Empire of Ivory

Chapter 1

SEND UP ANOTHER, damn you, send them all up, at once if you have to,” Laurence said savagely to poor Calloway, who did not deserve to be sworn at: the gunner was firing off the flares so quickly his hands were scorched black, skin cracking and peeling to bright red where some powder had spilled onto his fingers; he was not stopping to wipe them clean before setting each flare to the match.

One of the little French dragons darted in again, slashing at Temeraire’s side, and five men fell screaming as a piece of the makeshift carrying-harness unraveled. They vanished at once beyond the lantern-light and were swallowed up in the dark; the long twisted rope of striped silk, a pillaged curtain, unfurled gently in the wind and went billowing down after them, threads trailing from the torn edges. A moan went through the other Prussian soldiers still clinging desperately to the harness, and after it followed a low angry muttering in German.

Any gratitude the soldiers might have felt for their rescue from the siege of Danzig had since been exhausted: three days flying through icy rain, no food but what they had crammed into their pockets in those final desperate moments, no rest but a few hours snatched along a cold and marshy stretch of the Dutch coast, and now this French patrol harrying them all this last endless night. Men so terrified might do anything in a panic; many of them had still their small-arms and swords, and there were more than a hundred of them crammed aboard, to the less than thirty of Temeraire’s own crew.

Laurence swept the sky again with his glass, straining for a glimpse of wings, an answering signal. They were in sight of shore, the night was clear: through his glass he saw the gleam of lights dotting the small harbors all along the Scottish coast, and below heard the steadily increasing roar of the surf. Their flares ought to have been plain to see all the way to Edinburgh; yet no reinforcements had come, not a single courier-beast even to investigate.

“Sir, that’s the last of them,” Calloway said, coughing through the grey smoke that wreathed his head, the flare whistling high and away. The powder-flash went off silently above their heads, casting the white scudding clouds into brilliant relief, reflecting from dragon scales in every direction: Temeraire all in black, the rest in gaudy colors muddied to shades of grey by the lurid blue light. The night was full of their wings: a dozen dragons turning their heads around to look back, their gleaming pupils narrowing; more coming on, all of them laden down with men, and the handful of small French patrol-dragons darting among them.

All seen in the flash of a moment, then the thunderclap crack and rumble sounded, only a little delayed, and the flare dying away drifted into blackness again. Laurence counted ten, and ten again; still there was no answer from the shore.

Emboldened, the French dragon came in once more. Temeraire aimed a swipe which would have knocked the little Pou-de-Ciel flat, but his attempt was very slow, for fear of dislodging any more of his passengers; their small enemy evaded with contemptuous ease and circled away to wait for his next chance.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, looking round, “where are they all? Victoriatus is in Edinburgh; he at least ought to have come. After all, we helped him, when he was hurt; not that I need help, precisely, against these little dragons,” he added, straightening his neck with a crackle of popping joints, “but it is not very convenient to try and fight while we are carrying so many people.”

This was putting a braver face on the situation than it deserved: they could not very well defend themselves at all, and Temeraire was taking the worst of it, bleeding already from many small gashes along his side and flanks, which the crew could not bandage up, so cramped were they aboard.

“Only keep everyone moving towards the shore,” Laurence said; he had no better answer to give. “I cannot imagine the patrol will pursue us over land,” he added, but doubtfully; he would never have imagined a French patrol could come so near to shore as this, either, without challenge; and how he should manage to disembark a thousand frightened and exhausted men under bombardment he did not like to contemplate.

“I am trying; only they will keep stopping to fight,” Temeraire said wearily, and turned back to his work. Arkady and his rough band of mountain ferals found the small stinging attacks maddening, and they kept trying to turn around mid-air and go after the French patrol-dragons; in their contortions they were flinging off more of the hapless Prussian soldiers than the enemy could ever have accounted for. There was no malice in their carelessness: the wild dragons were unused to men except as the jealous guardians of flocks and herds, and they did not think of their passengers as anything more than an unusual burden; but with malice or none, the men were dying all the same. Temeraire could only prevent them by constant vigilance, and now he was hovering in place over the line of flight, cajoling and hissing by turns, encouraging the others to hurry onwards.

“No, no, Gherni,” Temeraire called out, and dashed forward to swat at the little blue-and-white feral: she had dropped onto the very back of a startled French Chasseur-Vocifère: a courier-beast of scarcely four tons, who could not bear up under even her slight weight and was sinking in the air despite the frantic beating of its wings. Gherni had already fixed her teeth in the French dragon’s neck and was now worrying it back and forth with savage vigor; meanwhile the Prussians clinging to her harness were all but drumming their heels on the heads of the French crew, crammed so tightly not a shot from the French side could fail of killing one of them.

In his efforts to dislodge her, Temeraire was left open, and the Pou-de-Ciel seized the fresh opportunity; this time daring enough to make an attempt at Temeraire’s back. His claws struck so near that Laurence saw the traces of Temeraire’s blood shining black on the curved edges as the French dragon lifted away again; his hand tightened on his pistol, uselessly.

“Oh, let me, let me!” Iskierka was straining furiously against the restraints which kept her lashed down to Temeraire’s back. The infant Kazilik would soon enough be a force to reckon with; as yet, however, scarcely a month out of the shell, she was too young and unpracticed to be a serious danger to anyone besides herself. They had tried as best they could to secure her, with straps and chains and lecturing, but the last she roundly ignored, and though she had been but irregularly fed these last few days, she had added another five feet of length overnight: neither straps nor chains were proving of much use in restraining her.

“Will you hold still, for all love?” Granby said despairingly; he was throwing his own weight against the straps to try and pull her head down. Allen and Harley, the young lookouts stationed on Temeraire’s shoulders, had to go scrambling out of the way to avoid being kicked as Granby was dragged stumbling from side to side by her efforts. Laurence loosened his buckles and climbed to his feet, bracing his heels against the strong ridge of muscle at the base of Temeraire’s neck. He caught Granby by the harness-belt when Iskierka’s thrashing swung him by again, and managed to hold him steady, but all the leather was strung tight as violin strings, trembling with the strain.

“But I can stop him!” she insisted, twisting her head sidelong as she tried to work free. Eager jets of flame were licking out of the sides of her jaws as she tried once again to lunge at the enemy dragon, but their Pou-de-Ciel attacker, small as he was, was still many times her size and too experienced to be frightened off by a little show of fire; he only jeered, backwinging to expose all of his speckled brown belly to her as a target in a gesture of insulting unconcern.

“Oh!” Iskierka coiled herself tightly with rage, the thin spiky protrusions all over her sinuous body jetting steam, and then with a mighty heave she reared herself up on her hindquarters. The straps jerked painfully out of Laurence’s grasp, and involuntarily he caught his hand back to his chest, the numb fingers curling over in reaction. Granby had been dragged into mid-air and was dangling from her thick neck-band, vainly, while she let loose a torrent of flame: thin and yellow-white, so hot the air about it seemed to twist and shrivel away, it made a fierce banner against the night sky.

But the French dragon had cleverly put himself before the wind, coming strong and from the east; now he folded his wings and dropped away, and the blistering flames were blown back against Temeraire’s flank. Temeraire, still scolding Gherni back into the line of flight, uttered a startled cry and jerked away while sparks scattered over the glossy blackness of his hide, perilously close to the carrying-harness of silk and linen and rope.

“Verfluchtes Untier! Wir werden noch alle verbrennen,” one of the Prussian officers yelled hoarsely, pointing at Iskierka, and fumbled with shaking hand in his bandolier for a cartridge.

“Enough there; put up that pistol,” Laurence roared at him through the speaking-trumpet; Lieutenant Ferris and a couple of the topmen hurriedly unlatched their harness-straps and let themselves down to wrestle it out of the officer’s hands. They could only reach the fellow by clambering over the other Prussian soldiers, however, and while too afraid to let go of the harness, the men were obstructing their passage in every other way, thrusting out elbows and hips with abrupt jerks, full of resentment and hostility.

Lieutenant Riggs was giving orders, distantly, towards the rear; “Fire!” he shouted, clear over the increasing rumble among the Prussians; the handful of rifles spoke with bright powder-bursts, sulfurous and bitter. The French dragon made a little shriek and wheeled away, flying a little awkward: blood streaked in rivulets from a rent in his wing, where a bullet had by lucky chance struck one of the thinner patches around the joint and penetrated the tough, resilient hide.

The respite came late; some of the men were already clawing their way up towards Temeraire’s back, snatching at the greater security of the leather harness to which the aviators were hooked by their carabiner straps. But the harness could not take all their weight, not so many of them: if the buckles stretched open, or some straps gave way, and the whole began to slide, it would entangle Temeraire’s wings and send them all plummeting into the ocean together.

Laurence loaded his pistols fresh and thrust them into his waistband, loosened his sword, and stood up again. He had willingly risked all their lives to bring these men out of a trap, and he meant to see them safely ashore if he could; but he would not see Temeraire endangered by their hysteric fear.

“Allen, Harley,” he said to the boys, “do you run across to the riflemen and tell Mr. Riggs: if we cannot stop them, they are to cut the carrying-harness loose, all of it; and be sure you keep latched on as you go. Perhaps you had better stay here with her, John,” he added, when Granby made to come away with him: Iskierka had quieted for the moment, her enemy having quitted the field, but she still coiled and re-coiled herself in sulky restlessness, muttering in disappointment.

“Oh, certainly! I should like to see myself do any such thing,” Granby said, taking out his sword; he had for-gone pistols since becoming Iskierka’s captain, to avoid the risk of handling open powder around her.

Laurence was too unsure of his ground to pursue an argument; Granby was not properly his subordinate any longer, and the more experienced aviator of the two of them, counting years aloft. Granby took the lead as they crossed Temeraire’s back, moving with the sureness of a boy trained up from the age of seven; at each step Laurence handed forward his own lead-strap and let Granby lock it on to the harness for him, which he could do one-handed, that they might go more quickly.

Ferris and the topmen were still struggling with the Prussian officer in the midst of a thickening clot of men; they were disappearing from view under the violent press of bodies, only Martin’s yellow hair visible. The soldiers were near full riot, men beating and kicking at one another, thinking of nothing but an impossible escape. The knots of the carrying-harness were tightening, giving up more slack, so all the loops and bands of it hung loose and swinging with the thrashing, struggling men.

Laurence came on one of the soldiers, a young man, eyes wide and staring in his wind-reddened face and his thick mustache wet-tipped with sweat, trying to work his arm beneath the main harness, blindly, though the buckle was already straining open, and he would in a moment have slid wholly free.

“Get back to your place!” Laurence shouted, pointing to the nearest open loop of the carrying-harness, and thrust the man’s hand away from the harness. Then his ears were ringing, a thick ripe smell of sour cherries in his nostrils as his knees folded beneath him. He put a hand to his forehead slowly, stupidly; it was wet. His own harness-straps were holding him, painfully tight against his ribs with all his weight pulling against them. The Prussian had struck him with a bottle; it had shattered, and the liquor was dripping down the side of his face.

Instinct rescued him; he put up his arm to take the next blow and pushed the broken glass back at the man’s face; the soldier said something in German and let go the bottle. They wrestled together a few moments more; then Laurence caught the man’s belt and heaved him up and away from Temeraire’s side. The soldier’s arms were spread wide, grasping at nothing; Laurence, watching, abruptly recalled himself, and at once he lunged out, reaching to his full length; but too late, and he came thumping heavily back against Temeraire’s side with empty hands; the soldier was already gone from sight.

His head did not hurt over-much, but Laurence felt queerly sick and weak. Temeraire had resumed flying towards the coast, having rounded up the rest of the ferals at last, and the force of the wind was increasing. Laurence clung to the harness a moment, until the fit passed and he was able to make his hands work properly again. There were already more men clawing up: Granby was trying to hold them back, but they were overbearing him by sheer weight of numbers, even though struggling as much against one another as him. One of the soldiers grappling for a hold on the harness climbed too far out of the press; he slipped, landed heavily on the men below him, and carried them all away; as a tangled, many-limbed mass they fell into the slack loops of the carrying-harness, and the muffled wet noises of their bones cracking together sounded like a roast chicken being wrenched hungrily apart.

Granby was hanging from his harness-straps, trying to get his feet planted again; Laurence crab-walked over to him and gave him a steadying arm. Below he could just make out the washy seafoam, pale against the black water; Temeraire was flying lower and lower as they neared the coast.

“That damned Pou-de-Ciel is coming round again,” Granby panted as he got back his footing; the French had somehow got a dressing over the gash in the dragon’s wing, even if the great white patch of it was awkwardly placed and far larger than the injury made necessary. The dragon looked a little uncomfortable in the air, but he was coming on gamely nonetheless; they had surely seen that Temeraire was vulnerable. If the Pou-de-Ciel and his crew were able to catch the harness and drag it loose, they might finish deliberately what the soldiers had begun in panic, and the chance of bringing down a heavy-weight, much less one as valuable as Temeraire, would surely tempt them to great risk.

“We will have to cut the soldiers loose,” Laurence said, low and wretched, and looked upwards, where the carrying-loops attached to the leather; but to send a hundred men and more to their deaths, scarce minutes from safety, he was not sure he could bear; or ever to meet General Kalkreuth again, having done it; some of the general’s own young aides were aboard, and doing their best to keep the other men quiet.

Riggs and his riflemen were firing short, hurried volleys; the Pou-de-Ciel was keeping just out of range, waiting for the best moment to chance his attack. Then Iskierka sat up and blew out another stream of fire: Temeraire was flying ahead of the wind, so the flames were not turned against him, this time; but every man on his back had at once to throw himself flat to avoid the torrent, which burnt out too quickly before it could reach the French dragon.

The Pou-de-Ciel at once darted in while the crew were so distracted; Iskierka was gathering herself for another blow, and the riflemen could not get up again. “Christ,” Granby said; but before he could reach her, a low rumble like fresh thunder sounded, and below them small round red mouths bloomed with smoke and powder-flashes: shore batteries, firing from the coast below. Illuminated in the yellow blaze of Iskierka’s fire, a twenty-four-pound ball of round-shot flew past them and took the Pou-de-Ciel full in the chest; he folded around it like paper as it drove through his ribs, and crumpled out of the air, falling to the rocks below: they were over the shore, they were over the land, and thick-fleeced sheep were fleeing before them across the snow-matted grass.

The townspeople of the little harbor of Dunbar were alternately terrified at the descent of a whole company of dragons onto their quiet hamlet, and elated by the success of their new shore battery, put into place scarcely two months ago and never before tried. Half-a-dozen courier-beasts driven off and one Pou-de-Ciel slain, overnight became a Grand Chevalier and several Flammes-de-Gloire, all hideously killed; the town could talk of nothing else, and the local militia strutted through the streets to general satisfaction.

The townspeople grew less enthusiastic, however, after Arkady had eaten four of their sheep; the other ferals had made only slightly less extravagant depredations, and Temeraire himself had seized upon a couple of cows, shaggy yellow-haired Highland cattle, sadly reported afterwards to be prize-winning, and devoured them to the hooves and horns.

“They were very tasty,” Temeraire said apologetically; and turned his head aside to spit out some of the hair.

Laurence was not inclined to stint the dragons in the least, after their long and arduous flight, and on this occasion was perfectly willing to sacrifice his ordinary respect for property to their comfort. Some of the farmers made noises about payment, but Laurence did not mean to try and feed the bottomless appetites of the ferals out of his own pocket. The Admiralty might reach into theirs, if they had nothing better to do than sit before the fire and whistle while a battle was carrying on outside their windows, and men dying for lack of a little assistance. “We will not be a charge upon you for long. As soon as we hear from Edinburgh, I expect we will be called to the covert there,” he said flatly, in reply to the protests. The horse-courier left at once.

The townspeople were more welcoming to the Prussians, most of them young soldiers pale and wretched after the flight. General Kalkreuth himself had been among these final refugees; he had to be let down from Arkady’s back in a sling, his face white and sickly under his beard. The local medical man looked doubtful, but cupped a basin full of blood, and had him carried away to the nearest farmhouse to be kept warm and dosed with brandy and hot water.

Other men were less fortunate. The harnesses, cut away, came down in filthy and tangled heaps weighted by corpses already turning greenish: some killed by the French attacks, others smothered by their own fellows in the panic, or dead of thirst or plain terror. They buried sixty-three men out of a thousand that afternoon, some of them nameless, in a long and shallow grave laboriously pickaxed out of the frozen ground. The survivors were a ragged crew, clothes and uniforms inadequately brushed, faces still dirty, attending silently. Even the ferals, though they did not understand the language, perceived the ceremony, and sat on their haunches respectfully to watch from a distance.

Word came back from Edinburgh only a few hours later, but with orders so queer as to be incomprehensible. They began reasonably enough: the Prussians to be left behind in Dunbar and quartered in the town; and the dragons, as expected, summoned to the city. But there was no invitation to General Kalkreuth or his officers to come along; to the contrary, Laurence was strictly adjured to bring no Prussian officers with him. As for the dragons, they were not permitted to come into the large and comfortable covert itself at all, not even Temeraire: instead Laurence was ordered to leave them sleeping in the streets about the castle, and to report to the admiral in command in the morning.

He stifled his first reaction, and spoke mildly of the arrangements to Major Seiberling, now the senior Prussian; implying as best he could without any outright falsehood that the Admiralty meant to wait until General Kalkreuth was recovered for an official welcome.

“Oh; must we fly again?” Temeraire said; he heaved himself wearily back onto his feet, and went around the drowsing ferals to nudge them awake: they had all crumpled into somnolence after their dinners.

Their flight was slow and the days were grown short; it lacked only a week to Christmas, Laurence realized abruptly. The sky was fully dark by the time they reached Edinburgh; but the castle shone out for them like a beacon with its windows and walls bright with torches, on its high rocky hill above the shadowed expanse of the covert, with the narrow buildings of the old medieval part of the city crammed together close around it.

Temeraire hovered doubtfully above the cramped and winding streets; there were many spires and pointed roofs to contend with, and not very much room between them, giving the city the appearance of a spear-pit. “I do not see how I am to land,” he said uncertainly. “I am sure to break one of those buildings; why have they built these streets so small? It was much more convenient in Peking.”

“If you cannot do it without hurting yourself, we will go away again, and orders be damned,” Laurence said; his patience was grown very thin.

But in the end Temeraire managed to let himself down into the old cathedral square without bringing down more than a few lumps of ornamental masonry; the ferals, being all of them considerably smaller, had less difficulty. They were anxious at being removed from the fields full of sheep and cattle, however, and suspicious of their new surroundings; Arkady bent low and put his eye to an open window to peer inside at the empty rooms, making skeptical inquires of Temeraire as he did so.

“That is where people sleep, is it not, Laurence? Like a pavilion,” Temeraire said, trying cautiously to rearrange his tail into a more comfortable position. “And sometimes where they sell jewels and other pleasant things. But where are all the people?”

Laurence was quite sure all the people had fled; the wealthiest tradesman in the city would be sleeping in a gutter tonight, if it were the only bed he could find in the new part of town, safely far away from the pack of dragons who had invaded his streets.

The dragons eventually disposed of themselves in some reasonable comfort; the ferals, used to sleeping in rough-hewn caves, were even pleased with the soft and rounded cobblestones. “I do not mind sleeping in the street, Laurence, truly; it is quite dry, and I am sure it will be very interesting to look at, in the morning,” Temeraire said consolingly, even with his head lodged in one alley-way and his tail in another.

But Laurence minded for him; it was not the sort of welcome which he felt they might justly have looked for, a long year away from home, having been sent halfway round the world and back. It was one thing to find themselves in rough quarters while on campaign, where no man could expect better, and might be glad for a cow-byre to lay his head in. To be deposited like baggage on the cold unhealthy stones, stained years-dark with street refuse, was something other; the dragons might at least have been granted use of the open farmland outside the city.

And it was no conscious malice: only the common unthinking assumption by which men treated dragons as inconvenient if elevated livestock, to be managed and herded without consideration for their own sentiments; an assumption so ingrained that Laurence had recognized it as outrageous only when forced to do so by the marked contrast with the conditions he had observed in China, where dragons were received as full members of society.

“Well,” Temeraire said reasonably, while Laurence laid out his own bedroll inside the house beside his head, with the windows open so they might continue to speak, “we knew how matters were here, Laurence, so we cannot be very surprised. Besides, I did not come to make myself more comfortable, or I might have stayed in China; we must improve the circumstances of all our friends. Not,” he added, “that I would not like my own pavilion; but I would rather have liberty. Dyer, will you pray get that bit of gristle out from between my teeth? I cannot reach forward to put my claw upon it.”

Dyer startled up from his half-doze upon Temeraire’s back and, fetching a small pick from their baggage, scrambled obediently into Temeraire’s opened jaws to scrape away.

“You would have more luck in achieving the latter, if there were more men ready to grant you the former,” Laurence said. “I do not mean to counsel you to despair; we must not, indeed. But I had hoped to find on our arrival more respect than when we left, not less; which must have been a material advantage to our cause.”

Temeraire waited until Dyer had climbed out again to answer. “I am sure we must be listened to on the merits,” he said, a large assumption, which Laurence was not at all sanguine enough to share, “and all the more, when I have seen Maximus and Lily, and they are ranged with me. And perhaps also Excidium, for he has been in so many battles: no one could help but be impressed with him. I am sure they will see all the wisdom of my arguments; they will not be so stupid as Eroica and the others were,” Temeraire added, with shades of resentment. The Prussian dragons had at first rather disdained his attempts at convincing them of the merits of greater liberty and education, being as fond of their tradition of rigorous military order as ever were their handlers, and preferring instead to ridicule as effete the habits of thought which Temeraire had acquired in China.

“I hope you will forgive me for bluntness; but I am afraid even if you had the hearts and minds of every dragon in Britain aligned with your own, it would make very little difference: as a party you have not very much influence in Parliament,” Laurence said.

“Perhaps we do not, but I imagine if we were to go to Parliament, we would be attended to,” Temeraire said, an image most convincing, if not likely to produce the sort of attention which Temeraire desired.

Laurence said as much, and added, “We must find some better means of drawing sympathy to your cause, from those who have the influence to foster political change. I am only sorry I cannot apply to my father for advice, as relations stand between us.”

“Well, I am not sorry, at all,” Temeraire said, putting back his ruff. “I am sure he would not have helped us; and we can do perfectly well without him.” Aside from his loyalty, which would have resented coldness to Laurence on any grounds, he not unnaturally viewed Lord Allendale’s objections to the Aerial Corps as objections to his own person; and despite their never having met, he felt violently as a matter of course towards anyone whose sentiments would have seen Laurence separated from him.

“My father has been engaged with politics half his life,” Laurence said: with the effort towards abolition in particular, a movement met with as much scorn, at its inception, as Laurence anticipated for Temeraire’s own. “I assure you his advice would be of the greatest value; and I do mean to effect a repair, if I can, which would allow our consulting him.”

“I would as soon have kept it, myself,” Temeraire muttered, meaning the elegant red vase which Laurence had purchased in China as a conciliatory gift. It had since traveled with them five thousand miles and more, and Temeraire had grown inclined to be as possessive of it as any of his own treasures; he now sighed to see it finally sent away, with Laurence’s brief and apologetic note.

But Laurence was all too conscious of the difficulties which faced them; and of his own inadequacy to forward so vast and complicated a cause. He had been still a boy when Wilberforce had come to their house, the guest of one of his father’s political friends, newly inspired with fervor against the slave trade and beginning the parliamentary campaign to abolish it. Twenty years ago now; and despite the most heroic efforts by men of ability and wealth and power greater than his own, in those twenty years surely a million souls or more had yet been carried away from their native shores into bondage.

Temeraire had been hatched in the year five; for all his intelligence, he could not yet truly grasp the weary slow struggle which should be required to bring men to a political position, however moral and just, however necessary, in any way contrary to their immediate self-interest. Laurence bade him good-night without further disheartening advice; but as he closed the windows, which began to rattle gently from the sleeping dragon’s breath, the distance to the covert beyond the castle walls seemed to him less easily bridged than all the long miles which had brought them home from China.

The Edinburgh streets were quiet in the morning, unnaturally so, and deserted but for the dragons sleeping in stretched ranks over the old grey cobbles. Temeraire’s great bulk was heaped awkwardly before the smoke-stained cathedral, and his tail running down into an alley-way scarcely wide enough to hold it. The sky was clear and cold and very blue, only a handful of terraced clouds running out to sea, a faint suggestion of pink and orange early light on the stones.

Tharkay was awake, the only soul stirring when Laurence came out; he was sitting, crouched against the cold, in one of the other narrow doorways to an elegant home, the heavy door standing open behind him, looking into the entry hall, tapestried and deserted. He had a cup of tea, steaming in the air. “May I offer you one?” he inquired. “I am sure the owners would not begrudge it.”

“No, I must go up,” Laurence said; he had been woken by a runner from the castle, summoning him to a meeting at once. Another piece of discourtesy, when they had only arrived so late; and to make matters worse, the boy had been unable to tell him of any provisions made for the feeding of the hungry dragons. What the ferals should say when they awoke, Laurence did not like to think.

“You need not worry; I am sure they will fend for themselves,” Tharkay said, not a cheering prospect, and offered Laurence his own cup for consolation; Laurence sighed and drained it, grateful for the strong, hot brew. He gave Tharkay back the cup, and hestitated; the other man was looking across the cathedral square with a peculiar expression—his mouth twisted at one corner.

“Are you well?” Laurence asked; conscious he had thought not enough about his men, in his anxiety over Temeraire; and Tharkay he had less right to take for granted.

“Oh, very; I am quite at home,” Tharkay said. “It is some time since I was last in Britain, but I was tolerably familiar with the Court of Session, then,” nodding across the square at Parliament House, where the court met: Scotland’s highest civil court, and a notorious pit of broken hopes, endless dragging suits, and wrangling over technicalities and estates; presently deserted by all its solicitors, judges, and suitors alike, and only a scattering of harried papers blown up against Temeraire’s side like white patches, relics of old settlements. Tharkay’s father had been a man of property, Laurence knew; Tharkay had none; the son of a Nepalese woman perhaps would have been at some disadvantage in the British courts, Laurence supposed, and any irregularity in his claims easily exploited.

At least he did not look at all enthusiastic to be home; if home he considered it, and Laurence said, “I hope,” tentatively, and tried awkwardly to suggest that Tharkay might consider extending his contract, when they had settled such delicate matters as payment for those services already rendered: Tharkay had been paid for guiding them along the old silk trading routes from China, but since then he had recruited the ferals to their cause, which demanded a bounty beyond Laurence’s private means. And his services could by no means be easily dispensed with now, not until the ferals were settled somehow into the Corps, Tharkay being, apart from Temeraire, almost the only one who could manage more than a few words of their odd, inflected language. “I would gladly speak to Admiral Lenton at Dover, if you would not object,” Laurence added; he did not at all mean to discuss any such irregular question with whichever notable was commanding here, after the treatment which they had so far received.

Tharkay only shrugged, noncommittal, and said, “Your messenger grows anxious,” nodding to where the young runner was fidgeting unhappily at the corner of the square, waiting for Laurence to come along.

The boy took him the short distance up the hill to the castle gates; from there Laurence was escorted to the admiral’s office by an officious red-coated Marine, their path winding around to the headquarters building through the medieval stone courtyards, empty and free from hurry in the early-morning dimness. The doors were opened, and he went in stiffly, straight-shouldered; his face had set into disapproving lines, cold and rigid. “Sir,” he said, eyes fixed at a point upon the wall; and only then glanced down, and said, surprised, “Admiral Lenton?”

“Laurence; yes. Sit, sit down.” Lenton dismissed the guard, and the door closed upon them and the musty, book-lined room; the Admiral’s desk was nearly clear, but for a single small map, a handful of papers. Lenton sat for a moment silently. “It is damned good to see you,” he said at last. “Very good to see you indeed. Very good.”

Laurence was very much shocked at his appearance. In the year since their last meeting, Lenton seemed to have aged ten: hair gone entirely white, and a vague, rheumy look in his eyes; his jowls hung slack. “I hope I find you well, sir,” Laurence said, deeply sorry, no longer wondering why Lenton had been transferred north to Edinburgh, the quieter post; he wondered only what illness might have so ravaged him, and who had been made commander at Dover in his place.

“Oh…” Lenton waved his hand, fell silent. “I suppose you have not been told anything,” he said, after a moment. “No, that is right; we agreed we could not risk word getting out.”

“No, sir,” Laurence said, anger kindling afresh. “I have heard nothing, and been told nothing; with our allies asking me daily for word of the Corps, until there was no more use in asking.”

He had given his own personal assurances to the Prussian commanders; he had sworn that the Aerial Corps would not fail them, that the promised company of dragons, which might have turned the tide against Napoleon, in this last disastrous campaign, would arrive at any moment. He and Temeraire had stayed and fought in their place when the dragons did not arrive, risking their own lives and those of his crew in an increasingly hopeless cause; but the dragons had never come.

Lenton did not immediately answer, but sat nodding to himself, murmuring. “Yes, that is right, of course.” He tapped a hand on the desk, looked at some papers without reading them, a portrait of distraction.

Laurence added more sharply, “Sir, I can hardly believe you would have lent yourself to so treacherous a course, and one so terribly shortsighted; Napoleon’s victory was by no means assured, if the twenty promised dragons had been sent.”

“What?” Lenton looked up. “Oh, Laurence, there was no question of that. No, none at all. I am sorry for the secrecy, but as for not sending the dragons, that called for no decision. There were no dragons to send.”

Victoriatus heaved his sides out and in, a gentle, measured pace. His nostrils were wide and red, a thick flaking crust around the rims, and a dried pink foam lingered about the corners of his mouth. His eyes were closed, but after every few breaths they would open a little, dull and unseeing with exhaustion; he gave a rasping, hollow cough that flecked the ground before him with blood; and subsided once again into the half-slumber that was all he could manage. His captain, Richard Clark, was lying on a cot beside him: unshaven, in filthy linen, an arm flung up to cover his eyes and the other hand resting on the dragon’s foreleg; he did not move, even when they approached.

After a few moments, Lenton touched Laurence on the arm. “Come, enough; let’s away.” He turned slowly aside, leaning heavily upon a cane, and took Laurence back up the green hill to the castle. The corridors, as they returned to his offices, seemed no longer peaceful but hushed, sunk in irreparable gloom.

Laurence refused a glass of wine, too numb to think of refreshment. “It is a sort of consumption,” Lenton said, looking out the windows that faced onto the covert yard; Victoriatus and twelve other great beasts lay screened from one another by the ancient windbreaks, piled branches and stones grown over with ivy.

“How widespread—?” Laurence asked.

“Everywhere,” Lenton said. “Dover, Portsmouth, Middlesbrough. The breeding grounds in Wales and Halifax; Gibraltar; everywhere the couriers went on their rounds; everywhere.” He turned away from the windows and took his chair again. “We were inexpressibly stupid; we thought it was only a cold, you see.”

“But we had word of that before we had even rounded the Cape of Good Hope, on our journey east,” Laurence said, appalled. “Has it lasted so long?”

“In Halifax it started in September of the year five,” Lenton said. “The surgeons think now it was the American dragon, that big Indian fellow: he was kept there, and then the first dragons to fall sick here were those who had shared the transport with him to Dover; then it began in Wales when he was sent to the breeding grounds there. He is perfectly hearty, not a cough or a sneeze; very nearly the only dragon left in England who is, except for a handful of hatchlings we have tucked away in Ireland.”

“You know we have brought you another twenty,” Laurence said, taking a brief refuge in making his report.

“Yes, these fellows from where, Turkestan?” Lenton said, willing to follow. “Did I understand your letter correctly; they were brigands?”

“I would rather say jealous of their territory,” Laurence said. “They are not very pretty, but there is no malice in them; though what use twenty dragons can be, to cover all England—” He stopped. “Lenton, surely something can be done—must be done,” he said.

Lenton only shook his head briefly. “The usual remedies did some good, at the beginning,” he said. “Quieted the coughing, and so forth. They could still fly, if they did not have much appetite; and colds are usually such trifling things with them. But it lingered on so long, and after a while the possets seemed to lose their effect—some began to grow worse—”

He stopped, and after a long moment added, with an effort, “Obversaria is dead.”

“Good God!” Laurence cried. “Sir, I am shocked to hear it—so deeply grieved.” It was a dreadful loss: she had been flying with Lenton some forty years, the flag-dragon at Dover for the last ten, and though relatively young had produced four eggs already; perhaps the finest flyer in all England, with few to even compete with her for the title.

“That was in, let me see; August,” Lenton said, as if he had not heard. “After Inlacrimas, but before Minacitus. It takes some of them worse than others. The very young hold up best, and the old ones linger; it is the ones between who have been dying. Dying first, anyway; I suppose they will all go in the end.”

Chapter 2

CAPTAIN,” KEYNES SAID, “I am sorry; any gormless imbecile can bandage up a bullet-wound, and a gormless imbecile you are very likely to be assigned in my place. But I cannot stay with the healthiest dragon in Britain when the quarantine-coverts are full of the sick.”

“I perfectly understand, Mr. Keynes, and you need say nothing more,” Laurence said. “Will you not fly with us as far as Dover?”

“No; Victoriatus will not last the week, and I will wait and attend the dissection with Dr. Harrow,” Keynes said, with a brutal sort of practicality that made Laurence flinch. “I have hopes we may learn something of the characteristics of the disease. Some of the couriers are still flying; one will carry me onwards.”

“Well,” Laurence said, and shook the surgeon’s hand. “I hope we shall see you with us again soon.”

“I hope you will not,” Keynes said, in his usual acerbic manner. “If you do, I will otherwise be lacking for patients, which from the course of this disease will mean they are all dead.”

Laurence could hardly say his spirits were lowered; they had already been reduced so far as to make little difference out of the loss. But he was sorry. Dragon-surgeons were not by and large near so incompetent as the naval breed, and despite Keynes’s words Laurence did not fear his eventual successor, but to lose a good man, his courage and sense proven and his eccentricities known, was never pleasant; and Temeraire would not like it.

“He is not hurt?” Temeraire pressed. “He is not sick?”

“No, Temeraire; but he is needed elsewhere,” Laurence said. “He is a senior surgeon; I am sure you would not deny his attentions to those of your comrades who are suffering from this illness.”

“Well, if Maximus or Lily should need him,” Temeraire said crabbily, and drew furrows in the ground. “Shall I see them again soon? I am sure they cannot be so very ill. Maximus is the biggest dragon I have ever seen, even though we have been to China; he is sure to recover quickly.”

“No, my dear,” Laurence said uneasily, and broke the worst of the news—“The sick have none of them recovered, and you must take the very greatest care not to go anywhere near the quarantine-grounds.”

“But I do not understand,” Temeraire said. “If they do not recover, then—” He paused.

Laurence only looked away. Temeraire had good excuse for not understanding at once. Dragons were hardy creatures, and many breeds might live a century and more; he might have justly expected to know Maximus and Lily for longer than a man’s lifetime, if the war had not taken them from him.

At last, sounding almost bewildered, Temeraire said, “But I have so much to tell them—I came for them. So they might learn that dragons may read and write, and have property, and do things other than fight.”

“I will write a letter for you, which we can send to them with your greetings, and they will be happier to know you well and safe from contagion than for your company,” Laurence said. Temeraire did not answer; he was very still, and his head bowed deeply to his chest. “We will be near-by,” Laurence went on, after a moment, “and you may write to them every day, if you wish; when we have finished our work.”

“Patrolling, I suppose,” Temeraire said, with a very unusual note of bitterness, “and more stupid formation-work; while they are all sick, and we can do nothing.”

Laurence looked down, into his lap, where their new orders lay amid the oilcloth packet of all his papers, and had no comfort to offer: brusque instructions for their immediate removal to Dover, where Temeraire’s expectations were likely to be answered in every particular.

He was not encouraged, on reporting to the headquarters at Dover directly they had landed, by being left to cool his heels in the hall outside the new admiral’s office for thirty minutes, listening to voices by no means indistinct despite the heavy oaken door. He recognized Jane Roland, shouting; the voices that answered her were unfamiliar; and Laurence rose to his feet abruptly, straightening as the door was flung open. A tall man in a naval coat came rushing out with clothing and expression both disordered, his lower cheeks mottled to a moderate glow under his sideburns; he did not pause, but threw Laurence a furious glare before he left.

“Come in, Laurence; come in,” Jane called, and he went in; she was standing with the admiral, an older man dressed rather astonishingly in a black frock coat and knee-breeches with buckled shoes.

“You have not met Dr. Wapping, I think,” Jane said. “Sir, this is Captain Laurence, of Temeraire.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, and made his leg deep to cover his confusion and dismay. He supposed that if all the dragons were in quarantine, to put the covert in the charge of a physician was the sort of thing which might make sense to landsmen, as with the notion advanced to him once, by a family friend seeking his influence on behalf of a less-fortunate relation, to advance a surgeon—not even a naval surgeon—to the command of a hospital ship.

“Captain, I am honored to make your acquaintance,” Dr. Wapping said. “Admiral, I will take my leave; I beg your pardon for having been the cause of so unpleasant a scene.”

“Nonsense; those rascals at the Victualing Board are a pack of unhanged scoundrels, and I am happy to put them in their place; good day to you. Would you credit, Laurence,” Jane said, as Wapping closed the door behind himself, “that those wretches are not content that the poor creatures eat scarcely enough to feed a bird anymore, but they must send us diseased stock and scrawny?

“But this is a way to welcome you home.” She caught him by the shoulders and kissed him soundly on both cheeks. “You are a damned sight; whatever has happened to your coat? Will you have a glass of wine?” She poured for them both without waiting his answer; he took it in a sort of appalled blankness. “I have all your letters, so I have a tolerable notion what you have been doing, and you must forgive me my silence, Laurence; I found it easier to write nothing than to leave out the only matter of any importance.”

“No; that is, yes, of course,” he said, and sat down with her at the fire. Her coat was thrown over the arm of her chair; now that he looked, he saw the admiral’s fourth bar on the shoulders, and the front more magnificently frogged with braid. Her face, too, was altered but not for the better; she had lost a stone of weight at least, he thought, and her dark hair, cropped short, was shot with grey.

“Well, I am sorry to be such a ruin,” she said ruefully, and laughed away his apologies. “No, we are all of us decaying, Laurence; there is no denying it. You have seen poor Lenton, I suppose. He held up like a hero for three weeks after she died, but then we found him on the floor of his bedroom in an apoplexy; for a week he could not speak without slurring. He came along a good ways afterwards, but still he has been a shade of himself.”

“I am sorry for it,” Laurence said, “though I drink to your promotion,” and by herculean effort he managed it without a stutter.

“I thank you, dear fellow,” she said. “I would be et up with pride, I suppose, if matters were otherwise, and if it were not one annoyance after another. We glide along tolerably well when left to our own devices, but I must deal with these idiotish creatures from the admiralty. They are told, before they come, and told again, and still they will simper at me, and coo, as if I had not been a-dragonback before they were out of dresses, and then they stare if I dress them down for behaving like kiss-my-hand squires.”

“I suppose they find it a difficult adjustment,” Laurence said, with private sympathy. “I wonder the Admiralty should have—” and belatedly he paused, feeling he was treading on obscure and dangerous ground. One could not very well quarrel with pursuing whatever means necessary to reconcile Longwings, perhaps Britain’s most deadly breed, to service, and as the beasts would accept none but female handlers, some must be offered them; Laurence was sorry for the necessity that would thrust a gently born woman out of her rightful society and into harm’s way, but at least they were raised up to it. And where necessary, they had perforce to act as formation-leaders, transmitting the maneuvers to their wings; but this was a far cry from flag rank, not to say commanding the largest covert in Britain, and perhaps the most critical.

“They certainly did not like to give it to me, but they had precious little choice,” Jane said. “Portland would not come from Gibraltar; Laetificat is not up to the sea-voyage anymore. So it was me or Sanderson, and he is making a cake of himself over the business; goes off into corners and weeps like a woman, as though that would help anything: a veteran of nine fleet actions, if you would credit it.” Then she ran her hand through her disordered crop and sighed. “Never mind, you are not to listen to me, Laurence; I am impatient, and his Animosia does poorly.”

“And Excidium?” Laurence ventured.

“Excidium is a tough old bird, and he knows how to husband his strength: has the sense to eat, even though he has no appetite. He will muddle along a good while yet, and you know, he has close on a century of service; many his age have already shot themselves of the whole business and retired to the breeding grounds.” She smiled; it was not whole-hearted. “There; I have been brave. Let us to pleasanter things: you have brought me twenty dragons, and by God do I have a use for them. Let us go and see them.”

“She is a handful and a half,” Granby admitted lowly, as they considered the coiled serpentine length of Iskierka’s body, faint threads of steam issuing from the many needle-like spikes upon her body, “and I haven’t ridden herd on her, sir, I am sorry.”

Iskierka had already established herself to her own satisfaction, if no one else’s, by clawing out a deep pit in the clearing next to Temeraire’s where she had been housed, then filling it with ash: this acquired from some two dozen young trees which she had unceremoniously uprooted and burnt up inside her pit. She had then added to the powdery grey mixture a collection of boulders, which she fired to a moderate glow before going to sleep, comfortably, in her heated nest. The bonfire and its lingering smolder were visible for some distance, even to the farmhouses nearest the covert, and a few hours past her arrival had already produced several complaints and a great deal of alarm.

“Oh, you have done enough keeping her harnessed out in the countryside, without a head of cattle to your name,” Jane said, giving the drowsing Iskierka’s side a pat. “They may bleat to me all they like, for a fire-breather, and you may be sure the Navy will cheer your name when they hear we have our own at last. Well done; well done indeed, and I am happy to confirm you in your rank, Captain Granby. Should you like to do the honors, Laurence?”

Most of Laurence’s crew had already been employed in Iskierka’s clearing, in beating out the stray embers which flew out of her pit and threatened to ignite all the covert if left unchecked. Ash-dusty and tired as they all were, they had none of them gone away, lingering consciously without the need of any announcement, and now lined up on a muttered word from young Lieutenant Ferris to watch Laurence pin the second pair of gold bars upon Granby’s shoulders.

“Gentlemen,” Jane said, when Laurence had done, and they gave a cheek-flushed Granby three huzzahs, whole-hearted if a little subdued, and Ferris and Riggs stepped over to shake him by the hand.

“We will see about assigning you a crew, though it is early days yet with her,” Jane said, after the ceremony had dispersed, and they proceeded on to make her acquainted with the ferals. “I have no shortage of men now, more’s the pity. Feed her twice daily, see if we cannot make up for any growth she may have been shorted, and whenever she is awake I will start you on Longwing maneuvers. I don’t know if she can scorch herself, as they can with their own acid, but we needn’t find out by trial.”

Granby nodded; he seemed not the least nonplussed at answering to her. Neither did Tharkay, who had been persuaded to stay on at least a little longer, as one of the few of them with any influence upon the ferals at all. He rather looked mostly amused, in his secretive way, once past the inquiring glance which he had first cast at Laurence: as Jane had insisted upon being taken to the newcome dragons at once, there had been no chance for Laurence to give Tharkay a private caution in advance of their meeting. He did not reveal any surprise, however, but only made her a polite bow, and performed the introductions quite calmly.

Arkady and his band had made very little less confusion of their own clearings than Iskierka, preferring to knock down all the trees between and cluster together in a great heap. The chill of the December air did not trouble them, used as they were to the vastly colder regions of the Pamirs, but they spoke disapprovingly of the dampness, and on understanding that here before them was the senior officer of the covert, at once demanded from her an accounting of the promised cows, one apiece daily, by which they had been lured into service.

“They make the position that if they do not happen to eat the cows upon a given day, still they are owed the cattle, which they may call in at a future time,” Tharkay explained, provoking Jane’s deep laugh.

“Tell them they shall have as much as they like to eat on any occasion, and if they are too suspicious for that to satisfy them, we shall make them a tally: they may each of them take one of these logs they have knocked about over to the feeding pens, and mark it when they take a cow,” Jane said, more merry than offended at being met with such negotiations. “Pray ask will they agree to a rate of exchange, two hogs for a cow, or two sheep, should we bring in some variety?”

The ferals put their heads together and muttered and hissed and whistled amongst themselves, in a cacophony made private only by the obscurity of their language, and finally Arkady turned back and professed himself willing to settle on the trade agreement, except that he insisted goats should be three to a cow, they having some contempt for that animal, more easily obtained in their former homeland and likely there to be scrawny.

Jane bowed to him to seal the arrangement, and he bobbed his head back, his expression deeply satisfied, and rendered all the more piratical by the red splash of mongrel color which covered one of his eyes and spilled down his neck. “They are a gang of ruffians and make no mistake,” Jane said, as she led them back towards her offices, “but I have no doubt of their flying, at any rate: with that sort of wiry muscle they will go in circles around anything in their weight-class, or over it, and I am happy to stuff their bellies for them.”

“No, sir; there’ll be no trouble,” the steward of the headquarters said, rather low, of finding rooms for Laurence and his officers; even arriving as they had out of nowhere and without notice. Most of the captains and officers were encamped out in the quarantine-grounds with their sick dragons, despite the cold and wet, and the building was queerly deserted: hushed and silent, as it had not been even at the low-ebb of the days before Trafalgar, when nearly all the formations had gone south to help bring down the French and Spanish fleets.

They all drank Granby’s health together, but the party broke up early, and Laurence was not disposed to linger afterwards: a few wretched lieutenants sitting together at a dark table in the corner, not talking; an older captain snoring with his head tipped against the side of his armchair, a bottle of brandy empty by his elbow. Laurence took his dinner alone in his rooms, near the fire; the air was chill, from the rooms to either side being vacant.

He opened the door at a faint tapping, expecting perhaps Jane, or one of his men with some word from Temeraire, and was startled to find instead Tharkay. “Pray come in,” Laurence said, and belatedly added, “I hope you will forgive my state.” The room was yet disordered, and he had borrowed a dressing-gown from a colleague’s neglected wardrobe; it was considerably too large around the waist, and badly crumpled.

“I am come to say good-bye,” Tharkay said, and shook his head, when Laurence had made an awkward inquiry. “No, I have nothing to complain of; but I am not of your company. I do not care to stay only to be a translator; it is a rôle which must soon pall.”

“I would be happy to speak to Admiral Roland—perhaps a commission—” Laurence said, trailing away; he did not know what might be done, or how such matters were arranged in the Corps, except to imagine them a good deal less formally prescribed than in the Army, or the Navy, but he did not wish to promise what might be wholly infeasible.

“I have already spoken to her,” Tharkay said, “and have been given one, if not the sort you mean; I will go back to Turkestan and bring back more ferals, if any can be persuaded into your service on similar terms.”

Laurence would have been a good deal happier to have the ferals already in their service remotely manageable; a quality they were not more likely to gain, after Tharkay’s departure. But he could not object; it was hard to imagine Tharkay’s pride should allow him to remain as a supernumerary, even if restlessness alone did not drive him on. “I will pray for your safe return,” Laurence said, and offered him instead a glass of port, and supper.

“What an odd fellow you have found us, Laurence,” Jane said in her offices, the next morning. “I ought to give him his weight in gold, if the Admiralty would not squawk: twenty dragons talked out of the trees, like Merlin; or was it Saint Patrick? Anyway, I am sorry to rob you of the help, and pray don’t think me ungrateful, if you are in your rights to complain; it is enough of a miracle you should have brought us Iskierka and one egg whole, considering the way Bonaparte has been romping about the Continent, much less our amiable band of brigands. But I cannot spare the chance of more, however mean and scrawny they might be; not with matters as they stand.”

The map of Europe was laid out topmost on her table, great clots of markers, representing dragons, spread from the western borders of Prussia’s former territory all the way to the footsteps of Russia. “From Jena to Warsaw in three weeks,” she said, as one of her runners poured out wine for them. “I would not have given a bad ha’penny for the news, if you had not brought it yourself, Laurence; and if we hadn’t had it from the Navy, too, I would have sent you to a physician.”

Laurence nodded. “And I have a great deal to tell you of Bonaparte’s aerial tactics, which are wholly changed from what they were. Formations are of no use against him; at Jena, the Prussians were routed, wholly routed. We must at once begin devising counters to his new methods.”

But she was already shaking her head. “Do you know, Laurence, I have less than forty dragons fit to fly? and unless he is a lunatic, he will not come across with less than a hundred. He shan’t need any fine tactics to do for us. For our part, there is no one to learn any new.”

The scope of the disaster silenced him: forty dragons, to try and patrol all the coastline of the Channel, and give cover to the ships of the blockade.

“What we want at present is time,” Jane continued. “There are a dozen hatchlings in Ireland, preserved from the disease, and twice as many eggs due to hatch in the next six months: we bred a good many of them, early on. If our friend Bonaparte will only be good enough to give us a year, things will look something more like: the rest of these new shore batteries in place, the young dragons brought up, your ferals knocked into shape; not to mention Temeraire and our new fire-breather.”

“Will he give us a year?” Laurence said, low, looking at the counters: not very many yet, upon the Channel coastline; but he had seen first-hand how swiftly Napoleon’s dragon-borne army could now move.

“Not a minute, if he hears anything of our pitiable state,” Jane said. “But that aside—well, we hear he has made a very good friend in Warsaw, a Polish countess they say is a raving beauty; and he would like to marry the Tsar’s sister. We will wish him good fortune in his courting, and hope he takes a long leisurely time about it. If he is sensible, he will want a winter night for crossing the Channel, and the days are already growing longer.

“But you may be sure that if he learns how thin we are on the ground, he will come posting back quick as lightning, and damn the ladies. So our task of the moment is to keep him properly in the dark. A year’s time, then we will have something to work with; but until then, for you all it must be—”

“Oh, patrolling,” Temeraire said, in tones of despair, when Laurence had brought their orders.

“I am sorry, my dear,” Laurence said, “very truly sorry; but if we can serve our friends at all, it will be by taking on those duties which they have had to set aside.” Temeraire was silent and brooding, unconsoled; in an attempt to cheer him, Laurence added, “But we need not abandon your cause, not in the least. I will write my mother, and those of my acquaintance who may have the best advice to give, on how we ought to proceed—”

“Whatever sense is there in it,” Temeraire said, miserably, “when all our friends are ill, and there is nothing to be done for them? It does not matter if one is not allowed to visit London, if one cannot even fly an hour. And Arkady does not give a fig for liberty, anyway; all he wants are cows. We may as well patrol; or even do formations.”

This was the mood in which they went aloft, a dozen of the ferals behind them more occupied in squabbling amongst themselves than in paying any attention to the sky; Temeraire was in no way inclined to make them mind, and with Tharkay gone, the few hapless officers set upon their backs had very little hope of exerting any form of control.

These young men had been chosen—from no shortage of officers, so many men having been grounded by the illness of their assigned beasts—for their skill in language. The ferals were all of them far too old to acquire a new tongue easily; so the officers should have to learn theirs instead. To hear them trying to whistle and cluck out the awkward syllables of the Durzagh language had quickly palled as entertainment and grown a nuisance to the ear, but it had also to be endured; no-one knew the tongue with any fluency aside from Temeraire, and a few of Laurence’s younger officers who had acquired a smattering in the course of their journey to Istanbul.

Laurence had indeed lost two of his already-diminished number of officers entirely to the cause: one of the riflemen, Dunne, and Wickley of the bellmen had both of them enough grasp of Durzagh to make the basic signals understood to the ferals, and they were not so young as to make a command absurd. They had been set aboard Arkady in a highly theoretical position of authority; there was none of that natural bond which the first harnessing seemed to produce, of course, and Arkady was far more likely to obey his own whimsical impulse than any orders which they might give. The feral leader had already given it as his opinion that this flying over the ocean was absurd, as a useless territory in which no reasonable dragon would interest itself, and the likelihood he would veer away at any moment in search of better entertainment seemed to Laurence high.

Jane had set them a course along the coastline, for their first excursion; no risk at all of an action, so near to land, but at least the cliffs interested the ferals, and the bustle of shipping around Portsmouth, which they would gladly have investigated further if not called to order by Temeraire. They flew on past Southampton and westward along towards Weymouth, setting a leisurely pace; the ferals resorting to wild acrobatics to entertain themselves, swooping to such heights as must have rendered them dizzy and ill, save for their former habituation among the most lofty mountains of the earth, and plummeting thence into absurd and dangerous diving maneuvers, so close they threw up spray as they skimmed up again from the waves. It was a sad waste of energy, but well-fed as the ferals now were, by comparison to their previous state, of energy they had a surfeit which Laurence was glad enough to see spent in so restrained a manner, if the officers clinging sickly to their harnesses did not agree.

“Perhaps we might try a little fishing,” Temeraire suggested, turning his head around, when abruptly Gherni cried out above them, and the world spun and whirled as Temeraire flung himself sidelong; a Pêcheur-Rayé went flying past, and the champagne-popping of rifle-fire spat at them from his back.

“To stations,” Ferris was shouting, men scrambling wildly; the bellmen were casting off a handful of bombs down on the recovering French dragon below while Temeraire veered away, climbing. Arkady and the ferals were shrilly calling to one another, wheeling excitedly; they flung themselves with eagerness on the French dragons: a light scouting party of six, as best Laurence could make out among the low-lying clouds, the Pêcheur the largest of the lot and the rest all light-weights or couriers; both outnumbered and outweighed, therefore, and reckless to be coming so close to British shores.

Reckless, or deliberately venturesome; Laurence thought grimly it could not have escaped the notice of the French that their last encounter had brought no answer from the coverts.

“Laurence, I am going after that Pêcheur; Arkady and the others will take the rest,” Temeraire said, curving his head around even as he dived.

The ferals were not shy by any means, and gifted skirmishers, from all their play; Laurence thought it safe to leave the smaller dragons entirely to them. “Pray make no sustained attack,” he called, through the speaking-trumpet. “Only roust them from the shore, as quickly as you may—” as the hollow thump-thump of bombs, exploding below, interrupted.

Without the hope of surprise, the Pêcheur knew himself thoroughly overmatched, Temeraire a more agile flyer and in a wholly different class so far as weight. Having risked and lost a throw of the dice, he and his captain were evidently not inclined to try their luck again; Temeraire had scarcely stooped before the Pêcheur dropped low to the water and beat away quickly over the waves, his riflemen keeping up a steady fusillade to clear his retreat.

Laurence turned his attention above, to the furious howling of the ferals’ voices: they could scarcely be seen, having lured the French high aloft, where their greater ease with the thin air could tell to their advantage. “Where the devil is my glass?” he said, and took it from Allen. The ferals were making a sort of taunting game of the business, darting in at the French dragons and away, setting up a raucous caterwauling as they went, without very much actual fighting to be seen. It would have done nicely to frighten away a rival gang in the wild, Laurence supposed, particularly one so outnumbered, but he did not think the French were to be so easily diverted; indeed as he watched, the five enemy dragons, all of them only little Pou-de-Ciels, drew into close formation and promptly bowled through the cloud of ferals.

The ferals, still putting on a show of bravado, scattered too late to evade the rifle-fire, and now some of their shrill cries were for real pain. Temeraire was beating up furiously, his sides belling out like sails as he heaved for the breath to get himself so high aloft, but he could not easily gain their height, and would be at a disadvantage himself against the smaller French when he had. “Give them a gun, quickly, and show the signal for descent,” Laurence shouted to Turner, without much hope; but the ferals came plummeting down in a rush when Turner put out the flags, none too reluctant to put themselves around Temeraire.

Arkady was keeping up a low, indignant clamoring under his breath, nudging anxiously at his second Wringe, the worst-hit, her dark grey hide marred with streaks of darker blood. She had taken several balls to the flesh and one unlucky hit to the right wing, which had struck her on the bias and scraped a long, ugly furrow across the tender webbing and two spines; she was listing in mid-air awkwardly as she tried to favor it.

“Send her below to shore,” Laurence said, scarcely needing the speaking-trumpet with the dragons crowded so close that they might have been talking in a clearing, and not the open sky. “And pray tell them again, they must keep well-clear of the guns; I am sorry they have had so hot a lesson. Let us keep together and—” but this came too late, as the French were coming down in arrow-head formation, and the ferals followed too closely on his first instruction and spread themselves out across the sky.

The French also at once separated; even together they were not a match for Temeraire, whom they had surely recognized, and by way of protection engaged themselves closely with the ferals. It must have been an odd experience for them; Pou-de-Ciels were generally the lightest of the French combat breeds, and now they were finding themselves the relative heavy-weights in battle against the ferals, who even where their wingspan and length matched were all of them lean and concave-bellied creatures, a sharp contrast against the deep-chested muscle of their opponents.

The ferals were now more wary, but also more savage, hot with anger at the injury to their fellow and their own smaller stinging wounds. They used their darting lunges to better effect, learning quickly how to feint in and provoke the rifle volleys, then come in again for a real attack. The smallest of them, Gherni and motley-colored Lester, were attacking one Pou-de-Ciel together, with the more wily Hertaz pouncing in every now and again, claws blackened with blood; the others were engaged singly, and more than holding their own, but Laurence quickly perceived the danger, even as Temeraire called, “Arkady! Bnezh's’li taqom—” and broke off to say, “Laurence, they are not listening.”

“Yes, they will be in the soup in a moment,” Laurence agreed; the French dragons, though they seemed on the face of it to be fighting as independently as the ferals, were maneuvering skillfully to put their backs to one another; indeed they were only allowing the ferals to herd them into formation, which should allow them to make another devastating pass. “Can you break them apart, when they have come together?”

“I do not see how I will be able to do it, without hurting our friends; they are so close to one another, and some of them are so little,” Temeraire said anxiously, tail lashing as he hovered.

“Sir,” Ferris said, and Laurence looked at him. “I beg your pardon, sir, but we are always told, as a rule, to take a bruising before a ball; it don’t hurt them long, even if they are knocked properly silly, and we are close enough to give any of them a lift to land, if it should go so badly.”

“Very good; thank you, Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said, putting strong approval in it; he was still very glad to see Granby matched off with Iskierka, even more so when dragons would now be in such short supply, but he felt the loss keenly, as exposing the weaknesses in his own abbreviated training as an aviator. Ferris had risen to his occasions with near-heroism, but he had been but a third lieutenant on their departure from England, scarcely a year ago, and at nineteen years of age could not be expected to put himself forward to his captain with the assurance of an experienced officer.

Temeraire put his head down and puffed up his chest with a deep breath, then flung himself down amongst the shrinking knot of dragons, and barreled through with much the effect of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; the ferals flung into higher excitement. They flew around with much disorderly shrilling for a few moments, and as they did, the French righted themselves: the formation leader waved a signal-flag, and the Pou-de-Ciels wheeled together and away, escaping.

Arkady and the ferals did not pursue, but came gleefully romping back over to Temeraire, alternating complaints at his having knocked them about, with boastful prancing over their victory and the rout of the enemy, which Arkady implied was in spite of Temeraire’s jealous interference. “That is not true, at all,” Temeraire said, outraged, “you would have been perfectly dished without me,” and turned his back upon them and flew towards land, his ruff stiffened up with indignation.

They found Wringe sitting and licking at her scarred wing in the middle of a field. A few clumps of bloodstained white wool upon the grass, and a certain atmosphere of carnage in the air, suggested she had quietly found herself some consolation; but Laurence chose to be blind. Arkady immediately set up as a hero for her benefit, and paraded back and forth to re-enact the encounter. So far as Laurence could follow, the battle might have raged a fortnight, and engaged some hundreds of enemy beasts, all of them vanquished by Arkady’s solitary efforts. Temeraire snorted and flicked his tail in disdain, but the other ferals proved perfectly happy to applaud the revisionary account, though they occasionally jumped up to interject stories of their own noble exploits.

Laurence meanwhile had dismounted; his new surgeon Dorset, a rather thin and nervous young man, bespectacled and given to stammering, was going over Wringe’s injuries. “Will she be well enough to make the flight back to Dover?” Laurence inquired; the scraped wing looked nasty, what he could see of it; she uneasily kept trying to fold it close and away from the inspection, though fortunately Arkady’s theatrics were keeping her distracted enough that Dorset could make some attempt at handling it.

“No,” Dorset said, with not the shade of a stammer and a quite casual authority. “She needs lie quiet a day or so under a poultice, and those balls must come out of her shoulder presently, although not now. There is a courier-ground outside Weymouth, which has been taken off the routes and will be free from infection; we must find a way to get her there.” He let go the wing and turned back to Laurence blinking his watery eyes.

“Very well,” Laurence said, bemused; at the change in his demeanor more than the certainty alone. “Mr. Ferris, have you the maps?”

“Yes, sir; though it is twelve miles straight flying to Weymouth covert across the water, sir, if you please,” Ferris said, hesitating over the leather wallet of maps.

Laurence nodded and waved them away. “Temeraire can support her so far, I am sure.”

Her weight posed less difficulty than her unease with the proposed arrangement, and, too, Arkady’s sudden fit of jealousy, which caused him to propose himself as a substitute: quite ineligible, as Wringe outweighed him by several tons, and they should not have got a yard off the ground.

“Pray do not be so silly,” Temeraire said, as she dubiously expressed her reservations at being ferried. “I am not going to drop you unless you bite me. You have only to lie quiet, and it is a very short way.”

Chapter 3

BUT THEY REACHED Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, in much perturbation of spirit, Wringe having expressed the intention, five or six times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air to fly the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, and thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting, their lives saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down bruised and ill from the knocking-about they had taken, and helped away by their fellows to be dosed liberally, with brandy, at the small barracks-house.

Wringe put up a singular fuss to having the bullets extracted, sidling away her hindquarters when Dorset approached knife in hand, insisting she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have no patience with her evasions; his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the dry, hard-packed earth, made her meekly flatten to the ground and submit to being picked over with a lantern suspended overhead. “That will do,” Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. “Now some fresh meat, to be sure, and a night’s quiet rest. This ground is too hard,” he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder with the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.

“I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only pray let me have a cow and I will sleep,” Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so Laurence could stroke his muzzle while his own shallow cuts were poulticed. He ate the cow in three tremendous tearing gulps, hooves-to-horns, tipping his head backwards to let the last bite of the hindquarters go down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in a macabre sort of fascination, his mouth gaping, and his two sons likewise with their eyes starting from their heads. Laurence pressed a few more guineas into the man’s unresisting hand and hurried them all off; it would do Temeraire’s cause no good to have fresh and lurid tales of draconic savagery spreading.

The ferals disposed of themselves directly around the wounded Wringe, sheltering her from any draft and pillowing themselves one upon the other as comfortably as they could manage, the smaller ones among them crawling upon Temeraire’s back directly he had fallen asleep.

It was too cold to sleep out, and they had not brought tents with them on patrol; Laurence meant to leave the barracks, small enough in all conscience without dividing off a captain’s partition, to his men, and take himself to a hotel, if one might be had; in any case he would have been glad of a chance to send word back to Dover by the stage, that their absence would not occasion distress. He did not trust any of the ferals to go alone yet, with their few officers so unfamiliar.

Ferris approached as Laurence made inquiry of the few tenants of the covert. “Sir, if you please, my family are here in Weymouth; I am sure my mother would be very happy if you chose to stay the night,” he said, adding, with a quick, anxious glance that belied the easy way in which he issued this invitation, “I should only like to send word ahead.”

“That is handsome of you, Mr. Ferris; I would be grateful, if I should not be putting her out,” Laurence said. He did not miss the anxiety. In courtesy, Ferris likely felt compelled to make the invitation, if his family had so much as an attic corner and a crust of bread to spare. Most of his younger gentlemen, indeed most of the Corps, were drawn from the ranks of what could only be called the shabby-genteel, and Laurence knew they were inclined to think him higher than he did himself: his father kept a grand state, certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow on either side, except perhaps his mother’s, and was better accustomed to a hanging berth than a manor.

Out of sympathy he would have spared Ferris, but for the likely difficulty of finding any other lodgings, and his own weary desire to be settled, even if it were only in an attic corner, with a crust of bread. The noise of the day behind them, he was finding it difficult not to yield to a certain lowness of spirit. The ferals had behaved quite as badly as expected, and he could not help but see how impossible it should be, to guard the Channel with such a company. The contrast could not have been greater, to the fine and ordered ranks of British formations, those ranks now decimated; and he felt their absence all the more keenly for it.

The word was accordingly sent, and a carriage summoned; it was waiting outside the covert gates by the time they had gathered their things, and walked to meet it down the long narrow path which led away from the dragon-clearings.

A twenty-minutes’ drive brought them to the outskirts of Weymouth. Ferris grew steadily more hunched as they bowled along, and so miserably white that Laurence might have thought him taken ill with the motion, if he had not seen Ferris perfectly settled through thunderstorm aloft and typhoon at sea, and not likely to be distressed by the motion of a comfortable, well-sprung chaise. The carriage turned, then, drawing into a heavily wooded lane, and Laurence realized his mistake as the forest parted, and they drew abreast the house: a vast and sprawling gothic sort of edifice, the blackened stone barely to be seen behind centuries of ivy, the windows all illuminated and throwing a beautiful golden light out onto a small ornamental brook which wound through the open lawn before the house.

“A very fine prospect, Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said as they rattled over the bridge. “You must be sorry not to be home more often. Does your family reside here long?”

“Oh, a dog’s age,” Ferris said blankly, lifting his head. “There was some Crusader or other first built the place, I think, I don’t know.”

Laurence hesitated and a little reluctantly offered, “My own father and I have disagreed on certain of our occasions, I am sorry to say, so I am not often at home.”

“Mine is dead,” Ferris said. After a moment, he seemed to realize this was a rather abrupt period to the conversation, and added with an effort, “My brother Albert is a good sort, I suppose; he has ten years on me, so we have never really got to know one another.”

“Ah,” Laurence said, left no more the wiser as to the cause of Ferris’s dismay.

There was certainly nothing lacking in their welcome. Laurence had braced himself for neglect: perhaps they would be shown directly to their rooms, out of sight of the rest of the company; he was tired enough to even hope to be so slighted. But nothing of the sort: a dozen footmen were out with their lights lining the drive, another two waiting with the step to hand them down, and a substantial body of the staff coming outside to greet them despite the cold and what must surely have been a full house within to manage, a wholly unnecessary ostentation.

Ferris blurted desperately, just as the horses were drawn up, “Sir—I hope you will not take it to heart, if my mother—she means well—” The footmen opened the door, and discretion stopped Ferris’s mouth.

They were shown directly to the drawing room, to find all the company assembled to meet them, not very large, but decidedly elegant: the women all in clothing of unfamiliar style, the surest mark of the height of fashion to a man who was often from society a year at a time, and several of the gentlemen bordering on outright dandyism. Laurence noted it mechanically; he was himself in trousers and Hessians, and those stained with dust; but he could not be brought to care, very much, even when he saw the other gentlemen in the greater formality of knee-breeches. There were a couple of military men among their number, a colonel of Marines whose long, seamy, sun-leathered face had a certain vague familiarity that meant they had most likely dined together on one ship or another, and a tall army captain in his red coat, lantern-jawed and blue-eyed.

“Henry, my dear!” A tall woman rose from her seat to come and greet them with both her hands outstretched: too like Ferris to mistake her, with the same high forehead and reddish-brown hair, and the same trick of holding her head very straight, which made her neck look longer. “How happy we are you have come!”

“Mother,” Ferris said woodenly, and bent to kiss her presented cheek. “May I present Captain Laurence? Sir, this is Lady Catherine Seymour, my mother.”

“Captain Laurence, I am overjoyed to make your acquaintance,” she said, offering him her hand.

“My lady,” Laurence said, giving her a formal leg. “I am very sorry to intrude upon you; I beg you will forgive our coming in all our dirt.”

“Any officer of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps is welcome in this house, Captain,” she declared, “at any moment of day or night, I assure you, and should he come with no introduction at all still he should be welcome.”

Laurence did not know what to say to this; he himself would no more have descended upon a strange house without introduction than he would have robbed it. The hour was late, but not uncivilized, and he came with her own son, so in any case these reassurances were not much to the point; he could not have supposed it otherwise, having been invited and welcomed. He settled on a vague, “Very kind.”

The company was not similarly effusive. Ferris’s eldest brother Albert, the present Lord Seymour, was a little high in the instep, and made a point early on, when Laurence had made a compliment to his house, of conveying the intelligence that the house was Heytham Abbey, in the possession of the family since the reign of Charles II; the head of the family had risen from knight to baronet to baron in steady climb, and there remained.

“I congratulate you,” Laurence said, and did not take the opening to puff off his own consequence; he was an aviator, and well knew that one evil outweighed any other considerations in the eyes of the world. He could not help but wonder that they should have sent a son to the Corps; there was no sign of the pressure of an encumbered estate, which might have made one reason: while appearances might be kept up on credit, so extravagant a number of servants could not have been managed.

Shortly dinner was announced, to Laurence’s surprise; he had hoped for nothing more than a little cold supper, and thought them arrived late for even this much. “Oh, think nothing of it, we are grown modern, and often keep town hours even when we are in the country,” Lady Catherine cried. “We have so much company from London that it would be tiresome for them to be always shifting their dinner-hour early, and sending away dishes half-eaten, to be wished-for later. Now, we will certainly not stand on formality; I must have Henry beside me, for I long to hear all you have been doing, my dear, and Captain Laurence, you shall take in Lady Seymour, of course.”

Laurence could only bow politely and offer his arm, although Lord Seymour certainly ought to have preceded him, even if Lady Catherine chose to make a natural exception for her son. Her daughter-in-law looked for a moment as if she liked to balk, Laurence thought, but then she laid her hand on his arm without any further hesitation, and he chose not to notice.

“Henry is my youngest, you know,” Lady Catherine said to Laurence over the second course; he was on her right. “Second sons in this house have always gone to the drum, and the third to the Corps, and I hope that may never change.” This, Laurence thought, might have been subtly directed at his dinner companion, by the direction of her eyes; but Lady Seymour gave no sign she had heard; she was correctly speaking with the gentleman on her right, the army captain, who was Ferris’s brother Richard. “I am very glad, Captain, to meet a gentleman whose family feels as I do on the matter.”

Laurence, who had only narrowly escaped being thrown from the house by his irate father on his shift in profession, could not in honesty accept this compliment, and with some awkwardness said, “Ma’am, I beg your pardon, I must confess you do us credit we have not earned: younger sons in my family go to the Church, but I was mad for the sea, and would have no other profession.” He had then to explain his wholly accidental acquisition of Temeraire and subsequent transfer to the Aerial Corps.

“I will not withdraw my remarks; it is even more to their credit that you were given good principles enough to do your duty, when it was presented to you,” Lady Catherine said firmly. “It is shameful, the disdain that so many of our finest families will profess for the Corps, and I certainly will never hold with it in the least.”

The dishes were being changed again as she made this ringing and over-loud speech, and Laurence noticed that they were going back nearly untouched after all. The food had been excellent, and he could only conceive, after a moment, that all Lady Catherine’s protestations were a humbug: they had already dined earlier. He watched covertly as the next course was dished out, and indeed the ladies in particular picked unenthusiastically at their food, scarcely making pretense of conveying a single morsel to their mouths; of the gentlemen only Colonel Prayle was making any serious inroads. He caught Laurence looking and gave him just the slightest bit of a wink, then went on eating with the steady trencherman rhythm of a professional soldier used to take his food when it was before him.

If they had been a large party, coming late to an empty house, Laurence might have conceived of a gracious host holding back dinner for their convenience, or serving a second meal to the newcomers, but not under such pretense, as though they should have been offended with a simple supper, served to them privately, the rest of the company having dined. He was obliged to sit through several more removes, conscious they were a pleasure to no one else of the company; Ferris himself ate with his head down, and only lightly, though in the ordinary course of events he was as rapacious as any nineteen-year-old boy unpredictably fed of late. When the ladies departed to the drawing room, Lord Seymour began to offer port and cigars, with a determined if false note of heartiness, but Laurence refused all but the smallest glass he could take for politeness’ sake, and no one objected to rejoining the ladies quickly, they most of them already beginning to droop by the fire even though not half-an-hour had elapsed.

No-one proposed cards or music; the conversation was low and leaden. “How dull you all are to-night!” Lady Catherine rallied them, with a nervous energy. “You will give Captain Laurence quite a disgust of our society. You cannot often have been in Dorsetshire, Captain, I suppose.”

“I have not had that pleasure, ma’am,” Laurence said. “My uncle lives near Wimbourne, but I have not visited him in many years.”

“Oh! Perhaps you are acquainted with Mrs. Brantham’s family.”

That lady, who had been nodding off, roused enough to say with sleepy tactlessness, “I am sure not.”

“It is not very likely, ma’am; my uncle moves very little outside his political circles,” Laurence said, after a pause. “In any event, my service has kept me from the enjoyment of much wider society, particularly these last years.”

“But what compensations you must have had!” Lady Catherine said. “I am sure it must be glorious to travel by dragon, without any worry that you shall be sunk in a gale, and so much more quickly.”

“Ha ha, unless your ship grows tired of the journey and eats you,” Captain Ferris said, nudging his younger brother with an elbow.

“Richard, what nonsense, as if there were any danger of such a thing! I must insist on your withdrawing the remark,” Lady Catherine said. “You will offend our guest.”

“Not at all, ma’am,” Laurence said, discomfited; the vigor of her objection gave an undeserved weight to the joke, which in any case he could more easily have borne than her compliments; he could not help but feel them excessive and insincere.

“You are kind to be so tolerant,” she said. “Of course, Richard was only joking, but you would be quite appalled how many people in society will say such things and believe them. I am sure it is very poor-spirited to be afraid of dragons.”

“I am afraid it is only the natural consequence,” Laurence said, “of the unfortunate situation prevailing in our country, which keeps dragons so isolated in their distant coverts as to make them a point of horror.”

“Why, what else is to be done with them?” Lord Seymour said. “Put them in the village square?” He amused himself greatly with this suggestion; he was uncomfortably florid in the face, having performed heroically his host’s duties at the second dinner. He even now was doing justice to another glass of port, over which he coughed his laugh.

“In China, they may be seen in the streets of every town and city,” Laurence said. “They sleep in pavilions no more separated from residences than one town-house from another, in London.”

“Heavens; I should not sleep a wink,” Mrs. Brantham said, with a shudder. “How dreadful these foreign customs.”

“It seems to me a most peculiar arrangement,” Seymour said, his brows drawing together. “Look here, how do the horses stand it? My driver in town must go a mile out of his way when the wind is in the wrong quarter and blowing over the covert, because the beasts get skittish.”

Laurence was in honesty forced to admit they did not; horses were not often to be seen in the Chinese cities, except for the trained cavalry beasts. “But I assure you the lack is not felt; aside from mule-carts, they have also dragons employed as a sort of living stagecoach, and citizens of higher estate are conveyed by courier, at what you can imagine must be a much higher rate of speed. Indeed, Bonaparte has already adopted the system, at least within his encampments.”

“Oh, Bonaparte,” Seymour said. “No; thank goodness we organize things more sensibly here. I have been meaning to congratulate you, rather: ordinarily not a month goes by when my tenants are not complaining of the patrols, going overhead and frightening their cattle to pieces; leaving their—” he waved his hand expressively in concession to the ladies “—everywhere, but this sixmonth not a peep. I suppose you have put in new routes, and none too soon. I had nearly made up my mind to speak on the matter in Parliament.”

This remark, thoroughly aware as he was of the circumstances which had reduced the frequency of the patrols, Laurence could not make himself answer civilly; so he did not answer at all, and instead went to fill his glass again.

He took it away and went to stand by the window farthest from the fire, to keep himself refreshed by the cool draught which came in. Lady Seymour had taken a seat beside it, for the same reason; she had put aside her wineglass and was fanning herself. When he had stood there a moment she made a visible effort and engaged him. “So you had to shift from the Navy to the Aerial Corps—It must have been very hard. I suppose you went to sea when you were older?”

“At the age of twelve, ma’am,” Laurence said.

“Oh!—but then you came home again, from time to time, surely? And twelve is not seven; no one can say there is no difference. I am sure your mother must never have thought of sending you from home at such an age.”

Laurence hesitated, conscious that Lady Catherine and indeed most of the other company, which had not already dozed off, were now listening to their conversation. “I was fortunate to secure a berth more often than not, so I was not much at home myself,” he said, as neutrally as he could. “I am sure it must be hard, for a mother, in either case.”

“Hard! of course it is hard,” Lady Catherine said, interjecting here. “What of it? We ought to have the courage to send our sons, if we expect them to have the courage to go, and not this sort of half-hearted grudging sacrifice, to send them so late they are too old to properly take to the life.”

“I suppose,” Lady Seymour said, with an angry smile, “that we might also starve our children, to accustom them to privation, and send them to sleep in a pigsty, so they might learn to endure filth and cold—if we cared very little for them.”

What little other conversation had gone forward, now was extinguished quite; spots of color stood high in Lady Catherine’s cheeks, and Lord Seymour was snoring prudently by the fire, his eyes shut; poor Lieutenant Ferris had retreated into the opposite corner of the room and was staring fixedly out the window into the pitch-dark grounds, where nothing was to be seen.

Laurence, sorry to have so blundered into an existing quarrel, by way of making peace said, “I hope you will permit me to say, I find the Corps as an occupation has been given a character which it does not deserve, being no more dangerous or distasteful, in daily use, than any other branch; I can at least say from my own experience that our sailors face as much hard duty, and I am sure Captain Ferris and Colonel Prayle will attest to the privations of their own respective services.” He raised his glass to those gentlemen.

“Hear, hear,” Prayle said, coming to his aid, jovially, “it is not aviators only who have all the hard luck, but we fellows, too, who deserve our fair share of your sympathy; and at least you may be sure they have all the latest news at any moment: you must know better than any of us, Captain Laurence, what is going forward on the Continent now; is Bonaparte setting up for invasion again, now he has packed the Russians off home?”

“Oh, pray do not speak of that monster,” Mrs. Brantham spoke up. “I am sure I have never heard anything half so dreadful as what he has done to the poor Queen of Prussia: taken both her sons away to Paris!”

At this, Lady Seymour, still high-colored, burst out, “I am sure she must be in agony. What mother’s heart could bear it! Mine would break to pieces, I know.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” Laurence said, to Mrs. Brantham, into the awkward silence. “They were very brave children.”

“Henry tells me you have had the honor to meet them, Captain Laurence, and the Queen, during your service,” Lady Catherine said. “I am sure you must agree, that however much her heart should break, she would never ask her sons to be cowards, and hide behind her skirts.”

He could say nothing, but only gave her a bow; Lady Seymour was looking out the window and fanning herself with short jerking strokes. The conversation limped on a very little longer, until he felt he could in politeness excuse himself, on the grounds of the necessity of an early departure.

He was shown to a handsome room, with signs of having been hastily rearranged, and someone’s comb left by the washbasin suggested it had been otherwise occupied until perhaps that evening. Laurence shook his head at this fresh sign of over-solicitousness, and was sorry any of the guests should have been shifted on his account.

Lieutenant Ferris knocked timidly on his door, before a quarter-of-an-hour had passed, and when admitted tried to express his regrets without precisely apologizing, as he could scarcely do. “I only wish she would not feel it so. I did not like to go, at the time, I suppose, and she cannot forget that I wept,” he said, fidgeting the curtain uneasily; he was looking out the window to avoid meeting Laurence’s eyes. “But that was only being afraid at leaving home, as any child would be; I am not sorry for it now, at all, and I would not give up the Corps for anything.”

He soon made his good-nights and escaped again, leaving Laurence to the rueful consideration that the cold and open hostility of his father might yet be preferable to a welcome so anxious and smothering.

One of the footmen tapped at the door to valet Laurence, directly Ferris had gone: but he had nothing to do; Laurence had grown so used to doing for himself, that his coat was already off, and his boots in the corner, although he was glad enough to send those for blacking.

He had been abed scarcely a quarter-of-an-hour before he was roused again, by a great clamor of barking from the kennels and the horses shrilling madly. He went to the window: lights were coming on in the distant stables, and he heard a thin faint whistling somewhere aloft, carrying clear from a distance. “Bring my boots at once, if you please; and tell the household to remain within doors,” Laurence told the footman, who came hurrying at his ring.

He went down in some disarray, still tying his neckcloth, the flare in his hand. “Clear away, there,” he called strongly, some number of the servants gathered in the open court before the house. “Clear away: the dragons will need room to land.”

This intelligence left the courtyard empty. Ferris was already hurrying out, with his own signal-flare and a candle; he knelt down to set off the blue light, which went hissing up into the air and burst high. The night was clear, and the moon only a thin slice; almost at once the whistling came again, louder: Gherni’s high ringing voice, and she came down to them in a rustle of wings.

“Henry, is that your dragon? Where do you all sit?” said Captain Ferris, coming down the stairs cautiously. Gherni, whose head did not come up to the second-story windows, indeed would have been hard-pressed to carry more than four or five men. While no dragon could precisely be called charming, her blue-and-white china complexion was elegant, and the dark softened the edges of her claws and teeth into a less threatening shape. Laurence was heartened that some other few of the party, still dressed more or less, had gathered on the stoop to see her.

She cocked her head at the question and said something inquiringly in the dragon-tongue, quite incomprehensible to them all, then sat up on her hind legs to call out a piercing answer to some cry which only she had heard.

Temeraire’s more resonant voice became audible to them all, answering, and he came down into the wide lawn behind her: the lamps gleaming on his obsidian-glossy scales in their thousands, and his shivering wings kicking up a spray of dust and small pebbles, which rattled against the walls like small-shot. He curved down his head from its great serpentine height, well clear of the roof of the house. “Hurry, Laurence, pray,” he said. “A courier came and dropped a message to tell us there is a Fleur-de-Nuit bothering the ships off Boulogne. I have sent Arkady and the others to chase him away, but I do not trust them to mind without me there.”

“No indeed,” Laurence said, and turned only to shake Captain Ferris’s hand; but there was no sign of him, or of any living soul but Ferris and Gherni: the doors had been shut up tight, and the windows all were close-shuttered before they lifted away.

“Well, we are in for it, make no mistake,” Jane said, having taken his report in Temeraire’s clearing: the first skirmish off Weymouth and the nuisance of chasing away the Fleur-de-Nuit, and besides those another alarm which had roused them, after a few more hours of snatched sleep; and quite unnecessarily, for they arrived only in time, at the edge of dawn, to catch sight of a single French courier vanishing off over the horizon, chased by the orange gouts of cannon-fire from the fearsome shore battery which had lately been established at Plymouth.

“These were none of them real attacks,” Laurence said. “Even that skirmish, though they provoked it. If they had worsted us, they could not have stayed to take any advantage of it, not such small dragons; not if they wished to get themselves home again before they were forced to collapse on shore.”

He had given his men leave to snatch some sleep on the way back, and his own eyes had closed once or twice during the flight, but that was nothing to seeing Temeraire almost grey with fatigue, his wings tucked limply against his back.

“No; they are probing our defenses, and more aggressively than I had looked for,” Jane said. “I am afraid they have grown suspicious. They chased you into Scotland without hide nor wing of another dragon to be seen: the French are not fools to overlook something like that, however badly it ended for them. If any one of those beasts gets into the countryside and flies over the quarantine-coverts, the game will be up: they will know they have free rein.”

“How have you kept them from growing suspicious before?” Laurence said. “Surely they must have noted the absence of our patrols.”

“We have managed to disguise the situation, so far, by sending out the sick for short patrols, on clear days when they can be seen for a good distance,” Jane said. “A good many of them can still fly, and even fight for a while, although none of them can stand up to a long journey: they tire too easily, and they feel the cold more than they should; they complain of their bones aching, and the winter has only made matters worse.”

“Oh! If they are laying upon the ground, I am not surprised they do not feel well,” Temeraire said, rousing, and lifting up his head. “Of course they feel the cold; I feel it myself, when the ground is so hard and frozen, and I am not sick at all.”

“Dear fellow,” Jane said, “I would make it summer again if I could; but there is nowhere else for them to sleep.”

“They must have pavilions,” Temeraire said.

“Pavilions?” Jane said, and Laurence went into his small sea-chest and brought out to her the thick packet which had come with them all the way from China, wrapped many times over with oilcloth and twine, the outer layers stained nearly black, the inner still pale, until he came to the thin fine rice paper inside, with the plans for the dragon pavilion laid out upon them.

“Just see if the Admiralty will pay for such a thing,” Jane said dryly, but she looked the designs over with a thoughtful more than a critical eye. “It is a clever arrangement, and I dare say it would make them a damned sight more comfortable than lying on damp ground; I do hear the ones at Loch Laggan do better, where they have the heat from the baths underground, and the Longwings who are quartered in the sand-pits have held up better, though they do not like it in the least.”

“I am sure that if only they had the pavilions, and some more appetizing food to eat, they would soon get better; I did not like to eat at all, when I had my cold, until the Chinese cooked for me,” Temeraire said.

“I will second that,” Laurence said. “He scarcely ate at all before; Keynes was of the opinion the strength of spices compensated, to some part, for the inability to smell or taste.”

“Well, for that, any rate, I can squeeze out a few guineas here and there and manage a trial; we have certainly not been spending half of what we ordinarily would in powder,” Jane said. “It will not do for very long, not if we are to feed two hundred dragons spiced meals, and where I am to get cooks to manage it I have no idea, but if we see some improvement, we may have some better luck in persuading their Lordships to carry the project forward.”

Chapter 4

GONG SU WAS ENLISTED in the cause, and all but emptied his spice cabinets, making especially vigorous use of his sharpest peppers; much to the intense disapproval of the herdsmen, who were rousted from a post usually requiring little more than dragging cows from pen to slaughter, and set to stirring pungent cauldrons. The effect was a marked one, the dragons’ appetites more startled awake than coaxed, and many of the nearly somnolent beasts began clamoring with fresh hunger. The spices were not easily replaced, however, and Gong Su shook his head with dissatisfaction over what the Dover merchants could provide; the cost even of this astronomical.

“Laurence,” Jane said, having called him to her quarters for dinner, “I hope you will forgive me for serving you a shabby trick: I mean to send you to plead our case.

I do not like to leave Excidium for long now, and I cannot take him over London sneezing as he does. We can manage a couple of patrols here, while you are gone, and make it a rest for Temeraire: he needs one in any case. What? No, thank Heaven, that fellow Barham who gave you so much difficulty is out. Grenville has the place now; not a bad fellow, so far as I can tell; if he does not understand the least thing about dragons, that hardly makes him unique.”

“And I will say, privately, in your ear,” she added, later that evening, reaching over for the glass of wine by the bed and settling back against his arm; Laurence lying back thoroughly breathless with his eyes half-closed, the sweat still standing on his shoulders, “that I would not hazard two pins for my chances of persuading him to anything. He yielded to Powys in the end, over my appointment, but he can scarcely bear to address a note to me; and the truth is I have made use of his mortification to squeak through half-a-dozen orders I have not quite the authority for, which I am sure he would have liked to object to, if he could do so without summoning me. Our chances are precious small to begin, and we will do a good deal better with you there.”

It did not prove the case, however; because Jane, at least, could scarcely have been refused admittance by one of the secretaries of the Navy: a tall, thin, officious fellow, who said impatiently, “Yes, yes, I have your numbers written in front of me; and in any case you may be sure we have taken note of the higher requisitions of cattle. But have any of them recovered? You say nothing of it. How many can fly now that could not before, and how long?”—as if, Laurence felt resentfully, he were inquiring about the improved performance of a ship, given changes in her cordage or sailcloth.

“The surgeons are of the opinion, that with these measures we can hope to greatly retard the further progress of the illness,” Laurence said; he could not claim that any had recovered. “Which alone must be of material benefit, and perhaps with these pavilions also—”

The secretary was shaking his head. “If they will do no better than now, I cannot give you any encouragement: we must still build these shore batteries all along the coastline, and if you imagine dragons are expensive, you have not seen the cost of guns.”

“All the more reason to care for the dragons we have, and spend a little more to safeguard their remaining strength,” Laurence said. His frustration added, “And especially so, sir, that it is no more than their just deserts from us, for their service; these are thinking creatures, not cavalry-horses.”

“Oh; romantical notions,” the secretary said, dismissive. “Very well, Captain; I regret to inform you his Lordship is occupied to-day. We have your report; you may be sure he will reply to it, when he has time. I can give you an appointment next week, perhaps.”

Laurence with difficulty restrained himself from replying to this incivility as he felt it deserved; and went out feeling he had been a far worse messenger than Jane herself would have been. His spirits were not to be recovered even by the treat of catching a glimpse of the lately created Duke of Nelson in the courtyard: that gentleman splendid in his dress uniform and his peculiar row of misshapen medals. They had been half-melted to the skin at Trafalgar, when a pass by the Spanish fire-breather there had caught his flagship, and his life nearly despaired of from the dreadful burns. Laurence was glad to see him so recovered: a line of pink scarred skin was visible upon his jaw, running down his throat into the high collar of his coat, but this did not deter him from talking energetically with, or rather to, a small group of attentive officers, his one arm gesturing.

A crowd had collected at a respectful distance to overhear, placed so that Laurence had to push his way out to the street through them, making apologies muttered as softly as he could; he might have stayed to listen, himself, another time. At present he had to make his way through the streets, a thick dark slurry of half-frozen ice and muck chilling his boots, back to the London covert, where Temeraire was waiting anxiously to receive the unhappy news.

“But surely there must be some means of reaching him,” Temeraire said. “I cannot bear that our friends should all grow worse, when we have so easy a remedy at hand.”

“We will have to manage on what we can afford within the current bounds, and stretch that little out,” Laurence said. “But some effect may be produced by the searing of the meat alone, or stewing; let us not despair, my dear, but hope that Gong Su’s ingenuity may yet find some answer.”

“I do not suppose this Grenville eats raw beef every night, with the hide still on, and no salt; and then goes to sleep on the ground,” Temeraire said resentfully. “I should like to see him try it a week and then refuse us.” His tail was lashing dangerously at the already-denuded tree-tops around the edge of the clearing.

Laurence did not suppose it, either: and it occurred to him that the First Lord might very likely dine from home. He called to Emily for paper, and wrote quickly several notes; the season was not yet begun, but he had a dozen acquaintances likely to be already in town in advance of the opening of Parliament, besides his family. “There is very little chance I will be able to catch him,” he warned Temeraire, to forestall raising hopes only to be dashed, “and still less that he will listen to me, if I do.”

He could not wish whole-heartedly for success, either; he did not think he could easily sustain his temper, in his present mood, against still more of the casual and unthinking insult he was likely to meet in his aviator’s coat, and any social occasion promised to be rather a punishment than a pleasure. But an hour before dinner, he received a reply from an old shipmate from the gunroom of the Leander, long since made post and now a member himself, who expected to meet Grenville that night at Lady Wrightley’s ball: that lady being one of his mother’s intimates.

There was a sad and absurd crush of carriages outside the great house: a blind obstinacy on the part of two of the coach drivers, neither willing to give way, had locked the narrow lane into an impasse so that no one else could move. Laurence was glad to have resorted to an old-fashioned sedan-chair, even if he had done so for the practical difficulties in getting a horse-drawn carriage anywhere near the covert. He reached the steps un-spattered, and if his coat was green, at least it was new, and properly cut; his linen was beyond reproach, and his knee-breeches and stockings crisply white, so he felt he need not blush for his appearance.

He gave in his card and was presented to his hostess, a lady he had met in person only once before, at one of his mother’s dinners. “Pray how does your mother; I suppose she has gone to the country?” Lady Wrightley said, perfunctorily giving him her hand. “Lord Wrightley, this is Captain William Laurence, Lord Allendale’s son.”

A gentleman just lately entered was standing beside Lord Wrightley, still speaking with him; he startled at overhearing the introduction, and turning insisted on being presented to Laurence as a Mr. Broughton, from the Foreign Office.

Broughton at once seized on Laurence’s hand with great enthusiasm. “Captain Laurence, you must permit me to congratulate you,” he said. “Or Your Highness, as I suppose we must address you now, ha ha!” and Laurence’s hurried, “I beg you will not—” went thoroughly ignored as Lady Wrightley, astonished as she might justly be, demanded an explanation. “Why, you have a prince of China at your party, I will have you know, ma’am. The most complete stroke, Captain, the most complete stroke imaginable. We have had it all from Hammond: his letter has been worn to rags in our offices, and we go about wreathed in delight, and tell one another of it only to have the pleasure of saying it over again. How Bonaparte must be gnashing his teeth!”

“It was nothing to do with me, sir, I assure you,” Laurence said with despair. “It was all Mr. Hammond’s doing—a mere formality—” too late: Broughton was already regaling Lady Wrightley and half-a-dozen other interested parties with a representation both colorful and highly inaccurate of Laurence’s adoption by the emperor, which had been nothing more in truth than a means of saving face. The Chinese had required the excuse to give their official imprimatur to Laurence serving as companion to a Celestial dragon, a privilege reserved, among them, solely for the Imperial family, and Laurence was quite sure the Chinese had happily forgotten his existence the moment he had departed: he had not entertained the least notion of trading upon the adoption now he was got home.

As the brangle of carriages outside had stifled the flow of newcomers, there was a lull in the party, still in its early hours, which made everyone very willing to hear the exotic story; if in any case its success would not have been guaranteed by the fairy-tale coloration which it had acquired. Laurence thus found himself the interested subject of much attention, and Lady Wrightley herself was by no means unwilling to claim Laurence’s attendance as a coup rather than a favor done an old friend.

He would have liked to go, at once; but Grenville had not yet come, and so he clenched his teeth and bore the embarrassment of being presented around the room. “No, I am by no means in the line of succession,” he said, over and over, privately thinking he would like to see the reaction of the Chinese to the suggestion; he had been made to feel an unlettered savage more than once, among them.

He had not expected to dance; society was perennially uncertain whether aviators were entirely respectable, and he did not mean to blight some girl’s chances, nor open himself to the unpleasant experience of being fended off by a chaperone. But before the first dance, his hostess presented him deliberately to one of her guests, as an eligible partner; so even though much surprised he of course had to ask. Miss Lucas was perhaps in her second season, or her third; a plump attractive girl, still very ready to be delighted with a ball, and full of easy, cheerful conversation.

“How well you dance!” she said, after they had gone down the line together, with rather more surprise than would have made the remark perfectly complimentary, and asked a great many questions about the Chinese court which he could not answer: the ladies had been kept thoroughly sequestered from their view. He entertained her a little instead with the description of a theatrical performance, but as he had been stabbed at the end of it, his memory was imperfect; and in any case it had been carried on in Chinese.

She in turn told him a great deal of her family in Hertfordshire, and her tribulations with the harp, so he might express the hope of one day hearing her play, and mentioned her next younger sister coming out next season. So she was nineteen, he surmised; and was struck abruptly to realize that Catherine Harcourt at this age had been already Lily’s captain, and had flown that year in the battle of Dover. He looked at the smiling muslin-clad girl with a strange hollow feeling of astonishment, as if she were not entirely real; and then looked away. He had written already two letters each to Harcourt and to Berkley, on Temeraire’s behalf and his own; but no answer had come. He knew nothing of how they did, or their dragons.

He said something polite afterwards, returning her to her mother, and, having displayed himself in public a satisfactory partner, was forced to submit with rigid good manners to filling out one set after another; until at last near eleven o’clock Grenville came in, with a small party of gentlemen.

“I am expected in Dover tomorrow, sir, or would not trouble you here,” Laurence said grimly, having approached him; he loathed the necessity of anything like encroachment, and if he had not been introduced to Grenville at least the once, many years before, did not know he could have steeled himself to it.

“Laurence, yes,” Grenville said vaguely, looking as though he would have liked to move away. He was no great politician: his brother was Prime Minister, and he had been made First Lord for loyalty, not for brilliance or ambition. He listened without enthusiasm to the carefully couched proposals, which Laurence was forced to make general for the benefit of the interested audience, who were not to know of the epidemic: there would be no concealing such information from the enemy, once the general public was in possession of it.

“There is provision made,” Laurence said, “for the relics of the slain, and for the sick and wounded; not least because that care may preserve them or their offspring for future service, and give encouragement to the healthy. The plan which has been advanced is for nothing more than such practical attentions, sir, which have been proven beneficial by the example of the Chinese, whom all the world acknowledge as first in the world, so far as an understanding of dragonkind.”

“Of course, of course,” Grenville said. “The comfort and welfare of our brave sailors or aviators, and even our good beasts, is always foremost in the considerations of the admiralty,” a meaningless platitude, to one who had ever visited in a hospital; or had, as Laurence, been forced to subsist from time to time upon such provisions as were considered suitable for the consumption of those brave sailors: rotting meat, biscuit-and-weevil, the vinegar-water beverage which passed for wine. He had been applied to for support by veterans of his own crews or their widows, denied their pensions on scurrilous grounds, on too many occasions to find such a claim other than absurd.

“May I hope, then, sir,” Laurence said, “that you approve our proceeding in this course?” An open avowal, which could not be easily retracted without embarrassment, was what he hoped for; but Grenville was too slippery, and without openly refusing, evaded any commitment.

“We must consider the particulars of these proposals, Captain, more extensively; before anything can be done,” he said. “The opinions of our best medical men must be consulted,” and so on and so forth, continuing without a pause in this vein until he was able to turn to another gentleman of his acquaintance, who had come up, and address him on another subject: a clear dismissal, and Laurence knew very well that nothing would be done.

He limped back into the covert in the early hours of the morning, a faint lightness just beginning to show. Temeraire lay fast asleep and dreaming with his slit-pupiled eyes half-lidded, his tail twitching idly back and forth, while the crew had disposed of themselves in the barracks or tucked against his sides: likely the warmer sleeping place, if less dignified. Laurence went into the small cottage provided for his use and gladly sank upon the bed to work off, wincing, the tight buckled shoes, still new and stiff, which had cut sadly into his feet.

The morning was a silent one; besides the failure of the attempt, which had somehow been communicated generally throughout the covert, although Laurence had told no one directly but Temeraire, he had given a general furlough the previous night. Judging by the evidence of their bloodshot eyes and wan faces, the crew had made good use of their leave. There was a certain degree of clumsiness and fatigue apparent, and Laurence watched anxiously as the large pots of oat-porridge were maneuvered off the fire, to break their fast.

Temeraire meanwhile finished picking his teeth with a large leg bone, the remnant of his own breakfast of tender veal stewed with onions, and set it down. “Laurence, do you still mean to build the one pavilion, even if the Admiralty will give us no funds?”

“I do,” Laurence answered. Most aviators acquired only a little prize-money, as the Admiralty paid but little for the capture of a dragon compared to that of a ship, the former being less easily put to use than the latter, and requiring substantial expense in the upkeep, but Laurence had established a handsome capital while still a naval officer, upon which he had little charge, his pay being ordinarily sufficient to his needs. “I must consult with the tradesmen, but I hope that by economizing upon the materials and reducing the pavilion in size, I may afford to construct one for you.”

“Then,” Temeraire said, with a determined and heroic air, “I have been thinking: pray let us build in the quarantine-grounds instead. I do not much mind my clearing at Dover, and I had rather Maximus and Lily were more comfortable.”

Laurence was surprised; generosity was not a trait common amongst dragons, who were rather jealous of anything which they considered their own property, and a mark of status. “If you are quite certain, my dear; it is a noble thought.”

Temeraire toyed with the leg-bone and did not look entirely certain, but eventually made his assent final. “And in any case,” he added, “once we have built it, perhaps the Admiralty will see the benefit, and then I may have a handsomer one: it would not be very pleasant to have a small poky one, when everyone else has a nicer.” This thought cheered him considerably, and he crunched up the bone with satisfaction.

Revived with strong tea and breakfast, the crew began to get Temeraire under harness for the return to Dover, only a little slowly; Ferris taking especial pains to see that the buckles were all secure after Laurence dropped a quiet word in his ear. “Sir,” Dyer said, as he and Emily came in from the covert gates with the post for Dover, which they would carry with them, “there are some gentlemen coming,” and Temeraire raised his head from the ground as Lord Allendale came into the covert with a small, slight, and plainly dressed gentleman at his side.

Their progress was arrested at once, while they stared up at the great inquisitive head peering back at them, Laurence very glad for the delay in which he could gather his own wits: he would scarcely have been more shocked to receive a visit from the King, and a good deal better pleased. He could imagine only one cause for it: more than one person of his parents’ acquaintance had been at the ball, and the news of the foreign adoption must have traveled to his father’s ears. Laurence knew very well he had given his father just cause to reproach him by having submitted to the adoption, whatever its political expedience; but he was by no means satisfied to endure those reproaches in front of his officers and his crew, aside from any practical consideration of what Temeraire’s reaction might be to seeing him abused.

He handed away his cup to Emily and gave his clothing a surreptitious look, devoutly grateful the morning was cold enough he had not been tempted to forgo coat or neckcloth. “I am honored to see you, sir; will you take tea?” he asked, crossing the clearing to shake his father’s hand.

“No, we have breakfasted,” Lord Allendale said abruptly, his eyes still fixed on Temeraire, and only with a jerk of effort turned away to present to Laurence his companion, Mr. Wilberforce: one of the great movers of the cause of abolition.

Laurence had only met the gentleman once, long before. Wilberforce’s face had settled into graver lines in the intervening decades, and now he looked anxiously up at Temeraire; but there was still something warm and good-humored about the mouth, a gentleness to his eyes, confirming that early generous impression which Laurence had carried away, if indeed his public works had not been testament enough. Twenty years of city air and incessant fighting had ruined his health, but not his character; parliamentary intrigue and the West Indies interests had undermined his work, but he had persevered; and besides his tireless labor against slavery, he had stood a resolute reformer all the while.

There was scarcely a man whose advice Laurence would more have desired, in furthering Temeraire’s cause; and if the circumstances had been other, and he had reached that rapprochement with his father, which he had hoped for, he would certainly have sought an introduction. The reverse, however, he could not understand; there was no reason his father should bring Wilberforce hence, unless perhaps he had some curiosity to encounter a dragon.

But the gentleman’s expression, looking on Temeraire, did not seem enthusiastic. “I myself would be very happy for a cup of tea, in quiet, perhaps?” he said, and after a certain hesitation yielded to the further question, “Is the beast quite tame?”

“I am not tame,” Temeraire said very indignantly, his hearing perfectly adequate to the task of overhearing this unwhispered exchange, “but I am certainly not going to hurt you, if that is what you are asking; you had much better be afraid of being stepped upon by a horse.” He knocked his tail against his side in irritation, nearly sweeping off a couple of the topmen engaged in pitching the traveling-tent upon his back, and so gave himself the lie even as he spoke. His audience was sufficiently distracted by his remarks not to notice this nice point, however.

“It is most wonderful,” Mr. Wilberforce said, after conversing with him a little longer, “to discover such excellent understanding in a creature so far removed from ourselves; one might call it even miraculous. But I see that you are making ready to depart; so I will beg your pardon,” he bowed to Temeraire, “and yours, Captain, for so indelicately moving to the subject which has brought us here, to seek your assistance.”

“I hope you will speak as frankly as you like, sir,” Laurence said, and begged them to sit down, with many apologies for the situation: Emily and Dyer had dragged chairs out of the cabin for their use, as that building was hardly fit for receiving guests, and arranged them near the embers of the cooking-fire for warmth.

“I wish to be clear,” Wilberforce began, “that no-one could be insensible of the service which his Grace has rendered his country, or begrudge him the just rewards of that service, and the respect of the common man—”

“You might better say, the blind adoration of the common man,” Lord Allendale put in, with more heavy disapproval. “And some not so common, who have less excuse; it is appalling to see the influence the man has upon the Lords. Every day he is not at sea is a fresh disaster,” and Laurence gathered, after a few moments more of confusion, that they were speaking of none other than Lord Nelson himself.

“Forgive me; we have spoken so much of these matters, among ourselves, that we go too quickly.” Wilberforce drew a hand over his jaw, rubbing down his jowls. “I believe you know something already,” he said, “of the difficulties which we have encountered, in our attempts to abolish the trade.”

“I do,” Laurence said: twice already, victory had seemed in reach. Early in the struggle, the House of Lords had held up a resolution already past the Commons, with some excuse of examining witnesses. On another attempt, a bill had indeed gone through, but only after amendments had changed abolition to gradual abolition: so gradual indeed that there were no signs of it as yet to be seen, fifteen years later. The Terror in France had by that time been making a bloody ruin of the word liberty, and putting into the hands of the slave traders the choice name of Jacobin to be leveled against abolitionists; no further progress had been made, for many years.

“But in this last session,” Wilberforce said, “we were on the verge of achieving a vital measure: an act which should have barred all new ships from the slave trade. It ought to have passed; we had the votes in our grasp—then Nelson came from the countryside. He had but lately risen from his sickbed; he chose to address Parliament upon the subject, and by the vigor of his opposition alone caused the measure to fail in the Lords.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” Laurence said, if not surprised: Nelson’s views had been pronounced in public, often enough. Like many a naval officer, he thought slavery, if an evil, also a necessary one, as a nursery for her sailors and a foundation of her trade; the abolitionists a cohort of enthusiasts and quixotics, bent on undermining England’s maritime power and threatening her hold upon her colonies, while only that domination allowed her to hold fast against the looming threat of Napoleon.

“Very sorry,” Laurence continued, “but I do not know what use I can be to you; I cannot claim any personal acquaintance, which might give me the right to try and persuade him—”

“No, no; we have no such hope,” Wilberforce said. “He has expressed himself too decidedly upon the subject; also many of his great friends, and sadly his creditors, are slave-owners or involved with the trade. I am sorry to say such considerations may lead astray even the best and wisest of men.”

They sought rather, he explained, while Lord Allendale looked morose and reluctant, to offer the public a rival for their interest and admiration; and Laurence gradually understood through circular approaches that they meant him for this figure, on the foundation of his recent and exotic expedition, and the very adoption which he had expected his father to condemn.

“To the natural interest which the public will have, in your late adventure,” Wilberforce said, “you join the authority of a military officer, who has fought against Napoleon himself in the field; your voice can dispute Nelson’s assertions, that the end of the trade should be the ruin of the nation.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, not certain if he was sorrier to be disobliging Mr. Wilberforce, or happier to be forced to refuse such an undertaking, “I hope you will not think me lacking in respect or conviction, but I am in no way fitted for such a role; and could not agree, if I wished to. I am a serving-officer; my time is not my own.”

“But here you are in London,” Wilberforce pointed out gently, “and surely, while you are stationed at the Channel, can on occasion be spared,” a supposition which Laurence could not easily contradict, without betraying the secret of the epidemic, presently confined to the Corps and only the most senior officials of the Admiralty. “I know it cannot be a comfortable proposal, Captain, but we are engaged in God’s work; we ought not scruple to use any tool which He has put into our way, in this cause.”

“For Heaven’s sake, you will have nothing to do but attend a dinner party, perhaps a few more; kindly do not cavil at trifles,” Lord Allendale said brusquely, tapping his fingers upon the arm of his chair. “Of course one cannot like this self-puffery, but you have tolerated far worse indignities, and made far greater a spectacle of yourself, than you are asked to do at present: last night, if you like—”

“You needn’t speak so to Laurence,” Temeraire interrupted coldly, giving the gentlemen both a start: they had already forgotten to look up and see him listening to all their conversation. “We have chased the French off four times this last week, and flown nine patrols; we are very tired, and we have only come to London because our friends are sick: and left to starve, and die in the cold; because the Admiralty will do nothing to make them more comfortable.”

He finished stormily, a low threatening resonance building in his throat, the instinctive action of the divine wind operating; it lingered as an echo, when he had already stopped speaking. No one spoke for a moment, and then Wilberforce said thoughtfully, “It seems to me we need not be at cross-purposes; and we may advance your cause, Captain, with our own.”

They had meant, it seemed, to launch him with some social event, the dinner-party Lord Allendale had mentioned, or perhaps even a ball; which Wilberforce now proposed instead to make a subscription-party, “whose avowed purpose,” he explained, “will be to raise funds for sick and wounded dragons, veterans of Trafalgar and Dover—there are such veterans, among the sick?” he asked.

“There are,” Laurence said; he did not say, all of them: all but Temeraire himself.

Wilberforce nodded. “Those are yet names to conjure with, in these dark days,” he said, “when we see Napoleon’s star ascendant over the Continent; and will give still further emphasis, to your being also a hero of the nation, and make your words a better counterweight to Nelson’s.”

Laurence could scarcely bear to hear himself so described; and in comparison with Nelson, who had led four great fleet actions, destroyed all Napoleon’s navy, established Britain’s complete primacy at sea; who had justly won a ducal coronet by valor and deeds in honorable battle, not been made a foreign prince through subterfuge and political machination. “Sir,” he said, with an effort restraining himself from a truly violent rejection, “I must beg you not to speak so; there can be no just comparison.”

“No, indeed,” Temeraire said energetically. “I do not think much of this Nelson, if he has anything to say for slavery: I am sure he cannot be half so nice as Laurence, no matter how many battles he has won. I have never seen anything as dreadful as those poor slaves in Cape Coast; and I am very glad if we can help them, as well as our friends.”

“And this, from a dragon,” Wilberforce said, with great satisfaction, while Laurence was made mute by dismay. “What man can refuse to feel pity for those wretched souls, when it may be stirred in such a breast? Indeed,” he said, turning to Lord Allendale, “we ought to hold the assembly here where we sit. I am certain it will answer all the better, so far as producing a great sensation, and moreover,” he added, with a glint of humor in his eye, “I should like to see the gentleman who will refuse to consider an argument made to him by a dragon, with that dragon standing before him.”

“Out of doors, at this season?” Lord Allendale said.

“We might organize it like the pavilion-dinners in China: long tables, with coal-pits underneath to make them warm,” Temeraire suggested, entering with enthusiasm into the spirit of the thing, while Laurence could only listen with increasing desperation as his fate was sealed. “We will have to knock down some trees to make room, but I can do that very easily, and if we were to hang panels of silk from the remainder, it will seem quite like a pavilion, and keep warm besides.”

“An excellent notion,” Wilberforce said, leaving his chair to inspect the scratched diagrams which Temeraire was making in the dirt. “It will have an Oriental flavor, exactly what is needed.”

“Well, if you think it so; all I can say in its favor, it will certainly be the nine-days’ wonder of society, whether more than half-a-dozen curiosity-seekers come or not,” Lord Allendale said.

“We can spare you for one night, now and again,” Jane said, sinking Laurence’s final hopes of escape. “Our intelligence is nothing to brag about, now we have no couriers to risk on spy-missions; but the Navy do a good business with the French fishermen, on the blockade, and they say there has yet been no movement to the coast. They might be lying, of course,” she added, “but if there were a marked shift in numbers, the prices of the catch would have risen, with livestock going to dragons.”

The maid brought in the tea, and she poured for him. “Do not I beg you repine too much upon it,” Jane went on, meaning the Admiralty’s refusal to give them more funds. “Perhaps this party of yours will do us some good in that quarter, and Powys has written me to say he has cobbled together something for us already, by subscription among the retired senior officers. It will not do for anything extravagant, but I think we can keep the poor creatures in pepper, at least until then.”

In the meanwhile, they set about the experimental pavilion: the promise of so substantial a commission proved enough to tempt a handful of more intrepid tradesmen to the Dover covert. Having met them at the gates, with a party of crewmen, Laurence escorted them the rest of the way to Temeraire, who in an attempt to be unalarming hunched himself down as small as a dragon of some eighteen tons could manage, and nearly flattened his ruff down against his neck. Yet he could not help but insinuate himself into the conversation once the construction of the pavilion was well under discussion, and indeed his offerings were quite necessary, as Laurence had not the faintest notion how to convert the Chinese measurements.

“I want one!” Iskierka said, having overheard too much of the proceedings from her nearby clearing: heedless of Granby’s protests, she squirmed herself through the trees into Temeraire’s clearing, shaking off a blizzard of ash-flakes, and alarming the poor tradesmen very much with a hiccough of fire which sent steam shooting out her spines to clear them. “I want to sleep in a pavilion, too: I do not like this cold dirt at all.”

“Well, you cannot have one,” Temeraire said. “This is for our sick friends, and anyway you have no capital.”

“Then I shall get some,” she declared. “Where does one get capital, and what does it look like?”

Temeraire proudly rubbed his breastplate of platinum and pearl. “This is a piece of capital,” he said, “and Laurence gave it me: he got it from taking a ship in a battle.”

“Oh! that is very easy,” Iskierka said. “Granby, let us go get a ship, and then I may have a pavilion.”

“Lord, you cannot have anything of the sort, do not be silly,” Granby said, nodding his rueful apologies to Laurence as he came into the clearing, along the trail of smashed branches and crushed hedge which she had left in her wake. “You would burn it up in an instant: the thing is made of wood.”

“Can it be made of stone?” she demanded, swinging her head around to one of the wide-eyed tradesmen. She was not grown very large, despite the twelve feet in length she had acquired since settling at Dover with a steady diet, being rather sinuous than bulky, in the Kazilik style, and she yet looked little more than a garden-snake next to Temeraire. But her appearance at close quarters was by no means reassuring, with the hissing-kettle gurgle of whatever internal mechanism produced her fire plainly audible and the vents of hot air issuing from her spines, white and impressive in the cold.

No one answered her, except the elderly architect, a Mr. Royle. “Stone? No, I must advise against it. Brick will be a much more practical construction,” he opined; he had not looked up from the papers since being handed them, so badly nearsighted he was inspecting the plans with a jeweler’s loupe, an inch from his watery blue eyes, and could most likely not make either dragon out in the least. “Silly oriental stuff, this roof, do you insist on having it so?”

“It is not silly oriental stuff at all,” Temeraire said, “it is very elegant: that design is my mother’s own pavilion, and it is in the best fashion.”

“You will need linkboys on it all winter long to brush the snow clear, and I will not give a brass farthing for the gutters after two seasons,” Royle said. “A good slate roof, that is the thing, do you not agree with me, Mr. Cutter?”

Mr. Cutter had not the least opinion to offer, as he was backed to the trees and looked ready to bolt, if Laurence had not prudently stationed his ground crew around the border of the clearing to forestall just such panicked flight.

“I am very willing to be advised by you, sir, as to the best plan of construction, and the most reasonable,” Laurence said, while Royle blinked around himself looking for a response. “Temeraire, our climate here is a good deal wetter, and we must cut our cloth to suit our station.”

“Very well, I suppose,” Temeraire said, with a wistful eye for the upturned roof-corners and the brightly painted wood.

Iskierka meanwhile took inspiration, and began to plot the acquisition of capital. “If I burn up a ship, is that good enough, or must I bring it back?” she demanded, and began her piratical career by presenting Granby with a small fishing-boat, the next morning, which she had picked up from Dover harbor during the night. “Well, you did not say it must be a French ship,” she said crossly, to their recriminations, and curled up to sulk. Gherni was hastily recruited to replace it under cover of darkness, the following night, undoubtedly to the great puzzlement of its temporarily bereft owner.

“Laurence, do you suppose that we should be able to get more capital, by taking French ships,” Temeraire asked, with a thoughtfulness very alarming to Laurence, who had just returned from dealing with this pretty piece of confusion.

“The French ships-of-the-line are penned in their harbors by the Channel blockade, thank Heaven, and we are not privateers, to go plying the lanes for their shipping,” Laurence said. “Your life is too valuable to be risked in such a selfish endeavor; in any case, once you began to behave in such an undisciplined manner, you may be sure Arkady and his lot would follow your example at once, and leave all Britain undefended, not to mention the encouragement Iskierka would take.”

“Whatever am I to do with her?” Granby said, wearily taking a glass of wine with Laurence and Jane that evening, in the officers’ common room at the covert headquarters. “I suppose it is being dragged hither and yon in the shell, and all the fuss and excitement she has had; but that is no excuse forever. I must manage her somehow, and I am at a standstill. I would not be amazed to find the entire harbor set alight one morning, because she took it into her head that we would not have to sit about defending the city if it were all burnt up; I cannot even make her sit still long enough to get her under full harness.”

“Never mind; I will come by tomorrow, and see what I can do,” Jane said, pushing the bottle over to him again. “She is a little young for work, by all the authorities, but I think her energy had better be put to use than go in all this fretting. Have you chosen your lieutenants, Granby?”

“I will have Lithgow, for my first, if you’ve no objection, and Harper for a second, to act as captain of the riflemen also,” he said. “I don’t like to take too many men, when we don’t know what her growth will be like.”

“You do not like to turn them off later, you mean, when they like as not cannot get another post,” Jane said gently, “and I know it will be hard if it comes to that; but we cannot shortchange her, not with her so wild. Take Row also, as captain of the bellmen. He is old enough to retire if he must be turned off, and a good steady campaigner, who will not blink at her starts.”

Granby nodded a little, his head bowed, and the next morning Jane came to Iskierka’s clearing in great state, with all her medals and even her great plumed hat, which aviators scarcely wore, a gold-plated saber and pistols on her belt. Granby had assembled all his new crew, and they saluted her with a great noise of arms, Iskierka nearly coiling herself into knots with excitement, and the ferals and even Temeraire peering over the trees to watch with interest.

“Well, Iskierka: your captain tells me that you are ready for service,” Jane said, putting her hat under her arm to look sternly at the little Kazilik, “but what are these reports I hear of you, that you will not mind orders? We cannot send you into battle if you cannot follow orders.”

“Oh! it is not true!” Iskierka said. “I can follow orders as well as anyone, it is only no one will give me any good ones, and I am only told to sit, and not to fight, and to eat three times a day; I do not want any more stupid cows!” she added smolderingly; the ferals, hearing this translated for them by their own handful of officers, set up a low squabbling murmur of disbelief.

“It is not only the pleasant orders we must follow, but the tiresome ones as well,” Jane said, when the noise had died down. “Do you suppose Captain Granby likes to be forever sitting in this clearing, waiting for you to grow more settled? Perhaps he would rather go back to service with Temeraire, and have some fighting himself.”

Iskierka’s eyes went platter-wide, and she hissed from all her spikes like a furnace; in an instant she had thrown a pair of jealous coils around Granby, which bid fair to boil him like a lobster in steam. “He would not! You would not, at all, would you?” she appealed to him. “I will fight just as well as Temeraire, I promise; and I will even obey the stupidest orders; at least, if I may have some pleasant ones also,” she qualified hastily.

“I am sure she will mind better in future, sir,” Granby managed himself, coughing, his hair already plastered down soaking against his forehead and neck. “Pray don’t fret; I would never leave you, only I am getting wet,” he added plaintively, to her.

“Hm,” Jane said, with an air of frowning consideration. “Since Granby speaks for you, I suppose we will give you your chance,” she said, at last, “and here you may have your first orders, Captain, if she will let you come for them and, to be sure, stand still for her harness.”

Iskierka immediately let him loose and stretched herself out for the ground crew, only craning her neck a little to see the red-sealed and yellow-tasseled packet, a formality often dispensed with in the Corps, which directed them in very ornate and important language to do nothing more than run a quick hour’s patrol down to Guernsey and back. “And you may take her by that old heap of rubble left at Castle Cornet, where the gunpowder blew up the tower, and tell her it is a French outpost, so she may flame it from aloft,” Jane added to Granby, in an undertone not meant for Iskierka’s ears.

Iskierka’s harness was indeed a great deal of trouble to arrange, as the spines were placed quite randomly, and the frequent issuing of steam made her hide slick: an improvised collection of short straps and many buckles, wretchedly easy to tangle, and she could not entirely be blamed for growing tired of the process. But the promise of coming action and the observing crowd made her more patient; at length she was properly rigged out, and Granby with relief said, “There, it is quite secure; now try and see if you can shake any of it loose, dear one.”

She writhed and beat her wings quite satisfactorily, twisting herself this way and that to inspect the harness. “You are supposed to say, All lies well, if you are comfortable,” Temeraire whispered loudly to her, after she had been engaged in this sport for several minutes.

“Oh, I see,” she said, and settling again announced, “All lies well; now we shall go.”

In this way she was at least a little reformed; no one would have called her temper obliging, certainly, and she invariably stretched her patrols farther afield than Granby would have them, in hopes of meeting some enemy more challenging than an abandoned old fortification, or a couple of birds. “But at least she will take a little training, and eats properly, which I call a victory, for now,” Granby said. “And after all, as much a fright she gives us, she’ll give the Frogs a worse; Laurence, do you know, we talked to the fellows at Castle Cornet, and they set up a bit of sail for her: she can set it alight from eighty yards. Twice the range of a Flamme-de-Gloire, and she can go at it for five minutes straight; I don’t understand how she gets her breath while she is at it.”

They had indeed some trouble in keeping her out of direct combat, for meanwhile the French were continuing their harassment and scouting of the coast, with ever-increasing aggression. Jane used the sick dragons more heavily for patrol, to spare Temeraire and the ferals: they, instead, sat most of the day waiting on the cliffs for one warning flare or another to go up, or listening with pricked ears for the report of a signal-gun, before they dashed frantically to meet another incursion. In the space of two weeks, Temeraire skirmished four times more with small groups, and once Arkady and a few of his band, sent experimentally on patrol by themselves while Temeraire snatched a few more hours of sleep, just barely turned back a Pou-de-Ciel who had daringly tried to slip past the shore batteries at Dover, less than a mile from a clear view of the quarantine-grounds.

The ferals came back from their narrow but solitary victory delighted with themselves, and Jane with quick cleverness took the occasion to present Arkady ceremonially with a long length of chain: almost worthless, being made only of brass, with a large dinner-platter inscribed with his name for a medal, but polished to a fine golden shine and rendering Arkady for once speechless with amazement as it was fastened about his neck. For only a moment: then he burst forth in floods of caroling joy, and insisted on having every single one of his fellows inspect his prize; nor did Temeraire escape this fate. He indeed grew a little bristling, and withdrew in dignity to his own clearing to polish his breastplate more vigorously than usual.

“You cannot compare the two,” Laurence said cautiously, “it is only a trinket, to make him complacent, and encourage them in their efforts.”

“Oh, certainly,” Temeraire said, very haughty, “mine is much nicer; I do not in the least want anything so common as brass.” After a moment he added, muttering, “But his is very large.”

“Cheap at the price,” Jane said the next day, when Laurence came to report on a morning for once uneventful: the ferals more zealous than ever, and rather disappointed not to find more enemies than the reverse. “They come along handsomely: just as we had hoped.” But she spoke tiredly; looking into her face, Laurence poured her a small glass of brandy and brought it to her at the window, where she was standing to look out at the ferals, presently cavorting in mid-air over their clearing after their dinner. “Thank you, I will.” She took the glass, but did not drink at once. “Conterrenis has gone,” she said abruptly, “the first Longwing we have lost; it was a bloody business.”

She sat down all together, very heavily, and put her head forward. “He took a bad chill and suffered a haemorrhage in the lungs, the surgeons tell me. At any rate, he could not stop coughing, and so his acid came and came; it began at last to build up on the spurs, and sear his own skin. It laid his jaw bare to the bone.” She paused. “Gardenley shot him this morning.”

Laurence took the chair beside her, feeling wholly inadequate to the task of offering any comfort. After a little while she drank the brandy and set down her glass, and turned back to the maps to discuss the next day’s patrolling.

He went away from her ashamed of his dread of the party, now only a few days’ hence, and determined to put himself forward with no regard for his own mortification; if for the least chance of improving the conditions of the sick.

…and I hope you will permit me to suggest [Wilberforce wrote] that any oriental touch to your wardrobe, only a little one, which might at a glance set you apart, would be most useful. I am happy to report that we have engaged some Chinese as servants for the evening, by offering a good sum in the ports, where occasionally a few of them may be found having taken service on an East Indiaman. They are not properly trained, of course, but they will only be carrying dishes to and from the Kitchens, and we have instructed them most severely to show no alarm at being in the presence of the dragon, which I hope they have understood. However, I do have some Anxiety as to their comprehension of what faces them, and should you have enough liberty to come early, that we may try their Fortitude, it would be just as well.

Laurence did not indulge in sighs; he folded the letter, sent his Chinese coat to his tailors for refurbishment, and asked Jane her permission to go some hours earlier. In the event, the Chinese servants did set up a great commotion on their arrival, but only by leaving all their work and running to prostrate themselves before Temeraire, nearly throwing themselves beneath his feet in their efforts to make the show of respect generally considered due a Celestial, as symbolic of the Imperial family. The British workmen engaged in the final decoration of the covert were not nearly so complaisant, and vanished one and all, leaving the great panels of embroidered silk, surely made at vast expense, hanging half askew from the tree branches and dragging upon the earth.

Wilberforce exclaimed in dismay as he came to greet Laurence; but Temeraire issued instructions to the Chinese servants, who set to work with great energy, and with the assistance of the crew the covert was a handsome if astonishing sight in time to receive the guests, with brass lamps tied makeshift onto branches to stand in place of Chinese paper lanterns, and small coal-stoves placed at intervals along the tables.

“We may bring the business off, if only it will not come on to snow,” Lord Allendale said pessimistically, arriving early to inspect the arrangements. “It is a pity your mother could not be here,” he added, “but the child has not yet come, and she does not like to leave Elizabeth in her confinement,” referring to the wife of Laurence’s eldest brother, soon to present him with his fifth.

The night stayed clear, if cold, and the guests began to arrive in cautious dribs and drabs, keeping well away from Temeraire, who was ensconced in his clearing at the far end of the long tables, and peering at him not very surreptitiously through opera glasses. Laurence’s officers were all meanwhile standing by him, stiff and equally terrified in their best coats and trousers: all new, fortunately, Laurence having taken the trouble to direct his officers to the better tailors in Dover, and funding himself the necessary repairs which all their wardrobes had required after their long sojourn abroad.

Emily was the only one of them pleased, as she had acquired her first silk gown for the occasion, and if she tripped upon the hem a little she did not seem to mind, rather exultant in her kid gloves and a string of pearls, which Jane had bestowed upon her. “It is late enough in conscience for her to be learning how to manage skirts,” Jane said. “Do not fret, Laurence; I promise you no one will be suspicious. I have made a cake of myself in public a dozen times, and no one ever thought me an aviator for it. But if it gives you any comfort, you may tell them she is your niece.”

“I may do no such thing; my father will be there, and I assure you he is thoroughly aware of all his grandchildren,” Laurence said. He did not tell her that his father would immediately conclude Emily to be his own natural-born child, should he make such a false claim, but only privately decided he should keep Emily close by Temeraire’s side, where she would be little seen; he had been in no doubt that his guests would keep a very good distance, whatever persuasion Mr. Wilberforce intended to apply.

That persuasion, however, took the most undesirable form, Mr. Wilberforce saying, “Come; behold this young girl here who thinks nothing of standing in reach of the dragon. If you can permit yourself, madam, to be outdone by trained aviators, I hope you will not allow a child to outstrip you,” while Laurence with sinking heart observed his father turning to cast an astonished eye on Emily which confirmed all his worst fears.

Lord Allendale did not scruple, either, to approach and interrogate her; Emily, perfectly innocent of malice, answered in her clear girlish voice, “Oh, I have lessons every day, sir, from the captain, although it is Temeraire who gives me my mathematics, now, as Captain Laurence does not like the calculus. But I had rather practice fencing,” she added candidly, and looked a little uncertain when she found herself laughed over, and pronounced a dear, by the pair of society ladies who had been persuaded to venture close to the great table, by her example.

“A masterful stroke, Captain,” Wilberforce murmured softly; “wherever did you find her?” and did not wait for an answer before he accosted a few gentlemen who had risked coming near, and worked upon them in the same fashion, adding to his persuasions that if Lady So-and-So had approached Temeraire, surely they could not show themselves hesitant.

Temeraire was very interested in all the guests, particularly admiring the more bejeweled of the ladies, and managed by accident to please the Marchioness of Carstoke, a lady of advanced years and receded neckline whose bosom was concealed only by a vulgar set of emeralds-in-gold, by informing her she looked a good deal more the part, in his estimation, than the Queen of Prussia, whom he had only seen in traveling-clothes. Several gentlemen challenged him to perform simple sums; he blinked a little, and having given them the answers inquired whether this was a sort of game performed at parties, and whether he ought to offer them a mathematical problem in return.

“Dyer, pray bring me my sand-table,” he said, and when this was arranged, he sketched out with his claw a small diagram for purposes of setting them a question on the Pythagorean theorem, sufficient to baffle most of the attending gentlemen, whose own mathematical skills did not extend past the card-tables.

“But it is a very simple exercise,” Temeraire said in some confusion, wondering aloud to Laurence if he had missed some sort of joke, until at last a gentleman, a member of the Royal Society on a quest to observe for himself certain aspects of Celestial anatomy, was able to solve the puzzle.

When Temeraire had audibly spoken to the servants in Chinese, and conversed in fluent French with several of the guests, and had failed to eat or crush anyone, increasing fascination began at last to trump fear and draw more of the company towards him. Laurence shortly found himself quite neglected as of considerably less interest: a circumstance which would have delighted him, if only it had not left him subject to awkward conversation with his father, who inquired stiltedly about Emily’s mother: questions whose evasion would only have made Laurence seem the more guilty, and yet whose perfectly truthful answers, that Emily was the natural-born daughter of a Jane Roland, a gentlewoman living in Dover, and whose education he had taken as his charge, left entirely the wrong impression, which Laurence could no more correct than his father would outright ask.

“She is a pretty-behaved girl, for her station in life, and I hope she does not want for anything,” Lord Allendale said, in a sort of sidling way. “I am sure if there was any difficulty in finding her a respectable situation, when she is grown, your mother and I would be glad to be of assistance.”

Laurence did his best to make it clear that this handsome offer was unnecessary, in some desperation turning to a lie of omission, saying, “She has friends, sir, as must prevent her ever being in real distress; I believe there is already some arrangement made for her future.” He gave no details, and his father, his sense of propriety satisfied, did not inquire further; fortunate, as that arrangement, military service in the Corps, would hardly have recommended itself to Lord Allendale. The bleak notion came to Laurence only afterwards, that if Excidium were to die, Emily should have no dragon to inherit, and thus no assured post: though a handful of Longwing eggs were presently being tended at Loch Laggan, there were more women serving in the Corps than would be needed to satisfy these new hatchlings.

He made his escape, saying he saw Wilberforce beckoning him over; that gentleman indeed welcomed his company, if he had not immediately been soliciting it, and took hold of Laurence’s arm to guide him through the crowd, and introduce him to all his prodigious acquaintance, amongst the curiously mingled attendance. Many had come merely to be entertained, and for the sensation of seeing a dragon; or more honestly for the right to say they had done so: a substantial number of these being gentlemen of fashion, come already from heavy drinking, whose conversation would have made the noise impenetrable in a smaller space. Those ladies and gentlemen active in the abolition movement, or evangelical causes, were easily distinguished by their markedly more sober appearance, both in dress and mien; the tracts which they were giving out were ending largely upon the ground, and being trodden into the dirt.

There were also a great many patriots, whether from real feeling or the desire to attach their names to a subscription-list with the word Trafalgar upon it, as Wilberforce had arranged it should be published in the newspapers, and not inclined to be quibbling over whether those veterans were men or dragons. The political range was thoroughly represented, therefore, and more than one heated discussion had broken out, with the lubrications of liquor and enthusiasm. One stout and red-faced gentleman, identified by Wilberforce as a member from Bristol, was declaring to a pale and fervent young lady trying to give him a tract that “it is all nonsense; the passage is perfectly healthy, for it is in the interest of the traders to preserve their goods. It is as good a thing as ever will happen to a black, to be taken to a Christian land, where he may lose his heathen religion and be converted.”

“That is excellent grounds, sir, for importing the Gospel to Africa; it does less well to excuse the behavior of Christian men, in tearing away the Africans from their homes, for profit,” he was answered, not by the lady, but by a black gentleman, who had been standing a little behind her, and assisting her in giving out the pamphlets. A narrow, raised scar, the thickness of a leather strap, ran down the side of his face, and the edges of ridged bands of scar tissue protruded past the ends of his sleeves, paler pink against his very dark skin.

The gentleman from Bristol perhaps had not quite that brazen character which would have permitted him to defend the trade in the face of one of its victims. He chose rather to retreat behind an expression of offended hauteur at having been addressed without introduction, and would have turned aside without reply; but Wilberforce leaned forward and said with gentle malice, “Pray, Mr. Bathurst, allow me to present you the Reverend Josiah Erasmus, lately of Jamaica.” Erasmus bowed; Bathurst gave a short jerking nod, and cravenly quitted the field, with an excuse too muttered to be intelligible.

Erasmus was an evangelical minister, “And I hope a missionary, soon,” he added, shaking Laurence’s hand, “back to my native continent,” whence he had been taken, a boy of six years of age, to suffer through that aforementioned healthy passage, chained ankles and wrists to his neighbors, in a space scarcely large enough to lie down in.

“It was not at all pleasant to be chained,” Temeraire said, very low, when Erasmus had been presented him, “and I knew at least they would be taken off, when the storm had finished; anyway, I am sure I could have broken them.” Those chains of which he spoke, indeed, had been for his own protection, to keep him secured to the deck through a three-days’ typhoon; but the occasion had come close on the heels of his witnessing the brutal treatment of a party of slaves, at the port of Cape Coast, and had left an indelible impression.

Erasmus said simply, “So did some of our number; the fetters were not well made. But they had nowhere to go but to throw themselves on the mercy of the sharks: we had not wings to fly.”

He spoke without the rancor for which he might have been pardoned, and when Temeraire had expressed, darkly, the wish that the slavers might have been thrown overboard instead, Erasmus shook his head. “Evil should not be returned for evil,” he said. “Their judgment belongs to the Lord: my answer to their crimes will be to return to my fellows with the word of God. And I hope that the practice cannot long continue when we are all brothers in Christ, so that the slaver and his prey will both be saved.”

Temeraire was dubious of this most Christian speech, and after Erasmus had left them muttered, “I would not give a fig for the slavers, myself; and God ought to judge them more quickly,” a blasphemous remark which made Laurence blanch, lest Wilberforce should have overheard; but his attention was fortunately elsewhere at present, on a growing noise at the far end of the long clearing, where a crowd was gathering.

“I wonder he should have come,” Wilberforce said: it was Nelson himself, who had entered the clearing in the company of several friends, some of them naval officers of Laurence’s acquaintance, and was presently paying his respects to Lord Allendale. “Of course we did not omit an invitation, but I had no real expectation; perhaps because it was sent in your name. Forgive me, I will take myself off awhile; I am happy enough to have him come and lend his reflected glow to our party, but he has said too much in public for me to converse easily with him.”

Laurence was better pleased, for his own part, to find Nelson not offended in the least at whatever whispers and comparisons had been put about between them; that gentleman was rather as amiable as anyone could wish, offering his good hand. “William Laurence; you have gone a long way since we last met. I think we were at dinner together on the Vanguard in ninety-eight, before Aboukir Bay: how very long ago, and how short a time it seems!”

“Indeed, sir; and I am honored your Grace should remember,” Laurence said, and at his request rather anxiously took him back to be presented to Temeraire, adding, when Temeraire’s ruff ominously unfurled at the name, “I hope you will make his Grace most welcome, my dear; it is very kind of him to come and be our guest.”

Temeraire, never very tactful, was unfortunately not to be warned by so subtle a hint, and rather coldly asked, “What has happened to your medals? They are all quite misshapen.”

This, he certainly meant as a species of insult; however Nelson, who famously preferred only to win more glory, than to speak of what he already had gained, could not have been better pleased at the excuse to discuss the battle, told over so thoroughly by the public before ever he had risen from his injuries, with an audience for once innocent of the details. “Why, a rascal of a Spanish fire-breather gave us a little trouble, at Trafalgar, and they were caught in the flame,” he said, taking one of the ample number of vacant chairs at the table nearby, and arranging bread rolls for the ships.

Temeraire, growing interested despite himself, leaned in closely to observe their maneuvers on the cloth. Nelson did not flinch back in the least, though the onlookers who had gathered to observe took nearly all of them several steps back. He described the Spanish dragon’s passes with a fork and much lurid detail, and further rescued his character, in Temeraire’s eyes, by concluding, “And very sorry I am that we did not have you there: I am sure you should have had no trouble in running the creature off.”

“Well, I am sure, too,” Temeraire said candidly, and peered at the medals again with more admiration. “But would the Admiralty not give you fresh ones? That is not very handsome of them.”

“Why, I consider these a better badge of honor, dear creature, and I have not applied for replacement,” Nelson said. “Now, Laurence, do I recall correctly; can I possibly have read a report in the Gazette that this very dragon of yours lately sank a French ship, called the Valérie, I believe, and in a single pass?”

“Yes, sir; I believe Captain Riley of the Allegiance sent in his report, last year,” Laurence said uneasily; that report had rather understated the incident, and while he was proud of Temeraire’s ability, it was not the sort of thing he thought civilian guests would find reassuring; still less so should any of them learn that the French, too, now had their own Celestial, and that the same dreadful power might be turned against their own shipping.

“Astonishing; quite prodigious,” Nelson said. “What was she, a sloop-of-war?”

“A frigate, sir,” Laurence answered, even more reluctantly. “—forty-eight guns.”

There was a pause. “I cannot be sorry, although it was hard on the poor sailors,” Temeraire said, into the silence, “but it was not very noble of them, stealing upon us during the night, when their dragon could see in the dark and I could not.”

“Certainly,” Nelson said, over a certain murmur from the assembled company; he, having recovered from his surprise, had rather a quick martial gleam in his eye, “certainly; I congratulate you. I think I must have some conversation with the Admiralty, Captain, on your present station; you are on coastline duty at present, am I not correct? A waste; an unconscionable waste; you may be sure they will hear from me on the subject. Do you suppose he could manage as much on a ship-of-the-line?”

Laurence could not explain the impossibility of a change in their assignment without revealing the secret; so he answered a little vaguely, with gratitude for his Grace’s interest.

“Very clever,” Lord Allendale said grimly, in conference with them and Wilberforce, when Nelson had gone away again, nodding his farewells in the most affable manner to all who sought his attention. “I suppose we must consider it a badge of success that he should prefer to send you away.”

“Sir, I believe you are mistaken; I cannot allow his motives on this matter to be other than sincere, in wishing the best use made of Temeraire’s abilities,” Laurence said stiffly.

“It is very boring, always going up and down the coast,” Temeraire put in, “and I should much rather have some more interesting work, like fighting fire-breathers, if we were not needed where we are; but I suppose we must do our duty,” he finished, not a trifle wistfully, and turned his attention back to the other guests, who were all the more eager to speak with him now in imitation of Nelson’s example: the party most assuredly a success.

“Laurence, may we fly over the quarantine-grounds, as we go, and see how comes the pavilion?” Temeraire asked, the next morning, as they made ready for the flight back to Dover.

“It will not be very far advanced,” Laurence said; Temeraire’s ulterior motive, to look into the quarantine-grounds to see Maximus and Lily, was tolerably transparent: there had been no reply to the letters which Laurence had sent, either to them or to their captains, and Temeraire had begun to inquire after them with increasing impatience. Laurence feared Temeraire’s likely reaction to seeing them so reduced by illness as he supposed them to be, but could think of no very good reason with which to divert him.

“But I should like to see it in all its stages,” Temeraire said, “and if they have made any mistakes, we ought to correct it early, surely,” he finished triumphantly, with the air of having hit upon an unanswerable justification.

“Is there any reason to fear infection in the air?” Laurence asked Dorset quietly, aside. “Will there be a danger to flying over the grounds?”

“No, so long as he keeps a good distance from any of the sick beasts. It is certainly the phlegmatic humors which carry the infection. So long as he does not put himself directly in the way of a sneeze or a cough, I cannot think the danger substantial, not aloft,” Dorset said absently, without much consideration to the question, which did not fill Laurence with great confidence.

But he settled for extracting a promise that Temeraire should stay well aloft, where perhaps he might not see the worst of the ravages which had been inflicted on his friends, nor approach any dragon in the air.

“Of course I promise,” Temeraire said, adding, unconvincingly, “I only want to see the pavilion, after all; it is nothing to me if we see any other dragons.”

“You must be sure, my dear, or Mr. Dorset will not countenance our visit; we must not disturb the sick dragons, who require their rest,” Laurence said, resorting to stratagem, which at last won Temeraire’s sighs and agreement.

Laurence did not truly expect to see any dragons aloft; the ill beasts only rarely left the ground anymore, for the brief showy patrols which Jane continued to use to keep up their illusion of strength for the French. The day was cloudy and drear, and as they flew towards the coast, they met a thin misting of rain blowing in from the Channel; the exertion surely would not be asked of the sick dragons.

The quarantine-grounds were inland of Dover itself, the borders marked off by smoking torches and large red flags, planted into the ground: low deserted rolling meadows, the dragons scattered about with little cover even from the wind, which snapped all the flags out crisply and made them all huddle down small to escape. But as Temeraire drew near the proscribed territory, Laurence saw three specks, increasing rapidly into three dragons: aloft, and flying energetically, two on the heels of a much smaller third.

Temeraire said, “Laurence, that is Auctoritas and Caelifera, from Dover, I am sure of it, but I do not know that other little dragon at all; I have never seen one of that kind.”

“Oh, Hell, that is a Plein-Vite,” Ferris said, after a single borrowed look through Laurence’s glass. The three dragons were directly over the quarantine-grounds, and the great miserable hulks of other sick beasts were plainly visible for the French dragon to see, even through the mist, in all their bloodstained dirt. And already the two dragons who had attempted to halt her were falling off the pace and drooping earthwards, exhausted, as the tiny French dragon darted and looped and evaded, beating her wings mightily, and flung herself past the borders of the grounds, heading towards the Channel as quick as ever she could go.

“After her, Temeraire,” Laurence said, and they leapt into pursuit, Temeraire’s enormous wings beating once to every five of hers, but eating up the yards with every stroke.

“They haven’t much endurance, they’re close-couriers only, for all they’re fast as bloody lightning; they must have brought her nearly up to the coast by boat, at night, to save her strength for the flight back,” Ferris said, shouting over the knife-cut wind. Laurence only nodded, to save his voice: Bonaparte had likely been hoping to slip so small a messenger-beast through where the larger had not been able to manage.

He raised the speaking-trumpet and bellowed, “Rendezvous,” to no effect. The flare they fired off for emphasis, launched ahead of the little dragon’s nose, was a signal less easily missed or misinterpreted, but there was no slackening in the furious pace. The Plein-Vite had only a small pilot, a young boy scarcely much older than Roland or Dyer, whose pale and frightened face Laurence could plainly see in his glass as the boy looked back to see the vast black-winged pursuit ready to engulf him. He turned back to speak encouragement to his beast, casting off bits of harness and buckle as she flew: the boy even kicked off his shoes, and threw overboard his belt with its sword and pistol, flashing in the sunlight as they turned end-over-end, surely prized treasures; and heartened by her rider’s example, with an effort the little dragon began to speed her strokes and pull away, her advantage in speed and small breadth before the wind telling.

“We must bring her down,” Laurence said grimly, lowering his glass; he had seen what effect the divine wind had on enemy dragons of fighting-weight, and on soldiers under arms: what damage it might wreak, upon so small and helpless a target, he neither liked to think nor wished to witness, but their duty was plain. “Temeraire, you must stop them; we cannot let them slip away.”

“Laurence, she is so very little,” Temeraire objected unhappily, turning his head only just enough to be heard; he was still pressing on after her, with all the will in the world, but she would not be caught.

“We cannot try to board her,” Laurence answered, “she is too small and too quick; it would be a death-sentence to make any man attempt that leap. If she will not surrender, she must be brought down. She is pulling away; it must be now.”

Temeraire shuddered, then with decision drew breath and roared out: but over the French dragon, not directly at her. She gave a startled shrill cry of alarum, backwinging as if she was trying to reverse her course, her pace dropping off to nothing for a moment. With a convulsive gathered lunge, Temeraire was above her and folding his wings, bearing her bodily down towards the earth below: soft pale yellow sand, heaped in rolling dunes, and the little French dragon went tumbling pell-mell as they plowed into the dirt behind her, oceanic waves of dust billowing up in a cloud around them.

They slid across the ground some hundred yards, Laurence blind and trying to shield his mouth from the flying sand, hearing Temeraire hissing in displeasure and the French dragon squalling. Then “Hah!” Temeraire said triumphantly, “je vous ai attrapé il ne faut pas pleurer; oh, I beg your pardon, I am very sorry,” and Laurence wiped the grit from his face and nostrils, coughing violently, and clearing his stinging vision found himself looking almost directly into the alarming fiery orange of a Longwing’s slit-pupiled eye.

Excidium turned his head to sneeze, acid droplets spraying involuntarily with the gesture, smoking briefly as the sand absorbed them. Laurence gazed in horror as the great head swung wearily back and Excidium said, in a harsh and rasping voice, “What have you done? You ought not have come here,” while the sand-cloud settled to show him one among a half-a-dozen Longwings, Lily raising her head out of her shielding wing beside him, all of them huddled close in the sand-pit that was their place of quarantine.

Chapter 5

THEY HAD NO companion in their isolated quarantine-meadow but little Sauvignon, the French courier-beast, who had not even the solace of her captain’s presence. He, poor child, had been marched away in irons against her good behavior, while she made piteous cries under the restraint of Temeraire’s reluctant but irresistible hold upon her back, his great claw nearly pinning her to the ground entirely.

She huddled upon herself after he was gone, and was only gradually persuaded by Temeraire to eat a little, and then to talk. “Voici un joli cochon,” Temeraire said, nudging over one of the spit-roasted hogs which Gong Su had prepared for him, lacquered in dark orange sauce. “Votre capitaine's’inquiétera's’il apprend que vous ne mangez pas, vraiment.”

She took a few bites, shortly proceeding to greater enthusiasm once Temeraire had explained to her that the recipe was à la Chinois: her naïve remark that she was eating “comme la Reine Blanche” and a little more conversation confirmed to Laurence that Lung Tien Lien, their bitter enemy, was now securely established in Paris, and deep in Napoleon’s councils. The little courier, full of hero-worship for the other Celestial, was not to be led into exposing any secret plans, if she knew of any, but Laurence needed no revelations to tell him that Lien’s voice was sure to be loud for invasion, if Napoleon required any additional persuasion, and that she would strive to keep his attention firmly fixed upon Britain and no other part of the world.

“She says Napoleon is having the streets widened, so Lien may walk through all the city,” Temeraire said, disgruntled, “and he has already built her a pavilion beside his palace. It does not seem fair that we have such difficulties here, when she has everything her own way.”

Laurence answered only dully; he cared very little anymore for such larger affairs, when he was to watch Temeraire die as Victoriatus had died, reduced to that hideous bloody wreckage; a devastation far more complete than any Lien might have engineered from the deepest wells of malice. “You were with them only a few moments; let us hope,” Jane had said, but no more than that, and in her lack of encouragement Laurence saw Temeraire’s death-warrant signed and sealed. All the sand-pit was surely thick with the contagion; the Longwings had been penned up there for the better part of a year, the effluvia buried in the sand along with their poisonous acid.

He understood, belatedly, why he had seen none of his former colleagues, why Berkley and Harcourt had not answered his letters. Granby came to visit him, once: they could neither of them manage more than half-a-dozen words, painfully stilted; Granby consciously avoiding the subject of his own healthy Iskierka, and Laurence not wishing in the least to speak of Temeraire’s chances, especially not where Temeraire himself might hear, and learn to share his own despair. At present Temeraire had no concern for himself, secure in the confidence of his own strength, a comfort which Laurence had no desire to take from him before the inevitable course of the disease should manage the job.

“Je ne me sens pas bien,” Sauvignon said, on the morning of the fourth day, waking herself and them with a violent burst of sneezing; she was taken away to join the other sick beasts, leaving them to wait alone for the first herald of disease.

Jane had come to see him daily, with encouraging words as long as he wished to hear them, and brandy for when he could no longer; but she reluctantly said, coming to see him on the unhappy day, “I am damned sorry to speak of this so bluntly, Laurence, but you must forgive me. Would Temeraire have begun to think of breeding yet, do you know?”

“Breeding,” Laurence said bitterly, and looked away; it was natural, of course, that they should wish to preserve the bloodline of the rarest of all breeds, acquired with such difficulty, and now also in the possession of their enemy; yet to him it could be only a desire to replace what should be irreplaceable.

“I know,” she said gently, “but we must expect it to come on him any day now, and mostly they are disinclined once they get sick; and who can blame them.”

Her courage reproached him; she suffered as much herself with no outward show, and he could not yield to his own feelings before her. In any case there was no shading of the truth to be had; he could not lie, and was forced to confess that Temeraire had “grown very fond of a female Imperial, in the retinue of the Emperor, while we were in Peking.”

“Well, I am glad to hear it: I must ask if he would oblige us with a mating, to begin as soon as tonight, now he has been without question exposed,” Jane said. “Felicita is not very poorly, and informed her captain two days ago that she thinks she has another egg in her; she has already given us two, good creature, before she fell sick. She is only a Yellow Reaper, a middle-weight; it is not the sort of cross any breeder of sense would choose to make, but I think any Celestial blood must be better than none, and we have few enough who are in any state to bear.”

“But I have never seen her in my life,” Temeraire said puzzledly, when the question was put to him. “Why should I wish to mate with her?”

“It is akin to an arranged marriage of state, I suppose,” Laurence said, uncertain how to answer; it seemed to him belatedly a coarse sort of proposal, as though Temeraire were a prize stallion to be set on to a mare, neither of their preferences consulted, and not even a prior meeting. “You need do nothing you do not like,” he added abruptly; he would not see this forced on Temeraire, in the least, any more than he should have lent himself to such an enterprise.

“Well, it is not as though I expect I would mind,” Temeraire said, “if she would like it so very much, and I am rather bored only sitting about all day,” he added, with rather less modesty than candor, “only I do not understand at all why she should.”

Jane laughed, when Laurence had brought her this answer, and went out to the clearing and explained, “She would like to have an egg from you, Temeraire.”

“Oh.” Temeraire immediately puffed out his chest deeply in gratification, his ruff coming up, and with a gracious air bowed his head. “Then certainly I will oblige her,” he declared, and as soon as Jane had gone demanded that he be washed and his Chinese talon-sheaths, stored away as impractical for regular use, be brought out and put on him.

“She is so damned happy to be of use, I could weep,” said Felicita’s captain Brodin, a dark-haired Welshman not many years older than Laurence, with a craggy face which looked made for the grim and brooding lines into which it had presently settled. They had left the two dragons outside in Felicita’s clearing to arrange the matter to their own liking, which by the sound they were doing with great enthusiasm, despite the difficulties which ought to have been inherent in managing relations between two dragons of such disparate size. “And I know I have nothing to complain of,” he added bitterly, “she does better than nine-tenths of the Corps, and the surgeons think she will last ten years, at this rate of progress.”

He poured out an ample measure of wine, and left the bottle on the table between them, with a second and third waiting. They did not speak much, but sat drinking together into the night, drooping gradually lower over their cups until the dragons fell quiet, and the shuddering aspen trees went still. Laurence was not quite sleeping, but he could not think of moving or even to lift his head, weighted with a thick smothering stupor like a blanket; all the world and time dulled away.

Brodin stirred him awake in his chair in the small hours of the morning. “We will see you again tonight?” he asked tiredly, as Laurence stood and bent back his shoulders to crack the angry muscles loose.

“Best so, as I understand it,” Laurence said, looking at his hands in vague surprise: they trembled.

He went out to collect Temeraire, whose profoundly smug and indecorous satisfaction might have put him to the blush, were he disposed to be in any way critical of what pleasures Temeraire might enjoy under the present circumstances. “She has already had two, Laurence,” Temeraire said, laying himself back down to sleep in his own clearing, drowsy but jubilant, “and she is quite sure she will have another; she said she could not tell at all that it was the first time I had sired.”

“But is it?” Laurence asked, feeling slow and stupid, “Did not you and Mei…?” Belatedly the nature of the question stopped him.

“That had nothing to do with eggs,” Temeraire said dismissively, “it is quite different,” and coiling his tail neatly around himself went to sleep, leaving Laurence all the more confused, as he could not dream of prying further.

They repeated the visit the following evening. Laurence looked at the bottle and did not take it up again, but with an effort engaged Brodin upon other things: the customs of the Chinese and the Turks, and their sea-journey to China; the campaign in Prussia and the great battle of Jena, which he could re-create in considerable detail, having observed the whole cataclysm from Temeraire’s back.

This was not, perhaps, the best means for relieving anxiety; when he had laid out all that whirling offensive, and the solid massed ranks of the Prussian army, in the form of walnut shells, were swept clean from the table, he and Brodin sat back and looked at one another, and then Brodin stood restlessly up and paced his small cabin. “I would as soon he came across while some of us still can fight, if only I could give more than ninepence for our chances if he did.”

It was a dreadful thing to hope for an invasion, with unspoken the suggestion of a desire to be killed in one: perilously close, Laurence felt uneasily, to mortal sin, an extreme of selfishness even if it did not mean that England would be laid bare after, and he was troubled to find a sympathetic instinct in himself. “We must not speak so. They do not fear their own deaths, and God forbid that we should teach them to do so, or show less courage than they themselves do.”

“Do you think they do not learn fear by the end?” Brodin laughed unpleasantly and short. “Obversaria scarcely knew Lenton, by the end, and he took her out of the shell with his own hands. She could only cry for water, and for rest, and he could give her none. You may think me a heathen dog if you like: I would thank God or Bonaparte or the black Devil himself for giving her a clean death in battle.”

He poured the bottle, and when he was finished Laurence reached for it across the table.

“The breeders prefer two weeks,” Jane said, “but we will be glad for as long as he feels himself up to the task,” so Laurence dragged himself from his bed the next day, his sleep gone all to pieces, taken half in wine at Brodin’s table and half during the early hours of the morning, and crept through his day, supervising the useless harness-work and lessons for Emily and Dyer, until it was time to go again. They repeated the engagement twice more, and then on the fifth day, while he sat lumpen and considering the chessboard dully, Brodin raised his head and said to Laurence abruptly, “Has he not yet begun to cough?”

“Perhaps my throat is a little sore,” Temeraire said judiciously. Laurence was sitting, his head bent nearly to his knees, scarcely able to support the weight of hope resting so unexpectedly upon his shoulders, while Keynes and Dorset clambered over Temeraire like monkeys: they had listened to his lungs with a great paper cone placed against the chest, to which they put their ears, and stuck their heads in his jaws to examine his tongue, which remained a healthy and unspotted red.

“We must cup him, I think,” Keynes said at last, turning to his medical satchel.

“But I am perfectly well,” Temeraire objected, sidling away from the approach of the wicked curved blade of the catling. “It does not seem to me that one ought to be forced to take medicine when one is not sick; anyone would think you had no other work to do,” he said, aggrieved, and the operation was only achieved by persuading him of the noble service which it should be, to the sick dragons.

It yet required a dozen attempts: he kept withdrawing his leg at the last moment, until Laurence convinced him not to look, but to keep his eyes turned in quite the opposite direction until the ready basin held by Dorset was filled, and Keynes said, “There,” and clapped the cautery, waiting ready in the fire, to the nick at once.

They would have carried the steaming bowlful of dark blood away without another word, if Laurence had not chased after them to demand their verdict: “No, of course he is not sick, and does not mean to be, so far as I can tell,” Keynes said. “I will say no more at present; we have work to do,” and went away, leaving Laurence almost ill himself with reaction; he felt a man who had stepped out of the shadow of the gallows, two weeks of anxious dread giving way quite suddenly to this almost shattering relief. It was very difficult not to yield to the force of his emotions, with Temeraire saying, “It is not very nice to be cut open, and I do not see what good it will do at all,” nosing experimentally at the tiny seared-shut wound, and then nudging him in alarum. “Laurence? Laurence, pray do not worry; it does not hurt so much, and look, it has already stopped bleeding.”

Jane was writing papers before Keynes had half made her his report, her face lit with energy and purpose, the grey shroud of sorrow and weariness fully visible only now with its removal.

“Let us not have any rioting, if you please,” Keynes said almost angrily. His hands were still gory with blood crusted under the fingernails; he had come straight from his work, in making comparisons of the samples of blood beneath his microscope. “There is no justification for it. It may very well be merely a difference in physiognomy, or an individual trait. I have said only there is the merest possibility, worthy of a trial—worthy of a small trial, with no expectations—” His protests were useless: she did not pause for a moment. He looked as though he would have liked to snatch away her pen.

“Nonsense; a little riot is just what we need,” Jane said, without even looking up, “and you will write the most damned encouraging report ever seen, if you please; you will give no excuses to the Admiralty.”

“I am not speaking to the Admiralty at present,” Keynes said, “and I do not care to give unfounded hopes. In all likelihood, he has never had the disease—it is some natural resistance, unique to his breed; and the cold which he suffered last year merely coincidence.”

The hope was indeed a very tenuous one. Temeraire had been ill en route to China, briefly, the sickness settling itself out of hand after little more than a week in Capetown, and so dismissed at the time and afterwards as a mere trifling cold. Only his present resistance to the disease had given Keynes the suspicion that the illnesses might perhaps have been one and the same. But even if he were not mistaken, there might be no cure; if there were a cure, it might not be easily found; if it were found, still it might not be brought back in time to save many of the sick.

“And it is by no means the least likely possibility,” Keynes added peevishly, “that there may be no curative agent whatsoever; many a consumptive has found a temporary relief in warmer climes.”

“Whether the climate or the waters or the food, I do not care two pins; if I must ship every dragon in England to Africa by boat to take the cure, you may be sure I will do it,” Jane said. “I am almost as glad to find some cause to lift our spirits again as for the chance of a cure, and you will do nothing to depress them again,” Little hope riches enough to those who until lately had none, and worth pursuing with every means at hand. “Laurence, you and Temeraire must go, though I hate to give you up again,” she added, handing him his orders, hastily written and scarcely legible, “but we must rely on him to remember best whatever might have suited his taste, and be the foundation of the cure. The ferals come along as well as could be hoped, thank Heavens, and with this latest spy captured, perhaps we will be lucky, and Bonaparte will not be in such a hurry to send good dragons after bad.

“And I am sending along all your formation,” she continued. “They are in urgent need, having been among the first to take sick; if you bring them back well, which God willing, you can hold the Channel while we treat the others.”

“Then I may see Maximus and Lily again, now,” Temeraire said jubilantly, and would not wait, but insisted that they go at once: they had scarcely set down outside the barren clearing where Maximus slept, before Berkley came striding out to them and seizing Laurence by the arms nearly shook him, saying ferociously, “For God’s sake, say it is true, and not some damned fairy-tale,” and he turned aside and covered his face when Laurence gave his assent.

Laurence pretended not to see. “Temeraire, I believe your harness is loose, there over the left flank, will you look at it?” he said firmly, when Temeraire would have kept peering at Berkley’s bowed shoulders.

“But Mr. Fellowes was working on it only last week,” Temeraire said, diverted, nosing over it experimentally. He delicately took up a bit of the harness between his teeth and tugged on it. “No, it lies perfectly well; it does not feel the least bit loose at all.”

“Here, let’s have a look at you,” Berkley interrupted brusquely, having mastered himself. “A good twelve feet more since you sailed away to China, no? And you look well, Laurence; I expected to see you ragged as a tinker.”

“You would certainly have found me so, when we had first returned,” Laurence answered, gripping his hand. He could not return any compliment; Berkley had put off some six stone of weight, at first glance, and it did not suit him; his jowls hung loose from his cheeks.

Maximus looked still more dreadfully altered, the great scaly red-and-gold hide sagging in folds around the base of the neck, and forward of his chest with the massive fretwork of his spine and shoulders holding it up like tent-poles, and what Laurence supposed to be the air-sacs swollen and bulging from his wasted sides. His eyes were slitted nearly shut, and a thin raspy noise of breathing issued from his cracked-open jaws, a trail of drool puddling beneath them; the nostrils were caked over with dried flaking effluvia.

“He will wake up in a bit, and be glad to see you both,” Berkley said gruffly, “but I don’t like to wake him when he can get any rest. The blasted cold will not let him sleep properly, and he don’t eat a quarter of what he should.”

Temeraire, having followed them into the clearing, made no sound, but crouched himself down, his neck curved back upon itself like a wary snake, and sat there utterly still, his wide unblinking gaze fixed on Maximus, who slept on, rasping, rasping. Laurence and Berkley conversed in low voices, discussing the sea-voyage. “Less than three months to the Cape,” Laurence said, “to judge by our last voyage; and we had some fighting off the Channel to see us off, which did not speed matters.”

“However long, better on a ship to some purpose than lying about like this, if we all drown at it,” Berkley said. “We will be packed by morning, and the lummox will eat properly for once if I have to march the cows down his gullet.”

“Are we going somewhere?” Maximus said sleepily, in a voice much thickened, and turned his head aside to cough low and deep, several times, and spit into a small leaf-covered pit dug for the purpose. He rubbed each of his eyes against his foreleg, in turn, to clear away the mucus, and then seeing Temeraire slowly brightened, his head rising. “You are back; was China very interesting?” he asked.

“It was, oh, it was, but,” Temeraire burst out, “I am sorry I was not at home, while all of you were sick; I am so very sorry,” and hung his head, miserably.

“Why it is only a cold,” Maximus said, only to be interrupted by another bout of coughing, after which he added regardless, “I will be perfectly hearty soon, I am sure; only I am tired.” He closed his eyes almost directly he had said this, and fell again into a light stupor.

“They have the worst of it,” Berkley said heavily, seeing Laurence away; Temeraire had crept very quietly out of the clearing again, so they might go aloft without disturbing Maximus. “All the Regal Coppers. It is the damned weight; they do not eat, so they cannot keep up their muscle, and then one day they cannot breathe. Four lost already, and Laetificat will not see summer, unless we find your cure.” He did not say that Maximus would follow soon after, if not precede her; he did not need to.

“We shall find it,” Temeraire said fiercely, “we shall, we shall, we shall.”

“I hope to find you well, and your charge, when we return,” Laurence said, shaking Granby’s hand; behind him a great bustle and commotion were under way as the crew made their final preparations: they would depart tomorrow on the evening tide, the wind permitting, and needed to be well aboard by morning, with so many dragons and their crews to be stowed. Emily and Dyer were busily folding his clothing into his battered old sea-chest, which had only just survived their most recent voyage, and Ferris was saying sharply, “Don’t think I do not see you with that bottle, Mr. Allen; you may pour it out directly, do you hear?”

He had a great many new men aboard, replacements for the unhappy number of his crew who had been lost in their year’s absence. Jane had sent them all on trial, for his approval, but in the torment and anxiety of the past two weeks, and the heavy work of those before, he had grown only indifferently acquainted with them; now suddenly there was no more time, and he must make do with whomever had been given him. He was not a little sorry to be making his farewells to a man whose character he knew and understood, and upon whom he would have been happy to rely.

“I expect you will find us all to pieces,” Granby said, “with half of England on fire, and Arkady and his lot celebrating in the ruins, roasting cows; it will be wonderful otherwise.”

“Tell Arkady from me that they are all to mind properly,” Temeraire said, craning his head over carefully, so as not to dislodge the harness-men scurrying upon his back, “and that we will certainly be back very soon, so he need not think he has everything all to himself, even if he does have a medal now,” he finished, still disgruntled.

They were prolonging their conversation over a cup of tea when a young ensign came for Laurence. “Begging your pardon, sir, but there is a gentleman to see you, at the headquarters,” the boy said, and added, in tones of amazement, “a black gentleman,” so a very puzzled Laurence had to say his last farewells more abruptly and go.

He came into the officers’ common room; there was no difficulty in picking out his guest, although Laurence struggled for a moment before recalling his name: Reverend Erasmus, the missionary whom Wilberforce had presented to him, at the party two weeks before—had it been so short a time? “You are very welcome, sir; but I am afraid you find me at sixes and sevens,” Laurence said, beckoning to the servants, who had not yet brought him any refreshment. “We are leaving port tomorrow—a glass of wine?”

“Only a cup of tea, I thank you,” Erasmus said. “Captain, I knew as much; I hope you will forgive me for descending on you at such a time, without notice. I was with Mr. Wilberforce this morning, when your letter of apology arrived, informing him you were bound for Africa: and I have come to beg you for passage.”

Laurence was silent. He had every right, as a point of etiquette, to invite some number of guests; this being the prerogative of dragon captains aboard a transport as much as that of the captain of the ship herself. But the situation was not a simple one, for they would travel on the Allegiance, under a captain, who though one of Laurence’s dearest friends, and indeed his former first officer, owed no small portion of his fortune to his family’s substantial plantations in the West Indies, manned by slaves. Erasmus himself, Laurence realized with a sinking feeling, might even once have toiled in their very fields: he believed some of Riley’s father’s holdings were in Jamaica.

Aside from all the discomfort which any strong difference of politics among shipmates might ordinarily engender, in the close quarters of a journey, Laurence had on previous occasions failed to conceal his sentiments towards the practice, and some ill-feeling had unhappily resulted. To now inflict upon Riley a passenger whose very presence would seem a silent and unanswerable continuation of their argument, had the look of a calculated insult.

“Sir,” Laurence said slowly, “I believe you said you had been taken from Louanda? We are bound for Capetown, far to the south. It will not be your own nation.”

“Beggars cannot be choosers, Captain,” Erasmus said simply, “and I have only been praying for passage to Africa. If God has opened a path for me that leads to Capetown, I will not refuse it.”

He made no further appeal, but only sat expectantly, his dark eyes leveled steadily across the table. “Then I am at your service, Reverend,” Laurence said, as of course he had to, “if you can only manage to be ready in time; we cannot miss the tide.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Erasmus rose and shook his hand vigorously. “Have no fear: in hopes of your consent, my wife has already been making our arrangements, and by now will already herself be on the road with all our worldly substance; there is not much of it,” he added.

“Then I will hope to see you tomorrow morning,” Laurence said, “in Dover harbor.”

The Allegiance stood waiting for them in the cold sunny morning, looking oddly squat with her masts stubby and bare, the topmasts and yards laid out upon the deck, and the enormous chains of her best bower and kedge anchors stretching out from the water, groaning softly as she rocked on the swell. She had come into harbor some four weeks earlier, Laurence and Temeraire having reached England, in the end, scarcely any sooner than their ocean passage would have brought them, if they had sailed home with the Allegiance after all.

“You may not complain of your delays; I am too happy to find you alive and well and not skeletons in some Himalayan pass,” Riley said, shaking his hand eagerly in welcome, nearly before Laurence had stepped off Temeraire’s back. “And you brought us home a fire-breather, after all. Yes, I could scarcely help but hear of her; the Navy is bursting with the news, and I believe the ships on blockade take it in turn to go past Guernsey and watch her flaming away at that old rock heap through their glasses.

“But I am very happy we shall make shipmates again now,” he continued, “and though you will be more crowded, I hope we will make shift to see you all comfortable; you are a party of seven this time?”

He spoke with so much earnest friendliness and concern that Laurence was stricken with a sense of dishonesty and said abruptly, “Yes, we are a full complement; and Captain, I must tell you, I have brought a passenger along, with his family. He is a missionary, bound for the Cape, and applied to me only yesterday afternoon—he is a freedman.”

He regretted his words as soon as he had spoken; he had meant to make the introduction more gently, and was conscious that he had let guilt make him clumsy and indelicate. Riley was silent. “I am sorry I could not give you more warning,” Laurence added, in an attempt to make apology.

“I see,” Riley said only, “—of course you may invite anyone whom you wish,” very shortly, and touching his hat went away without further conversation.

He made no pretense of courtesy to Reverend Erasmus when that gentleman came aboard a little later that morning, neglecting even a greeting, which would have offended Laurence on the part of any guest, much less a man of the cloth; but when he saw the minister’s wife left sitting in the small and poky boat which had been sent for them, with her two small children, and no offer made to rig a bosun’s chair over the side to bring them aboard, he had had enough.

“Ma’am,” he said, leaning over the side, “pray be easy, and only keep hold of the children; we will have you aboard in a moment. I beg you will not be alarmed,” and straightening said, “Temeraire, will you lift that boat up, if you please, so the lady may come aboard.”

“Oh, certainly, and I will be very careful,” Temeraire said, and leaning over the side of the ship—well-balanced, to her other side, by Maximus, still prodigious in weight despite his reduced state—he seized the boat carefully in one enormous forehand, and plucked it dripping from the water. The boat’s crew were loud in their protestations of alarm, while the two little girls clung to their stoic-faced mother, who did not permit herself to look at all anxious; the entire operation scarcely covered the space of a moment, and then Temeraire was setting the boat upon the dragondeck.

Laurence offered his hand to Mrs. Erasmus: she silently accepted, and having climbed down, reached in herself to lift out the children, one after another, and then her own portmanteau and satchel. She was a tall, stern-faced woman, more substantial in build and considerably darker of skin than her husband, with her hair pinned severely down under a plain white kerchief. Her two small daughters, in perfectly white pinafores, having been admonished briefly to stay quiet and out of the way, clutched each other’s hands tightly.

“Roland, perhaps you will see our guests to their cabin,” Laurence said to Emily quietly, hoping her presence might comfort them. To his regret, it was time to give over any attempt to conceal her sex. The progression of a year and more having its natural consequences upon her figure, which bid fair to take after her mother’s, it would soon be quite impossible anyone should be deceived, and he must henceforth simply brazen out any challenge, hoping for the best; thankfully, in the present case, it could not signify what the Erasmuses should think of her, or the Corps, as they were to be left securely behind in Africa.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” Emily informed the girls blithely as she led them away, seeing their stares, “at least, not the dragons; although we had some terrific storms on our last sea-voyage,” which left them as easy in their minds as they had been; they looked very meek as they followed her below to their quarters.

Laurence turned back to Lieutenant Franks, commanding the boat’s crew, who had gone silent, having been set down amidst seven dragons, even if these were mostly sleeping. “I am sure Temeraire would be happy to put the boat back in her traces,” he said, but when that young man only stammered miserably, a pang of guilt made him add, “but perhaps you have another return to make,” and on Franks’s relieved assent, had Temeraire set the boat back down into the water.

He then went himself below, to his cabin, much reduced from the previous voyage, as the space was now divided with six other captains; but he had been given a forward room, with a share of the bow windows, and it was better than many a cabin he had endured in the Navy. He did not have to wait long; Riley came and knocked—unnecessarily, as the door was standing open—and begged the favor of a word.

“That will do, Mr. Dyer,” Laurence said, to the young runner presently ordering his things, “pray go see if Temeraire needs anything, then you may attend to your lessons,” as he wanted no audience.

The door was shut; Riley began stiffly, “I hope you are settled to your satisfaction.”

“—I am.” Laurence did not mean to begin the quarrel; if Riley wished to stand upon the point, he might do so.

“Then I am sorry to say,” Riley said, not looking very sorry, only pale with anger, “I am very sorry to say, that I have received a report, which I could scarcely credit, if I had not seen with my own eyes—”

He was not speaking loudly, yet; the door swung open in the middle of his sentence, and Catherine Harcourt looked in. “Pray forgive me,” she said, “but I have been trying to find you these twenty minutes, Captain Riley; this ship is too damned large. Not that I mean to complain of her in the least, of course: we are very obliged to you indeed for our passage.”

Riley stammered a vague polite reply, staring very fixedly at the top of her head. He had not known her for a woman at the time of their first meeting, which had encompassed little more than a day, and that the day after a battle. Catherine was of a slimmer stature than Jane, and with her hair pulled back snugly in her customary plait, her wide pleasant face with its snub nose freckled and brown with sun and wind, she might more easily be mistaken by the unsuspecting. But the general secret had slipped out during their previous voyage to China, and Riley had been very much shocked and disapproving at the intelligence.

“And I hope you are comfortably—that your cabin—” he said now, at a loss for the form of address.

“Oh, my bags are stowed; I suppose I will find them sometime,” Harcourt said briskly, either unconscious or deliberately blind to Riley’s awkward constraint. “That makes no nevermind; it is these tubs of oiled sand, for Lily to rest her head upon. I am very sorry to have to trouble you, but we are quite at a loss where they are to be stowed: we must have them near the dragondeck, in case she should have a fit of sneezing and we must change them out quick.”

As the acid of a Longwing was perfectly capable, unchecked, of eating through an entire ship straight down to the hull and sinking her, this topic naturally engaged all the interest which could be imagined, of the ship’s captain, and Riley answered her with energy, his discomfort forgotten in the practical concern. They settled it that the tubs should be stored in the galley, directly below the dragondeck, and this decided, Catherine nodded and thanked him, adding, “Will you dine with us to-night?”—an inconvenient friendliness, but of course her prerogative: to make a technical point of the matter, she was Laurence’s superior officer, as formally their assignment remained to form a part of Lily’s formation, although Temeraire had operated under independent orders now for so long that Laurence himself scarcely remembered the fact.

But it was delivered informally, at least, so it did not seem offensive when Riley said, “I thank you, but I must be on deck to-night, I am afraid,” a polite excuse, which she accepted on its face, and nodding her farewells left him alone with Laurence once again.

It was awkward to resume, with the first natural impulse of anger thus blunted, but with a will they rose to the occasion, and after only a few more moderate exchanges, Riley’s “And I hope, sir, that I need never again see the ship’s crew or her boats subjected to, I am sorry to call it so, outright interference, under not only the permission but the encouragement—” progressed very neatly to Laurence’s reply,

“And for my part, Captain Riley, I would be glad to never again be witness to such a positive disdain not only for all the generally understood requirements of courtesy, but for the very safety of her passengers, from the crew of one of His Majesty’s vessels—I will not say deliberate insult—”

They were soon in such fine form as might be expected from two men both in the habit of command, and of full voice, whose former acquaintance made it no difficulty to touch upon such subjects as might provoke the most dramatic reaction. “You cannot claim,” Riley said, “not to have a proper understanding of precedence in these matters; you can make no such excuse. You know your duty perfectly well. You set your beast deliberately onto the ship’s crew, without permission. You might have asked for a chair, if you wished one slung—”

“If I had imagined that such a request needed to be made, upon what I had supposed to be a well-run ship, when a lady was to come aboard—” Laurence said.

“I suppose we must mean a little something different by the term,” Riley retorted, sarcastic and quick.

He at once looked heartily embarrassed, when the remark had escaped him; but Laurence was in no way inclined to wait for him to withdraw, and said angrily, “It would grieve me indeed to be forced to impute any un-gentlemanlike motive—any selfish consideration, which might prompt a gentleman to make remarks so nearly intolerable upon the character and respectability of a clergyman’s wife, and a mother, wholly unknown to him and therefore offering no grounds whatsoever to merit his scorn—save perhaps as an alternative, preferable to the examination of his own conscience—”

The door flung open without a knock; Berkley thrust his head into the cabin. They stopped at once, united in appalled indignation at this perfect disregard for privacy and all shipboard etiquette. Berkley paid no attention to their stares. He was unshaven and gaunt; Maximus had passed an uncomfortable night after his short flight aboard, and Berkley had slept no more than his dragon. He said bluntly, “We can hear every damned word on deck; in a moment Temeraire will pull up the planking and stick his nose in. For God’s sake go knock each other down somewhere quietly and have done.”

This outrageous advice, more suitable for a pair of schoolboys than grown men, was not heeded, but the quarrel was necessarily ended by the open reproof; Riley begged to be excused, and went at once away.

“I must ask you to go-between for us, with Captain Riley, I am afraid, henceforth,” Laurence said to Catherine, some time afterwards, when his temper had been as much relieved as could be managed by the violent pacing of the narrow length of his cabin. “I know we agreed I should manage it, but matters have arisen so that—”

“Of course, Laurence, you need say nothing more,” she interrupted, in practical tones, leaving him in some despair of the discretion of all his fellow aviators; it was such a settled part of his understanding of shipboard life, that one should pretend not to have heard, even what of necessity had been perfectly audible, that he hardly knew how to answer their frankness, “and I will give him a private dinner, instead of making it a common one with all of us, so there will be no difficulty. But I am sure you will make up the matter in a trice. What is there worth arguing about, when we have three months of sailing together ahead of us?—unless you mean to entertain us all with the gossip of the thing.”

Laurence did not in the least like to form the subject of whispers, but he drearily knew her optimistic hopes to be ill-founded. No unforgivable remarks had been made but many unforgettable ones, a good number by himself, he was sorry to recall, and if they did not need for honor’s sake to avoid one another entirely, he felt they could hardly be on such terms of camaraderie as they had formerly known, ever again. He wondered if he was to blame, perhaps for continuing, too much, to think of Riley as his subordinate; if he had presumed too far on their relationship.

He went to sit with Temeraire as the ship made ready to weigh anchor: the familiar old shouts and exhortations strangely distant from him, and he felt a disconnect from the life of the ship such as he had never expected to know; almost as though he had never been a sailor at all.

“Look there, Laurence,” Temeraire said; south of the harbor, a small ragged knot of dragons could be seen winging away from the covert: towards Cherbourg, Laurence guessed, by their line of flight. His glass was not to hand, and they were little larger than a flock of birds at the distance, too far to make out their individual markings, but as they flew, one among them briefly fired out a small exuberant tongue of flame, yellow-orange-hot against the blue sky: Iskierka set out with a handful of the ferals, for the first time on a real patrol; the measure of the desperate circumstances which they left behind.

“Are we not leaving soon, Laurence?” Temeraire asked; he was painfully impatient to be under way. “If we would make better speed, I would be very happy to pull, at any time,” and he turned to look at Dulcia, presently lying in an uneasy sleep upon his back, coughing miserably every so often without even opening her eyes.

She and Lily, who lay with her head half-buried up to the bone spurs in a great wooden tub full of sand, were yet in much better state than the rest of the formation; poor Maximus had made the flight to the ship in easy short stages, and even so with much difficulty. He had been given all the far side of the dragondeck and was sleeping there already, heedless of the furious bustle around him as the last of the preparations to launch them commenced. Nitidus lay sprawled in exhaustion tucked against Maximus’s side, where once the Pascal’s Blue would have lain comfortably on his back, and Immortalis and Messoria, huddled to either side of Lily in the middle of the deck, were grown a sort of pale lemon yellow like milk custard.

“I could drag up the anchors in a trice, I am sure, much quicker,” Temeraire added. The topmasts had been sent up, and the yards, and they were warping up to the kedge: fully four hundred men or more could heave on the massive quadruple-capstan at once, and all of them would be needed to bring up the massive weight of the best bower. The sailors on deck were most of them already stripped to the waist, despite the cold morning, to get about it; Temeraire certainly could have provided material aid, but Laurence was under no illusion how such an offer would presently be received.

“We would only be in the way,” he said; “they will manage quicker without us.” He laid his hand on Temeraire’s side, looking away from the labor in which they could have no part, to the open ocean ahead.