It sounds to me like you have got so lazy, having all your meals given you, and nothing to do, that you do not even want to put yourself to the trouble of properly bullying other people; or maybe,” he added, having made up his mind to be really insulting, “you are just a coward, and thought I was the same: well, I am not, and I am not going to give you my cave, either, no matter what you do.”

Requiescat did not rise to the remarks, but only shook his head dolefully. “There, I am not a clever chap, so I have made a mull of explaining, and now your back is put up. I suppose we will have to get the council together, or you will never believe me. It is a bother, but it is your right, after all.” He heaved himself back up to his feet and added, infuriatingly, “You may keep the place until then; it will take me a day or so to get word to everyone,” before he padded out again, leaving Temeraire quivering with rage.

“His cave is the nicest,” Perscitia said anxiously, later, “at least, certainly we have always thought so; I am sure you would like it, and maybe you could make it even more pleasant than this. Why don’t you go and see, first, before fighting him?”

“I do not care if it is Ali Baba’s cave, and full of gold and lamps,” Temeraire said, not trying to master his temper; it was better to be angry than miserable, and he was glad of anything to think about instead of what he could do nothing to repair. “It is a question of principle: I am not going to be bullied, as though I were not up to his weight. If I made the other cave nice, he should only try and take that back, I am sure; or some other dragon would try and push me out: no, thank you. Who are this council?”

“It is all the biggest dragons,” Perscitia said, “and a Longwing, although Gentius does not bother to come out much anymore.”

“All of them his friends, I suppose,” Temeraire said.

“No one much likes Requiescat,” Moncey said, perched on the lip of Temeraire’s cave. “He eats so much, and will never take less, even if it is short commons all around. But he is the biggest, and so there shouldn’t be fighting, the general rule is that caves go by who is strongest, if there is any quarrel; and no-one is allowed to take a place out of his class, or others will get jealous and squabble.”

“You see it is just as I told you, all unfairness,” Perscitia said bitterly, “as if the only quality of any importance were one’s weight, or how good one is at scratching and biting and kicking up a fuss; never any consideration for really remarkable qualities.”

“I will allow it to have some practical sense,” Temeraire said, “as a way to choose caves; but it is nonsense that after I have taken one, which he might have had at any moment before I came, and did not want, that he should be able to snatch it from me after I have gone to so much trouble to make it nice. And he is not stronger than me, either, if he does weigh more. I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back; and as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.”

“That’s as may be, but he knows all the council, and you don’t,” Moncey said, practically. “You ain’t going to fight a dozen heavy-weights at once, and beg pardon, but no-one looking at you would say, right-o, there is a match for old Requiescat: not that you are little, but you are a bit skinny looking.”

“I am not; am I?” Temeraire said, craning his head anxiously to look back at himself. He did not have spines along his back, the way Maximus or Requiescat did, but was sleek; he was perhaps a bit long for his weight, by British standards. “But anyway, he is not a fire-breather, or an acid-spitter.”

“Are you?” Moncey inquired.

“No,” Temeraire said, “but I have the divine wind; Laurence says it is even better.” However, it belatedly occurred to him that perhaps Laurence might have been speaking partially; certainly Moncey and Perscitia looked blank, and it was difficult to explain just how it operated. “I roar, in a particular sort of way—I have to breathe quite deeply, and there is a clenching feeling, along the throat, and then—and then it makes things break; trees, and so on,” Temeraire finished in an ashamed mutter, conscious that it sounded very dull and useless, when so described. “It is very unpleasant to be caught in it,” he added defensively, “at least, so I understand, from how others have acted, if they are before me when I use it.”

“How interesting,” Perscitia said, politely. “I have often wondered what sound is, exactly; we ought to do some experiments.”

“Experiments ain’t going to help you with the council,” Moncey said.

Temeraire switched his tail against his side, thinking, and then he said with distaste, “No, I see that: it is all politics. It is plain to me: I must work out what Lien would do.”

He cornered Lloyd, the next morning, and said, “Lloyd, I am very hungry to-day; may I have an extra cow, to take up to my cave?”

“There, that is a little more like,” Lloyd said approvingly; not deaf at all to a request so satisfactory to his own ideas of dragon-husbandry, he ordered it directly; and while waiting, Temeraire asked, attempting an air casual, as though he were only making conversation, “I do not suppose you might recall, who Gentius has sired?”

The old Longwing cracked a bleary eye, when Temeraire landed, and peered at him rather incuriously. “Yes?” he said. His cave was not so large, but a comfortable dry hollow tucked well under the mountainside, on higher ground overlooking a curve of the creek, so he might merely creep downhill for a drink without flying, and then back up, to a large flat rock full in the sun, where he presently lay napping.

“I beg your pardon for not coming by before, sir,” Temeraire said, inclining his head, “to visit you; I have served with Excidium these last three years at Dover—your third hatchling,” he added, when Gentius looked vague.

“Yes, Excidium, of course,” Gentius said, his tongue licking the air, experimentally, and Temeraire laid down before him the cow, butchered with the help of Moncey’s small claws to take out the large bones. “A small gift to show my respect,” Temeraire said, and Gentius brightened. “Why, that is très gentil of you,” he said, with atrocious pronunciation, which Temeraire just in time remembered not to correct, and took the cow into his mouth to gum at it slowly with the wobbly remainder of his teeth. “Very kind, as my first captain liked to say,” Gentius mumbled reminiscently around it. “You might go in there and bring out her picture,” he added, “if you are very careful with it.”

The portrait was rather odd and flat-looking, and the woman in it very plain, even before time and the elements had faded her; but it was in a really splendid golden frame, so large and thick that Temeraire could take it delicately between two talon-tips to lift it, and carry it out into the sun. “How beautiful,” he said sincerely, holding it where Gentius could at least point his head in its direction, although his eyes were so milky with cataracts he could not have seen it as more than a blur in the golden square.

“Charming woman,” Gentius said, sadly. “She fed me my first bite, fresh liver, when my head was no bigger than her hand. One never quite gets over the first, you know.”

“Yes,” Temeraire said, low, and looked away unhappily; at least Gentius had not had her taken from him, and put who knew where.

When he had put the portrait back with equal care, and listened to a long story about one of the wars in which Gentius had fought—something with the Prussians, where pepper guns had been invented: very unpleasant things, especially when one had not been expecting them at all—then Gentius was quite ready to be sympathetic, and to shake his head censoriously over Requiescat’s behavior. “No proper manners, these days, that is what it is.”

“I am very glad to hear you say so: that is just what I thought, but as I am quite young, I did not feel sure of myself, without advice from someone wiser, like yourself,” Temeraire said, and then with sudden inspiration added, “I suppose next, he will propose that if any of us have some treasure, which he likes, gold or jewels, we must give it to him: it follows quite plainly.”

That was indeed enough to rouse Gentius up, with so handsome a treasure of his own to consider. “I do not see that you are wrong at all,” he said, darkly. “Of course we cannot have Winchesters taking caves fit for Regal Coppers, there would be no end of trouble and quarreling, and then sooner or later the men will involve themselves, and make it all even worse; they think somehow Reapers are less use than Anglewings, because there are more of them and they are clannish, instead of the other way round; and they have many more such odd notions. But that is not the same as taking away a cave perfectly suitable to your weight and standing.” He paused and said delicately, “I do not suppose you had a formation of your own?”

“No,” Temeraire said, “at least, not officially; although Arkady and the others fought under my orders, and I was wing-mates with Maximus: he is Laetificat’s hatchling.”

“Laetificat, yes; fine dragon,” Gentius said. “I served with her, you know, in ’seventy-six; we had a dust-up with the colonials at Boston. They got artillery above our positions—”

Temeraire came away eventually with Gentius’s firm promise to attend the council-meeting, and returned to his cave well-pleased with the success of his first efforts. “Who else is on the council?” he asked.

While Perscitia began listing off names, Reedly, a mongrel half-Winchester with yellow streaks, piped up from the corner, “You ought to speak to Majestatis.”

Perscitia bristled at once. “I see no reason why he ought do any such thing. Majestatis is a very common sort of dragon; and he is not on the council, anyway.”

“He made sure I got a share of the food, when we were all sick, and things were short,” Minnow said, on the other side; she was a muddy-colored feral with touches of Grey Copper and Sharpspitter and even a little Garde-de-Lyon, which had given her vivid orange eyes and blue spots to set off her otherwise drab coloring.

A low murmur of general agreement went around. A crowd had gradually accumulated in Temeraire’s cave to offer their advice and remarks, a good many of the smaller dragons having interested themselves in Temeraire’s case: those he had sheltered and their acquaintance, and besides them the not-insignificant number who had some injury, real or imagined, to lay at Requiescat’s door. “And he is not on the council only because he does not care to be; he is a Parnassian,” Minnow added, to Temeraire.

“If he were a Flamme-de-Gloire, it would hardly signify,” Perscitia said coldly, “as he does nothing but sleep all the time.”

Moncey nudged Temeraire with his head and murmured, “Corrected her once, six years ago.”

“It was only an error of arithmetic!” Perscitia said heatedly. “I should have found it out myself in a moment, I was only occupied with the much more important question—”

“Where does he live?” Temeraire asked, interrupting; he felt that anyone who did not have time for politics must be rather sensible.

Majestatis was indeed sleeping when Temeraire came to see him; his cave was out of the way, and not very large; but Temeraire noticed that there was a carefully placed heap of stones, along the back, which blocked one’s view into the interior; if he widened his pupils as far as they would go, he thought he could make out a darker space behind them, as if there were a passageway going back deeper into the mountainside.

He coiled himself neatly and waited without fidgeting, as was polite; but at length, when Majestatis showed no signs of waking—after ten minutes, or perhaps five—very nearly five—Temeraire coughed; then he coughed again, a little more emphatically, and Majestatis sighed and said, without opening his eyes, “So you are not leaving, I suppose?”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, his ruff prickling, “I thought you were only sleeping, not ignoring me deliberately; I will go at once.”

“Well, you might as well stay, now,” Majestatis said, lifting his head and yawning himself awake. “I don’t bother to wake up if it isn’t important enough to wait for, that’s all.”

“That is sensible, I suppose; if you like to sleep better than to have a conversation,” Temeraire said, dubiously.

“You’ll like it better in a few years yourself,” Majestatis said.

“No, I do not suppose I will,” Temeraire said. “At least, the Analects say the superior dragon does not sleep more than fourteen hours of the day, so I shan’t; unless,” he added, desolately, “I am still shut up in here, where there is nothing worth doing.”

“If you think so, what are you doing here, instead of in the coverts?” Majestatis said. He listened to the explanation with the same casual sympathy of one hearing a story-teller, which Temeraire was beginning to expect, and passed no judgment, other than to nod equably and say, “A bad lot for you, poor worm.”

“Why have you come here?” Temeraire ventured. “You are not very old, yourself; do you really like to sleep so much? You might have a captain, and be in battles.”

Majestatis shrugged with one wing-tip, flared and folded down again. “Had one, mislaid him.”

“Mislaid?” Temeraire said.

“Well,” Majestatis said, “I left him in a water-trough, and I don’t suppose he is still sitting there, so I have no notion where he has got to.”

He was not inclined to be very enthusiastic; when Temeraire had explained, he sighed and said, “You are young, to be making such a fuss out of it.”

“If I am,” Temeraire retorted, “at least I am not complacent, and ready to let this sort of bullying go on, when I can do something about it; and I do not mean to be satisfied,” he added, with a pointed look at the back of Majestatis’s cave, “to arrange matters better only for myself.”

Majestatis’s eyes slitted narrow, but he did not stir otherwise. “It seems to me you are as likely to make it worse for everyone. There’s no wrangling now, at least, and no one is getting hurt.”

“No one is very comfortable, either,” Temeraire said. “We all might have nicer places, but no one will work to improve theirs, if they know it may be taken away from them, at any time, because they have made it nice. Once a cave is yours, it ought to be yours, like property.”

The council looked a little dubious at this argument, when Temeraire repeated it to them, the next afternoon: a strong westerly wind had swept the last scattering traces of rain-clouds before it and scraped the sky to a wintry brilliance, and they had gathered in a great clearing among the mountains, full of pleasant broad smooth-topped rocks, warmed by the sun. Majestatis had come after all, and Gentius, although the old dragon was mostly asleep after the effort of making the flight, curled upon the blackest rock and murmuring occasionally to himself. Requiescat sprawled inelegantly across half the length of the clearing, making himself look very large; Temeraire disdained the attempt and kept himself neatly coiled, with his ruff spread proudly; although he privately wished he might have had his talon-sheaths, and even a headdress such as he had seen in some of the markets along the old silk caravan roads; he was sure that could not fail to impress.

Ballista, a big Chequered Nettle, thumped her barbed tail on the ground several times to silence the muttering which had arisen amongst the council, in the middle of Temeraire’s remarks. “And if we agree,” Temeraire went on, valiantly, in the face of so much skepticism, “that everyone may keep their own cave, when they have got it, I would be very happy to show anyone the trick of arranging them better; so you all may have nicer caves, if you only take a little trouble to make them so.”

“Very nice I am sure,” one peevish older Parnassian said, “if you are a yearling, to be fussing with rocks and twigs.”

There were several snorts of agreement; and Temeraire bristled. “If you do not care to, and you are happy with your cave as it is, then you needn’t; but neither ought you go and take someone else’s cave, when they have done all the work. Certainly I am not going to be robbed, as if I were a lump; I will smash the cave up myself and make it not at all nice for anyone, before I hand it over meekly.”

“Now, now, then,” Ballista said. “There is no call to go yelling about smashing things or making threats; that is enough of that. Now we’ll hear Requiescat.”

“Hum, quarrelsome, ain’t he,” Requiescat said. “Well, you all know me, chums, and I don’t mean to make a brag of myself, but I expect no one would say I couldn’t take any cave I liked, if I wanted to. I am not a squabbler, and don’t like to hurt anybody; a young fellow like this is excitable enough to bite off a bigger fight than he can swallow—”

“Oh!” Temeraire said indignantly. “You mayn’t claim any such thing, unless you like to prove it; I have beat dragons nearly as big as you.”

Requiescat swung his big head around. “Ain’t it true you’re bred not to fight? Persy was going about saying some such.”

Perscitia gave an angry yelp of “I never,” stifled quickly by the other small dragons sitting around her at Ballista’s censorious glare.

“Celestials,” Temeraire said, very coolly, “are bred to be the very best sort of dragon. In China, we are not supposed to fight unless the nation is in danger, because China has a good deal many more dragons than here, and we are too valuable to lose; so we only fight in emergencies, when ordinary fighting-dragons are not up to the task.”

“Oh, China,” Requiescat said dismissively. “Anyway, fellows, there you have it plain as day. I say I am tops, and ought to have the best cave; he says it ain’t so, and he won’t hand it over. Ordinary, there’d be no ways to work that out but a tussle, and then someone gets hurt and everyone is upset. This is just the sort of thing the council was made up for, and I expect it ought to be pretty clear to all of you which of us is right, without it coming to claws.”

“I do not say I am ‘tops,’” Temeraire said, “although I think it is just as likely that I am; I say that the cave is mine, and it is unjust for you take it. That is what the council ought to be for: justice, not squashing everyone down, just to keep things comfortable for the biggest dragons.”

The council, being composed of the biggest dragons, did not look very enthusiastic. Ballista said, “All right; we have heard everyone out. Now look, Temeraire—” She pronounced it quite wrongly, Teymuhreer. “—we don’t want a lot of fuss and bother—”

“I do not see why not,” Temeraire said. “What else have we to do?”

Several of the smaller dragons tittered, rustling their wings together; she cleared her throat warningly at them and continued, “We don’t want a lot of fighting, anyhow. Why don’t you just go on and show us a bit of flying, so we know what you can do; then we can settle this clear.”

“But that is not at all the point!” Temeraire said. “If I were as small as Moncey—” He looked, but Moncey was not among the little dragons observing, so he amended, “If I were as small as Minnow there, it oughtn’t make any difference. No one was using it, no one wanted it; not before I had it.”

Requiescat gave a flip of his wings. “It was not the nicest, before,” he said, in reasonable tones.

Temeraire snorted angrily; but Ballista said impatiently, “Yes, yes; go on, then; unless you don’t like us to see,” and that was too much to bear; he threw himself aloft, spiraling high and fast as he could, tightening into a spring, and then dived directly into formation-maneuvers: that was what would please them, he thought bitterly. He finished the training pass and backwinged directly into the reverse, flying the pattern backwards, and then hovered mid-air before descending straight downwards: showing away, of course, but they had demanded he do so; and landing he announced, “I will show you the divine wind, now; but you had all better clear away from that rock wall, as I expect a lot of it will come down.”

There was a good deal of grumbling as the big dragons shifted themselves, with dragging tails and annoyed looks; Temeraire ignored them and breathed in very deeply, several times, stretching his chest wide: he meant to do as much damage as he could. He noticed in belated dismay, though, that the face of the rock wall was not loose, or even the nice soft white limestone in the caves, which crumbled so conveniently. He nosed out to it and scraped a claw down the face: he barely left white scratches on the hard grey rock.

“Well?” Ballista said. “We are all waiting.”

There was no help for it; Temeraire backed away from the cliff, and drew breath, preparatory; and then there was a hurried rush of wings above: Moncey dropped into the clearing beside him, panting, and said, “Call it off; it’s all off,” urgently, to Ballista.

“Hey, what’s this, then?” Requiescat said, frowning.

“Quiet, you fat lump,” Moncey said, slitting a good many eyes; he was not much bigger than the Regal Copper’s head. “I’m fresh from Brecon: the Frogs have come over the Channel.”

A great confused babble arose, all around; even Gentius roused, with a low hiss, and while everyone spoke at once, Moncey turned to Temeraire and said, “Listen, your Laurence, word is in they locked him up on a ship called the Goliath—”

“The Goliath!” Temeraire said. “I know that ship; Laurence has spoken of it to me before. That is very good—that is splendid; it is on blockade, I know just where it is, nearly, and I am sure anyone at Dover can tell me exactly where—”

“Old fellow, I wish I needn’t pop it out so; but there’s no good way to say it,” Moncey said. “The Frogs sank her this morning, coming across. She is at the bottom of the ocean, and not a man got off her before she went down.”

Temeraire did not say anything; a terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned blindly away to let it come, the roar bursting out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.

Chapter 3

THEY PULLED THE ship’s boats into Dover harbor past eleven o’clock at night, sweating underneath their chilled, wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars; they climbed out shivering onto the docks, Captain Puget handed up in a litter almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, the only one left to oversee; the rest of the senior officers were all dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty and glanced around. The men offered him nothing, beaten down with rowing and defeat, silent. At last Laurence said quietly to the young man, “The port admiral,” prompting, and Frye colored and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, “You had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, Mr. Meed, and let him decide what is to be done.”

With two Marines for guards, Laurence went with Meed along the dockside streets to the port admiral’s office, where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the Goliath in her last moments after the double broadside had dismasted her: smoke everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, and cannon running wild back and forth on her decks; here instead the hallways were thick with unchecked speculation. “Five hundred thousand men landed,” one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic without common sense; “Already in London,” said another, “and ten millions in shipping seized,” the very last of these the only plausible suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary, and taken the merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number: an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion already begun, like coal heaped into a burning stove.

“I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,” the port admiral said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders; there was a vast roaring noise outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them, so Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they were carried away: the boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.

Set adrift, Meed looked helplessly. Laurence wondered if he should have to find his own prison and lock himself into it, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat contempt, and said, “That is the traitor, is it? This way, and you two damned dogs take a proper hold of him, before he crawls away in this press.”

He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, left from some press-gang perhaps, and swinging it to clear the way took them out into the street, Meed trotting gratefully after. He brought them to an old run-down sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard, howling unhappily to add to the clamor of the uneasy, half-rioting crowd. Beating upon the door brought out the master of the house, who whined objections which the lieutenant overruled one after another, and at last defeated entirely by pushing in upon him.

“There, and better than you deserve,” he said to Laurence coldly, having taken them up to the small and squalid attic, and held open the door. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache, and a solid push would have served to lay him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him a moment, and then went inside, stooping under the lintel; the door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the lieutenant ordering the two Marines to stay and stand watch, and the owner’s complaints trailing him back down the stairs.

It was bitterly cold. The irregular floor of warped and knotted boards felt strange under Laurence’s feet, still expecting the listing motion of the ship. There was a handkerchief-square of a window for air and light, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke, and a reddish glow shining on the undersides of the rooftops, all that he could see.

Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting by now all along the coast: men landed at Deal, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five hundred thousand, nothing like, but enough, perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry to establish a secure beachhead, secure enough, and then Napoleon could land men as quick as he could get them across the Channel.

This, Laurence would have said, could be not very quickly; not in the face of the Navy. But that opinion fell before the maneuvers he had witnessed today: pitting great numbers of light-weights, easy to feed and quick to maneuver, against the British heavy-weights, in the face of all common wisdom; and using the massed power of their own heavy-weights instead against the ships, the British point of strength. It bore the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had seen at the battle of Jena, spearheaded there by Lien, and Laurence had no doubt her advice had served Napoleon in this latest adventure.

Laurence had reported on the Battle of Jena to the Admiralty; it was a bitter thought to consider that his treason must have undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. Jane at least, he had thought—had hoped—would still have kept it under consideration, even if she had not forgiven; would have understood him so far, to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But in what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons had been locked in their same formations, all the same antiquated habits of aerial war.

The noise outside the window rose and fell like the sea; somewhere nearby glass was breaking. A woman shrieked. The glow increased. He lay down and tried to sleep a little; his rest was broken by ragged eruptions of noise, already falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting and sore, from fragmentary images of the burning ship, which in his dreams became black and glossy beneath the flames, scales curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once; there was a small dirty pitcher of water to which he was not yet thirsty enough to resort for drinking, and he splashed his face a little with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked black with soot and grime. He lay down again; there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.

It did not grow light so much as less dark; there was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached sharply. No one came with food; there was not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell: four long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven, restless; his arms clasped behind his back, feeling as though they were weighted down with round-shot, dragging; he had rowed for five hours without a pause.

That at least had been something to do: something besides this useless fretting away to no purpose. The city burned, and all he could do here was burn with it; or moulder to be taken a prisoner by the French, with Napoleon’s army scarcely ten miles distant. And even if he died, Temeraire might never know—might keep himself a prisoner long after any cause had gone, and stay to be taken by the French. Laurence could not trust Napoleon for Temeraire’s safety: not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the self-interest which would see him master of the only Celestial outside China’s borders, would be louder in Napoleon’s ear than any prompting of generosity.

The guards might be persuaded to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if nothing else; if only Laurence could persuade himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialed and convicted, and justly so, with all due process of law, though he would gladly have forgone it all. The endless dragging out of evidence, though he had been condemned already by his own voice; the panel of officers listening, faces blank if not tight with disgust. Navy officers all of them; not an aviator had been allowed to serve. Too many of them had been one after another dragged into the vile business, implicated and smeared any way they could be—Ferris, because Laurence must have confided in his first lieutenant—“And it must present a curious appearance to the court,” the prosecutor had said, sneering, while Ferris sat drawn and pale and wretched and did not look at Laurence, “that he did not raise the alarm for an hour after the accused and his beast were known to be missing, and did not at once open the letter which was left behind—”

Chenery, too, had been named, only because he had also been in London covert at the time, and Berkley and Little and Sutton all brought in to give evidence; and if Harcourt and Jane had not been mentioned, Laurence was sure it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do it, without embarrassing themselves more than their targets. “I did not know a damned thing about the business, and I am sure neither did anyone else; anyone who knows Laurence will tell you he would not have breathed a word of it to anyone,” Chenery had said defiantly, “but I do say sending over the sick beast was a blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you like to hang me for saying so, you are welcome.”

They had not hanged Chenery, thank God, for lack of evidence and for need of his dragon; but Ferris, a lieutenant with no such protection, had been broken out of the service: every effort Laurence had made to insist that the guilt was his alone had been ignored. A fine officer lost to the service, his career and his life spoilt—Laurence had met his mother, his brothers; they were an old family and a proud, and Ferris had been away from home from the age of seven: they did not have that intimate, personal knowledge which should make them confident of his innocence, and give him the affectionate support now denied him from his fellow-officers. To witness his misery and know himself culpable hurt Laurence worse than his own conviction had done.

That had never been in any doubt. There had been no defense to make, and no comfort but the arid certainty that he had done as he ought; that he could have done nothing else. That was no comfort at all, but that it saved him from the pain of regret: he could not regret what he had done. He could not have let ten thousand dragons, most of them wholly uninvolved in the war, be murdered for his nation’s advantage. When he had said as much, and freely confessed that he had disobeyed his orders, assaulted a Marine, stolen the cure, and given aid and comfort to the enemy, there was nothing else to say; the only charge which he had contested, was that he had stolen Temeraire, too. “He is neither the King’s possession nor a dumb beast, and his choice was his own and freely made,” Laurence had said, but he had been ignored, of course; and he had scarcely been taken from the room before he was brought back in again to hear his sentence of death pronounced.

And then at once quietly postponed: he had been hurried from the chamber under guard, and into a stifling, black-draped carriage. A long blind rattling journey ending at Sheerness, where he had been put aboard the Lucinda and then transferred to Goliath, and put into the brig: an oubliette meant only to keep him breathing, and little else. A living death, worse than the hanging he was promised in future, and if he stayed, and was not taken by the French, they would only put him back into an upright coffin. Laurence knew it well.

But that was not his choice to make; he had made one choice, and sacrificed all the others. His life was no longer his own, even if the court chose to leave it to him a little while longer, and to flee now would be no better than to have fled to China, or to have accepted Napoleon’s offers and solicitations to stay. He could not go. He had no other way of knowing himself not a traitor, no other reparation he could make. He might look at the door, but he could not open it.

A brief glaze of rain washed the window and thinned the smoke outside. He went to stand by the window, though he could not see anything but a general grey dimness. The sun, if it had come up, stayed hidden; he rather felt than knew it was past dawn.

The knob rattled in the door, and the door opened. Laurence turned and stopped, staring, at the man on the other side: the familiar but unexpected lean face, travel-leathered, and the Oriental features. “I hope I find you in good health,” Tharkay said. “Will you come with me? I believe there is still a danger of fire.”

The guards had vanished; the house was entirely deserted, but for a couple of men who had wandered in drunk off the street and were sleeping in the front hall. Laurence stepped over their legs and out into the morning: a thin pallid haze of smoke and false dawn lying over the docks and drifting out to sea. Glass and broken slate and charred wood littered the street, and unspeakable trash; a couple of sweepers lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing not very much to help.

Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley, where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle, lay blocking the way; a young kestrel with long trailing jesses perched on its side, tearing occasionally at the flesh and uttering a satisfied cry. Tharkay held out his hand and whistled, and the kestrel came back to him, to be hooded and secured upon his shoulder.

“I am three weeks back from the Pamirs,” Tharkay said. “I brought another dozen feral beasts for your ranks; in good time, it seems. Roland sent me to bring you in.”

“But how came you here?” Laurence said, while they picked their way onwards through the unfashionable backstreets. The town looked very much as though it had been already sacked, and those windows and doors yet intact were all shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly glowering air. “How you knew I was in the town—”

“The town was not the difficulty; the wreckers off the coast knew which way the Goliath’s boats had gone,” Tharkay said. “I was here before you were, I imagine; finding where you had been stowed was more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble to get these, first,” showing Laurence a folded packet of papers, “from the port admiral, in the assumption he would know the whereabouts of the prisoner he was assigning to me, but he left me in the hall two hours, and quarreled with me another, and only when I had his signature did he at last confess to having not the least knowledge where you were, with the harbor on fire.”

They came to a bare clearing, a courier-covert, where little Gherni waited for them fidgeting anxiously; she hissed at Tharkay urgently. He answered her in the same tangled dragon-language, which Laurence could not make much sense of, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing Laurence at the couple of handholds to get himself aboard.

“We may have some difficulty,” Tharkay said. “Bonaparte’s men are still nearly all on the coast, but his dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand, I believe,” he answered, when Laurence asked how many men, “and as many as two hundred beasts, if one cares to believe the figure. The Corps has fallen back with the rest of the army, to Woolwich. I believe to await Bonaparte’s pleasure; why they are being so courteous, you would have to ask the generals.”

“I thank you for coming,” Laurence said; Tharkay had risked a great deal, with such geography: half Bonaparte’s army landed somewhere between them and the Army. “You have taken service, then?” he asked, looking at Tharkay’s coat: he wore gold bars, a captain’s rank. It was not uncommon in the Army for a man to be commissioned when he was needed, if a rarer phenomenon in the Corps, where the dragon made the rank, than in other branches. But with Tharkay one of the few who could speak with the feral dragons of the Pamirs, it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him; more of one that he had accepted.

“For now.” Tharkay shrugged.

“No-one could accuse you of an interested choice,” Laurence said, too grim for even black humor, with the smell of the burning city in his nostrils.

“One of its advantages,” Tharkay said. “Any fool could throw in his lot with a victor.”

Laurence did not ask why he had been sent. Fifty thousand men landed was answer enough: Temeraire must be wanted, and Laurence himself the only, however undesirable, means to come by his services; it was a pragmatic and a temporary choice only, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or legal. Tharkay himself volunteered no more: Gherni was already springing aloft, and the vigor of the wind blew all possible words away.

The sky had the peculiar late-autumn crispness, very blue and clear and cloudless, beautiful flying weather, and they had scarcely been half an hour aloft before Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them, and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, except perhaps a few specks drifting that might have been wandering birds; but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the edge of the woods and, peering out from the shade, saw at length two shapes leap up from the ground, and come closer. Two big grey-and-brown dragons, gliding with lazy assurance, and well they might: Grand Chevaliers, the largest of the French heavy-weights, only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. They were messy with recent pillaging, and each had what looked like a dozen cows dangling stupefied in their belly-netting, these occasionally uttering groggy and perplexed moans, and pawing ineffectually at the air with their hooves.

The pair went by calling to each other cheerfully in French too colloquial and rapid for Laurence to follow, their crews laughing. Their shadows passed like scudding clouds, a moment’s complete blotting of the sun, while Gherni held very still beneath the branches. Her eyes were the only part of her which moved, tracking the great dragons’ passage overhead.

She could not be persuaded back aloft, afterwards, but curled up as deeply as she could wedge herself into the trees, and proposed instead that they should bring her something to eat. She would not go again until it was dark. That the French Fleur-de-Nuits would be out then, in their turn, was not an argument which Laurence wished very much to attempt on her, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only shrugged, and examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. “Perhaps the Chevaliers will not have eaten all the cattle.”

There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people; only a scattering of unhappy chickens, which Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel against, one after another. They would not make much dinner for Gherni, but a little was better than nothing; and then in the stable a small pig was discovered, rooting unconcernedly in the straw, oblivious both to the fate which it had earlier escaped and to the one which now descended upon it.

Gherni was neither picky nor patient enough to demand her pork cooked, and they roasted the chickens for themselves over a small, well-banked fire, feeding the kestrel on the sweetbreads, and waving their hands through the smoke to thin it out. Without salt the meat had little flavor, but did well enough to fill their stomachs. They gnawed it down to the bones, and buried the remnants deep; they rubbed their greasy hands clean with grass.

And then only the wait for the sun to go down: a crawling time, when it was scarcely yet noon, and the ground cold and hard to sit upon: wet rotting leaves in a muck everywhere, the wind blowing a steady chill into fingers and feet, with all the stamping they could do. But Laurence could stand when he chose, and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing freely into his face, and see the placid well-ruled fields in their orderly brown ranks and tall white birch-trees raising their limbs high against the unbroken sky.

Tharkay came and stood beside him. There was no alteration in his looks or manner; if he was silent, he had been silent before. It was to Laurence as much liberation as the absence of locks and barred doors, to be able to stand here a moment, and be no traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of another. He had suffered wide disapproval before, without intolerable pain, when he knew himself in the right; he had not known it could be so heavy.

Tharkay said, “I might never have found you, of course.”

It was an offer, and Laurence was ashamed to be tempted; tempted so strongly he could not immediately make his refusal, not with all freedom open before him, and the stench of smoke and the ship’s bilges still thick in the back of his throat, ready to be tasted.

“My idea of duty is not yours,” Tharkay said. “But I know of no reason why you owe it to any man to die, to no purpose.”

“Honor is sufficient purpose,” Laurence said, low.

“Very well,” Tharkay said, “if your death would preserve it better than your life. But the world is not yet quite ranged all between Britain and Napoleon, and you do not need to choose between them or die. You would be welcome, and Temeraire, in other parts of the world. You may recall there is at least a semblance of civilization,” he added dryly, “in some few places, beyond the borders of England.”

“I do not—” Laurence said, struggling, “I will not pretend that I do not consider it, for Temeraire’s sake if not my own. But to fly would be to make myself truly a traitor.”

“Laurence,” Tharkay said, after a pause, “you are a traitor.” It was a blow to hear him say so, in his cool blunt way, all the lack of passion in the words serving only to make them seem less accusation than statement of fact. “Allowing them to put you to death for it may be a form of apology, but it does not make you less guilty.”

Laurence did not know how to answer; of course Tharkay was right. It was useless to cry, that he loved his country, and had betrayed her only in extremis, as the lesser of two hideous evils. He had betrayed her, and the cause mattered not at all. So perhaps for nothing, now, he condemned Temeraire to lonely servitude, himself to life-long imprisonment. Perhaps all that could be lost, had been lost. And yet—and yet—He could not answer.

They stood a long while, mutely. At last Tharkay shook his head, and put his hand on Laurence’s shoulder. “It is getting dark.”

“Yes, I sent for him,” Jane said, flatly. “And you may leave off your coughing and your insinuations: if I wanted a man between my legs so badly, there is a campful of handsome young fellows outside, and I dare say I could find one out to oblige me, without going to such trouble.”

Having momentarily appalled her audience of generals and ministers into silence, she rode on, with no more muttering to contend against, “If the French took him prisoner, they would have two Celestials; and even if the two are too close related to breed direct, they will cross-breed them—perhaps to Grand Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits: in a generation they will have a breed of their own, and we nothing: we haven’t a single egg out of Temeraire yet. Put Laurence in a gaol-waggon and bring him along under guard, if you insist; but if you have any sense, you will make use of him, and the beast.”

The atmosphere in the generals’ tent was not a convivial one. All conversation circled endlessly around the central disaster of the landing, returning to it again and again, and Laurence had already gathered enough to understand: Jane had not been in command of the aerial defense, after all. Sanderson had been made Admiral at Dover, over her head.

For what reason, Laurence scarcely needed to wonder: they had never liked making her commander, but having been forced to do it by necessity, they would likely have gone on as they had begun rather than admit a mistake; if they had not wanted vengeance, if they had not thought her complicit in Laurence’s treason.

As for Sanderson, Laurence knew the man a little: he was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a large independent formation at Dover; they had served together, if not very closely. Thoroughly experienced but no brilliant officer, Laurence would have said, and Sanderson’s attention was badly divided. Though his Animosia had been dosed with the cure, several times, she still fared poorly from the aftereffects of the epidemic, and it had nearly killed him, too: he was not a year short of sixty, and had scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.

He sat now in a corner of the tent and wiped occasionally at an oozing cut over his eye with a folded bandage, saying nothing, while the generals shouted instead at Jane; he looked grey and faded under the bright bloody streak on his forehead.

“Splendid, so you would put a known traitor and his uncontrollable beast into the middle of our very lines,” one member of the Navy Board said. “You may as well rig up a telegraph and signal all our plans to Bonaparte at once.”

“Bonaparte can’t damned well have an easier time of it than he has already, unless you run up a white flag instead,” Jane snapped. “He has a hundred dragons more than he ought to, by any numbers. You gentlemen at the Admiralty swear up and down we should have heard if he’d stripped Prussia and Italy to the bone; so I suppose he is pulling them out of the trees; and as we can’t do the same, we must have every last beast we can scrounge. Six beasts too injured to fight in the next month, four of our newest ferals slunk off, and you want to let a Celestial rot; pure idiocy.”

“Why precisely are we listening to this haranguing fishwife?” someone said.

“To be precise,” Jane said, “you aren’t listening to me, and you had better start. Begging your pardon, Sanderson, you are a damned fine formation-leader; but you weren’t the man for this.”

“No, not at all, Roland,” Sanderson said, dully, and patted the cloth to his forehead again.

“We are listening to her,” another general said in back, impatient: a lean sharp-faced man with a decided aquiline nose, and the Order of the Bath, “because you could not scrape up a competent man for the job. We are not going to beat Bonaparte with yesterday’s mess.”

“Portland—” another began.

“Stop bleating the man’s name like a talisman,” the general said. “If it is not Nelson with you, it is Portland. Gibraltar is as bad as Denmark: neither of them is to be had in under a month. Until then, get out of her way.”

“General Wellesley, you cannot seriously be lending your voice to the suggestion—” another minister said, gesturing to Laurence.

“Thank you; I am capable of deciding to what I will lend my voice, without consultation,” Wellesley said. He raked Laurence up and down with a cold dismissive eye. “He’s a sentimentalist, isn’t he—surrendered himself? Damned romantic. What difference does it make? Hang him after.”

Jane took him to her tent. “No, you had better stay, Frette,” she said, speaking to her aide-de-camp, who had risen from a camp-table as she ducked inside. “I can better afford to be frank before a witness than make hay for any more rumors.”

She poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it with her back to him. Laurence could not quarrel with her decision, but he wished that they had been alone; he himself felt it impossible to speak as he wished before anyone else. Then she put down the glass and sat down behind her desk. “Tomorrow you will go by courier to Pen Y Fan,” she said, tiredly, without looking at him. “That is where they have been keeping Temeraire. Will you bring him back?”

“Yes, of course,” Laurence said.

“They very likely will hang you after, unless you manage to do something heroic,” Jane said.

“If I had wished to avoid justice, I might have stayed in France,” Laurence said. “Jane—”

“Admiral Roland, if you please,” she said, sharply. After a moment’s silence, she added, “I cannot blame you, Laurence; Christ knows it was ugly. But if I am to do any good, I cannot be fighting their damned Lordships as well as Napoleon’s dragons. Frette will take you to the officers’ tent to eat, and find you somewhere to sleep. You will go tomorrow, and when you come back you will be flying in formation, under Admiral Sanderson. That will be all.”

She gave a jerk of her head, and Frette clearing his throat held open the tent flap; Laurence could only bow, and withdraw too slowly, wishing he had not seen her drop her forehead to her clenched fist, and the grimness around her mouth.

There was a dreadful awkwardness when he came into the large mess tent in Frette’s company. He saw none of his nearest acquaintance, and was glad to postpone that evil, but several remarks were made by captains little known to him, which he had to pretend not to hear, and worse than that was the discomfort and downcast faces of those who would not snub him, but still did not choose to meet his eyes.

He had been prepared for this much; he was not as well braced to have his hand seized, and aggressively pumped, by a gentleman he had only seen perhaps twice before, across the officers’ common room at Dover. Captain Hesterfield loudly said, “May I shake your hand, sir?” too late for the request to be refused, and then nearly bodily dragged Laurence over to his table in the corner, and presented him to his companions.

There were six officers at the small and huddled table: two Prussians, one of whom, Von Pfeil, Laurence recognized from the siege of Danzig, and another who stood and shook his hand, and introduced himself as cousin to Captain Dyhern, with whom they had fought at the Battle of Jena. They were refugees from their own country, having chosen exile and service in Britain over accepting the parole which Napoleon had offered to Prussian officers.

Another stranger, Captain Prewitt, had been called to England a few months before, out of desperation: his Winchester had escaped the epidemic, as they were ordinarily assigned to Halifax covert, whence he had been stationed on a lonely circuit out in Quebec to put him out of the way of anyone hearing his radical political views, as he freely acknowledged.

“Or perhaps my poetry,” Prewitt said, laughing at himself, “but my pride can better stand condemnation of my politics than of my art, so I choose to take it so. And this is Captain Latour,” a French Royalist turned British officer. Hesterfield and the two others, Reynolds and Gounod, were political sympathizers of Prewitt’s, if a little quieter than he on the subject, and Laurence gradually realized they were not incidentally supporters of his act, but were divided from the rest of the company precisely by quarreling over it.

“Murder, murder most foul, there is no other word,” Reynolds declared, covering Laurence’s hand with his own, pinning it to the table by the wrist, and looking at him with the focused, too-earnest expression of the profoundly drunk. Laurence did not know what to say; he had agreed, and had laid down his life to prevent it, but he did not care to be congratulated for it, by a stranger.

“Treason is another word, if you like,” another officer said, at the nearest populated table, making no pretenses about eavesdropping; a bottle of whiskey half-empty stood before him, and he was drinking alone.

“Hear, hear,” another man said.

There were entirely too many bottles in the room, and too many angry and disappointed men. It was an invitation for a scene. Laurence disengaged his hand. He would heartily have liked to excuse himself and shift tables, but Frette had abandoned him to Prewitt and his willing company, and Laurence could not imagine imposing himself on anyone else in the room. “I beg you gentlemen not to speak of it,” he said quietly, to the table: to no avail. Reynolds was already arguing with the whiskey-drinker, and their voices were penetrating.

Laurence set his jaw, and tried not to hear. “And I say,” the whiskey-drinker was saying, “that he is a traitor who ought to be drug outside, strung up, and drawn and quartered after, and you with him, if you say otherwise—”

“Medieval sentiment—” They were both standing now, Reynolds shaking off Gounod’s half-hearted restraining hand to get up. Their voices had risen enough to drown all nearby conversation.

Laurence rose, and catching Reynolds by the shoulder firmly, pressed him back towards his chair. “Sir, you do me no kindness by this; leave off,” he said, low and sharply.

“That’s right, let him teach you how to be a coward,” the other man said.

Laurence stiffened. He could not resent insults which he had earned, he had sacrificed the right to defend himself against traitor—but coward was a slap he could not gladly swallow. Yet even if dueling were not forbidden aviators, he could not make challenge. He had caused enough harm; he could not—would not—do more. He closed his mouth on the bitterness in the back of his throat, and did not turn to look the man in the face, though he stood now so offensively close his liquored breath came hot and strongly over Laurence’s shoulder.

“Call him a coward, when you would’ve sat and done nothing,” Reynolds flung back, resisting the push. He shook off Laurence’s hand, or tried. “I suppose your dragon would think a lot of your being happy to see ten thousand of them put down, poisoned or good as, like dogs—”

“At least one of ’em ought to be poisoned,” the other man said, and Laurence let go of Reynolds and turned and knocked him down.

The man was drunk and unsteady, and going down pulled the table and the bottle over with him, cheap liquor bubbling out over the dirt as it rolled away. For a moment no-one spoke, and then chairs went back across the tent, eagerly, as if nothing more had been wanted than a pretext.

The quarrel at once devolved into a confused melee, with nothing so organized as sides; Laurence saw two men from the same table wrestling in a corner. But a few men singled him out, one a captain he knew by face from Dover, if not immediately by name; he had streaks of black dragon blood fresh on his clothing. Geoffrey Windle, Laurence remembered incongruously, as they grappled, and then Windle struck him full on the jaw.

The impact rocked him back on his heels: his teeth snapped together, jarring all up to his skull with the startling pain of a bitten cheek. Gripping a tent-pole for purchase, Laurence managed to seize a chair and pull it around between them as Windle lunged at him again; the man tripped over it and went into the pole with his full weight: considerable, as he had some three stone over Laurence. The canvas roof above sagged precipitously.

Two more men came at Laurence, faces ugly with anger, and caught him by the arms together to rush him against the nearest table: drunk enough to be belligerent, not enough to be clumsy. He still had on his buckled shoes and his laddered stockings, and neither good purchase on the ground, nor the weight of his boots to kick out with. They pinned him down, and one had out a knife, a dull eating-knife, still slick with grease from his dinner. Laurence set his heel down against the surface of the table and heaved, managing to get his shoulders loose a moment, twisting away from the short furious stabbing of the blade, so it only tore into his ragged coat.

The tent-pole creaked and gave, and the canvas came pouring down upon them in a sudden catastrophic rush. His arms were free, only to be imprisoned worse in the smothering folds, so heavy he had an effort to lift it clear enough from his face to breathe. He rolled off the table, and then there were hands gripping his arm again, pulling at him. Laurence struck out blindly at the new attacker, and they went falling together, rolling along the dirt floor, until the other man managed to drag the edge of the canvas off their heads and get them into the open air; and it was Granby.

“Oh, Lord,” Granby said: Laurence turned and saw half the tent crumpled in on a heaving mass beneath. Those sober enough to have avoided the fighting were carrying out the lanterns from the other side, and others dousing the collapsed canvas with water; some smoke trickled out from beneath.

“You’ll do a damned sight more good to come out of the way; here,” Granby said, when Laurence would have gone to help, and drew him along one of the camp paths, narrow and stumbling-dark, towards the dragon-clearings.

They walked in silence over the uneven ground. Laurence tried to slow his short, clenched breathing, without success. He felt inexpressibly naïve. He had not even thought to fear such a possibility, until he heard it in the mouth of a drunkard. But when they did hang him—knowing it would lose them Temeraire’s use—what might not those same men do, who had meant to infect all the world’s dragons with consumption and condemn them to an agonized death. Of course they would gladly see Temeraire dead, rather than of use to anyone they were disposed to see as an enemy—France or China or any other nation. They would not scruple at any sort of treachery necessary to achieve his destruction; to them Temeraire was only an inconvenient animal.

“I suppose,” Granby said, abruptly, out of the dark, “that he insisted on it: your carrying the stuff to France, I mean.”

“He did,” Laurence said, after a moment, but he did not mean to hide behind Temeraire’s wings. “I am ashamed to say, he was forced to, at first; I am ashamed of it. I would not have you believe I was taken against my will.”

“No,” Granby said, “no, I only meant, you shouldn’t have thought of it at all, on your own.”

The observation felt true, and uncomfortably so, though Laurence supposed Granby had meant it as consolation. A sudden sharp stab of feeling caught his breath: loneliness and something more, an inarticulate next cousin to homesickness. He wanted very badly to see Temeraire. Laurence had slept his last night beneath the sheltering wing nearly three months ago, in the northern mountains, treason already committed and a few hours snatched before they made the fatal flight across the Channel. Since then there had been only a succession of prisons, more or less brutal, for them both: and what had these months been for Temeraire, alone and friendless and unhappy, in the breeding grounds full of feral beasts and veterans, with likely no order or discipline to keep them from fighting.

They fell into silence again, passing the clearings one by one, the millhouse rumble of sleeping dragons to either side, their own dinners finished and their crews toiling on the harnesses with only a few lanterns, the faint clanking of the smiths’ hammers tapping away and the acrid smoky stink of harness oil. They had a long walk out in the dark, after the last clearing, climbing a steep slope upwards to the crown of a hill, prominently placed overlooking all the camp, where Iskierka lay sleeping in a thick spiny coil, steam issuing with every breath, and the feral dragons scattered around her.

She cracked an eye open as they came in and inquired drowsily, “Is it a battle yet?”

“No, love, back to sleep,” Granby said, and she sighed and shut her eye; but she had drawn the notice of the men: they looked up, and then they looked from Laurence to Granby, and then they looked back down again, saying nothing.

“Perhaps I had best not stay,” Laurence said. He knew some of the faces: men from his own crew, some of his former officers; he was glad they had found places here.

“Stuff,” Granby said. “I am not so damned craven, and anyway,” he added, more despondently, when he had led Laurence into his own tent, pitched in the comfortable current of heat which Iskierka gave steadily off, “I cannot be much farther in the soup than I am already, after yesterday. She’s spoilt, there is no other word for it. Wouldn’t keep in formation, wouldn’t obey signals—took the ferals with her—” He shrugged, and taking up his own private bottle from the floor poured them each a glass, which he drank with an unaccustomed enthusiasm.

“It’s not so bad, on patrol,” Granby said, wiping his mouth after. “She doesn’t need any coaxing to look out the enemy, and she’ll take directions to make it easier; I hardly notice anymore. But in a fleet action—I don’t mean she was useless,” he added, with a defensive note. “Did for a first-rate and three frigates, all herself and those fellows, and chased a dozen French beasts. But she hasn’t a shred of discipline. Pretended not to hear me, left the right wing of the Corps wide open, and two beasts badly hurt for it. I ought to be broken for it, if they could afford to give her up.”

He was pacing the small confines of the tent, still holding the empty glass, and talking swiftly, almost nervously; more to be saying something, filling the air between them, than the particular words. “This is the sort of thing that rots the Corps,” he said. “I never thought I would be—a bad officer, someone who ruins his dragon, some other kind of fool, kept on because his beast won’t serve otherwise—the Army, the Navy, they sneer at us for that, as much for anything else, and there at least they are right to sneer. So our admirals have to dance to the Navy’s tune, and meanwhile the youngsters see it, too, and you can’t ask them to be better, when they see a fellow let off anything, anything at all—”

He pulled himself up abruptly, realizing too late that his words were applicable to more of his audience than himself, and looked at Laurence miserably.

“You are not wrong,” Laurence said. He had assumed as much himself, after all, in his Navy days: had thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, disregarding law and authority as far as they dared, barely kept in check—to be used for their control over the beasts, and not respected.

“But if we have more liberty than we ought,” Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, “it is because they have not enough: the dragons. They have no stake in victory but our happiness; their daily bread any nation would give them just to have peace and quiet. We are given license so long as we do what we ought not: so long as we use their affections to keep them obedient and quiet, to ends which serve them not at all—or which harm.”

“How else do you make them care?” Granby said. “If we left off, the French would only run right over us, and take our eggs themselves.”

“They care in China,” Laurence said, “and in Africa, and care all the more, that their rational sense is not imposed on, and their hearts put into opposition with their minds. If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault and not theirs.”

Laurence slept the night in Granby’s tent, atop a blanket; he would not take Granby’s cot. It was odd to sleep hot and wake in a midsummer sweat, then step out and see the camp below dusted overnight with snow, soiled grey tents for the moment clean white, and the ground already churning into muddy slush.

“You are back,” Iskierka said, looking at Laurence: she was wide awake, picking over the charred remnants of her breakfast, and watching the sluggish camp with a disgruntled eye. “Where is Temeraire? He has let you get into a wretched state,” she added, with rather a smug air. Laurence could not argue: he was a pitiful sight indeed, in raggedy coat and his shoes beginning to open at the seams; and the less said of his stockings, the better. “Granby,” she said, looking over his shoulder, “you may lend Laurence your fourth-best coat, and then you may tell Temeraire,” she added to Laurence, “that I am very sorry he cannot give you nicer things.”

However, Granby was wearing his fourth-best coat, as the other three were so adorned with gold braid and jewels, the fruits of Iskierka’s determined prize-hunting, as to be wholly unsuitable for actual fighting. It would not in any case have been a very successful loan, as Laurence had some four inches in the shoulders which Granby had instead in height; but Granby sent word out, and shortly a young runner came back, carrying a folded coat, and a spare pair of boots.

“Why, Sipho,” Laurence said. “I am glad to find you well; and your brother, I hope?” He had worried what might have become of the two boys, brought from Africa, who had so helped them there; he had made them his own runners briefly by way of providing for them, but he had too shortly thereafter put himself in no position to be of assistance to anyone.

“Yes, sir,” Sipho said in English as perfect as Laurence had ever heard in his life, though less than a year before the child had never heard a word of it. “He is with Arkady, and Captain Berkley says, you are welcome to these, and to come and say hello to Maximus would you, if you are not too damned stiff-necked; he said to say just that,” he added earnestly.

“You aren’t the only one who owes them,” Berkley said, in his blunt way, when Laurence had come and thanked him for assuming the responsibility. “You needn’t worry about them being cast off anyway: we need them. They can jaw with those damned ferals, better than any man jack of us; that older boy talks their jabber quicker than he does English. You can worry about their getting knocked on the head instead. I had a fight on my hands to make the Admiralty let me keep this one grounded for now: they would have put him up as an ensign, if you like; not nine years of age. Demane they would have no matter what I said, but that is just as well. Fights,” he added succinctly, “so he may as well do it against the Frogs, where it don’t get him in hot water.”

Maximus was much recovered, from the last Laurence had seen him: three months of steady feeding on shore had brought him nearly up to his former fighting weight, and he put his head down and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Tell Temeraire that Lily and I have not forgotten our promise, and we are ready to fight with him whenever he should ask; we will not let them hang you, at all.”

Laurence stared up at the immense Regal Copper. All his crew looked deeply distressed, as well they might, the outlaw remark being perfectly audible several clearings over. Berkley only snorted. “There has been plenty of talk like that, and louder,” he said. “I expect that is why you have been kept stuffed between decks in a ship instead of a decent prison on land. No, don’t beg my pardon. It was sure as sixpence you and that mad beast of yours would make a spectacle of yourselves soon or late. Bring him back, do for a dozen Frogs, and save us all the bother of the execution.”

With this sanguine if unlikely recommendation, Laurence reported to the courier-clearing with his orders, looking a little less shabby: Berkley was a thickset man, but if the borrowed coat was too large at least it could be got on, and with a little padding of straw at the toes, the boots were entirely serviceable. His repaired appearance got him no better treatment, however. There were a dozen beasts waiting for messages and orders, but when Laurence had presented himself, the courier-master said, “If you will be so good as to wait,” and left him outside the clearing. Laurence was near enough to see the master talking with his officers; none of the courier-captains looked very inclined to take him up. He was left standing an hour, while four messages came in and were sent out, before another Winchester landed bringing fresh orders from the Admiralty, and at last the courier-master came and said, “Very well; we have a man to take you.”

“Morning, sir,” the captain said, touching his hat, as Laurence came over: Hollin, his former ground-crew master. “Elsie, will you give the captain a leg up? There is a strap there, sir, handy for you.”

“Thank you, Hollin,” Laurence said, grateful for the steady matter-of-factness, and climbed up to her back. “We are for Pen Y Fan.”

“Right you are, sir, we know the way,” Hollin said. “Do you need a bite to sup, Elsie, before we go?”

“No,” she said, raising her head dripping from the water-trough. “They always have lovely cows there, I will wait.”

They did not speak very much during the flight. Winchesters were so small and quick one felt always on the point of flying off on one’s own, the force of the wind steadily testing the limits of the carabiner straps, and Laurence’s hands, already blistered, grew bruised where he held on to the leather harness. They raced past blurring fields of brown stalks and snow, the thin cold air chapping at their faces and leaking down into the neck of Laurence’s coat, through the threadbare shirt and piercing to the skin. He did not mind in the least, except to wish they might go quicker still; he resented now every mile remaining.

Goodrich Castle swelled up before them, on its hill, and Hollin put out the signal-flags as they flashed by: courier, with orders, and the fort’s signal-gun fired in acknowledgment, already falling behind them.

The mountains were growing nearer, and nearer, and as the sun began to set Elsie came over the final sharp ridge and over the broad packed-earth feeding grounds, stained dark with much blood, and the cliffs full of dragon-holes. She landed. The cattle pen was empty, its wide door standing open. There were no lights and no sound. There was not a dragon anywhere to be seen.

Chapter 4

OVERNIGHT, ICICLES HAD grown upon the overhang of the cave, a row of glittering teeth, and now as the sun struck they steadily dripped themselves away upon the stone, an uneven pattering without rhythm or sense. Temeraire opened his eyes, once in a while, dully to watch them shrink back away towards the edge; then he closed his eyes and put his head down. No one had further proposed his removal, or disturbed him.

A scrabbling of claws made him look up; a small dragon had landed on the ledge, and Lloyd was sliding down from its back—“Come now then,” Lloyd said, tramping in, his boots ringing and smearing field-muck on the clean stone. “Come now, old boy, why such a fuss, today? We have a lovely visitor waiting—a nice fat bullock will set you up—”

Temeraire had never very much wanted to kill anyone, except of course anyone who tried to hurt Laurence; he liked to fight well enough, as it was exciting, but he had never thought that he would like to kill anyone just for himself. Only, in this moment it seemed to him he would much rather anything than have Lloyd before him, speaking so, when Laurence was dead.

“Be silent,” he said, and when Lloyd continued, without a pause, “—the very best put aside for you special, tonight—” Temeraire stretched out his neck and put his head directly before Lloyd and said, low, “My captain is dead.”

That at least meant something to Lloyd: he went white and stopped talking; he held himself very still. Temeraire watched him closely. It was almost disappointing. If only Lloyd would say something else dreadful, or do something foul as he always did; if only—but Laurence would not like it—Laurence would not have liked it—Temeraire drew in a long hissing breath, and drew his head back, curling in upon himself again, and Lloyd sagged in relief.

“Why, there’s been some mistake,” he said, after a moment, his voice only a few shades less hearty. “I’ve heard nothing, old boy, word would’ve been sent me—”

It made Temeraire angry all over again but differently; that sharp strange feeling was dulled, and now he felt quite tired, and wished only for Lloyd to be gone away.

“I dare say you would tell me he were alive, if he had been hanged at Tyburn,” he said, bitterly, “only as long as it made me eat, and mate, and listen to you; well, I will not. I have borne it, I would have borne anything, only to keep Laurence alive; I will bear it no longer. I will eat when I like, and not otherwise, and I will not mate with anyone unless I choose.” He looked at the little dragon who had brought Lloyd up and said, “Now take him away, if you please; and tell the others I do not want him brought again without asking first.”

The little dragon bobbed his head nervously, and picked up the startled and protesting Lloyd to carry him down again. Temeraire closed his eyes and coiled himself again, with the drip-drip-drip of the icicles his only company.

A few hours later, Perscitia and Moncey landed on the cave ledge with a studied air of insouciance, carrying two fresh-killed cows. They brought them inside, in front of him. “I am not hungry,” Temeraire said sharply.

“Oh, we only told Lloyd they was for you so he would let us have extra,” Moncey said cheerfully. “You don’t mind if we eat them here?” and he tore into the first one. Temeraire’s tail twitched, entirely without volition, at the hot juicy smell of the blood, and when Perscitia nudged the second cow over, he took it in his jaws without really meaning to. Then somehow in a few swallows it was gone, and what they had left of the first also.

He went down for another, and even a fourth; he did not have to think or feel anything while he ate. A small flock of the littler dragons clustered together on the edge of the feeding grounds, watching him anxiously, and when he looked for another cow, a couple of them rose up to herd one towards him. But none of them spoke to him. When he had finished, he flew for a long distance along the river and settled down to drink only where he might be quite alone again. He felt sore in all his joints, as if he had flown very hard for a long time, in sleeting weather.

He washed, as well as he could manage alone, and went back to his cave to think. Perscitia came up to see him, with an interesting mathematical problem, but he looked at it and then said, “No. Help me find Moncey; I want to know what has been happening with the war.”

“Why, I don’t know,” Moncey said, surprised, when they had tracked him down, lazing in a meadow on the mountainside with some of the other Winchesters and small ferals: they were playing a bit of a game, where they tossed tree-branches upon the ground and tried to pick up as many as they could without dropping any. “It’s nothing to do with us, you know, not here. The Frenchy dragons and their captains are all kept over in Scotland, farther up. There won’t be any fighting round here.”

“It is to do with us, too,” Temeraire said. “This is our territory, all of ours; and the French are trying to take it away. That is as much to do with us as if they were trying to take your cave, and more, because they will take everything else along with your cave.”

The little dragons put down their sticks and came nearer to listen, with some interest. “But what do you want to do?” Moncey said.

The official couriers were crossing the countryside in every direction, at all speed, and the afternoon was not yet gone before Moncey and the other Winchesters were able to return, full of all the news which Temeraire could wish. If the numbers reported were perhaps a little inconsistent, that did not matter very much; Napoleon certainly had landed a great many men, all near London, and there had not been any great battle yet to throw him off.

“He is all over the coast, and then the fellows say there is this Marshal Davout fellow poking about in Kent, south of London, and another one, Lefèbvre, who is already somewhere along this way,” Moncey said, pointing out the countryside west of the city, and nearest Wales.

“Oh, I know that one, he was at the siege of Danzig,” Temeraire said. “I do not think he was so very clever, he did not make a big push to have us out, not until Lien came and took charge of everything. Where is our army?”

“All fallen back about London,” Minnow said. “Everyone says there is going to be a big battle there, in a couple of weeks perhaps.”

“Then there is not a moment to lose,” Temeraire said.

They passed the word for another council-meeting, and everyone came promptly: the other big dragons considerably more respectful now, if Ballista still was patronizing as she said, “You are upset, of course, and no wonder; but I am sure if you tell them you would like another captain—”

“No,” Temeraire said, the resonance making his whole body tremble, and looked away, while everyone fell quiet. After a moment he was able to continue. “I am not going to take another captain,” he said, “a stranger; I do not need a handler as if I were one of Lloyd’s cows. I can fight on my own, and so can any of you.”

“But what is there to fight for?” Requiescat said. “Even if the French win, they ain’t going to give us any bother, it will only be someone else taking eggs, just as careful.”

There was a murmur of agreement, and Moncey added, a little plaintively, “And I thought you were on about how unfair the Admiralty are, and not letting us have any liberty.”

“I do not mean to say anything for the Government at all,” Temeraire said. “But this country is our territory as much as it is any man’s; it belongs to us all together, and if we only sit here eating cows while Napoleon is trying to take it away, we have no right to complain of anything.”

“Well, what’s there to complain of, then?” Requiescat said. “We have everything as we like it.”

“So you would quarrel over one wet unpleasant cave instead of another, but you would not like to sleep in a pavilion, which is never wet or cold, even in winter?” Temeraire said, scornfully. “You only think you have things as you like, because you have never seen anything better, and that is because you have spent all your lives penned up here or in coverts.”

When he had described pavilions for them a little more, and the dragon-city in Africa, and added, “And in Yutien, there were dragons who were merchants, and all of them had heaps of jewels: only tin and glass, Laurence said, but they were very pretty anyway, and in Africa they had gold enough to put it on all their crews,” there were not many dragons who did not sigh at least a little, and those who had some little bit of treasure on them looked at it, and many of the rest looked at them, wistfully.

“It all sounds a lot of gimcrackery to me,” Requiescat said.

“Then you may stay here and have my cave, which is not a quarter as nice as a pavilion,” Temeraire said coolly, “and when we have beaten Napoleon and taken prizes, you shan’t have a share; Moncey will have more gold than you.”

“Prizes!” Gentius said, rousing unexpectedly. “I helped in taking a prize once. My captain had a fourteenth share. That is how she bought the picture.”

Everyone knew Gentius’s painting, and a really impressed murmur went around: this was better than hypothetical jewels in another country which none of them had seen.

“Now, now; settle down,” Ballista said, thumping her tail, but with a considerably more lenient air. “Look here, I suppose no-one much wants the French to beat, anyway; we have all had a go with them before, if we were ever in service. But the men don’t want us unless we take harness and captains, and we cannot just go wandering into battles: we will get circled round and shot up. That is no joke, even for us big ones.”

“If we fight thoughtlessly, just one alone at a time, we will,” Temeraire said, “but there is no reason we must, and we cannot be boarded if we have no harness, or—or anyone to capture. We will be our own army, and we will work out tactics for ourselves, not stuff men have invented without bothering to ask us even though they cannot fly themselves: it stands to reason we can do better than that, if we try.”

“Hm, well,” Ballista said; this was a convincing argument, and the general murmur of agreement found it so.

“All right, all right,” Requiescat said. “Very nice story-telling, but it is all a hum. Treasure and battles are well and good, but what d’you mean to do for dinner?”

They landed all together on the grounds the next morning at the feeding time, the cows bellowing invitingly in their pen, and the delicious grassy scent made Temeraire’s tongue want to lick out at the air. But the other dragons all kept the line with him: no one even put their nose out towards the running cattle. The herdsmen prodded the cows forward, with no results, and looked at one another and back at Lloyd, in confusion.

Lloyd began going up and down the line looking up at them all in bafflement, saying to one after another in turn, “Go on, then, eat something,” entreatingly. Temeraire waited until Lloyd came up to him and then bent his head down and said, “Lloyd, where do the cows come from?”

Lloyd stared at him. “Go on, eat something, old boy,” he repeated, feebly, so it came out as a question more than a command.

“Stop that; my name is Temeraire, or you may say sir,” Temeraire said, “since that is how to speak to someone politely.”

“Oh, ah,” Lloyd said, not very sensibly.

“You have heard that the French have invaded?” Temeraire inquired.

“Oh!” Lloyd said, in tones of relief. “None of you need worry anything about that. Why, they shan’t come anywhere near, or interfere with the cows. You shall all be fed, the cows will come here every day, there’s no call to save them, old boy—”

Temeraire raised his head and gave a small roar, only to quiet him; a bit of snow came tumbling down the slope on the other side of the feeding grounds, but it was not very much, a foot perhaps, scarcely deep enough to dust his talons. “You will say sir,” he told Lloyd, lowering his head to fix Lloyd securely with one eye.

“Sir,” Lloyd said, faintly.

Satisfied, Temeraire sat back on his haunches and explained. “We are not staying here,” he said, “so you see, it is no help to say the cows will be here. We are going to fight Napoleon, all of us; and we need to take the cows with us.”

Lloyd did not seem at first to understand him; it required the better part of an hour to work it into his head that they were all leaving the grounds together and did not mean to come back, and then he began to be desperate, and to beg and plead with them in a very shocking way which made Temeraire feel wretchedly embarrassed: Lloyd was so very small, and it felt bullying to say no to him.

“That is quite enough,” Temeraire said at last, forcing himself to firmness. “Lloyd, we are not going to hurt you or take away your food or your property, so you have no right to go on at us in this way, only because we do not like to stay.”

“How you talk; I’ll be dismissed my post for sure, and that’s the least of it,” Lloyd said, almost in tears. “It’s as much as my life is worth, if I let you all go out wandering wild, pillaging farmers’ livestock every which way—”

“But we are not going pillaging, at all,” Temeraire said. “That is why I am asking you where the cows come from. If the Government would feed them to us here, they are ours, and there is no reason we cannot take them and eat them somewhere else.”

“But they come from all over,” Lloyd said, and gesturing to his herdsmen added, “The drovers bring a string every week, from another farm. It is as much as all of Wales can do, to feed you lot; there’s not one place.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, and scratched his head; he had envisioned some very large pen, somewhere over the mountains perhaps, full of cows waiting to be taken out and carried along. “Well,” he decided, “then you all will have to help: you will go to the farms and fetch the cows and bring them along to us, and that way,” he added, with a burst of fresh inspiration, “no-one can complain to you, or sack you, because you will not have let us go off at all.”

This solution did not immediately promote itself to the herdsmen, who began to protest: some of them had families, and none of them liked to go to war. “No, that is all stuff,” Temeraire said. “It is your duty to fight the French as much as it is ours; more, because it is your Government, and it would press you if you were needed; I have been to sea with many pressed men. I know it is not very nice,” he added, although he did not entirely see why they did not like to go; anywhere was certainly better than this loathsome place, and they would be doing something, and not only sitting about, “but if Napoleon wins, that will also not be very nice, and anyway, I dare say the Government will stop your wages if they learn you are sitting here with no dragons about. And if you come, we will give you a share of the prizes we take.”

Prizes proved a magical word with men as well as dragons, as did the general conviction arrived at among the men through a deal of quiet muttering, that if they did not go, they should certainly be blamed, but no-one could complain they had not done their duty, if they followed the beasts when they ran off. Or at least, it would be more difficult to find them to complain.

“We might be ready soon as next week,” Lloyd said, one last gasping attempt. “If you’d all just have a bite to eat, and a bit of sleep—”

“We are leaving now,” Temeraire said, and rising up on his haunches called out, “Advance guard, aloft; and you may take your breakfast, too.”

Moncey and the small dragons all gleefully leapt onto the herd, first for once, and went up still eating as they flew; it was perhaps a little messy, but much quicker to eat as one went. Minnow swallowed the head of her cow, and waved a wing-tip. “We will see you at the rendezvous,” she called down. “Come on, then, pips, off we go,” she said to the other courier-weights and they all went storming away rapidly northward and east, along the planned route.

“Now can we eat?” Requiescat said, watching after them plaintively.

“Yes, you may all eat, but have half now, and take the rest to eat along the way, because otherwise you will fly slow, and be hungry again anyway at the end of it,” Temeraire said. “Lloyd, we are going to Abergavenny, or outside it, anyway; do you know where that is?”

“But we can’t drive the herd all that way by tomorrow,” Lloyd said.

“Then you will have to bring them as close as you can, and we will manage somehow,” Temeraire said; he was done listening to difficulties. “I have seen Napoleon’s army fight, and in a week they will be in London, so we must be, also.”

“We are a hundred fifty miles from London,” Lloyd protested.

“All the more reason to travel fast,” Temeraire said, and flung himself into the air.

Chapter 5

LAURENCE STOOD BEWILDERED in the empty grounds, and called Temeraire’s name a few times. There was no answer but the mumbled echoes that the cliffs gave back, and the momentary attention of a small red squirrel which paused to look at him, before continuing on its way. Elsie landed again, behind him. “Not a wing in the sky, sir,” Hollin said, “But we found—”

Elsie carried them up to a cave, reaching deep into the mountain face. Though the light was failing rapidly, Laurence could trace with his fingers the letters of Temeraire’s name, carved deeply into the rock: so at least he had been here, and well enough to leave this mark. They managed to fashion a torch to inspect it, but the cave was too tidy, inside, to guess when his habitation had ended: no bones or other remnants of food.

It was only two days since the landing, but with as many dragons as lived in the breeding grounds, if the herdsmen had all abandoned their posts, and the regular delivery of cattle had been interrupted, the provisions would quickly have been spent. The dragons must have scattered from hunger, and likely in all the directions of the rose.

“Well, let us not borrow trouble,” Hollin said, consoling. “He is a clever fellow, and it cannot have been so long since they left. There are some fresh bones down by the pen, from this morning by the look of them.”

Laurence shook his head. “I hope he would not have been so foolish, as to stay to the last,” he answered, low. “So many dragons will undoubtedly be eating up all the local supply, as they go, and he must have more food than a smaller beast.”

“I am a smaller beast,” Elsie said, a little anxiously, “but I must have something to eat, too, and there is nothing here.”

They went to Llechrhyd, the nearest settlement they found, and bought her a sheep from a small cottager, who told them the village by some lucky chance had not been raided. “Flew off east, all of them, at once this morning,” the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly made her dinner out behind the stable, “like a plague of crows: it was dark half-an-hour, all them passing over, and us sure they would fall on us in a moment; more than that I can’t say.”

“Hollin,” Laurence said, when he had turned away, disheartened, “I cannot tell you what your duty is; we have no very good intelligence, I am afraid, and if he is flying to feed himself, we cannot well imagine where he may have gone.”

“Well, sir,” Hollin said, “they said to bring you back with him, and I suppose those are my orders until I hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or good as. It’s not as though he’s so easy to miss.”

But this was not reckoning with the confusion of dozens of beasts all flung out upon the countryside at once. Certainly dragons, in the plural, had been seen everywhere—dreadful marauding beasts, and no one knew what things were coming to when they were just allowed to go flying around loose. But as to one particular dragon, black with a ruff, no-one had anything to say.

One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak-tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence entertained hopes. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an X clumsily carved through the bark, with four scratches below. “Red and yellow, like fire,” the oldest boy said, peering at them from over the window-sill of the house, despite his mother’s restraining hand, and sank them completely.

Ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake on the grounds of a stately house in Monmouthshire, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and eaten some of the deer: ten neat X’s were marked in the dirt by the lakeshore. “I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it was all I had to do to keep breathing, with half my maids fainted dead away,” she said. “And then one of the creatures came to the door, and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones,” she added. “We threw outside all the ones from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away.”

Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate. But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire’s influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, which they had witnessed, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.

The following day, they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly was not unhappy: the dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning some men had come through with a string of cattle, and given him replacements, which he pointed out in their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer’s own herd.

Seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps one of them had been black—yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen—no, two dozen—no, a hundred—numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave it no credit at all, but a few miles farther along, Elsie landed them in a torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary-pit on the low side away from the water, filled in but still fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. “We must be getting right close, then,” Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours together. They had one and all vanished into the air.

“WE WILL BE GETTING CLOSE to the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is dark,” Temeraire said, “and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss.”

The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed Gong Su very much. It was not that cooked food was so much pleasanter, he did not care about the taste at all at present. But Gong Su could stretch a single cow amongst five hungry dragons, if only there were rice, or something else like to cook it with.

The farther they got from Wales, the more complicated everything became. Lloyd said that it was expensive to bring the cows so far, because they must be fed along the road, and they could not be brought very quickly, because they would sicken and stop being fat and good to eat. It helped a great deal that Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows, in advance, and using the later ones to repay; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms, the French were sure to hear about it: Marshal Lefèbvre’s forces were busy snatching cows themselves.

“Maybe we oughtn’t be having the cows driven to us,” Moncey said. “We could always go fetch them for ourselves, and come back.”

“That is no good at all,” Perscitia said severely. “The longer we must fly to get to the supply, the more food we must eat only to reach there and come back, which is a waste, and also it means more time flying back and forth, instead of fighting.”

“Supply-lines,” Gentius said, dolefully, shaking his head. “War is all about supply-lines; my third captain told me.”

He had insisted on coming along, although he could not really see very well to fly anymore, and tired easily; but he was grown light enough that he could be carried along by any of the heavy-weights, and it was very satisfying to everyone to think they had a Longwing with them.

Aside from the difficulty about the food, Temeraire was pleased with their progress; he and Perscitia had devised several maneuvers, which even Ballista had allowed to be clever; and Moncey and the others had brought them a good deal of news about the French, although they could only sneak so close before it became too likely they should be caught; Temeraire was trying to think how they might better find a way to spy. They had worked out how to organize their camp so it did not take a great deal of room, by letting the smaller dragons sleep atop the big, which was warmer anyway, and after the first awkward day had learned to dig their necessary-pit far away from their water.

That had been very unpleasant, and five of the dragons had got quite sick, from being so thirsty they had drunk anyway, despite the smell. A few others had grown bored and gone off on their own, all of them ferals who had never served, but some of those had come back when they had not been able to find easy food on their own, which brought them straight back to the question of supply.

“We can go and fetch a great many cattle here, if they are drugged with laudanum,” Temeraire said, “but it seems to me, if the French are going about taking cows, we would do better to eat their food first, instead of our own, and let them have the bother of gathering it; and that way we may fight and eat together.”

It made a sensible strategy, they all agreed, and for Temeraire it was nearly more justification than cause: he wanted badly to fight. The urge to violence, not particular but general, hunger for some explosive action, was always stirring in him now, craving release, and Perscitia and Moncey often eyed him anxiously. Sometimes Temeraire would even rouse up, not from sleep but from some halfway condition, and find himself deserted: the others all flown away some distance, crouched down low and watching him.

“It isn’t healthy, how he pens it up,” Gentius said loudly after their meeting, not seeing Temeraire close enough to overhear. “You fellows don’t know what it is like, having a really fine captain and losing her: it is worse than having all your treasure stolen. That is why he goes so queer, now and again. A proper battle, that is what he needs, a bit of blood,” and Temeraire wanted it very much. He did not like the sensation of being a passenger, it seemed to him, in his own life, unable not to feel as he chose, and if a battle would repair it, he was almost tempted to go seek one out at once.

But he had brought everyone else along; he could not abandon them to their own devices now or drag them into a mindless squabble, even if he would have liked one. Instead he brooded on strategy, and when the urge grew more difficult to bear, he went away and curled himself tightly with his head against his flank, beneath the dark huddle of his wing, and murmured to himself from the Principia Mathematica, which Laurence had read to him so often he had it all by heart, and if he spoke low, and flattened his voice, he might almost imagine he heard Laurence instead, reading to him in the rain, safe and sheltered beside him.

But he need not have struggled so hard to keep it in: the very next morning, Minnow and Reedly came into camp flying so quick they had to skip-hop a few paces along the ground to stop, full of news: “Pigs,” Reedly said, panting, “so many of them, a whole pen back of their army, and some of ’em are big as ponies.”

“Pigs,” Gentius said thoughtfully, cracking an eye. “Pigs are good eating, all the way through.”

“Pigs are easy to keep,” Lloyd put in. “We drive ’em into the forest and they will feed themselves, and you go in and take one when you want, or round ’em up to drive them along.”

“And there are only a couple of old Chevaliers to guard them,” Minnow said. “They are big, but lazy, and they were fast asleep when we saw.”

“Very good,” Temeraire said, attempting to sound cool and serene, although his tail wanted to thump the ground in an undignified way. “Lloyd, you and your men will go with Moncey and the Winchesters. You will wait until we have attacked, and drawn everyone off, and then you will go and take the pigs and bring them along here.

“Now,” he said, turning, and swept a patch of dirt smooth with the tip of his tail. “Minnow, show me what the camp looks like—”

They set off a couple of hours before evening: Minnow and Reedly were very sure there was not a Fleur-de-Nuit with the company, and so they would attack at night, when everyone would be asleep and most surprised, and have the most difficulty in chasing after them when the pigs had been seized. The little dragons would come behind, that much was decided; and Temeraire after some thinking put one of their Chequered Nettles, Armatius, in front, carrying Gentius upon his back. Ballista and Majestatis went on either side of him, and Requiescat came behind them, and to either side of him a couple of Yellow Reapers carrying their flags.

These were not very elegant, only some velvet curtains tied up to saplings, but every real army had flags, and red was an auspicious color. Streaming out they made a fine show, especially carried by the Yellow Reapers to either side of Requiescat’s orange and red. Everyone brightened as they billowed out, and the Reapers were especially pleased, and held themselves proudly. Even Requiescat turned his head as they flew and said, “Well, those are something like, anyway,” to Temeraire, who only inclined his head, stiffly; he did not by then trust himself to speak.

They came near the camp with the sun already down behind them, and small cooking-fires lit, all over, among the tents. “Gentius,” Temeraire said, “when I roar, you will go in first—only show them your wings, and spit somewhere near the guns, and then fly back to Armatius and go back to camp. You cannot see well enough to be spitting once we have flown in, but they will not know that, and I dare say it will make them very alarmed.”

“Ha ha!” Gentius said. “Fighting again, at my age; I feel like a hatchling,” and he fluttered out his wings a little, making ready.

Temeraire broke away and flew ahead towards the camp, climbing as he did, and hovered directly above it; the moon had not yet risen, and he did not think they would notice him. It was very peculiar to be so close to the enemy but not fighting yet, to start a battle when he chose; and not wholly comfortable. It had always seemed so very plain to him, and quite natural, when one should dart in and begin; but that was when he only needed to think of himself. Now there were so many others to consider, and the enemy, too. Perhaps, it occurred to him suddenly, there were a great many other French dragons nearby, which they had not seen or heard of, who would appear out of nowhere and turn the tide. Then they should lose, and it would be his fault; he should have lost the day.

The prospect was alarming as no ordinary fighting would have been, and Temeraire almost thought perhaps he would go back, and ask the others what they thought. He looked back northwest: he could just make them out, a great mass of shadows darker than the trees and the fields below. They were coming on as slowly as they could, wingbeats lazy so they drifted low and then swooped back up, describing great arcs instead of flying straight, all of them waiting for his signal. If only he might have a little advice—

But he was quite alone. He trembled, but there was no use being cowardly; there was no-one to help him, and he must decide. Below, the two Chevaliers slept just one hill beyond the low rough earthwork barricade, where the sentries strolled along the line, casually. In the camp, fires were scattered about, and some horses—the wind drifted a little, bringing some eddy with it, and one of the horses raised its head and whickered, uneasily; another pawed at the ground and tossed its head.

“Ce n’est rien, ce n’est rien,” a man said, eating his supper near them.

Temeraire drew his lungs full, thought of Laurence, and roared out his challenge.

He kept roaring a long time. The Chevaliers jerked up in their clearing at once, their wings opening even before their eyes had, and began roaring furious answer, their heads twisting this way and that as they searched the sky for him. Men came racing from the tents about them; Temeraire saw a captain with flashes of gold on his shoulder, being put up. They sprang into the air half-crewed, men leaping for the harness from the ground as they rose.

“Je suis là!” Temeraire called out, propelling himself with great thrusts backwards away from the camp, and roared again. “Me voilà!” They wheeled mid-air and came barreling straight towards him, teeth bared, and he hovered and waited and then dropped himself straight out of the way, his wings folded closed and tight while they shot by, white flashes of rifle-fire sparking along their backs—and behind them, Gentius came soaring gracefully down over the camp on his wide-spread enormous wings, and spat acid over ten cannon in a row.

Bells of alarm were clanging madly now, torches lit, men rushing out to form into rows as the handful of horses screamed and struggled against their handlers. Temeraire could not help a wild surging sensation of excitement almost overpowering, as Requiescat and Ballista and Majestatis came thundering down through the camp, claws and tails dragging through tents and pickets and fires all alike, scattering them, and the red banners glowing in the fires that bloomed at once all over.

He dived down and joined their long straight row, stretching his ruff wide. They tore across the full length of the camp without a pause, and whipped back up aloft trailing canvas and rope and anything else they had snagged upon their claws. Once they had gone high enough again they could not be shot, they pulled it all off and let it drop down upon the camp.

Perscitia had suggested the notion, as they had no bombs, “especially if you can get some tents pulled up, and drop them on the pepper guns,” she had said, and it answered remarkably well—most of the tents bundled up as they dropped, but one luckily unfurled and floated down in a heap atop a company of infantry trying to aim the long-barreled pepper guns, the bayonets poking out of it and making them only worse entangled.

“Oh!” Temeraire said exultantly. “Oh, it is working! Perscitia, look—” but she was nowhere near to be seen, and he could not spend time finding her. The Chevaliers had wheeled about to come back, but they were holding off—the sizzling crisp of Gentius’s acid was sharp in the air for anyone to smell if only they put out their tongue, and though it was dark, the fires leaping up from the camp glowed red against Temeraire’s belly, and Majestatis and Requiescat and Ballista, enough to make it plain that there were four heavy-weights lined up opposite. Quickly Temeraire turned and roared out, “Chalcedony! Go around and at them!”

“What?” Chalcedony called back, circling himself in mid-air, to try and keep his place; he and the other Yellow Reapers and middle-weights were in a great mass waiting for their turn to have a go at the camp.

“The Chevaliers! All of you circle about and come at them, from behind, make them come towards us,” Temeraire called back, impatiently.

“Oh!” Chalcedony said, and the Reapers jumped at it, streamed out in a flock, and whipped around the Chevaliers.

“Second line!” Temeraire cried, and the Anglewings and Grey Coppers all darted down in a pair of short rows, and made another pass through the camp, crosswise to the one the heavy-weights had made—they were all middle-and light-weights, but so especially quick and skillful they were hard to hit even under the best of circumstances, and the soldiers had all been aiming their guns up at the heavy-weights in wholly the wrong direction, so the circumstances were not at all the best, for the French anyway.

But a great many of the Anglewings were vain of their flying, and instead of going straight through, Velocitas and Palliatia and a few of the others were stopping abruptly mid-flight, cornering neat as a box and darting back the way they had come a little, then reversing again, or doing complicated interweaving tricks of flying. It was all just showing away, and Temeraire frowned at it, because they were taking a great deal longer than they ought, and would get shot. And anyway, it was meant to be the heavy-weights’ turn to go again.

But he supposed that was selfish, and they would have some splendid fighting with the Chevaliers instead; but when he looked the Chevaliers were not coming towards them: they were too busy trying to defend themselves. The Reapers were darting at them in pairs, one from either flank, and as soon as the Chevalier turned to meet that attack, another pair would go at them from another direction. The Reapers were coming at them from below, so the men aboard the Chevaliers could not shoot them very easily. “Oh,” Temeraire said, disgruntled; it was being very neatly done, but that was not what he had wanted, at all.

At least the Grey Coppers were behaving in a more practical way—while the Anglewings made their fuss, the light-weights were snatching up anything that came handy, tent-poles or young trees that came away from the ground, and whacking away at the camp with them, knocking down people and tents and spreading the fires even more.

“There goes a gun,” Majestatis said laconically, pointing with his long talons: the French had managed to pull round one of their cannon the right way, despite the confusion, and a dozen men aiming pepper guns were standing with it.

“Come away!” Temeraire called down hurriedly. “Velocitas! Palliatia—oh, they are not listening!” and they paid for it: the cannon fired, canister shot; the pepper guns spat, and a general shriek went up from the Anglewings as the balls scattered over them. “Quick, Majestatis, we are fastest—”

“Hey, I ain’t going to just sit here,” Requiescat said, but Temeraire was already diving, roaring. “The gun for me,” Majestatis called, as they plummeted, and he managed to bang over the hot cannon as he shot past, his wickedly long claws slashing ruin among the artillery-men.

Temeraire went for the Anglewings, bulling them along and up again, and nudging a shoulder under Velocitas, who had gotten worst-hit, a pepper ball right in the face. His golden-yellow head was speckled black and red everywhere, and his eyes and nostrils were already swollen up so dreadfully he could not see, streams of mucus dripping away from his face; he was moaning wretchedly.

And then Requiescat came down behind them going too fast for his weight and bowled through everyone, crashing through the camp with his wings spread trying to slow himself, and knocking soldiers and dragons both every which way as he drove a massive furrow down the middle of the campground with his talons and his tail.

“Aloft!” Temeraire called furiously, squirming himself free of several tents and shaking off a couple of soldiers who had been thrown on his leg. “Everyone aloft, at once!” He punctuated the order with a roar, a proper one, which he aimed towards the caissons of ammunition stacked neatly by the guns. The pyramids of round-shot trembled and collapsed, balls rolling everywhere across the ground, crushing men’s legs, and the dragons all leapt aloft in the fresh confusion.

“Look, look,” cried Fricatio, one of the Grey Coppers, as he climbed up, “look, I caught a horse,” waving it in his talons.

“This is no time to be eating!” Temeraire said, but it reminded him of their real purpose, and he went up a little more to see: sure enough there were a great many shadows moving about near the pigs, and the gate of the pen was swinging wide open. “We have the pigs!” he cried, and everyone cheered noisily, and Temeraire added, “Now we can go!”

“Why?” Majestatis said.

“What?” Temeraire said.

“Why ought we go?” Majestatis said, and pointed down: all the soldiers were fleeing in a body eastward, routed, only stopping long enough to heave the wounded upon waggons, and drag them away. Aloft, the Chevaliers were turning tail and going, too, and the camp in all its flames was left deserted, to its conquerors.

“Well,” Temeraire said the next morning, peering down the slightly charred barrel, “it is very nice, but I am not sure what we can do with it.”

“Drop it on their heads, next battle,” Moncey suggested.

“Listen to you talk; we shan’t waste a real cannon like that,” Gentius said. “What we need is some men to fire it for us. A proper artillery company. And we need some proper surgeons, too,” he added, “for us and for ’em,” meaning the prisoners, most of them wounded who had been left behind on the field. There were not very many of these; by the time the dragons had managed to put out the fires, nearly all the casualties were dead.

Lloyd and the men had helped the survivors away, and put up a tent for them, but that left all the dead men lying about. The battle had been very satisfying, if not quite as long or as ordered as one might have wished, and Temeraire was not sorry to have killed the soldiers: it was just as well, since otherwise they would have had to fight them again, and after all they had invaded. But he was sorry they were dead, and it made one rather sad to look at them.

Most of the ferals did not see what the difficulty was, and a couple were for eating them. Temeraire flattened his ruff in horror, and everyone else hissed disapprovingly, so this suggestion was withdrawn. “Yes, that is enough of that kind of talk,” Gentius said. “But we can’t leave them lying about, either. That ain’t fitting; they were good enemies.”

So a couple of the Reapers had dug a grave, perhaps a little deep, some twenty foot, and the couriers had collected up the dead and put them inside, and after they had filled the hole in, Chalcedony had respectfully stuck one of the least-charred French flags upright into the mound, and they had all bowed their heads solemnly for a moment, and then they had eaten some pigs.

Now they were beginning the work of picking through the remains of the camp. Most things had been burnt up, but for metal pots, buckles, cannon-shot, and most excitingly a great solid lump of gold, a heap of sovereigns melted all together, which had been found in the charred remains of a chest. Reedly had nosed it out onto the ground in front of all of them, and many heads had craned forward to look at it in admiration; it shone brilliantly in the morning sun.

“Well, how is it to be shared out?” Requiescat said, eyeing it covetously.

“We must put it aside somewhere safe,” Temeraire said, “and when the war is over, we will take all the treasure we have gotten, like this, and have some splendid pavilions built all over, which we can all use whenever we like, which will be better than for us all to have only enough to buy a piece of a pavilion in only one place. And what is left over, we will use to get medals, for everyone, and everyone will have a medal to suit their size.”

All approving this arrangement, a few dragons were detailed off—after complicated negotiations, resulting in Reedly, Chalcedony and another Yellow Reaper, and an Anglewing, all going together, when Reedly could easily have carried it alone—to escort the gold chunk to a place of safety back in the breeding grounds. The rest of them had fallen back to searching the camp with even more enthusiasm than before: then they had uncovered the cannon.

Most of the guns had been ruined; those whose housings were not burnt or acid-eaten had been spiked by their crews before being abandoned. One, however, under the protective weight of a smothering tent, had escaped destruction. It was a little pitted, and its wheels were perhaps a bit singed along the edge, but it was a real great gun, a good twelve-pounder, and they had plenty of balls around for it. There was even a store of gunpowder left, as the waggon full of powder had been kept some distance away from the rest of the camp.

“But how are the men to know what is to be done, if they are not already soldiers?” Temeraire said. He had seen the guns fired many times, aboard ship, but he did not recall perfectly just how it was managed. “Perhaps Perscitia can work out—” he looked, and realized she was not poking through the camp with the others, but was sitting near the water-hole curled up in a lump.

“Are you hurt?” he inquired, having gone over to her.

“Of course I am not hurt,” she said, snappishly.

“Why are you sitting over here then, instead of coming to see; we have found some gold already, and maybe there is more.”

“Well, it is not as though I will have a share,” she said. “I did not do any fighting.”

“Everyone had a chance,” Temeraire said, injured; he did not feel he had been unfair. Naturally the heavy-weights ought to go first, if they could do the worst—

Perscitia looked away, and hunched her wings more snugly. “You may go away, if all you mean is to sneer, and be unpleasant. I am sure it is no business of anyone’s, if I did not care to fight.”

“I am not sneering, at all, and you may stop being so quarrelsome!” Temeraire said. “I did not notice that you did not fight.”

She fidgeted a little, and muttered by way of apology, “Others did,” glancing towards the other dragons.

“But why did you not, if you mind so much now?” Temeraire asked. “You might have, any time you liked.”

“I did not like,” she said, defiantly, “—so there, and you may call me a coward if you want; I am sure I do not care.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, and sat back on his haunches. He was not quite sure what to say. “I am very sorry?” he offered, uncertainly. He supposed it must be very unpleasant to be a coward. But he had always thought cowards were wretched creatures, who would do something unpleasant such as steal your things, even if they knew they could not win fighting for them, and that was not what Perscitia was like, at all. “And you are never shy of quarreling with anyone.”

“That is not the same,” she said. “One does not get shot for quarreling, or have a wing torn up, or a cannonball in the chest—I saw a dragon take a cannonball once, it was dreadful.”

“Of course,” Temeraire said, “but one must just be quick enough, and then you can dodge them.”

“That is nonsense,” she said. “A musket-ball can go much quicker than any dragon, so it is all decided by chance, before you ever think of evading, or even notice that someone is shooting at you. If you are very quick, of course, then you are gone before they can have fired very often,” she added, “so your chances are better, but they are best if you do not go anywhere in front of a gun at all.—And I am not very quick.”

Temeraire rubbed the side of a talon against his forehead, pondering. “In China,” he said, “only some kinds of dragons fight at all; a great many of them are scholars, and would not know what to do in a battle at all. No-one thinks any less of them, or calls them cowards; I suppose that is what you are.”

She lifted her head, and Temeraire added, “Anyway, we are all perfectly happy to fight, so there is no sense in your doing it, when you dislike it.”

“Well, I think just the same,” she said, brightening, “only I do not like anyone to say I did not do my part; but there is no part other than fighting.”

“We must work out how to use the gun,” Temeraire said. “That would be very useful, and perhaps you can think of something we might do with it, to help us fighting, and that is a fair share, as no-one else knows how to do it.”

This solution so suited her that by the end of the day, she had a dozen men working busily as a gun-crew. These had come to them along with another thirty, from the local militia, who had rather nervously come to the battlefield in the morning with their muskets, to see what had happened during the night. Reassured by the gaily flapping flags, they had come near enough to be pressed into service with cheerful ruthlessness by Lloyd and his fellows, tired of being hands for near sixty dragons as well as herdsmen.

The militiamen were abjured not to be such lumps when they cringed from Perscitia in fear, and lectured with great pomp by Lloyd on the need to stop Bonaparte, and then surrendered to her tender mercies. They spent the day working through the mechanics of the gun-firing, the swabbing, the wadding—steps Perscitia had pieced together by interrogating the men, on how their muskets were fired, and then every dragon who had ever been in service on board a ship or in a fleet action, and seen the great guns go.

It had been a little difficult: everyone remembered the sequence a little differently, and for a moment they were at a standstill, until she hit upon the notion of making a tally, of which order everyone recalled, and taking the most popular. By evening they successfully launched their first round-shot across the camp with a bang, to the great startlement of all the other dragons, napping full of pork and satisfaction.

“If we could only work out a way for it to slide properly, there is no reason you might not take it aloft,” she said wistfully that evening, coming to join the discussion with all her old sense of assurance restored. She would happily have kept working, but her men having grown sufficiently used to her, their remnants of fear had at last been outweighed by their fatigue, and they had rebelled and demanded a chance to sleep and eat. “At least, maybe Requiescat might, and it could be set off upon his back; but the recoil, that is the difficulty.”

“What to do next, that is the difficulty,” Temeraire said, and bent his head over the information which Moncey had brought and sketched out into maps, wondering how they might learn what the French would do next, and how soon he might bring them to another battle.

Chapter 6

SIR,” HOLLIN SAID, “I don’t like to make you think of it, but with him loose this long, gone this far off from the grounds, it stands to reason he isn’t flying wild—he has gone to look for you.”

“I know,” Laurence said.

If Temeraire had gone to Dover, he had flown straight into the arms of Napoleon’s invading army. And Laurence could not follow—Jane’s very justification for retrieving him from prison at all had been to keep him out of French hands. Already he was four days overdue in camp, or generously three, and their absence would reflect on her just when she most needed all forces of persuasion aligned in her favor to prepare for Napoleon’s inevitable march on London.

He knew what duty demanded: return, and report his failure, and wait until some word at last came in of Temeraire’s fate. To sit in gaol endlessly, with no notion of what had happened to Temeraire—Laurence did not know how he would bear it. But there was no other alternative. Already he had likely injured Hollin’s career, if so much prior association with him had not been tarnish enough; as he had injured Jane, and Ferris, and so many others—as if he had not already done enough harm.

“We might go another day,” Hollin suggested. “Work our way back towards the Army, sir, asking along the way, and maybe see what anyone has heard about the French. It stands to reason the generals will want to know that anyway, sir.”

Laurence knew he ought to refuse it. It was generosity offered from friendship, not Hollin’s real and considered judgment. “Thank you, Hollin; if you think it justified,” he said at last, the internal struggle lost, or at least some ground yielded. “But we shall go straight towards the camp,” he added, to win back a little of it, and tried to persuade himself perhaps Temeraire had heard, somehow, of the main body of the Army, and gone there. They might find him in Woolwich waiting—but no, that passed the limits of optimism. Temeraire was not waiting, anywhere, if he knew where Laurence was, and likely even if he had not the slightest idea. He had crossed half of Africa without the least notion and found Laurence in the middle of an unfamiliar continent; he would certainly not be discouraged by the need to search all of Britain if need be, even in the middle of a war; and as like as not get himself hurt thereby.

They flew much-interrupted, stopping at any farm with a herd of moderate size, and at any towns with a clearing large enough for a courier; but they got no news, or at least none they wanted. “Lost twenty of my sheep, but not to any dragons; to the French, damn they eyes,” one angry herdsman informed them.

“They are so close?” Laurence said, in dismay; they were yet west of London, much farther than he would have imagined the French had come even in small parties.

The man spat. “Came through here yesterday, pillaging buggers; begging your pardon sir, but it is enough to make a saint swear. Three of my best ewes going into their bellies, and a stud, all because of that lunkhead boy of mine didn’t get them into the hills in time. But there, who thought they would be here so soon?”

The mayor of Twickenham confirmed the French presence. “We have heard from Richmond they were dropped in,” he said, “dragon-back, and they have been all up and down this countryside thieving. Our lads are gone to fight them, north of here; there has been a militia mustered up round Richmond. There are some dragons with them there, sir; was a courier came here to fetch out our boys, as they had heard nothing yet of what to do. But of any loose dragons not a thing have I heard. We will be sure and keep our cattle under cover, though, you may be sure.”

He gave them dinner, very kindly, and waved away Hollin’s offer of payment, if he accepted it for the goat which went to feed Elsie. The mayor’s wife and oldest girl, a few years out of the schoolroom, ate with them, and Laurence was occasionally recalled to his manners enough to make some little conversation, but he was too burdened to be fit company. This fresh intelligence meant they must go back, at once; the generals must know the French had penetrated this far.

“There were some eagles, I hear,” the young woman ventured. “Georgie said, afore he went, the boys from Ham saw two of them.”

That was bad, very bad; two French regiments, and so far from the bulk of Napoleon’s army, that likely meant a Marshal somewhere in the area. The worst of the Marshals were competent alone; acting as the hands of their chief they were dangerous as vipers. There was nothing strategic to be won here, in the west of England, but a great deal of food; food which would keep those French dragons in the air. “Had they cavalry?” he asked abruptly, raising his head. “I beg your pardon,” he added, realizing belatedly he had interrupted a conversation which had moved on without him; Hollin and the young lady had been talking about the places which he saw on his route.

“Oh—I am sorry, sir, I don’t remember Georgie saying so,” she said, abashed at being addressed.

“But I think they do not, Captain,” the mayor said. “They came on foot here, anyway.”

If Napoleon had thrown all his lot onto air power—Laurence was not sure what it might mean. It disregarded all established wisdom about modern warfare, which held that a properly organized force of cavalry and infantry together, supported by pepper guns and artillery, could repel virtually any dragon attack. But no-one had ever heard of a dragon attack of more than fifty dragons before Napoleon’s first attempt at crossing the Channel in the year five; Laurence remembered their general astonishment at his managing to bring together a force of a hundred beasts.

He went outside after the meal, and waited politely and dully while Hollin took Miss—the name had already escaped Laurence—to see Elsie, by her nervous request; the dragon was interested to meet her, ladies not common company for dragons but for the female captains, who rarely dressed for their natural station; and Elsie was quite willing to be petted and offered a blancmange the young lady had made, which she politely licked up from the serving plate in a couple of swipes.

“Why, what a lovely plate,” she said after, with much more enthusiasm, and was visibly sorry to see it drawn back, as it had a gaily painted border in red and blue with a few small touches of silver. “I have never seen anything so pretty,” Elsie added, stretching her head to look at it again.

“Why, it is only an old—” the girl said, and then quickly swallowed the rest, and added, “which I have painted over; I am sure you may have it, if you like it so.”

“Oh,” Elsie said, and said urgently to Hollin, “Will you keep it for me? And perhaps it might be washed, and packed away safe?”

This took another half-an-hour to be done to her satisfaction, with much bobbing of heads and exchanges of compliments on both sides, a happy conversation which went past in a buzz of noise for Laurence, until at last he made an effort, and forced himself to say abruptly, “Hollin, we had better be going.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “But, shan’t you wait for him?” She pointed; and they looked to see another dragon in the sky, coming in their direction.

“A fine thing,” Miller said, “a fine thing. Expected four days ago in camp and I find you here, Captain Hollin, wandering around where you oughtn’t be, and taking a convicted felon into good society.”

Hollin flushed and said sharply, “If I have done wrong, Captain Miller, you may be sure I will explain myself to those as has the right to ask me to account for it. We have been looking for the dragon we was sent to fetch, seeing as how those fellows in the breeding ground have forgot their duty and gone, and the beasts all scattered.”

“What?” Miller said, forgetting to be pompous in his alarm. “All of them gone, out of the grounds? Where have they got to, what have they been eating—”

Miller’s courier beast, Devastatio, was markedly smaller than Elsie, who was big for a Winchester. Hollin had known better than most new young courier-captains how to see about the proper feeding of a dragon, and he had already been on friendly terms with most of the herdsmen around the bigger coverts, a further advantage. Devastatio had landed showily, nearly strutting the last few strides into the clearing, and having realized too late he was outweighed, was now trying his best to puff out his chest, and surreptitiously to climb upon a hillock. Elsie eyed him puzzledly, and then offered, “Would you like to see my plate?”

“Gentlemen,” Laurence said sharply, seeing Miller dragging Hollin through all the narrative of their search. “We have no time for this. The French have been sighted nearby, and we must go and bring the intelligence to camp at once.”

“We already know about the French being here, there has been some fighting,” Miller said. “Some bright militia-officer has raised the countryside and beat them properly over at Wembley, and at Harlesden last night. That is why we are here: I am carrying a colonel’s commission for him.”

“Oh!” the young lady said, having hung back a little from their conversation. “Have they beat, at Harlesden? Georgie will have been there—I must go tell Mother—” She half-turned, then turned back and curtseyed, and then hesitantly raised her hand a little, and Hollin stepping towards her brought it to his lips, also a little hesitantly, and said, “Your servant, Miss Jemson, and I hope my rounds might bring me again—”

“I hope so, too,” she said, pink, and having dared so far, turned and fled.

“Sir, if the news is in, and Miller will tell them where we are, we might keep looking—” Hollin said, turning back, his own cheeks a little ruddy.

“Oh, no; no, thank you, there’ll be none of that,” Miller said. “Your orders is not to be wandering over all Creation, it is to go and get the dragon and come back; well, if you haven’t got the dragon, you can do what is left, and that is to come back. If they want you to keep looking, they will tell you so. We will fly in company, like we ought when there is news like this to be bringing back, in case one of us is brought down. A hundred dragons out wild, eating people as like as cows? I don’t know what you was thinking not to return at once, except to save the neck of one as don’t deserve—”

“Captain Miller—” Hollin said.

“Enough,” Laurence said. “I do not intend to be the subject of quarreling in circumstances such as these. Captain Hollin, we had some rational hope of finding Temeraire quickly, having arrived so shortly after the dispersal of the breeding grounds; now we can have none. I am very sensible of your generosity, but will not trespass upon it further. Let us go at once.”

He had steeled himself to it, and now wanted nothing more than to have it over. The quicker he returned, the less damage would be done by his having kept them out, selfishly, further contrary to his duty; success only could have made it forgivable. Even then he ought to have been reproached. Granby was right, all along. His discipline had been wholly corrupted, Laurence saw now. Perhaps the effects were all the worse because he had not been brought up properly within the Corps, and had let the sudden liberty of the service, looser by necessity than the Navy, go to his head completely and become license.

He swung himself up and over onto Elsie, after Hollin had climbed up, and silently strapped himself in, heavy with self-reproach. He had no attention for their surroundings, or the journey, and let the cold wind coming in their faces make him dull. Devastatio flung himself ahead far of Elsie, by way of further self-puffery, which he was able to manage as she was burdened by two instead of one. It was all that saved them: because of the distance, the Petit Chevalier could not come at them together, and so he bore down on Devastatio alone in the lead.

The little Winchester squalled and tumbled straight down, blood streaming from his wing and side where he had been savagely clawed. He managed to right himself with great hissing gulps of breath, puffing out his sides until his fall slowed enough for him to gain purchase, but he was not flying properly, only able to limp half-skewed to the ground. Satisfied that he had been grounded, and might be retrieved at leisure, the Petit Chevalier wheeled about, and turned his attention to Elsie.

The name of the French breed was appropriate only by comparison with the Grand Chevalier; the heavy-weight coming towards them was some eighteen tons, his claws already stained with Devastatio’s blood, and he roared threateningly as he came on. Elsie gave a small desperate gasp and dived out of his way. She twisted nearly upside down to evade, setting Laurence and Hollin both dangling from their straps, and shot forward with all her might past the great dragon’s belly, rifle-shot from the bellmen whistling like wasps past their heads.

But she was too weighted down to get her full speed. The Petit Chevalier doubled back on himself and set in steady pursuit: over distance his strength would tell, and he would have them, if she could not escape before then. And he was fast enough to keep her in his sights an hour, Laurence judged, looking down over Elsie’s side to watch the dragon’s shadow flashing by over the ground.

It came chasing after Elsie’s smaller shadow like a racing cloud, pouring up and down the curves of the hills, darkening slopes and sending deer bounding away through the trees. The outline of the dragon remained steady as the ground rolled away beneath them with blazing speed, at least twenty-five knots with the wind howling and tearing at their clothing, no matter how low they crouched against Elsie’s neck.

The Petit Chevalier roared behind them. Laurence could not lift his head up into the wind to look back, but they were over a broad stretch of farmland, fields in neat snow-powdered squares bordered by roads, so the dragon-shapes made perfect silhouettes upon white, and as Elsie’s first desperate sprinting failed, the distance between the two shadows began slowly and inexorably to narrow.

And then, sliding into place behind the Petit Chevalier’s shape, a third shadow joined the line: beginning first as a small speck and rapidly growing, larger and larger and larger, until at last it swallowed up the other, and with a dreadful shattering roar a tremendous Regal Copper came thundering down from above. The enormous red-and-gold beast pounced directly upon the Petit Chevalier, serving him out with the very trick he had used on Devastatio, and without any restraint bowled him over and down.

The two heavy-weights went tumbling, head-over-heels, snarling and snapping wildly, uncontrolled; a couple of men went flying wildly off the French dragon’s back, and munitions, bombs, and rifles tumbling loose towards the countryside. Laurence had no idea how the Regal Copper’s crew were managing, and then he realized the dragon had no harness at all.

Elsie was panting as she slowed, curving in a wide arc so they could look back at the titanic struggle. “Oh, I am glad,” Elsie said, gulping air between words. “I am not—quite sure I could have run away from that big French one.”

“I hope we may not need to run away from that other fellow,” Hollin said, a sentiment which Laurence shared: the Regal Copper outweighed the other dragon by at least another seven or eight tons. He had now got his claws into the Chevalier’s shoulders and was scratching at him with his hind legs, shaking him all the time so the riflemen could not get their feet enough to fire at him properly; and the handful of wild shots which they managed did not trouble him greatly.

It was a savage style of fighting, and if cruder than formation-flying, on the level of such an individual contest the unexpected ferocity told worse than discipline. The Chevalier squalled at last, frantically, and with a great convulsive heave managed to tear himself free, leaving great torn gashes in his flesh, three furrows along each shoulder almost like bars of rank. He bolted headlong away, leaving the Regal Copper in possession of the field.

The victorious beast spread his wings, glowing vividly red with the sun behind them, and roared triumphantly after the Petit Chevalier, a great deep bellowing noise like hosts of thunder, and then the Regal Copper turned to look at them and said, in tones of great disapproval, “Well, and what are you about? I don’t think much of your sense, taking on a fellow that size.”

“Pray,” Elsie said timidly, “we didn’t mean to, only he came on us all of a sudden; and Devastatio is hurt.”

“Oh, there is another of you?” The Regal turned and scanned over the ground. They had drifted some way off in the fighting, and Devastatio had tried to drag himself under some trees, for concealment, but Regal Coppers had tolerable eyesight from a sufficient distance, and after a bit of scanning about he said, “Ha, there he is,” and flew over to the hiding place, landing with a tremendous thump. “You lot were all told this morning not to come round here,” the big dragon said severely, nosing over Devastatio’s wounds. “I said those big Frenchies were going to be going up and down carrying soldiers about all this way, didn’t I? This is going to be nasty, healing.”

“We were told nothing of the sort!” Miller said, having to lean rather frantically away to keep from being squashed by the prodding.

The Regal jerked his head back in surprise, and then put it farther back, squinting at them rather uselessly. “Is that a man? Why, you are under harness,” he said, exclaiming, and turned to squint at Elsie, too. “Both of you.”

“Of course they are,” Miller said, and added, with what Laurence had to admit was marked courage, if not much sense of gratitude, “Why are you flying about wild like this? Why have you gone out of the breeding grounds?”

“Hum,” the Regal Copper said. “I am no hand at explaining things, so I suppose you had better come along with me and talk to the commander.”

“What do you mean, commander,” Miller said, bewildered. “Are you fighting with the militia?”

“Yes, all those fellows are with us,” the Regal Copper said. “Come on then, up you get,” he added, to Devastatio. The Winchester sniffed a little, still licking at his wounds a bit more, but obeyed, climbing awkwardly onto the enormous dragon’s back. The Regal Copper went up with a tremendous propelling leap, took on a little height, and ponderously began to flap away, Elsie darting after him anxiously.

The flight was short, despite his slow pace, and he astonishingly landed them just outside the edges of a vast and neatly organized camp. Laurence had a glimpse of many dragons lying about in the clearing as they landed, and a large pen full of enormous black pigs.

The Regal padded along a broad cleared lane through the trees towards the heart of the camp, only to pull up short when a little Winchester, also without any harness, popped up on the border and said loudly, “Stop and give the watch-word!”

“It’s me, isn’t it?” the Regal Copper said. “And these two are with me, so they are all right, too.”

“That don’t matter,” the Winchester said, stubbornly. “Everyone must give the watch-word, or else I am to yell, but,” he said hastily, as the Regal Copper lowered his head, snorting, “I suppose that don’t mean you,” and hopped aside.

Laurence was startled to find a commander who had so little prejudice against unharnessed dragons that he had somehow conceived both to recruit them and make use of them in such a fashion. He wondered if the man could have some experience of the Corps—if he had a relation, or perhaps had lived near a covert. It made a solution twice over: both to keep the dragons from roving wild across the countryside, pillaging, and to strengthen his own militia force greatly. It did puzzle Laurence to see a dragon put on watch duty; but perhaps it would serve all the better to put off any spies.

Miller’s expression, where he sat perched up on the Regal beside Devastatio, stroking the injured dragon, suggested he was less impressed than scandalized to see beasts without harness, and serving in such a rôle.

For his part, the Regal did not seem to think much of it, either. “What things are coming to, I am sure I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head as he padded along. “It is all well and good to be talking on about pavilions and such,” and Laurence felt a great leap of hope, even before the Regal brought them out into the clearing at the center of the camp and said, “Temeraire, there are some fellows here to see you,” and Laurence flung loose his carabiner straps and leapt down from Elsie’s back, to see the great black head swinging around towards him.

“IT IS VERY WELL to have an eagle,” Temeraire said; it was a particularly bright gold now they had washed all the dirt from it—everyone had been ready to help—and the standard with it was very handsome, too, now the men had brushed it clean. It would be quite a wrench to sell it, he felt, and the way everyone else looked at it he expected they felt the same. “But we must not begin to think we will have things all our own way. There have not been very many French dragons to fight yet, because they are all busy carrying about the men, but sooner or later we will have to manage them.”

“I have some notions,” Perscitia said, “which we might like to try, when we have more to fight—”

“Temeraire,” Requiescat said, coming into the clearing behind him; Temeraire looked around and saw there was an injured Winchester on his back, and another trotting along behind him, with his old ground-crew master Hollin on her back.

Requiescat was still talking, and Perscitia going on about pepper, but Temeraire did not perfectly understand either of them; the words did not seem to want to make sense. That was Laurence, coming towards him; but Laurence was dead, and he was saying, “Temeraire, thank Heavens; I have been trying to find you these last five days.”

“But you are dead?” Temeraire said, uneasily. He had never seen a ghost, and had often thought it would be very interesting, but this was not, at all; it was dreadful, to see Laurence just as in life, to wish that he might reach out and gather him in, and keep him safe.

But Laurence said, “Of course I am not dead, my dear; I am here,” and Temeraire bent down his head and peered at Laurence very closely, and put out his tongue experimentally to sniff at him, and then at last he cautiously, so cautiously, put out his forehand to curl about Laurence and lift him up, and oh, he was quite solid: he was there, and he was not dead at all, and Temeraire gave a low joyful cry and curled around him tightly and said, “Oh, Laurence; I shall never let anyone take you from me again.”