Victory of Eagles

Chapter 7

NO; THEY NEARLY drowned you, and not even on purpose but only through carelessness. I am not letting them have you back,” Temeraire said. “Besides, I cannot go; I cannot just leave everyone here.”

“You are more desperately needed with the main force,” Laurence said, trying to explain, the obstinate gleam in Temeraire’s eye discouraging. “We must speak to the commander.”

“I am the commander,” Temeraire said.

Laurence stared up at his earnest expression from within the protective wall of dragon encircling him, and then pulling himself up onto the ridge of Temeraire’s forearm looked more closely around the clearing. There was not a senior officer to be seen, anywhere, and none of the dragons, many of them regarding him with equal curiosity, were harnessed—besides the enormous Regal, an old Longwing lay with milky orange eyes half-lidded sleepily, and a big Chequered Nettle, a Parnassian, and scattered smaller dragons all around.

Beyond them Laurence could see the camp all full of dragons: Yellow Reapers by the dozens, sleeping nearly in a single heap, and smaller courier-beasts and light-weights sprawled upon them everywhere. There were a handful of men dealing with the pigs and a few cattle, penned up to one side, but they were in rough clothing, not officers of the Corps. Some few hundred in red coats mostly faded to russet, standing by the guns, and some volunteers in private coats: that was all. “The militia,” Laurence said, slowly.

“Yes, Lloyd and some of our herdsmen told us where to fetch them,” Temeraire said. “They are very good fellows: once they settled down, at least, and began to believe we were not going to eat them. We needed them to fire our guns.”

“Good God,” Laurence said, comprehensively; he could well and vividly imagine the reaction which the Lords of the Admiralty should have, to the intelligence that the well-formed orderly militia which they confidently expected, with a clever young officer at its head, was rather an experimental and wholly independent legion of unharnessed dragons, without great sympathy for their Lordships, and under the particular command of the most recalcitrant dragon in all Britain.

“Well,” Temeraire said, when he had listened to Laurence’s awkward attempt to explain the orders which had brought them here, and the misunderstanding, “it does not seem at all complicated to me; they did not say you were only to give the commission, if the commander were a man?” he asked, lowering his head towards Miller.

“Why, not—no—” Miller said, staring, “but—”

“Then it is perfectly plain,” Temeraire said, riding over him. “I shall write and say I am happy to accept my commission, and apologize that my duty to the regiment prevents my returning with Laurence at present; they cannot complain of that. Anyway, we must send at once to warn them: Napoleon will be attacking London in two days.”

A more sensational means of diverting their attention he could hardly have conjured. Laurence did not know what to think, at first: Temeraire had perhaps a dragon’s idea of distances, and did not appreciate the difficulties inherent in moving so many men and horses and their supply, from a landing on a hostile shore, to assault. It had not yet been a week since the landings on the Channel coast. Without opposition, in that time Bonaparte might have marched his men in a long string to the city, but as an army, ready to fight, no: Laurence relied on it. Or, he wished to rely on it, but he recalled too vividly the thunder of the guns at Warsaw, a month and more before the French ought to have been there, either, and doubted uneasily. “Can you be certain?”

“We have been watching Marshal Lefèbvre’s corps,” Temeraire said. “They had orders this morning and set off directly; and they have been moving soldiers about all of to-day, towards London. Requiescat saw them.”

“Requiescat?” Laurence said.

“You have met him, he brought you here,” Temeraire said.

“He cannot have got very close, unnoticed,” Laurence said: a Regal Copper was an odd choice of spy.

“Oh, he did not try to sneak,” Temeraire said. “No-one very much likes to start a quarrel with him, you see, so he could come close before they were quite ready to fight him. And when the French could see no-one was with him, they supposed he was run away from the breeding grounds, and looking for other dragons to have some company. So they were very eager to tempt him to stay, and they put out cows for him in their camp. It was much easier than if we had to feed him ourselves, and he was able to see everything they were doing.”

“Which is, hieing themselves off towards the city,” Requiescat put in. “They was all looking for us before then, as we had blacked their eye a couple of times, but soon as the orders came in, off they went; and they sent all the cattle on ahead,” he finished, in gloomy tones.

“Blacked their eye,” Miller said, with a snort. “Yes, damned likely.”

“Like enough,” Hollin said, and pointed. Laurence looked: an eagle standard was jutting from the ground, the 13ème regiment blazoned on the banner. “I’ll take the news, sir,” Hollin added, looking at Laurence. “Me and Elsie can make the dash quick, on our own, and let them know—”

“Damned nonsense,” Miller said. “The news you ought to be taking is, there are sixty dragons as need rounding up, and herding back to the breeding grounds—” He cut off abruptly, as Temeraire took a step and lowered his head very close.

“We are not going to be herded anywhere we do not like,” he said, dangerously, “by Napoleon or by your admirals; and if you like to ask the other dragons of the Corps to try it, I expect they will see at once how very foolish it is, and if not, I will explain it to them, and I dare say they will join us instead.”

Laurence had a fair notion which dragons would be perfectly prepared to join Temeraire under such circumstances, with very little explanation required. That would bring the tally to two Longwings, even if one of them was surely past his real fighting days, and two Regal Coppers; to join with the five other heavy-weights Laurence could see, and a full complement of middle-weights and couriers, which would make Temeraire’s army very nearly the equal to the Corps in strength, at least those forces presently in England and under harness.

If he were not fully aware of these prospects, Miller was wise enough to blanch at the suggestion and to be quelled at least a little. He settled for writing a letter, in a quiet corner, while Temeraire dictated his own:

Gentlemen,

I am very happy to accept your commission, and we should like to be the eighty-first regiment, if that number is not presently taken. We do not need any rifles, and we have got plenty of powder and shot for our cannons,

—Laurence wrote with a vivid awareness of the reactions this should produce—

“Pepper, put in pepper,” another dragon said, craning her head over; she was a middle-weight, yellowish striped with gray, some kind of cross-breed. “And canvas, we must have a lot of canvas—”

“Oh, very well, pepper,” Temeraire said, and continuing his list of requests added,

“Temeraire, you cannot write so to your superior officers,” Laurence said, breaking off; he had forgone any attempt at explaining that the commission should be instantly withdrawn, and had swallowed many protests already on the language of the letter, in favor of getting its urgent news sent quickly; Jane would understand it, at least; but there were limits.

“But they really had better not,” Temeraire said, surprised. “They have not got enough soldiers, not anywhere near, because they are not moving quickly enough.”

Laurence persuaded him at last to soften the language:

“But what if they do not realize that means they ought to retreat?” Temeraire objected.

“They will understand it, I assure you,” Laurence said; he did not bother to say that they would very likely not believe it, and that nothing would come of Temeraire’s advice.

In this at least he was thoroughly wrong: a great deal came of it, if nothing very desirable. Laurence awoke the next morning, on his dragon-arm pallet, to a furious yelling noise outside the sheltering membrane of Temeraire’s wing. He was not allowed to get down to his feet; he was snatched at once and put on Temeraire’s back, by the breastplate-chain, and then Temeraire pushed himself up to his feet, just as a couple of courier-weights came bounding in urgently from the boundary-line of the camp, half-flying and half-leaping, and gasped out, “Temeraire, she hasn’t the watch-word, but—”

“I do not need any silly watch-word,” Iskierka said, padding into the clearing, and coiled herself back on her hindquarters and snorted a thin stream of fire for emphasis, and the whole mess of the Turkestan ferals came tumbling along behind her.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” Temeraire said, very ungraciously. He did not see why Iskierka had to come along, showing away and making a great noise of herself.

“To fight,” Iskierka said, as if the answer were obvious. “We are supposed to be in a war, and there has not been any fighting for four days, and I have not even been let to go flying anywhere and,” she hissed smoke again, “they came and lectured my Granby, when I went out for just a bit of hunting.”

“Well, there is about to be a great deal of fighting over there,” Temeraire said, “so you ought to go back.”

“No there is not,” Iskierka said, “at least, they are not getting ready for any fighting; they said it would be another week before there is a battle. But then we heard that you had had two battles already, and your letter came saying that there was going to be some more, so we have come to have a share of the fighting also. And,” she added, “when we have finished and beat Napoleon, I have decided that you may give me an egg.”

“Oh!” Temeraire said, swelling with indignation, “how very kind! I am to be honored, I suppose.”

“Well, I am much richer than you are,” she said, “and also I can breathe fire, so you ought to be.”

“I would not give you an egg,” Temeraire said, “if you were the very last dragon in the world, but me; I should rather have none at all.”

“You haven’t,” Iskierka said. “No-one has got an egg by you at all yet, so you see, I am very generous to try.”

This was no comfortable news, and Temeraire drew back a little, startled. He had not been very enthusiastic about all the breeding, by the end, but one could not help but be satisfied at being wanted, and think how many eggs there should be. He did not understand why there should be none. It did not sound very well; not, however, that it made him wish any more to give Iskierka one.

She meanwhile preened herself smugly, stretching out her coils in a messy way so everyone would notice her more. She had on a lot of gaudy stuff on her harness, some chains that were probably not real gold at all, and which had in them chips of what were certainly colored glass, and Temeraire could not help but be conscious that Granby, who was talking with Laurence and Tharkay over by the standard in low voices, was in a very fine green velvet coat, trimmed all over in golden braid, with not one but two swords at his waist, one of them short but both very brilliantly ornamented at the hilt, in fine shining leather sheaths; even if he did not look very happy at present. And Laurence was in a shabby coat which did not suit him at all.

The others were eyeing her with admiration, and Arkady and the other ferals, too, all of whom had bright stuff on them, hooked haphazardly onto their harness and making them look rather like slovenly pirates, Temeraire thought, and Arkady, Temeraire realized in outrage, Arkady had Demane on his back; Demane who was of his crew, and he said reproachfully to the boy, “What are you doing with him?”

“He does not know what the other soldiers are saying with the flags,” Demane said, looking up, “so I tell him, and then we decide whether to listen. The flags are wrong sometimes,” he added.

They had not brought anyone else from his own crew, or any food, or anything useful at all; they had no notion of how they were to be fed or where they were to sleep, and did not respect the order of the camp at all. Wringe, who was rather big for a feral, a good-sized middle-weight, tried to shove a Yellow Reaper out of his place, and so of course all the Reapers jumped up and hissed at her, and then Arkady and the others jumped in hissing back, and Temeraire had to roar to get all their attention and push them apart.

“You are new, so you must clear your own places,” he said sternly.

“Oh, that is easy,” Iskierka said, and hissed a command to Arkady, who quickly chivvied his gang to one side, and she then blasted fire out across a swath of ground at the edge of their clearing, dry leaves crisping up and tree-bark popping with sounds like gunfire off the trunks. One old dead pine caught like a torch and went into a perfect crackling blaze, while everyone else squawked and jumped to their feet.

“That is enough!” Temeraire said. “You may not go about setting fires in camp; we have powder all about, and you will have us all blown up. Now put out those trees, and clear it properly, by pulling them out.”

The ferals in a rather surly way smothered the flames with dirt and obeyed; but Iskierka did nothing but sit and yawn and observe, while everyone in the camp watched her, rather impressed than otherwise. It was not at all satisfactory, and when he said as much to Perscitia, she added insult to injury by having no sympathy, and saying instead, “A fire-breather will be very useful,” and showing him several maneuvers which she had sketched out, to make use of Iskierka especially.

“THEY DIDN’T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT,” Granby said to Laurence, no surprise. He was rather exhausted looking, and left sweat streaked on his forehead when he rubbed his hand against it. “The generals, anyway; you may be sure she swallowed it whole, and nothing would do but we would come and fight with you, or else Temeraire would be getting all the glory, and prizes, and she wanted an eagle, too; and once she has decided on something, those ferals will follow her to the end of Creation.” Arkady was still their leader, but even he had evidently taken to regarding her as a force of nature beyond ordinary leadership, so much treasure had she led them to seizing.

“Roland was damned understanding,” Granby added. “She sent a courier after me, with orders, after Iskierka had up and gone; put us on detached duty, scouting, so I am not insubordinate technically. But—” He raised his hands, helplessly.

“No preparations were made for a French attack?” Laurence said, low. “None whatsoever?”

“To be fair,” Granby said, “there is not much they can do; they haven’t the men yet. Admiral Roland tried to persuade them we ought to be ferrying in the troops, but to their minds, it will only make a mess, and mutiny everywhere when the men won’t go aboard.”

“They might retreat,” Tharkay said, “rather than wait to be routed.”

“Well,” Granby said, and Laurence felt much the same; it was one thing to retreat from the coast, having failed to prevent a landing, and another to let London be taken without a shot.

“Is there any hope you are mistaken?” Laurence asked Temeraire, a little later, after the ferals had been settled into the camp.

“They are moving their men somewhere,” Temeraire said, practically, “and I cannot think where he would move them, other than London, where your Army is; there are plenty of cows still around here, so it would not be only for food. But if you like I will ask Moncey and the others to go and see if they can work out where they have gone, for certain.”

Before this plan could be wholly put into effect, however, it was rendered unnecessary: Elsie came flying desperately into camp, nearly skidding across the ground. “Hurry, oh, hurry,” she cried, “they are not attacking tomorrow, they are attacking to-night,” and Hollin came scrambling off her back and said, “It is all true, sir; the scouts have seen them formed up not an hour’s march away, and there are ten Fleur-de-Nuits arming to the teeth in their camp.”

Laurence now had opportunity to see for himself how quickly an army of dragons might go, when their own camp moved: first the herd of cattle gone bellowing down the road in a cloud of dust, with the herdsmen beating them along, and a few aerial shepherds for encouragement. “We will meet you at Harpenden,” Temeraire said to the chief of the herdsmen, “or send you word there, where to bring the cows, and along which road; and if you do not hear from us, only make sure they are safe, and the French do not get them.”

“Aye, sir,” the man said, touching his forelock, quite automatically, and cheerfully shouting to his men kicked his mule, a placid beast, and moved along.

The handful of tents were struck and bundled up, stakes and all, into a crumpled heap upon one large cloth; cooking gear thrown in, too, and the great cauldrons all filled with round-shot. The middling dragons seized the guns, the militia and the remaining hands clambering up onto the smaller beasts with ropes to secure them—“It needs less rope, you see,” Temeraire explained, “for the little ones to carry, and the men say they like it better if only they can sit astride, instead of being cross-legged.”

He kept a stern headmaster’s eye on the operation, and from time to time darted an anxious glance at Laurence, as if to gauge his opinion; but there was nothing to complain of at all. As the dragons went aloft, they dipped down over the rear of the moving herd, and snatched themselves each some dinner, a cow or a fat pig, sluggish behind the rest, and flew away eating, with no evident difficulty in combining the activities, if they spattered themselves somewhat with blood.

“There, now we are ready also,” Temeraire said, and put out his hand for Laurence, to set him up aloft, and with a leap they were up: not an hour gone by, and beneath them nothing but the bare untidy field.

The flight was desperately quick from necessity, and the dragons flew in no particular order but one great disorganized mass, shifting continuously; or so it first seemed to Laurence, and then he discovered that the small dragons were dropping back, now and again, to rest upon the largest. The discovery was realized rather abruptly, when a small muddy-colored feral dropped down onto Temeraire’s back out of mid-air, and clutching on put her head out to peer at Laurence, with rather a critical expression, while she caught her breath with great gulps.

“Will Laurence, at your service,” Laurence said cautiously, after a few moments of silent staring.

“Oh, I am Minnow,” the dragon said. “Beg pardon, only I was a bit curious, because himself was so low, over losing you, I wondered if maybe you was different from other men.”

Her tone suggested she had found nothing out of the ordinary to admire. Temeraire put his head around indignantly. “Laurence is the very best captain there is. We have just been saving everyone, and fighting the admirals, so of course we do not have our nicest things with us presently.”

“Have you never wanted a companion?” Laurence asked the little dragon; little a relative term of course, as her head alone likely outweighed him entirely.

“I have chums enough,” she said, “and as for harness, and being told always where to go; no thanks very. I expect it is better for you big fellows,” she added to Temeraire, “in service, as no-one thinks they can bull you into anything you really do not like, but I hear enough from the old couriers to know it isn’t for me. Broke-down by the time their captains go, and nothing to show for it but harness-stripes. There, that has set me right, off I go,” she said, and jumped off again, with no more ceremony than she had arrived, and dashed off again out in front.

Laurence then saw the maneuver a common one, and responsible for the greater part of the confusion of shifting beasts. The heavy-weights indeed did not much change their positions, but made steady bulwarks in the force, timed to Requiescat’s pace, as he was the slowest of them all. The middle-weights, with more energy to spare, would occasionally break off and dive, low to the fields: returning, now and again, with cow or pig or sheep, which they either ate themselves or occasionally brought to the larger dragons.

“Yes, so we needn’t all stop,” Temeraire said, “and this way no-one is hungry when we arrive, not even Requiescat, even if he complains a little anyway just for show.”

“It ain’t for show,” Requiescat said, swinging his head around. “When I was in real fighting-trim I was twenty-six tons. I am not back up to snuff just yet, after that nasty cold,” a rather mild way of describing the effects of the virulent epidemic, which had struck the Regal Coppers particularly hard. All of them had lost a great deal of weight, which now was slow to return; although it was difficult to imagine Requiescat might be much larger than he was.

They met no opposition along the way, if a few French scouts: but these sighted them and turned and fled at once, bearing the news away. It was too much to hope for, that so large a force as they were, aloft, would go without notice; and if it made Napoleon delay his attack, indeed desirable he should have the news. Their flight bore them over Hammersmith and Kew, the snaking brown ribbon of the Thames with sparkling ice on its edges and a crust of snow, and then over the city itself.

Hollin took Elsie out ahead, quick, and threw out signal-flags; then the guns spoke from below, acknowledging, and below people came running into the streets to cheer them on, a heartening noise if made faint by distance. Temeraire called ahead, “Dirigion, Ventiosa, go ahead so they may see our flags,” and two Yellow Reapers darted out ahead, red velvet curtains streaming from their grasp.

Another twenty minutes’ flight brought the Army visible: a sea of redcoats in the churned mud and snow of camp. Temeraire took on height as they came in, so he had a clear lane before him, and then drawing breath roared. The air before them was cold and full of fragile wisps of white cloud, and these gave an ephemeral physical form to the terrible ringing force of the divine wind, breaking before its force into wide striated ripples, very much like the haze of heat which might appear over packed ground or sand in high summer. They melted away nearly at once again, but below, the dragons of the Corps were all putting their heads up from their clearings to watch them coming on, and roaring out in answer, glad greetings, and Temeraire banking took them down in a broad field, on the Army’s left flank near about Plumstead.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, as they were settling, “pray will you tell the generals that I am very happy to come and speak to them, but they will need to clear some room at their tent, if it is that large one in the middle of camp, and also they had better do something about the horses.”

“I must prepare you, they will certainly not be in the least happy to have you come,” Laurence said, “nor take any act towards easing that end.”

“Then,” Temeraire said, “we will all go away again, and they may fight Napoleon without us. They have asked us to come, and they need our help; they may not treat us like slaves. And we will manage to feed ourselves, I dare say, somehow or other, even if they do not like to keep giving us cows.”

Laurence hesitated; he wished to voice some protest, and speak of duty, but justice silenced him. It was surely in no wise Temeraire’s duty, nor the duty of any of those dragons, who had never been asked for an oath, nor received any recompense for service. His own duty, he saw less clear. If he were ordered to remain, to serve whether in the field or a sentence of death, there could be no alternative. But he feared the duty demanded of him would be rather to persuade Temeraire to stay—against the dragon’s own interests, if necessary.

He was brought to the same tent again, now much altered: the map-tables occupied the lion’s share of the floor, unfolded wide, and littered with markers and figures. A steady low arguing was going on in a back chamber which had been added on, through a fresh-cut flap, querulous voices and frightened, and only a few with any note of decision; Laurence could hear Jane’s voice rising clear and ringing above them all. He was kept standing silently, trying not to overhear.

A group of young lean unsmiling officers were working over the tables; they looked at Laurence with cold disdain, and then paid him no attention. At length a colonel came out and said to Laurence, icily, “I am to tell you that you will be pardoned, if you can make the dragons fight.”

That the remark gave him no pleasure was evident. “Damned disgrace,” one of the young men in the corner muttered, without looking up.

“Bring me sixty dragons the hour before a battle and I will pardon your treason, and murder, too,” Wellesley said, coming out of the back room. “I don’t know what sort of genius of disaster you are, Laurence, but if you can be aimed at Bonaparte instead of us, you are worth not hanging. Can you make the beasts obey?”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “I have brought you no dragons; you would better say, the dragons brought me. They do not obey me but Temeraire—”

“And the creature obeys you, that is good enough for me,” Wellesley said. “I am not in a mood to have my time wasted with legalities. Do your damned duty, or I will have you hanged, before I go and get myself shot on the field.” He snatched a paper from the table and scribbled upon it a few hurried lines, which could have been interpreted in nearly any fashion one chose, and thrust them out.

Laurence looked at the paper, life, liberty, duty all in one; and was nearly grateful to Wellesley for the bribery and threats, distasteful in themselves, which could only make the command easier to refuse.

“You will forgive me, sir,” he said, “I cannot make you the promise you wish; I have not the power to make it good. If you wish to speak with the leader of the dragon-militia, that is Temeraire himself. And he will not obey, nor the beasts with him, if they are not consulted.”

“For the love of God, and Bonaparte on our doorstep,” Wellesley said. “Do you imagine we have time to go jumping a mile across camp, to coddle dragons now and not just men?”

“He needs no coddling, sir,” Laurence said, “beyond what information you would consider appropriate, for any commander of a substantial militia arrived late, and without any prior knowledge of your plan of attack. He is more than willing to come to you, if there were space cleared for him, and the horses secured against their natural instinct of flight.”

Wellesley snorted. “Plan of attack? He can’t know any less about it than any man alive does. Rowley,” he said, turning abruptly to one of the young men at the side of the tent, who jerked to attention, “go tie up the horses and clear enough room for him to land. How much does he need?”

He waited for no answer, but went back into the general staff meeting. “Temeraire will require some hundred and fifty feet, square, to come down,” Laurence said to Rowley, going outside with him.

“What is he, clumsy as a cow?” the young man said sourly, and shouting gave orders for several tents to be moved, and an entire picket-line of horses. “I won’t answer for your neck if he eats the general’s favorite horse,” he added.

Laurence did not bother to answer these remarks, but went as quickly as he could back to the clearings, and halted: word had traveled at speed, and a handful of his crew had come to the camp, evidently having slipped away from their other assignments. “Sir,” Fellowes said, glancing up from his work, and Blythe beside him with a small forge. Gangly young Allen stood up flushing, two inches taller at a glance than he had been, and touched his hat, and with them Emily Roland.

“Gentlemen,” Laurence said, torn between gratitude and dismay, for they were working not on harness and armor but on Temeraire’s platinum breastplate, and Emily had brought Temeraire’s jeweled talon-sheaths.

These, having been given him in China, were remarkably beautiful, and remarkably gaudy, gold and silver engraved with elaborate Oriental designs and studded with small chips of gemstones. His breastplate, with its great pearl and sapphires, further advanced the service of vanity, with his old smaller string of gold and pearls suspended from its chain, not at all complementary. Besides this Temeraire had arranged to have himself scrubbed until he gleamed, and even, Laurence was sorry to see, his handful of scars painted over, with a pot of the sort of glossy black used upon doors and iron railings. It was most notable upon his chest, where a barbed French ball had taken him in the flesh, during an engagement at sea; the wound had been ugly, and though healed clean had left a puckered knot of scales.

When Laurence came in Temeraire was engaged in examining himself critically as best he could, in a large dressing-room mirror good enough only to show perhaps five feet of him at a time, and considering whether to add a spangled net of chains to be draped over his ruff.

“Iskierka offered me it,” he said, “and while of course ordinarily I would not borrow anyone else’s things, and pretend that they were mine, I am only thinking that, as we have not had time to make medals yet, it might stand in for them.”

“Pray let me advise you against it,” Laurence said, sadly, imagining the generals’ reaction. “Borrowed finery cannot be to anyone’s taste, and if it should be lost, or damaged, you would be indebted—”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, “that is very true; I suppose I had better not,” and he sighed wistfully. “Very well, Roland, take it off,” and he lowered his head reluctantly.

It did not much matter, however, in the end. Temeraire descended to a great spreading silence, even the horses’ frightened cries dying away to overwhelmed stillness. Rowley, still waiting outside, was pale beneath his dark narrow moustache, as Temeraire neatly fitted himself into what was indeed a very cramped space for him, having to coil up his tail as he landed.

“Well, is it here?” Wellesley said, coming out, and pausing looked up and up and up, and said nothing more. A few pieces of jewellery were perhaps not much to notice, Laurence realized, when one had never seen the whole dragon before; and as an Army officer, Wellesley had likely never been close to a beast over courier-weight; a seaman might at least have served on a transport.

“I am Colonel Temeraire, at your service,” Temeraire said, peering down interestedly.

“You are, are you?” Wellesley said after another moment, recovering his voice. “You’ll do to stop a few mouths, anyway. Rowley, go tell those fellows in there to come out, so we can meet with our new colonel.”

A man came hurriedly out of the tent: no military officer, but a gentleman in a neat sober suit of dark brown. “General, if you will forgive me—the Ministry feels there is some danger of a precedent—if I might have a word—” He had not properly, fully, noticed Temeraire yet: while he talked his eyes flicked a few times to the side and up, caught glimpses of black scales, the smooth horn of the talons, impressions which over the course of his sentence accumulated until at last he raised his head to look properly, and fell silent.

“No, you mightn’t,” Wellesley said with satisfaction, watching him choke, and pressed him unresistingly into a folding-chair. “Have a seat, Giles. Rowley, go on and tell the rest of them to come out here.”

“I beg your pardon,” Temeraire said to the poor man, who trembled violently as the dragon’s head lowered near, “but if you are part of the Ministry, I should like a word, myself. We would like to vote, please, and also to be paid.”

The professional soldiers were not quite so easily quelled, and Jane dispelled a great deal of the effect, by coming out and saying to Temeraire, “Did you deck yourself out for Christmas? This is a war, not a Vauxhall burlesque.”

“I have put on my nicest things, to be respectful,” Temeraire said, injured.

“To show away, you mean,” Jane said, and as this mode of conversation did not result in her being eaten, or squashed, the others grew more bold. More bold than Wellesley at least would have liked; he had very evidently hit on the notion of stifling dissent with his own proposals through an intimidation by proxy, more than he had any real interest in consulting Temeraire’s opinion.

What threat they faced was not any longer the subject of disagreement; scouts and word along the road had brought enough plain intelligence for that. The Fleur-de-Nuits would come, two formations’ worth of them, likely near the middle of the night, and would bombard them steadily until morning, when the massed French lines would fall upon them and try to drive them from their position.

This position was indeed an enviable one: the generals had retreated from the coast very particularly to reserve for themselves the luxury of choosing the next battlefield. That Napoleon would seek to occupy London, had never been in doubt. He had occupied Vienna, though that city lacked strategic value, and marched through Berlin, only for the moral value of these victories, the personal and not the military satisfaction of standing in his enemies’ palaces and feeling them his own.—And London had a great many banks. Gold and silver to fuel his invasion, and the chance to split the country south from north, with the Thames as a useful vein bringing him lifeblood from the coast.

So the British army had arranged itself on the southern bank between Woolwich and Oxleas Wood, overlooking the Great Dover Road to London, barricades having been established across what alternate roads might have served the French. If these impediments were not as advanced as one would have liked, Napoleon having moved too quickly, still they would have markedly delayed the progress of any great mass of men, and given the British time to fall upon them from behind, and they were well-placed if Napoleon tried to come at the city down the river. But Napoleon did not mean to scorn the gauntlet which had been thrown down: he was coming to them, along the main road.

In the present encampment, the British had the advantage of higher ground, with several stout farmhouses and a few old stone walls and fences, for barricades and fortifications, which should make them all the harder to dislodge. “We will hold here,” Sir Hew Dalrymple said: he had the command, an older officer with a stout neck and fair hair creeping back from his temples. “It would be folly to yield so advantageous a position—”

“And if we are forced to yield it?” Wellesley said, dryly; there was marshy ground on their western flank, sodden with snow; but no-one would discuss this difficulty.

“He has moved quicker than we had expected, but we must not let this throw us into disarray,” General Dalrymple continued. “That is how the Prussians ran into trouble—letting him cast them into confusion, changing their minds and their ground ten times a day.”

“Sir, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, unable to restrain himself. “That a lack of decision plagued the Prussian army, I cannot deny; but they were outfought, sir, on open ground—”

“With this trick of horse-blinders you have gone on about, in your report,” Dalrymple said. “You may set your mind at ease,” he added, in ironic tones, which said without a word how little he trusted Laurence’s anxiety, “we have not discounted what of your intelligence could be confirmed; our horses have their own damned hoods now, and if Bonaparte thinks he will stampede us with a few dragon-charges, he will soon learn otherwise.”

“And this time, Bonaparte has let his thirst for speed outpace his sense,” another general said. “All the scouts agree, even the beasts,” he added coldly in Jane’s direction, before she had said a word, “that he has not brought up all his army yet. He has some thirty thousand men, not fifty; we are not far short of him even without our levies and reinforcements.”

“You will be a damn sight shorter by morning,” she answered, “if you mean to lie here and be bombarded. And my scouts have made thirty thousand, but that does not mean there are not more to come.”

“You have caterwauled without a stop how we must have these sixty more dragons,” another officer, a colonel, said belligerently, “and swallow treason and unhandled beasts to have them, and now you talk as though we have nothing to do but sit and bear it while the French drop round-shot on our heads. If they are of no use here, they are of no use at all.”

“We have seen a great many of the French along our way from Wales,” Temeraire said, putting in his own oar, “and of course we can stop the Fleur-de-Nuits, if we can only see them, but at night that is difficult.”

“Difficult? So is winning battles difficult,” General Dalrymple said, scowling, and not looking up. He beckoned to his aide and thrust out a map to Laurence. “You will take the beasts here, a mile out past camp,” he said, “and hold the Fleur-de-Nuits there, until morning—”

“That is very silly; the Fleur-de-Nuits will go right around us if we are a mile out,” Temeraire said.

“A couple of rounds against Lefèbvre’s rear-guard, and now you try to tell us our business,” Dalrymple said to Laurence. “By God, I have half-a-mind to—you will obey orders, damn you; you will do as you are told and be grateful for the chance—”

“If I had done as I was told,” Temeraire said, “you should have sixty less dragons, and Lefèbvre would have a good deal more food, and tomorrow Napoleon would likely beat all of you for good. So that is a very stupid thing to say. Whyever ought I do as I am told?”

“If you do not, we will hang—” the belligerent officer began, and Jane said, “Maclaine!” too late, and Temeraire growled, deep in his throat, and lowered his head with his ruff up sharp.

Briefly, he had perhaps become to them only another voice in their deliberations, if a queer, more resonant one, speaking from aloft. But what contempt the little familiarity had produced, vanished in the face of that growl, the great glossy lowered head with the eyes half-a-foot across and glittering yellow-slitted like lamps, over a jawful of serrated teeth with the smallest the size of a man’s hand. It was too palpable a reminder that they were in the presence of a creature who could have, with a stroke, killed them all, and with very little effort to himself. To Laurence, Temeraire could never seem viscerally a threat; but he had handled the dragon from hatchling to maturity, and remembered him a creature scarcely larger than a dog.

“Laurence has oaths and duty to you, and he would let you hang him, although I do not understand why,” Temeraire said after a moment, low and angrily. “And I cannot make him come away with me, against his will, because that would also be wrong. But I will not let him be parted from me again, and if you do hang him, then I will take my friends and go; but not back to China. I will go to Napoleon, and I will tell him he may have my territory, if only he destroys you all, and I will give him any help he wants of me to do it. Now threaten me again, if you like.”

Laurence stood wretchedly, helplessly. He ought to have expected it. Lien had done as much, for the death of her companion, Prince Yongxing; had gone and put herself freely into Bonaparte’s hands, with nothing at the time but contempt for him and all the West, and even though a Napoleon the master of Europe might turn his eyes against her own nation, someday. And what sense of loyalty Temeraire might have begun to acquire to Britain, whatever Laurence might have been able to instill in him, had been undone thoroughly first by the Admiralty’s plan, to infect and kill all the dragons of the West, reserving the cure for British use; and by their later imprisonment and the death-sentence on Laurence which had been used as a bludgeon against him: and now used once too often.

To think his execution would leave Temeraire not free to make his own way back to China, but a devoted enemy of Britain, was a fresh agony; Laurence had no doubt that such a threat would only make the generals despise him and the dragon all the more, and see in it his own scheme for preserving his neck by blackmail. They might choose not to provoke Temeraire again, while Napoleon had men on British soil, but that, he hoped profoundly, was only a temporary state, and then—

Laurence did not discount, as Dalrymple did, Temeraire’s achievement: without experience or training for the task, or anything but will, he had persuaded sixty lazy, well-fed dragons to go with him to war; and had won two victories already, against the French army. That Lefèbvre was not the best of the Marshals, that he had no great number of dragons with him, that Temeraire had only engaged with small companies, meant very little next to the greater success that he had managed to keep his force together and fed. But these men might shortsightedly think themselves happy to be rid of Temeraire and any dragons recalcitrant enough to follow him; and if they did not, they would only take this as still more cause to try some low scheme of murder against him.

“Temeraire,” he said, low, trying, into the silence which lingered, “Temeraire, you cannot say such things; you are a serving-officer now—these are your superiors; you may not make threats, or growl at their orders—you must withdraw the remarks.”

“I did not growl at the orders,” Temeraire said after a moment, still low and angrily, but drawing away his head a little, and all around the circle one might see chests rising with postponed breath. “I did not growl at the orders, and will not, no matter how stupid they are; but as for hanging, if anyone should try to take you from me again, I shall growl at them, and worse, and it is no use telling me I ought not.”

“As one might expect—” Maclaine began, a little faintly, only to be interrupted by Wellesley.

“Damn you, Maclaine, stop baiting the damned bear to see it dance.” Wellesley seized the moment, and addressed the others, still silent and shaken. “This is all nonsense. I do not believe for a minute that Bonaparte has come up with a man less than all his army, whatever phantasy the scouts have brought you. We can get forty thousand men at Weedon, with their guns and supply, and if we give Bonaparte one of his precious pitched battles without every last one of them, we are a pack of fools.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” Dalrymple snapped. “Stand aside and wave him on to London?”

“London was lost three days ago,” Wellesley said, “if not two weeks ago, when Nelson was sent to Copenhagen with twenty ships, and Bonaparte saw his main chance. The sooner we swallow it, the better. Get the men on the road tonight, at once. They have been lying about with nothing to do but get drunk and gamble and whore for a week, they can give up a little sleep—”

Cries of protest began rising, through the stifled moment, accusations of defeatism and surrender. Wellesley raised his voice and kept going, “Waste munitions and men and beasts to hold a lost position—we all ought to be hanged for traitors if we do it. To Scotland—to Scotland and the mountains, damn you all! He can’t hold the country and keep the Channel open both. Let him have England for a month, let him spend men and dragons trying to hold it, and march for Loch Laggan. We will have a hundred thousand men by Christmas, and come down on him when we choose, not Bonaparte—”

“And let him milk London dry, and wreck the country in the meantime—” one man shouted.

“Send men on to London to warn the tradesmen and the bankers out of the city with whatever they can manage,” Wellesley said. “Half of them have gone running to Edinburgh already, after the King; let the rest of them go, too.”

“If they choose to,” someone said, “instead of stay, and shake Bonaparte’s hand as he comes in.”

“If they mean to stay, they’ll stay,” Jane said. “You won’t make ’em less eager by letting Bonaparte beat you beforehand. Scotland is the first damned thing of sense anyone has said. We needed these sixty beasts, Maclaine, but you cannot throw sixty dragons like round-shot and hope they land somewhere useful. In a week I will have worked out a way to use them, and by Christmas I will know how to do it properly; for tomorrow we can’t do more than cut them loose on his flank and let them do as they like everywhich-way.”

“But that sounds perfectly agreeable to me,” Temeraire interrupted. “I do not see at all why we ought not be able to beat Napoleon tomorrow, even if he outnumbers us; it seems quite cowardly to run away from him.”

Laurence sinkingly heard this speech, which he was sure could have no salutary effect. If he did not much like the idea of retreat, he had yet heard no plan of battle offered, which gave him any confidence that the British were prepared to meet Bonaparte; and he was not heartened, to see that those officers advocating loudest for battle, were by and large those in finer clothes, and fatter than field rations could keep a man.

“O, you wretched bloodthirsty creature,” Jane said, “as if it were not bad enough dealing with all the thrusting-out of chests already, now you must needs do it too; we need more sense, not less.”

“I am not thrusting out my chest at all,” Temeraire protested, pulling himself in rather concave instead, “and I am being very sensible, because if you did run away, it would not do any good, at least if you go by foot as you have been. He will just go after you. He can catch you up in a trice: they go fifty miles in a day.”

“Nonsense,” someone said.

“It is not nonsense,” Temeraire said. “Lefèbvre’s company, eight thousand men, were all near Newbury by Thursday morning, and they had only landed at Deal on Monday; so he can do it.”

There was a moment of perfect silence, on all sides: it was one thing to argue over retreat; another entirely to hear the enemy could not be escaped. After a moment, Jane said, “Well, he can beat us by the numbers, but we have around two dozen heavy-weights now, and he hasn’t more than ten, aside from his Fleurs. I will take it on to beat his speed, if you will only let me—”

“—put redcoats on dragons, yes, yes, as you keep saying,” she was interrupted, by another colonel. “I should like to see it.”

“You can come to our camp if you would,” Temeraire offered. “We have been carrying along a lot of them, although,” he added severely, “if you wanted us all to carry, you ought to have spent a little time making carrying-harnesses, which I know Laurence told you of; because it would be a good deal more convenient than rope, and we could manage more, but perhaps if they do not mind being bundled up into sacks made out of tents, or belly-netting—”

“I should damned well say they will mind,” one general said.

“Are they soldiers or aren’t they?” Wellesley snapped. “Shoot the first insubordinate bastard to refuse and the rest of them will go quiet enough.”

But it was too far; he and Jane were both shouted down. “Enough of this craven counsel,” General Dalrymple said. “We stand, and we fight. General Wellesley, you will take the right flank tomorrow, and hold the line at the barracks. General Burrard, you will take the left, and plan on pinching him, when he has worn himself out enough, trying to fight uphill against the main body of our force.”

Wellesley stiffened, at the assignment; something of a slap, to be set in the position where less maneuvering should be required, and less initiative. He made no outward protest, however, but his fingers on the hilt of his sword drummed.

“And as for you, Roland,” Dalrymple added, “if the damned beasts will not fight the Fleur-de-Nuits—”

“I did not say that at all!” Temeraire said, bristling. “We will fight anyone, I only said, we cannot stop them, if you send us out of camp to do it. The Fleur-de-Nuits can see at night, and we cannot; it stands to reason they can go right around us, above or below. We cannot stop them just by lining up somewhere in their road and hoping.”

“You can hear them, can’t you?” Dalrymple demanded, exasperated enough by repeated interruption to address Temeraire directly, for once.

“A Fleur-de-Nuit sounds just like a Yellow Reaper to us, flying,” Temeraire said. “They beat at the same pace.”

Laurence blinked. He had never noticed such a thing, nor considered it as a difficulty, and by the expressions of the other officers, neither had any of them; even Jane looked surprised by the intelligence, and she was an aviator of thirty years’ experience and more.

“And anyway,” Temeraire added, “one cannot tell where a sound is coming from closely, not when one is aloft and moving, and there are a great many other dragons about all beating in circles. If the Fleur-de-Nuits should go past us one at a time, we would likely never notice them at all, and then we would come back and you would complain we had not done anything. If you want us to stop them, you may say so, and then let us work out, how it is to be done.”

Chapter 8

TEMERAIRE COULD NOT call it a very satisfactory conversation, although he congratulated himself on putting an end to the threats against Laurence. But the generals were not very clever, at all, and whatever Laurence might say about superior officers, it seemed to Temeraire that if they were his superiors, then they ought to give him better orders than he could work out for himself, not worse; and some of them had wanted to run away, only because they did not have as many people.

“But, at least I have spoken to a fellow from the Ministry, and told him that we require voting, and pay, and he did not refuse; which I think is encouraging,” he told the others, “and they have been sensible enough to let us manage the Fleur-de-Nuits how we like: only, now we must work out how.”

“If we fight them here right at the camp,” Perscitia said thoughtfully, the tip of her tail flicking urgently back and forth, “then they must come right to us, to do any good, and there will be enough light from the fires to see them at least a little, and we can fight them off straightaway.”

“They need not fight you at all, if you are above the camp,” Laurence said. “They need only dart in and drop their bombs and fly away again: they are sure to hit something of value, without needing to be particular about their targets.”

“Perhaps if we should make a ring about the camp,” Temeraire said, “and then if we heavy-weights fly patterns, back and forth across, then they cannot come in without our noticing them, and we can catch them and teach them a good lesson; they will not long keep at it.”

“Yes,” Admiral Roland said, “and tomorrow we will have not a one of you fit to fly, which Napoleon will have bought cheap at the price of sending out ten dragons, who are no good in the day any road. No; we can’t spend near so much of your strength. Tonight every last heavy-weight of you must eat, and get at once to sleep; you have already been flying more than you ought, the day before a battle.”

Unfortunately the good sense of this rather dull objection, which Temeraire would have liked to dismiss, was making itself felt in a palpable way; Requiescat was snoring noisily in his corner, even though he was supposed to be attending to their conference, and Temeraire could not deny that he himself felt his mind drifting to his dinner more than seemed fitting, with a battle ahead. He sighed, and acknowledged the justice of it.

“But the little dragons cannot fight so many big, without any of us,” he said. “And we will need them, too, tomorrow; otherwise Napoleon will send all of his little ones against us, and even though most of us have not any crew to be captured, they will still tangle us up.”

Admiral Roland rubbed her cheek with her knuckles and then she said, “Well, we can’t spare the strength to keep them from the camp, so we had better keep the camp from them.”

It was a little while before they could begin to put the plan in motion: Admiral Roland had evidently some arguing to do first, but at last the fires began to be put out, all across the camp, and the men to take down their tents, grumbling against the cold.

“This is boring,” Iskierka said to him, dissatisfied, as they sat waiting: a large square of forest just beside the camp was being marked out for them by middle-weights. “It is not at all as good as fighting, and I do not want to sleep.”

“Well, you must sleep, or else you cannot fight tomorrow,” Temeraire said, although privately he felt rather much the same. “Now hurry, we do not have a good deal of time; the sun is already going down, and they will be sure to realize something is wrong, if it gets dark and they can see everything is ablaze.”

“Yesterday you did not want me setting trees on fire at all,” she said still grumbling, but leaping aloft she strafed across the marked square with her flame, until the trees began to catch; the middle-weights had pulled up a good broad line of trees all around, and clawed up the dirt, to make a fire-break. It made a fine blaze, pleasantly warm—“Temeraire,” Laurence said, gently touching his neck, and Temeraire jerked his head up; it had been very comfortable to doze.

“I am awake. Is it our turn yet?” He leapt aloft, and studied critically the still-blazing trees. He could not just cry away at them, for if they fell athwart the fire-break, they would catch all the rest of the trees, so he went in a careful perimeter about them, and roared inward into the square. The fire-weakened trees crashed and fell in the most satisfying way, sparks flying up in great glowing orange clouds like small fireworks.

“Well, I suppose it is a little easier to knock them down,” he admitted to Laurence, “after they have been burnt some; not that I could not have managed it alone.”

“You must also reserve your strength,” Laurence said. “Another pass, and that will have done it, I think; some trees left standing will do no harm. The signal, Mr. Allen,” Laurence added, and when Temeraire had given the field another circle, the middle-weights came in dropping their loads of wet dirt, scooped up easily from the riverbed of the Thames with waggon-carts as shovels, and heaped it onto the remaining flames.

What was left would not have been much use as a real place to rest, the field a wet and smoky mess, covered with heaps of debris and the cracked stumps of trees poking inconveniently out of the ground at odd intervals. No-one could have comfortably stretched out in it without a great deal more work done to clear it out. But there were still a handful of fires crackling left, smaller, which the men dug rings around, to keep from spreading, and after a little shoveling here and there a handful of tents were put up, and from aloft it looked well enough, especially with the stuffed redcoats, coats and breeches filled with straw, which Admiral Roland’s men had arranged about some of the fires.

“I like those,” Perscitia said, eyeing the figures, and paced back a few steps to examine them critically. “One must be quite close to notice, and I dare say if one were moving quickly, it would be quite impossible.”

“I hope it will do for the Fleurs, any road,” Admiral Roland said. “And now, the lot of you, to the herds; and to sleep. Laurence, do you want your officers?”

“I would not have them removed from other posts, if they have been placed,” Laurence said, “but I defer to your judgment, Admiral.” Temeraire tipped his head and put his ear towards Laurence, puzzled a little, to hear better his tone, which seemed to him a little odd.

“Are you not happy?” Temeraire asked anxiously, while he waited for his dinner; the herdsmen at the pen were conferring together, about the rations which they could provide, with occasional anxious glances towards the sixty dragons patiently arranged outside the fence. Laurence had been so very quiet, since the conference. “We are together again, and we will soon beat Napoleon; I am sure the generals cannot help but see, when that is done, that we have done everything correctly. I see now,” he added, “why they were ready to be so wicked: they are so very afraid of losing. And I cannot really blame them for being afraid, because they do not seem to be very clever; but they might at least be clever enough to see that they ought to let us manage things, if they are not very good at it themselves.”

“I would not for the world diminish your spirits,” Laurence said, after a moment. “I am very glad indeed to be with you again, and for the prospect of action; but I will counsel you against that degree of overconfidence, which lends itself only to disappointment. That,” he added, lower, nearly to himself, “was perhaps as much as anything the cause of the Prussian loss.”

“Well, they were very slow,” Temeraire said. “And it seems to me so are these fellows, but at least now it cannot matter any longer, since we are to fight here: we do not need to hurry anywhere. Whyever is it taking so long?” He stretched his head out over the fence. “What is the difficulty?”

They did not have enough, that was the difficulty: less than eighty cows in the pen, and all the harnessed dragons to be fed also. “Then you must make soup, and roast and crack the bones to make it tastier, and so we can eat them more easily; and you might put some grain in it, and some vegetables,” Temeraire added, to the rather perplexed-looking herdsmen. “Laurence, where has Gong Su gone to?”

“I do not know,” Laurence said. “He was privately hired, not an official member of the crew, and my affairs have been in no kind of order. I have not been able to carry on any sort of correspondence, nor meet my obligations. I expect he must have sought other employment: I hope he was successful.”

“I did not think all my crew would be taken away in this fashion,” Temeraire said, feeling rather displeased, “or I would have brought everyone with us to France; except then I suppose they would all have been called traitors, too, and perhaps some of them would not have liked to go.”

“No,” Laurence said. “But I thank you for the reminder; I must make arrangements, while I can; I must make inquiries after Gong Su, and make good my other debts.”

“There will be a great deal of time, after tomorrow,” Temeraire pointed out.

Laurence paused and then said, “Best to clear away such things before a battle, my dear.”

THE SOUP THE HERDSMEN at length managed was not very good, even though they were all hungry enough to eat it: the meat and vegetables in congealed lumps at the bottom, and not very pleasant, either, but squashy and flavorless. Only Gentius was pleased: he ate twice his usual amount, and pronounced it excellent, really excellent, and he would have another serving if there were any left.

“Not much like proper food,” Requiescat said unenthusiastically.

“Well, tomorrow when we have beaten them, we will go and get our own herd, and perhaps by then, Laurence will have got hold of Gong Su again,” Temeraire said, “and then he will make us a feast to celebrate, something very nice, perhaps, such as what they cook in the Imperial Palace.”

“I will be happy enough with a proper cow, fresh,” Requiescat said, and then sat up abruptly, throwing back his shoulders, as with a great thump Maximus came down in the clearing before them and rattled all the trees nearby.

“Hm,” Maximus said, and drew himself up on his haunches, too.

“You are here!” Temeraire cried, joyfully. “Is Lily with you also? Are you well?”

“Right as rain,” Maximus said absently, without looking away from Requiescat; they were both prickling up their spines and staring at one another directly in the eyes.

“Where is—Maximus?” Temeraire said, puzzled. “What are you doing?”

“Laurence!” a voice yelled faintly, from outside the camp, and Laurence looked up from where he was sitting and writing. “Laurence, get that damned lump of mine out of that camp, you have another Regal there!”

“Oh,” said Temeraire, and roared, loudly, over their heads; Maximus and Requiescat both jerked violently and turned to look at him instead, blinking. “There, now do not start that again, we have a battle tomorrow,” Temeraire said, “and you had better stop Berkley from running so fast, or he will have an apoplexy,” he added.

Maximus turned his head and said, “You do not have to run, what is there to be running for?” as Berkley came nearly staggering into the clearing, and Laurence went to give him his arm to the fallen tree which Temeraire had pulled down for him to sit on.

Berkley stared from Maximus to Requiescat and back, very suspiciously, while he gulped for breath. “Pray do not worry, I will not let them fight,” Temeraire said. “I would have thought you had more sense,” he added to them severely.

“I was not going to fight,” Maximus said, unconvincingly. “Only I have never seen anyone big as me before, except when I was still growing.”

“The girls are bigger,” Requiescat said, with rather a reminiscent tone. “But that is different.”

“I do not see why,” Temeraire said, “and it is not as though a Grand Chevalier were much smaller.” He did not think he was much smaller, either, but that perhaps would be rather puffing himself off to say.

“Don’t much like them, either,” Requiescat said.

Maximus nodded vigorously in agreement. “And we are on short commons,” he added. “I knew you must be back, as soon as they brought us this mess for dinner.” He nudged Temeraire’s shoulder with his head, in a friendly way. Temeraire wobbled, but managed with some effort to keep his balance.

“Tomorrow there will be plenty, and anyway, even if there were not, I dare say you could fly in opposite directions and find something, without having to quarrel over it,” Temeraire said. “But where is Lily?”

“She is in Scotland,” Maximus said. “Catherine has had the egg, so she cannot be flying to fight.”

“I suppose I did not tell you before: a boy,” Berkley said to Laurence, gloomily, “so no use to us; and ten pounds, damn him. Nearly killed her.”

“The egg is very noisy,” Maximus added.

“I hope they both do well now?” Laurence said.

“She can write and say so, which means she is only half-dead, I expect,” Berkley said, and heaved himself up to his feet. “Have you finished your damned card-call?” he said to Maximus. “If this fine scheme of Roland’s is going to do any good, you cannot be hopping all over the camp now it is getting dark. And you may carry me this time, instead of heaving yourself off without a word.”

“I only wanted to come see Temeraire a moment,” Maximus said, putting out one great curved claw for Berkley to climb into. “And now we have, so we may go.”

“We shall see each other tomorrow in the fighting, anyway,” Temeraire said, with satisfaction, and curled himself up to sleep with a sense of great contentment, only to be jarred rudely awake an hour later, by the queer muffled booming of bombs falling, and the popping voices of the pepper guns answering.

He put his head up and looked: he could not see anything much but the occasional white blooms of powder-flash from the ground, where the artillery-men were firing, and the great yellow bursts of flame as the bombs struck and burst. When there was no firing going on, he could only make out the faintest shadows of the handful of light-weights circling—mostly mongrels with better night-vision than most, Minnow and some other of the ferals, who had been organized into shifts to give some semblance of resistance to enhance the ruse.

“You ought to go back to sleep,” Laurence said, rousing, and Temeraire lowered his head to nose at him carefully: how good it was not to be alone, and to know Laurence was with him, and safe; only it would have been better still if they might have gone fighting together.

“I will, in a moment,” Temeraire said, privately hoping that perhaps the Fleurs might realize the trick, any moment now, and they should have to go and join in. But the French dragons were flying too high aloft, and the fires on the ground and the explosions of their own bombs dazzled their sensitive eyes too badly, particularly with the flash-powder being shot in their faces whenever the fighting detachment could manage: Arkady and some of his ferals, with their small crews, were taking a part.

He sighed and put his head down again, twitching as yet another of the bombs went off.

SILENCE WOKE LAURENCE, a little while before dawn: the bombardment had stopped. He rolled off Temeraire’s arm and went to wash his face, breaking the crust of ice in the bowl and scrubbing as best as he could: there was no soap. Smoke still rose from the decoy field, but the sky above was empty and lightening quickly. The French would be on the move by now: an hour, perhaps would see them—

A bell was ringing, distantly, a frantic note in its voice, and others picking up the alarm, coming nearer and nearer, sounding all over the camp, and Temeraire put his head up and said exultantly, “It is time to fight.”

He put Laurence aboard into an odd arrangement, with only the few straps of harness which Fellowes and Blythe had managed for him and Allen and Roland to latch on to; there would be no one more going up with them. He had considered whether to dismiss Roland back to whatever post she had abandoned, from concern that it might seem a reflection on Jane, a kind of endorsement she surely would not have chosen to make. But he did not know where she had been serving, and when he had inquired, Roland had put out her chin and only said, “I should prefer to stay, sir,” and she shook her head when he asked her if she had been signal-ensign. “Fifth lookout, sir; I shan’t be missed.”

Of course, Emily had no need to worry about her future, which was quite settled: she would inherit Excidium, on her mother’s retirement, a promotion guaranteed; Blythe and Fellowes were ground-crew masters and could always be sure of a place. Allen, however—

“No, sir, well,” Allen said, stumbling over his words, “that is, they hadn’t given me a place again, sir, aloft; I was with the clerks, so, it doesn’t much matter for me.”

It was, Laurence privately and sadly felt, a better place for him: Allen was hopelessly clumsy, and more than once had nearly accomplished his own end; but Laurence would not tell any man to stay behind the lines, who wished to be in them.

They now came stumbling from their small cold shelter, little more than a few branches laid down on the earth, next Temeraire’s side, to keep them from lying in the wet. Laurence reached a hand down, to help them up, where before many dozens would have been.

“I am coming, too,” another voice said, thickly accented; Laurence looked over and saw Demane standing already beside him, having come up the other side. The boy was bristling with arms: two smallswords, two pistols, two knives, all with mismatched hilts, and a sack of small bombs slung over his shoulder, which he strung onto the harness without waiting for permission. “No, you sit there,” he told Allen, pointing farther back along Temeraire’s shoulder to the lookout’s place, and such was the air of decision that Allen meekly obeyed; though he had three years and a foot in height over the younger boy.

“Are you not assigned to Arkady?” Laurence said.

“We are of your crew,” the boy said, meaning himself and Sipho, whom Laurence now spied down in the clearing, helping Fellowes and Blythe to arrange their meager supply of tools, waiting in case Temeraire should need to come back in for repairs. “Both of us, together. You said.”

“That is quite right,” Temeraire said, looking around, “and I am sure Arkady does not need him; he was allowed to fight last night,” with a note of some disgruntlement, “and will be sleeping late, and I dare say we will have won by the time he wakes up.”

So they were four aboard, where thirty were common and hundreds had been managed, all of them latched to the one thick band: it circled Temeraire’s neck, and was joined by securing straps to bands about either of his shoulders, so it would not slide about. When they had all hooked on their carabiners, Temeraire sat up, and now Laurence could see past the trees to where a cloud of French dragons was coming, like bees, back and forth along the road: setting down great numbers of men and guns.

He had seen these maneuvers before, at the Battle of Jena, and he was heartened a little to see that the British Army was not waiting idly by, but guns were being hastily advanced to fire upon the French positions, before they could be secured. The guns moved slow, however, men struggling to drag them forward through the mud, and already the French were answering nearly as vigorously.

“They are beginning without us,” Temeraire said, and his roar roused up all the dragons at once. “The enemy are here; are you all quite ready?” he asked them.

“No, wait, I have had an idea,” the blue-green dragon said, the one called Perscitia, and leapt into the air; in a moment she had returned, with something in her talons which she laid down upon the ground: a heap of the sodden and ragged figures, stuffed with straw, from their decoy clearing; some were still smoking and charred. “Tie them on to us,” she said, to the group of militiamen, rubbing their eyes, who had been sleeping beside her. “Tie them on, with rope—”

“They are quite wet,” Temeraire said, sniffing at the figures. “I do not see the use of that.”

“They will think you are harnessed!” Perscitia said. “Oh, and the paint, where is that black paint? Bring it at once, too, and make straps on them—”

“We have no time,” Temeraire protested.

“Their dragons are not fighting yet,” Perscitia said. “—very well, very well, we will do it only to the heavy-weights! Do you not see,” she snapped, “they will jump over to try and board you, and then there will be nothing for them to latch on to, and you will have them off in a trice.”

“Ha,” Jane said with satisfaction, when she had landed with Excidium, only a little while later, and had the plan explained to her, while the men finished painting Requiescat with the false harness-stripes. “Yes; very clever. They will smoke it soon enough, but while the trick lasts, they will be jumping over to board you big ones by the dozens. All right, gentlemen,” she looked over at Temeraire, “here are your orders, then: you unharnessed fellows will go in first, then, and go in close quarters at them. If you can draw their boarding parties, they will be undermanned when we come in, and we have the advantage in weight. He has only eight heavy-weight beasts brought up from the coast, as yet; I dare say he has had to send the rest back, for lack of food.”

“And when you have come in?” Temeraire asked.

“Then I cut you loose against the flanks of their infantry,” Jane said. “If we are all fighting aloft together, we will only get ourselves into a tangle, but you cannot do anything but good against them near to the ground, so long as you keep out of the line of fire of our artillery.”

“And keep out of our acid, too,” Excidium added, and leapt into the air.

“We have acid ourselves,” the old Longwing Gentius muttered, from where he was perched aboard a big Chequered Nettle, Armatius.

Temeraire turned his head and asked, “Are you all quite secure?”

Laurence checked his borrowed cutlass and pistols, one last time. “We are,” he answered, and they were aloft, with a great surging rush of wind, and many voices roaring as they rose.

Bonaparte’s Armée de l’Air was seduced easily into trying again the strategy, which had served them so well at Jena, the cloud of smaller dragons rushing the heavy-weights, loaded up with men. Laurence looked away; thirty Frenchmen at once had flung themselves with enthusiasm and courage onto Requiescat’s back, to face the large company they expected, and a shrug of the great Regal Copper’s shoulders threw them off into the air, grasping and futile; and a few of them cried out as they fell, dreadfully, until the noise ended below.

“Ow!” Temeraire said, suddenly, jerking, and Laurence looked back to see that he too, had been boarded; but one of the men, an ensign, had caught himself by stabbing a knife into the flesh and clinging to the hilt. “Ow, ow!” Temeraire added, as the French officer drew another blade, and began crawling grimly upwards stab by stab.

Laurence tightened his hands uselessly, on the harness; if there was nothing for the man to cling to, there was also nothing for them to use, to climb back and fight him off, and the Frenchman was placed near the back haunches, where Temeraire could not reach with his claws. And where, Laurence realized, in a few more of his laborious steps, he would be placed to try and stab at Temeraire’s spine. “Take hold the harness,” Laurence said, to his small crew, and called forward, “Temeraire! We are well-secured, turn over and shake him free—”

The world spun sickeningly, and for all his effort Laurence’s hands pulled loose from the harness, and left him dangling by the carabiner straps as they turned, once and twice spiraling, and righted again; all of them a little green from the close and rapid turn, and the two knife-hilts standing up alone from Temeraire’s back, the small cuts trickling a little blood down his side.

“That has torn it, sir,” Emily said, pointing; and Laurence nodded. The French had noticed their lack of success, and the loss of men: they were no longer trying to board, but turning a steady rifle-fire upon the beasts instead. Quicker than he might have hoped; but their attempts had borne some fruit, at least, and many of the French middle-weights and light-weights, who had so daringly come in close to the decoyed British heavy-weights, had paid for it dearly as well: blood ran freely down many a side, black and steaming in the cold air.

“Throw out a signal, Mr. Allen: we are made,” Laurence said, and leaned forward. “Temeraire, you had better pull away now, and go for their flank—they have a weakness, there on their right; do you see it?”

“No,” Temeraire said, rather reluctantly detaching himself from the Pêcheur-Couronné he was presently mauling about, who had with more valor than sense made a run directly at him. But the movement of men below caught his interest, after a glance. “Wait; I do, where that ditch is in their way, and they are having to go around—”

“Yes,” Laurence said: the French lines were compressed, awkwardly, where the men were crowding to advance, and they made an ideal target for an aerial strike, which should drive a hole into Napoleon’s flank not easily repaired. “Quickly, before they have got past—”

“Alors, la prochaine fois vous feriez mieux d’y réfléchir à deux fois,” Temeraire said to the smaller beast, before with a final lecturing shake he let it flee, and turning towards his fellows gave a roar unlike any Laurence had heard from him before: an odd inflected sort of sound, rising and falling in almost an eerie musical way. It pulled the attention of the other unharnessed beasts quickly, and they came peeling away from their individual battles with the French beasts, as the formal ranks of the Aerial Corps charging forward took their place.

As Temeraire banked away, Laurence turned in his straps to watch: the ranks of the harnessed beasts of the Corps were coming, not in their usual arrow-head formations, but drawn out into a single thin line of light-weights and courier-beasts and middle-weights. At intervals there was a small cluster: two middle-weights in front with a heavy-weight behind, like knots on a string; Maximus made one of them, red-gold and roaring, behind Messoria and Immortalis.

As the two forces met, the middle-weights clawed their way into the cloud of French light-weights, opening room for the heavy-weights to bull through behind them; the lighter British dragons engaging also, but only a little, slashing and continuing on, so the whole line advanced together through the French ranks, scattering them above and below.

It was as neat an answer as could be imagined, to the harrying French strategy, and now the heavy-weights were through and swooping with their tremendous loads of munitions: bombs and spikes dropping like a black iron rain down upon the French infantry and their gun emplacements. Laurence could see Excidium, those vast purple-and-orange wings spread wide as the Longwing darted low with a protective guard of two heavy-weights, and another who must have been Mortiferus, with a yellower cast to his wing-tips, on his flank. Their acid caught morning sun and sparkled, descending, and a hot grey cloud of smoke and agony rose in its wake.

The gap in the French defenses did not last for long; the French dragons regrouped and flung all their heavy-weights in a mass after the Longwings: three Petit Chevaliers, a couple of Defendeur-Braves, a marbled orange-yellow Chanson-de-Guerre. Together they massed some hundred tons and more, and descending with ferocity they could not be turned aside. Excidium and Mortiferus were forced back up into the safety of the British line, the other British heavy-weights turning to cover their escape, and the quick skirmishing cloud of the French harried them back away from the field.

Laurence was only a very little aware of the last of this: Temeraire leading them down they had stooped upon the infantry, shockingly low, and now the unharnessed dragons were wreaking a ruthless havoc on the awkwardly placed men, who could not easily get their guns up to shoot, compressed as their column was by the uneven ground. The great Chequered Nettle, Ballista, even landed herself fully on the ground a moment, and laid about with her massive barbed tail in great sweeps.

Temeraire was so close to the ground himself that Laurence was able to draw his pistols and shoot four men from his back, and Demane and Emily accounted for another two apiece, Allen another. It was more difficult to miss than to hit, at first, so packed were the French ranks; and then Laurence and his small crew were all standing in their straps and drawing swords, as a few of the soldiers leapt aboard daringly.

“Hi! Look there, the eagle, the eagle!” Moncey yelled in great excitement, darting around, but a young lieutenant shouted, “À moi! Vive l’Empereur!” and seizing the standard leapt into the ditch itself, quickly followed by the remnant of the company. All of the men knelt, heedless of the wet, and together they became a bristling mass of bayonets and rifle-fire, spitting at the dragons from below.

“Well, that is bad luck,” Temeraire said, as they were forced to lift away for a respite; but Laurence could not agree: they had wrecked the advance on the French right flank for too little cost to call it anything but good luck, the very best. Some of the dragons had taken fire, and a handful were turning tail for the camp, with shots to their wings or heads, and one smallish Yellow Reaper being helped away by his fellows had a long dreadful bayonet-slash across the belly, which had lain him open to the white gleam of ribs. But they were yet more than forty in number, after casualties and those who had been up at night fighting, and in a few hours the latter would return to the field.

The opening gambits had been made; no decisive stroke yet had fallen. The aerial combat settled into the steadier, grinding work of attrition. “You must send some of your fellows to rest,” Laurence said to Temeraire, when they had been aloft an hour, fighting nearly without a pause and in tiring style. The French had not made any more convenient mistakes, so it was all quick darting strikes whenever an opening could be seized, to get past the pepper guns and the rifles and do a little damage. “You cannot get worn down; the French dragons will take advantage as soon as they see you slowing too far. You see they are already going in shifts off the field.”

“I suppose,” Temeraire said, rather disconsolately, “only it is difficult enough already, with all of us, to manage to do any good; we have not got a single eagle, or even taken a gun. There was that one Majestatis broke, just now,” he added, “but that is not as good.”

“You are doing better than that; you have worn down their right flank, and the advantage to our own infantry will tell, more and more over the course of the day,” Laurence said. “You cannot expect a quick victory; remember how long the battle lasted, at Jena.”

It was still more of a struggle to make him go and rest himself; he would not do so until Laurence at last resorted to pointing out, “If you do not, then you will get more tired still; and if Lien should come in at the last moment—”

“Oh!” Temeraire said, “that would be just like her; I suppose I must—Ballista!” he called, “you must take charge, so I can go and rest, in case Lien comes sneaking in later. I wonder where she is hiding,” he added, rather darkly, and craned his head up to spy the rear of the French lines, hidden around a curve of the river.

The sky was brilliant clear, and the sunlight though not warming was bright; Lien’s red eyes and fragile white skin were vulnerable to such conditions, and likely, Laurence suspected, she would make no appearance, save in desperation. But if deception his suggestion were, it had sufficient good effect to make its own excuse; Temeraire grew rather drooping as they flew back to the clearings, and he fell with ravenous hunger on the dead horse which was laid out waiting for him, still in its cavalry saddle.

He shut his eyes and was asleep at once, after; Laurence climbed down to stretch his legs, and to let Fellowes and Blythe make their survey of the abbreviated harness while he made his own, walking up and down Temeraire’s sides to see what injuries had been made. The two knives, Emily was now carefully removing, slowly, fresh blood trickling. The handful of stab wounds had crusted over, at least, but there were a good half-dozen musket-shot wounds, balls gone into the meat of Temeraire’s flanks; and near one of them, Laurence was alarmed to notice, a puckered mark he had not before seen, a recent one: a ball had gone in, and not been removed.

“Sipho,” Laurence said, “go and find Mr. Keynes; you know him? Good; find him, or Dorset, and bring them at once; with their kit.” He dragged over a barrel and climbed up to lay his hand on the old wound; it felt a little hot and swollen, he thought, but perhaps it might only be the heat of battle, radiating from all Temeraire’s muscles as he lay.

“Infection,” Dorset pronounced with certainty, as soon as he had peered at it through his spectacles, and touched it with his fingertips. “My lancet, if you please, and have the tongs ready,” he said to Sipho, and then he slashed deep through the pucker, past the layer of scales and fat. A gushing flow of white and yellow pus came running free with a dreadful sour stench that made Laurence turn his head away. Dorset did not pause even an instant, but seized the tongs and drove them in deep, and pulling away brought out the musket-ball, black and shining with fluid, even as Temeraire roared awake with a bellow that shook the trees and knocked Dorset and Sipho and Laurence all flat as he flinched.

“It is over already,” Dorset said in answer to his shocked protesting, “and now you know why we take them out at once. It would have been more unpleasant if you were awake.”

“I do not see much how,” Temeraire said, rather bitterly, “and at least I should have been warned.”

“And should have jerked twenty feet away, before I could have the ball out,” Dorset returned unrepentant. “Enough complaining; now I must have the others.”

“But I must go back to fighting,” Temeraire said hurriedly, trying to escape; to no avail, and he put his head down, ruff flattened back, and muttered unhappily as Dorset went prying after the other balls, which at least were less deep.

“It will be done soon,” Laurence said, stroking his head, and Demane came out of the woods carrying a small deer, slung over his shoulders, which Temeraire picked and nibbled on for consolation.

Excidium came down beside them with a rustling like heavy silk, his great wings folding shut, and his crew swarmed down in a rush to treat his wounds: only a few scattered claw-marks, and one musket-ball, whose removal he bore with perfect stoicism. Temeraire’s complaints—Dorset was now searing shut all the cleaned wounds—promptly fell silent.

“Here you are, then,” Jane said, coming over and spying Emily, who looked a little hang-dog as she was caught: red-handed literally, for she was standing and holding the blood-wet instruments for Dorset as he worked. “And has Sanderson given you leave from your post?”

“Anyhow Artemisia can only fly an hour at a time,” Emily said, but there was rather a mulish gleam in her eye; Laurence did not imagine she had liked her mother’s former demotion, nor serving with the usurper.

“Admiral,” Temeraire said, “have you any more orders for us? I am sure we could be of great use in fighting them aloft with you; and it is not much fun just poking the infantry,” he added, his brief studied formality failing him.

“You all do very well where you are,” Jane said. “It is no time to be going off half-cocked, old fellow. I will go so far as to say I think we are nicely placed. He is making us work for every inch, but we are getting them, and soon we will have them up against the trees. Closer run than I would like, but Dalrymple was right after all, and I was wrong; it was a good chance to take.”

“I was sure it would go well,” Temeraire said, “but I would like at least one more eagle, before we make him run away again.”

“If we take him,” Jane said, and reached to scratch Temeraire’s harness, against such tempting of fate, “I hope we will get more than his eagles; we will get him. Yes, he is here, himself,” she added, when Laurence could not help himself but ask. “He is beyond the curve with his Old Guard, and his pet Celestial; a splendid creature, what I have been able to see of her.”

“I knew she should be hiding from the battle,” Temeraire said, darkly.

“Keeping them in reserve and her, too,” Jane said, “but that will not be enough. We have our own reserve: Iskierka will be waking up any moment now, and the others who were out to-night.”

“She fought last night?” Laurence said.

“Yes,” Jane said. “One can’t get her off the field once she is on it, not until the enemy has quitted; so I had Granby rouse her up when it began to get a little light, and chase off the last of the Fleurs. Then she was tired enough to sleep a while. She will wake up full of vim, and just what we need. Bonaparte has let Prussia go to his head, I suppose, and thought he could beat us with less than all his strength.”

“I have just been thinking,” Temeraire said, after a moment, “where do you suppose his Grand Chevaliers are?—and Marshal Davout; I have not seen his standards anywhere, on the field.”

“Returned to France, I imagine, or still on the coast ferrying,” Laurence said. “And Davout—”

“Portugal, last report,” Jane said.

“Well,” Temeraire said, “there were two of them west of here; we stole their pigs, but they had plenty of food besides that. And Davout is not in Portugal at all, we saw him north of London, two days ago.”

“What?” Jane said, and did not wait for an answer; she was running to Excidium at once, shouting orders, and leaping for the harness and her speaking-trumpet; Excidium going up even while her ensigns latched her on. “Alarm!” Laurence heard her shouting, “sound alarm, enemy to the north,” and flags were going out on every dragon as their crews caught the signal from Excidium’s back.

Temeraire sat up. “Whatever is she so worried for?” he said, looking at Laurence rather indignantly, but Laurence had a dreadful, sinking sensation. “Aloft,” he said, “come; we must go aloft as far as you can—” and when Temeraire had climbed high enough to make trees and hills and farmhouses all blur into the wide gentle curve of the earth, he paused, hovering, and in subdued voice said, “Yes; I see them.”

Davout was coming, directly for their rear, with thirty dragons and twenty thousand men.

Chapter 9

IN ANOTHER HOUR, there would have been nothing to do but stand and be pounded to pieces from either side; the little early warning was enough to try and disengage, at least, and Dalrymple at once issued the order for the retreat. Wellesley fought a brilliant rear-guard action, bloody and terrible, stretching his men to hold the full breadth of Napoleon’s line while the rest of them withdrew behind that shield.

But still the retreat became rout by the end: ten thousand men left floundering in the marsh to be taken prisoner, and the rest straggling ignominiously away north through the countryside, without more than their muskets and their boots, and sometimes lacking those. The dragons were carrying the guns, dispiritedly, and occasionally Temeraire would look back over his shoulder at the battlefield they had fled and the dragons in the distance, chasing, with a quivering ruff. He did not propose to turn, but looked away again and put his head down, dogged, and kept flying.

Bonaparte’s harrying pursuit fell off at last, near evening: the French dragons, having labored all day in battle or in carrying Davout’s men near, had reached their limits, and one by one began to sink further behind into the gloaming; until they must have been called off and could be seen turning away.

Laurence put his hand on Temeraire’s neck. “We have slipped the trap,” he said quietly. “You have bought us that, at least.”

“I still think we ought to go back,” Iskierka said, grumbling, flying beside them; she had been very angry to awaken only to be told she would not have any fighting after all, and Temeraire only had managed to half-persuade, half-bully her into flying along with the rest. “I am hungry, and I do not like carrying this cannon; it makes my shoulders ache.”

“We are all hungry,” Temeraire said, in a temper, “so pray stop complaining; you are very tiresome.”

“I am not!” she said, “only because you do not want to fight, and would rather run away—”

“That is enough,” Excidium said to her sternly, descending. “We will go back when we are ready to, and have more men and guns, and can be sure to win. That is strategy,” he added, “and you are old enough to understand it.”

Iskierka subsided, still muttering, as the older dragon flew on ahead.

Somewhere far behind, the remnants of the infantry and cavalry marched on, towards reinforcements and resupply at the well-defended central depot in Weedon Bec. The dragons however flew straight on through the night and the next day, putting an impractical distance between them and pursuit, and ensuring the safety of the artillery. There was not much for them to eat: the farmers hid their cattle, and they could not easily stop to hunt during the day. “The Quality must put up with having their game eaten,” Jane said, and divided them up into small companies, each to make camp on an estate large enough to have a deer park.

They would be in Nottinghamshire before nightfall, and Wollaton Hall had a herd of four hundred or more. “I can send you elsewhere,” Jane said, but Laurence shook his head. He little wished to be at home in the present circumstances: a condemned traitor, with the worst sort of news, bringing twenty hungry dragons to tear up the estate. But it could not be helped; worse if he took himself to some other house nearby, without paying his formal respects, and let some other group of dragons use the grounds; that would be cowardice, and shirking. If Lord Allendale chose to forbid him the house when he came, that was his father’s privilege; his own duty was to endure the rebuke he had earned.

They landed at last a few hours later, the dragons setting down their burdens with deep and grateful sighs; it was no joke even for a heavy-weight to carry two sixteen-pounders, over a distance of thirty miles, and Maximus and Requiescat had been loaded down with four apiece. Temeraire sighed and stretched himself out upon the cool ground like a long black snake.

Laurence slid down from Temeraire’s back, weary and sore himself with the long hours sitting dragon-back. “Will you speak to them up at the house?” Jane asked him, “or will I send Frette?”

“No; I will go,” Laurence said, and touching his hat turned away.

“Pray give my best regards to your mother,” Temeraire said, rousing a little, when Laurence rubbed his muzzle in farewell.

He walked slowly and with reluctance to the house, the windows mostly dark, and only a few link lights burning, near the door. There were a couple of footmen outside gripping muskets, nervously. “It is all right, Jones,” Laurence said, when he came close enough to recognize their faces. “It is only me; is Lord Allendale at home?”

“Oh—yes, sir, but,” Jones said, looking at him wide-eyed, and then the door opened. For a moment Laurence thought it was his father; but it was his eldest brother George, in slippers and dressing-gown over his nightshirt, and a valet getting a coat on over his shoulders.

“For Heaven’s sake, Will,” George said, coming down the stairs: he was Laurence’s senior by six years, and nearly as much time had gone by since Laurence had last seen him; he had grown stouter, but the tone of exasperation was unchanged. “That will be all,” he added abruptly to the footmen, “you may go back inside.” He said nothing more, until the door had shut behind them, and then turning back to Laurence hissed, “What in God’s name are you doing here? And coming to the front door—you might have a little discretion, at least. Have you—are you—hungry, do you need—”

He floundered, and Laurence flushed in sudden understanding, and bit out, “I have not fled gaol and come to the door to beg; I am paroled, to fight the invasion.”

“Paroled?” George said. “Paroled, for the invasion, and here you are in the middle of Nottinghamshire! Whoever is likely to believe such a story, I ask you.”

“Good God, I am not lying to you,” Laurence said impatiently. “I am not going to explain this twice over; will my father see me?”

“No; I shan’t so much as tell him you are here,” George said. “He is sick, Will: three stone down since August, and the doctors have said he must keep quiet, do you understand, perfectly quiet, if we want him to see another year. He cannot even oversee the estate manager anymore; why do you think I am here? and no wonder, with the worry he has had. If you need money, or someplace to sleep—”

“I am not here for myself,” Laurence broke in on him at last, feeling stiff and strange; the idea of his father ill, reduced, seemed unreal. “I am here with the Corps; we must requisition the deer, to feed the dragons. There are nine at present,” he added, “and will be more before morning; I did not want you to be alarmed.”

“Nine—” George looked towards the deer park, and saw the lights, the shadows of many dragons moving. “Then, you are not lying,” he said slowly. “What has happened?”

The news could hardly be concealed. “Trounced us, outside London,” Laurence said. “The army is strung out from Weedon to here, and he took ten thousand prisoner. We are falling back on Scotland.”

“My God,” George said, and they stood together in silence a moment. “Are you staying by the wood?” When Laurence had nodded, George said, “Well—you may take whatever you need of the deer, of course; it is the King’s right. There are the stables, and the farmhouse—I will send food down to you all from the kitchens, and your commander, we can give him a bed—” It was all a long string of delaying tactics, and at last he came to it and finished, awkwardly, “I am still not going to have you in, Will; I am sorry.”

“No,” Laurence said. “No, of course.” He might have insisted, for himself or his fellows: it was their right as officers to be quartered, when there was room in the house. But he could not bear to do so. Jane might, if she chose; he could not, himself, force his way in.

“Will you tell me—will he come through here?” George asked him, low. “Ought I send Elizabeth and Mother and the children away, to Northumbria perhaps—”

“I imagine he will send men to take cattle, for his beasts,” Laurence said, “but if he marches, he will march up the coast; he cannot leave our outposts behind his flank.” He drew his hand across his forehead, tiredly. “I am sorry, I cannot be sure of the counsel I am giving you, but I think there is no place much safer than here, unless you send them to Liverpool and by ship to Halifax.”

George nodded again, and turned and went up the stairs. He hesitated at the door, as if he would have spoken again; but in the end he said nothing. He went back inside, and the door shut behind him.

Laurence walked back alone from the house, his feet sure on the familiar lanes despite the dark; no insect sounds or any noise but the sighing of wind, occasionally, shaking the few dried leaves like rattles, drifting the smell of the dragons near, and of smoke. The ground crews of the harnessed dragons were making a little camp, not comfortless; fire at least was easy enough to come by when Granby only needed ask Iskierka for a little. The other captains were standing by it, warming their hands and talking in low voices, tracing the course they should take in the morning.

Some of the dragons were still arriving, who had guarded the rear of the retreat, and others already deep into their dinners, the lean bodies of deer stretched out limp upon the ground. Iskierka was doing the hunting, to the satisfaction of all except the smaller creatures of the forest, who fled out into the open with the panicked deer when she belched a roaring tongue of flame over the timber: mice and rabbits and sparrows, and a few poachers from the village fleeing with their snares.

“We will head onwards to Scotland, to Loch Laggan,” Jane was saying, “and wait there for the army to regroup. It will be a precious slow trip for them, but Wellington will pick up twenty thousand men at Weedon Bec guns, and another twenty in Manchester.”

“But can we keep the beasts fed along the way, and while we wait?” another woman’s voice asked from above, as another Longwing settled. “Mort, be a love and set me down.”

Laurence had never met Captain St. Germain before; she had long been assigned to Gibraltar. Mortiferus put her down beside the fire: a woman very tall and fat with delicate features, a mop of fair hair curling in wisps and pale-lashed blue eyes; in complete effect rather like a Rubens painting. She could have made two of Jane, who was not slender, and likely would have tipped the scales over Berkley.

“The countrymen will find venison thin on the ground for a few winters, but we will manage somehow,” Jane said. She looked around, at a small shriek; the servants from the house with their lanterns and the baskets of food had come down the lane, and one of the maids had stopped and fainted, on seeing the dragons. “Why, I call that handsome, Laurence; I hope you have given them our thanks,” she said, and waved her men forward to go take the food off their hands.

Laurence felt rather he might blush for the lack of hospitality, that left them out in the cold with the great house standing there on the hill, so many windows staring out empty with no-one behind them. But he was evidently the only one so conscious: the other aviators walked up the hill with expressions of pleased surprise, to meet the baskets coming, full of cold meat and bread, fresh-boiled eggs, and many pots of hot tea. One servant did come down the hill with them, carrying an enormous steaming platter that smelled pungently of Oriental spices, and even before he had stepped into the firelight, and Laurence saw his face, Temeraire had already raised his head and said joyfully, “Gong Su, you are here.”

The cook came forward and bowed repeatedly, to Temeraire and then as afterthought to Laurence, beaming as he set the platter down to be attacked by the aviators. “I am glad to find you well; but how came you here?” Laurence asked.

“Lady Allendale’s generosity,” Gong Su said, and turned to Temeraire, explaining in Chinese that Lady Allendale had written the Corps, and obtained the names of all Laurence’s followers, to see them taken care of by one means or another; she had given Gong Su a place. “And he says that he will come with us again,” Temeraire added with satisfaction, to the end of this translation, “so we may have properly cooked food, and if we will stop eating the deer now, he will soon have them stewed for us, with some grain.” At this announcement, several of the dragons unenthusiastically drew their deer all the closer, and began to eat as quickly as they could.

A fuss was still being made, along the path; the maid now enjoying her hysterics sufficiently to resist being helped away by a couple of the footmen who would just as lief had been gone themselves. “That is quite enough, Martha; Peyle, take her back to the house and give her hartshorn,” Lady Allendale said, putting an end to the noise; she continued on towards them steadily, well-wrapped in furs and trailed unhappily by a footman with a lantern, who lagged as they came closer and closer the clearing.

Lady Allendale herself paused, near the edge; she had last seen Temeraire some ten weeks after his hatching, before he had reached his full growth or even sprouted his ruff. It had been rather a different experience to encounter one half-grown beast in broad daylight, than now a dozen of them, mostly heavy-weights and the alarming orange-eyed Longwings, all of them up to their jowls in blood and magnified by the flickering of the fire upon their scaled hides.

Laurence was already on his feet; the other officers hastily stood as she came in timidly to their circle. “I am very happy to see you again, my lady,” Temeraire said, adding in an undertone to Laurence, “that is correct, is it not?—and thank you for keeping Gong Su safe for me.”

“Quite correct,” Lady Allendale said, and coming forward with a struggling, unhappy smile gave Laurence her hands; he silently bent and kissed her offered cheek. It was paler than it had been, the skin a little dry and papery, and more lined; her hair was quite silver. She did not keep smiling long, but let it fade, and took his arm for a support she for once truly needed, to look around the camp. “I hope you are all comfortable; we should be happy to make up beds, inside, for you gentlemen—I am sure room can be found—”

No-one immediately answered her, and then Jane had to say, “We do very well here, ma’am, although I thank you for the hospitality; we sleep with our dragons, when we are on the march. Frette, can you manage a chair,” she added, and Lady Allendale looked at her, and at Laurence, with a bewildered expression.

There was no help for it, of course, and he said, “Mother, may I present Admiral Roland, of Excidium; Lady Allendale.”

Jane bowed, and offered a hand to shake; Lady Allendale had recovered herself enough to accept it with cordiality, and also the folding camp chair which Frette brought from out of Jane’s tent and set near the fire, with another for Jane herself. Captain St. Germain was walking up and down the camp, stretching her legs, and had not noticed the visitor yet. “Thankee, Frette, I had rather stand; we will be sitting all day tomorrow,” she said, when he offered her one; and then pulled up short seeing Lady Allendale. There was a little awkward silence. Lady Allendale gazed with fascination at Jane, and at St. Germain, and around all the camp, with more attention than she had paid before to the other aviators. She was no fool; Laurence saw her marking out, quickly, the handful of other female officers: another on Jane’s crew, a lieutenant on Berkley’s, and a few midshipmen and ensigns, scattered about.

No-one offered any explanation, and of course she did not ask, but only said to Jane, “You are bound for Scotland, then,” politely.

“Aye, ma’am,” Jane said, “I hope we do not put you out,” an admirable beginning to a brief exchange of wine and small conversation, which might be quickly brought to a close with no rudeness on either side.

But Temeraire was now unoccupied, waiting for his dinner to be cooked, and he put in, anxiously, “Perhaps you had better come with us, and not stay here; I have just thought of it. Perhaps Napoleon may come here, before we have had a chance to beat him properly.”

“You cannot be carrying about civilians where you like,” Jane said to him, repressively. “A nice job we would do of keeping anyone safe, when it is our duty to go look him out. He may come marching through here by bad luck, or not; but we are sure to meet him sooner or late.”

“Yes, but when we meet him, we can fight him,” Temeraire said, “and be sure of keeping our friends safe.”

“I am very grateful for the concern,” Lady Allendale said gently, “but we will not go, I think; it would be quite unforgivable to leave our servants and the tenants alone to manage, in such circumstances: that is our duty.”

But this quite changed the conversation; she then inquired of Jane, whether her own family was somewhere safe. “I haven’t any to worry for, but my Emily, and of course I am lucky enough to have her in eye-shot, at present,” Jane said, nodding at where Emily was helping to put up the camp, and naturally then Emily had come over to be introduced, and having made her bow added earnestly, “And thank you very much, my lady, for the present; I am much obliged to you.”

Laurence knew his mother well enough to see, as most strangers would not have, that she was puzzled; and then understanding dawned. “Do you like the garnets, then?” she said, and leaned forward to look searchingly into Emily’s face, with a very different sort of interest; while Laurence felt his heart sink.

In London, the past year, his father had drawn entirely the wrong conclusion, from Emily’s presence among Temeraire’s crew and Laurence’s evident responsibilities towards her; and he had passed that conclusion along to Lady Allendale in terms not sufficiently guarded as to prevent her becoming very interested in Emily’s welfare.

“Oh, yes,” Emily said, “and I have been able to wear them, twice, to the theater in Dover.”

“Are you, are you in service, then?” Lady Allendale asked, willing to be inquisitor of a young girl, and where she felt she had a right, as she had not been of Jane herself. Emily unconcernedly nodded, unaware of any undercurrent, and said, proudly, “I am lately made ensign, my lady.”

“There, enough puffery; Dorset is looking for you,” Jane said, more discreet, and Emily bobbed once more and dashed away.

Lady Allendale watched her run back to her duties. The surgeon was working over the dragons: Temeraire was not the only one of the unharnessed beasts who had been carrying a musket-ball too long, and several of them were having to be treated in similar wise. Fortunately, he was downwind at present, and working on Ballista’s far side, so the gruesome operation was not in open view. Emily vanished around her flank, and Lady Allendale turned back and ventured, “She is very young,” to Jane, with not a little anxiety.

“Oh, she has been in harness since before she could walk,” Jane said. “We start them young, ma’am, so they don’t have much to be trained out of; and then she must be up to snuff to take Excidium, when I get too long in the tooth to be scrambling about aloft.”

“Well, I see where you come by it,” Jane said to Laurence, later: most of the dragons and the aviators asleep, and the fire crackling to cover their low conversation, a conversation made easier by several glasses of the wine which had been sent down for their supper, “all that noblesse oblige; but it is not stiffness. I like her. That is prodigious kind of her, to have taken an interest in Emily; does she think her your by-blow?”

So Laurence, who had been hoping devoutly Jane had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, had to admit the wretched muddle. Jane laughed heartily, as he had feared she would; but under the circumstances he found he could not be sorry to have given her a cause for unfeigned pleasure, even one embarrassing to himself. “Whyever did you not set her right?” she said, amused. “No, never mind. I expect she has not said a word about it openly, which you could answer, and you would not broach the subject if hot pokers were put to you. It must be very inconvenient, talking of anything awkward in your family.”

She fell silent then; it evoked too well their own awkward circumstances, and she looked down at her cup and rolled it between her palms. “I do beg your pardon,” Laurence said, after a moment, “with all my heart.”

“Yes,” Jane said, “but you beg it for the wrong things. Charging off alone, without a word, and that appalling letter you left for me, all ‘I could not love thee dear, so much,’ as though you owed me apology as a lover and not as your commander. I blushed to show it to anyone, and of course it had to be handed over. For a week, I could cheerfully have run you through myself, sitting in rooms with them reading out bits of it in insinuating tones, and putting Sanderson over me, damn them.”

“Jane,” he said, “Jane, you must see, I could ask no-one; to have put you in such a position—”

“What position, which you did not put me into, regardless?” Jane said. “They could not have suspected me more if I had really had all the guilty knowledge in the world.”

“If I had spoken, you should have been obliged to stop me,” Laurence said.

“And a good thing too if I had,” Jane said. “One private note to some Frenchman with a little rank, and they would have had the mushroom in hand in a month. Do you think every servant at Loch Laggan is incorruptible, knowing that Bonaparte would pay a million francs for the damned things?” He recoiled inwardly, and she saw it. “No, of course it would not have suited you to have done the whole thing quietly, you and your damned honor.”

“It would not have been any less treason,” Laurence said.

“No, but as you were bent on that in any case, it would have been a good deal less pain,” Jane said, and then she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. “No, never mind. I do not mean it. I do not suppose there was any decent way to go about it: all decency was already gone. But damn you anyway, Laurence.”

He felt the justice of her rebuke, and bowed his head over his hands. After a moment she added, “And to crown the whole, you must needs come back and make a martyr of yourself, so now anyone who cares a farthing for your life must watch you hanged; that is, if they do not decide to make a spectacle of it and draw and quarter you in the fine old style. I suppose you would go to it like Harrison, ‘as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.’ Well, I should not be damned cheerful, and neither should anyone else who loved you, and some of them can knock down half of London Town if they should choose.”

“I SHOULD CERTAINLY CHOOSE,” Temeraire said, and thought to himself that he would make a point of speaking again to the Ministry gentleman, or perhaps one of those generals, to make it perfectly plain. “Pray do not worry, Laurence,” he added, “I am sure they will not be so foolish.”

“Men can be very foolish indeed,” Laurence said, “and I must, I do, beg you not to enter into a resolution, which should prevent my being able to face death with equanimity. You should make me a coward, if I must fear that my death should turn you against my country.”

“But I do not at all want you to face death with equanimity,” Temeraire said, “if by that you mean letting them hang you, instead of making a fuss. If that should make you unhappy, so should I be unhappy, if you were killed. It was dreadful, so dreadful, when I thought that you were gone. I did not feel as though I knew myself anymore. I even wanted to kill poor Lloyd, for no reason at all, and I do not ever wish to feel so again.”

Laurence said, “Temeraire, you must know that you shall, inevitably; I have two score years or three perhaps at most, and you ten, to look forward to.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff, unhappily, not wishing even to speak of the matter. “But that at least, will not be anyone’s fault; no one will have taken you.” The distinction was very plain in his mind. Anyway he did not mean to think about something so far-away and misty. Perhaps he might think of some way to prevent it, by then; if dragons might live two hundred years, he did not see why people might not, also.

He turned his head gladly as Moncey came dropping down beside him. “Temeraire, they are hungry over by Nottingham Castle: there were not enough deer for everyone.”

“They may come here and share our breakfast,” Temeraire said, indicating the great pit where Gong Su had made them a great thickened wheat porridge flavored with venison and greens and preserved lemons. It had been ingeniously made waterproof by a thick lining of canvas, and heated by stones which Iskierka had fired, dropped in. “And from now on we will all go shares; you must all admit,” he said to the others, “it is perfectly nice.”

“Nothing as good as a fresh hot buck all to oneself,” Requiescat said, grumbling.

“Well,” Temeraire said, “if you prefer, you may take a single buck or a cow to yourself instead of three days of soup or porridge, because that is how far they may be stretched, Gong Su says.”

He was very happy to turn to such mundane affairs, and to pretend that he and Laurence had finished their conversation, and were again in perfect accord, although it made him feel a little ashamed. He knew Laurence would not interrupt anything which was like work: Laurence did not think much of officers who had conversations or pleased themselves while their duty waited. So it was a good excuse, and as long as Temeraire made himself busy, he could be sure not to be asked to return again to the difficult and unhappy subject.

He was quite resolved that he was not going to let Laurence be killed, no matter what. Laurence would certainly never be happy after being killed, so it did not seem to Temeraire much consolation that he should be a little happier beforehand. And Temeraire was now very sure that the only way to be certain of protecting Laurence, would be to make it plain to their Lordships that something dreadful would happen to them, if they dared to hurt him, so he had no intentions of withdrawing his threat. But he could not help but peer cautiously sidelong to where Laurence was speaking now with Admiral Roland: he looked tired, and although of course he would not let his shoulders slump, there was some quality of unhappiness in the way he stood, and Temeraire’s conscience smote him even while he considered his escape from the discussion with gratitude.

At least Laurence was dressed respectably now: Temeraire felt that there, at least, he had done his duty a little better. He had whispered a quiet word to Lady Allendale, last night, and she had sent down some clothes from the house: a warm thick cloak, and some of Laurence’s old things, which had been given her to keep when Laurence had been put in prison. It was not quite how Temeraire should have liked to see him dressed; but at least he had his sword again, and better boots, and a coat which fitted.

Then Palliatia landed, with four more Yellow Reapers, and a couple of Grey Coppers, hungry, and punished him by making his subterfuge quite real. They fell upon the porridge, were noisy and quarrelsome while eating, and when it was all gone she said belligerently, “And where will we eat tomorrow? No treasure and no food either; what of all your fine promises now?”

He was rather taken aback to be so challenged, and said, “You needn’t snap at me, because we have lost a battle. After all, if Napoleon were so easy to beat, he would not have any treasure worth taking. So you must expect some difficulties, and I call it poor-spirited to begin to complain only because you were not clever enough to find yourself enough dinner last night.”

“Oh, you did not talk of difficulties before,” she said, “and you did not seem to think so much of Napoleon either. If he has so much treasure, then it stands to reason he must be very difficult to beat, and perhaps we are not going to win at all.”

“And if we do,” a Grey Copper named Rictus said pointedly, raising his head out of the porridge-pit, “I expect there will be no pavilions anyway, or treasure, not for us, or leastways not for those of us who haven’t got our captains again, and a place in the Corps waiting for us any time we like. No, it’ll be back to the breeding grounds with us, and if we are only to end up as we began, I don’t see why we are going about getting ourselves shot, and clawed, and flying across all Creation hungry.”

There was a low scattered murmur of agreement, and worse, several other dragons raising their heads, in some interest, to see how he would answer. Temeraire sat up angrily. “I am not a sneak, and if you like to call me one, you may say so at once, and plainly, instead of creeping about implying it.”

“Well, what do you mean to do, when we have won?” Ballista said, having listened in so far. “Rictus isn’t wrong to say that you needn’t worry about the rest of us anymore: you are not unharnessed anymore, even if you haven’t much of a crew to speak of.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff at this last remark. After all, he had Gong Su back now, and Dorset—even if Dorset was not quite so desirable as Keynes—and of course Emily and Demane and Sipho, and Fellowes and Blythe, and even Allen, so he had a perfectly respectable number, which in any case had nothing to do with the matter. “You had a crew before, and might have one again, yourself, and so might any of us,” he pointed out, “so the question is not whether one is in harness, but whether one may choose to be, or not, and if it is only a choice between being in harness or being in the breeding grounds, that is not enough of a choice at all, when the breeding grounds are so boring; and that is the case even if one is in harness for the moment.”

“Yes, but,” Ballista said, and then paused until Majestatis, lying next to her, said bluntly, “Look, old worm, we are all doing what you say, so what if they should offer you something you want, if only you keep us quiet and fighting with the rest of the harnessed fellows? We all know they want to hang your captain—what if they should offer you his life?”

Temeraire paused in his turn. “Well, I am not going to let them hang Laurence no matter what,” he said, with a hasty glance to be sure he had not been overheard, “but I do see: they might offer me a very large pavilion, or a great deal of gold.” He rubbed a talon back and forth over his forehead, thoughtfully. “It would not be fair,” he said at last, “if I took anything that should be for me only, when I should be getting it not for my own work but for all of ours: we are all sharing. So perhaps,” he added, “one of you had better come along, when I go and talk to the generals again: one of the little ones who can go all about and let everyone know what it is they will give us.”

“I will come along,” Minnow said. “I have never been harnessed, and I don’t look to be ever, so no-one can say I am inclined to go soft on them. Anyway I would like to see a general, I never have.”

Temeraire stretched his head over to ask Laurence and Admiral Roland who was presently in command, and where they might be; which he thought quite a straightforward question. “Well, it isn’t,” Admiral Roland answered him. “It is still Dalrymple for the moment, I suppose. But he is likely to be replaced as soon as we get to Scotland and Government have a chance to take him out of harm’s way: our harm, that is. If there is a lick of sense among them it shall be Wellesley in his place, but we ought not put our hopes so high.”

“But then who am I to talk to?” Temeraire said. “I do not like to say so, but the others are not quite happy—after all our hard work, we have lost, and got no treasure, and they would like to know what use it is to keep on. Not,” he added hastily, in case Laurence or Admiral Roland should think that he was a poor officer, “that we have no discipline, but after all, they are not harnessed, so they wonder why we are helping so much.”

Laurence was silent a moment, and then he said, “We may as well speak to Wellesley: it cannot much matter who we have made arrangements with, if the war is lost.”

Admiral Roland nodded and said, “I will tell you: now we have got the guns out of the way, I meant to send some of us back anyway, to cover the infantry when they come out of Weedon. It is too close to London, and Bonaparte has too many dragons by half. I think I have worked out where he is getting them from,” she added. “He is using unharnessed beasts, too, pulled out of his own breeding grounds: I dare say that Celestial of his can talk them out of their caves as well as Temeraire can ours.”

“I do not see that she needed go to any special effort,” Temeraire said, with feeling, “when Napoleon is doing everything nice, and giving his dragons pavilions and treasure, too, I expect: I am sure no-one is complaining to her.”

Admiral Roland snorted. “Well, whether she has had much work or not, I am confident this is the best explanation for how he has laid hands on a hundred spare dragons, in so little time; he hasn’t taken a single beast off his eastern borders at all. And that means he can afford to spend a few dozen of them to harry our foot, on the march.”

Laurence nodded, and Temeraire saw the danger plainly: with the infantry walking to Scotland, they would be an easy target on the road for aerial assault; and going at their creeping pace of twenty miles a day would be in striking range of dragons headquartered at London for a week.

“The unharnessed beasts can less easily be taken by boarding, if Bonaparte should manage to put together some clever little strike,” she went on, “so it would be just as well to make Temeraire’s regiment the guard; and let him hash this out with Wellesley, before we have a mutiny on our hands: I haven’t the right to promise them anything, and you may be sure if I did their Lordships wouldn’t abide by it. And if you do secure them any pay,” she added dryly, “pray be sure it comes to the harnessed dragons, too: I am sure Excidium would not say no to a little treasure of his own.”

“It seems a great bother to me, to be flying back,” Armatius grumbled, when Temeraire had brought back the news: he did not much like always carrying Gentius around, but he was the least maneuverable of the heavy-weights, save Requiescat, so it fell to him nearly all the time.

“At least you do not need to carry a gun, too, in this direction,” Temeraire said, “and flying slower we will be able to find more food. Anyway, we are going to go arrange for our pay, which is like treasure that is given you every month without your having to work for it, so you cannot complain.”

Except the harnessed dragons sharing the park with them, who were disgruntled at not being allowed to come along and get some pay themselves. “Well, I am going back with you,” Iskierka announced, and would not be dissuaded, no matter what Granby said; and to Temeraire’s deep disgust Admiral Roland finally said, “No, it is just as well, Granby: she will only fuss, lying about in Scotland or going on patrol.”

But despite this setback, it was in any case satisfying to be flying back south, even though they were not to stay, because it felt to Temeraire a little as though they were reclaiming their territory; or at least refusing to acknowledge it was not theirs anymore. He still did not like to fall back all the way to Scotland, no matter how much more secure it should be, for regrouping; but if they must do it, at least they should not have run there directly from the battlefield, with the French dragons on their heels all the way: and perhaps they would even have a little fighting, if the French tried to attack the infantry on the march.

WEEDON WAS VISIBLE aloft from a long way: the walls of the depot were built of thick grey blocks of granite, with tall narrow turrets at each corner reaching far into the air, bristling with pepper guns. Around the walls, enormous stands of long halberds and arrow-headed spears had been planted on the ground in lines, so a great company of men might sleep safe from aerial assault, and the remnants of the infantry and cavalry were bivouacked among them. It did not look at all comfortable to attack, and thanks to the defenses, Temeraire had to lead everyone else to land all the way on the far side of the camp.

Wellesley came the long distance out to speak to them with no good grace, especially as he had to walk most of the way. “What the devil are you doing here? You ought to be nearly to Scotland by now, and half my cavalry are in fits.”

“We are here to protect you,” Temeraire said, injured, “and also to talk to you about pay, and our rights, since we did not win treasure.”

“Why, damn you, you can wait to bring the lawyers into it until after we have run the French out,” Wellesley said. “Good God, you may be sure Bonaparte does not have to argue his way through every battle.”

“If you would like to be compared to him,” Temeraire said, “then Bonaparte has also made a marketplace in Paris, for his dragons, and built them pavilions, and he is not penning them up in breeding grounds, either, if they do not like to be there—”

Laurence laid a hand on Temeraire’s leg, and Temeraire swallowed the rest of his remarks; it was difficult to remember that one must be respectful to a senior officer, even if the senior officer was unpleasant in return, and to have to think carefully about what one said, instead of laying everything out plainly, even if it was perfectly obvious and fair.

“Sir,” Laurence said, “we have been ordered to cover your retreat,” and handed Wellesley the note from Admiral Roland: a brief scrawl in her bad handwriting, which Temeraire could not quite read from overhead.

Wellesley scowled through the explanation, and then he crumpled the note and pitched it away; one of his aides hastily retrieved it out of the mud behind his back, to be sure it did not lie about to be picked up. “That woman is more to be relied on than half the general staff; it is a damned embarrassment. So this Chinese beast is managing Bonaparte’s dragons for him? How did he get the creature to obey him in the first place? He was not there for her hatching.”

“She is snobbish, so I suppose she liked that he is an emperor,” Temeraire said, “and that he should make it easy for her to be nasty to me: she is a very unpleasant sort of dragon.”

“I think perhaps you dislike her too greatly to be just, Temeraire,” Laurence said, and to Wellesley said, “Sir, she had lately lost her companion before coming to France, and being bereft was perhaps more vulnerable to a kindness which ordinarily pride would have armored her against. But Bonaparte has not won her by any trick, but with a high degree of real affection, and certainly all the outward shows of respect; and he has materially altered the conditions for dragons under his rule, for the better.”

“So anyone can manage a dragon, then, if you bribe the creature properly, and cosset it like a woman,” Wellesley said.

Temeraire laid his ruff back. He did not think he was unjust to Lien at all, himself; but he did see that of course, Laurence’s explanation was the more important one, for their own case, and even Lien was not just helping Napoleon because he had given her a few presents. Not that Temeraire would have said no, to a diamond as handsome as the one she had been wearing at the Battle of Jena; but that was after she had decided to help. “It is not bribery or cosseting, if you pay someone what they deserve, and if they do not like to help you otherwise.”

“It is a good two thousand pounds to feed a beast your size for a year,” Wellesley said. “Do you expect more?”

“Then give me the two thousand pounds,” Temeraire said, “and I will undertake to feed myself, and put aside some of the rest, as I like.”

“Hah,” Wellesley said, “and when you gamble it away, and are starving, and you steal a cow to eat, then what is to be done with you?”

“Of course I would not gamble with treasure,” Temeraire said repressively. “If I wanted to take someone else’s treasure, I would fight them; and if I did not want to fight them, then I would not want to take it with a game anyway, because if I did win, then of course they would want to fight to get it back afterwards.”

“And I suppose every other dragon has as much sense?” Wellesley said.

“If you prefer, sir,” Laurence said, “you may pay them their board and a wage above it; the form matters little. The question at hand is, whether you will agree they have a right to pay, and to all the same rights and liberties under which any man serves.”

“Why the devil ask me?” Wellesley said. “Go speak to Dalrymple, if you like. I have no authority to make commitments on behalf of the Government.”

Laurence said, “Sir, you are likely to be appointed to the command, and to just that authority; we both know that their Lordships are not likely to overrule, in the broad strokes, what commitments you feel necessary to make to secure so critical a victory, nor even question them greatly, if those commitments should deliver to the effort a substantial force of dragons, which otherwise have no inclination to remain and to serve.”

Wellesley tapped his boot again, and said nothing for a moment, looking at Laurence. “I can give you my word it will be considered, shall we say,” he offered, “and I can promise your beast the two thousand pounds per annum directly, as he is so sure he may be trusted. And we need hear nothing more of your own—difficulties.”

“Hah,” Minnow said, putting her head over Temeraire’s shoulder. “Just so: they are offering you something, only for you and your captain.”

Wellesley started back: he had evidently not noticed Minnow sitting quietly on Temeraire’s back, listening in.

“Yes, but I am not going to take it,” Temeraire said, and lowered his head more closely, so Wellesley had to look at him directly. “I do not choose to wait, and rely on generosity: I know perfectly well how generous their Lordships are. If you would like our help now, then you may say how much it is worth to you, also now. And if it is not as much as I think it worth, I will tell the others so, and they will leave, I expect. I will stay myself for Laurence, but I will not keep the others for my own personal sake. And it is not very handsome of you to propose anything so insulting, either,” he added reproachfully, lifting his head back away, “when you know I cannot fight you over it, because you are too small.”

“Do you know, you are the most damned peculiar pair of traitors I have ever heard of,” Wellesley said to Laurence. “Are you trying to get yourself into Foxe’s Book of Martyrs?”

Temeraire snorted angrily: Laurence had read him bits of that book, and it was all about people who had died in especially unpleasant ways. But Laurence only said, “Sir, there are abundant proofs for any man, by now, that any nation which gives its dragons liberty and brings them into the life of the state, winning their loyalty direct and not merely by intermediaries, must profit by it to so great an extent that no enemy which does not follow the same course can long hope to mount an aerial force to compete with them. If you do not care to learn from the example of China—”

One of the young officers on Wellesley’s staff, who had walked out with him, made a rude noise. “You need not sniff, either,” Temeraire said. “China may not have so many guns as here, but there are thousands of dragons in the army.”

“Thousands indeed,” Wellesley said, skeptically.

“Six thousand two hundred and eighty-eight, my mother told me,” Temeraire said. No one said anything a moment, and he supposed it might seem odd to be so precise, so he explained, “Because that is a lucky number—of course they have more dragons who can fight, but those dragons are not officially in the army.”

“And if,” Laurence said to Wellesley, “the population of France is not so great as that of China, if they should even achieve the same proportion of dragons to men and arable land, using the same techniques of husbandry which you may be sure Lien has conveyed to Bonaparte, their nation will shortly be able to field a military force of a thousand. Would you care to face that in five years, with the Corps at its present rate of growth?”

“Damn you, I am not in a mood to be lectured at with figures, as though I were in a boardroom in Whitehall,” Wellesley said. “Very well. Your beasts will have their keep, and above that, the same wages as any other man in service under the Navy Board—”

“A shilling a day will keep a seaman’s wife and children, and let him carouse on shore a little when he comes into port; it will not do as much for a dragon,” Laurence said.

“And we don’t want little coins we must keep track of, either, and cannot hold on to,” Minnow put in. “A proper mess that would be.”

Temeraire nodded. “No, and what we really want is to be able to go where we like. That is what I want promised, also: if we may go where we like, and do any work that is offered to us, then even should Government offer us unfair wages, we will work for someone else instead. And the same for harnessed dragons, too,” he added.

“Any work that is offered to you?” Wellesley said. “By all means. As for going where you like—”

He and Laurence wrangled a long time, in low voices, over sums and coverts, and how much ought to be paid to a heavy-weight, over a courier, and so on. Temeraire listened carefully, but he did not know all the places which Laurence named, where coverts ought to be, and also he was not quite certain about the money. His breastplate, he knew, was worth nearly ten thousand pounds, but shillings and pence were new. They were interrupted at last only by the arrival of a breathless courier from the main camp, to inform them that the last stragglers from the battlefield had been regrouped, and were ready to begin the march to the north.

“I have no more time for this,” Wellesley said. “Twenty coverts, on the Bath Road and the Great North Road, where they can go to sleep and be fed. As for pavilions, they can build the damned things themselves with their own shillings: set themselves up like admirals, if they like. And after this, they had damned well better keep in line.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, and made a bow: to Wellesley’s back; the general had already turned and walked away.

LAURENCE FOUND HIMSELF almost at once the center of a large and interested audience of dragons, all pressing in and jostling for room to hear him, as soon as he had begun to try and explain to Temeraire and Minnow the system of coinage.

“So ten pounds will buy a cow?” Minnow said intently, “and a pound and a shilling is a bit of gold?”

“If it is twenty shillings to a pound, and twenty-four shillings a day,” Temeraire said thoughtfully, “then that is nearly four hundred pounds a year for a heavy-weight—” performing calculations in his head, which produced a buzz of satisfaction among the other dragons.

“But where is it?” Iskierka demanded. “I did not come back to just hear numbers; what sort of treasure is that?”

Temeraire snapped at her a little. “It is reliable treasure,” he said. “Not all of us want to be always running around picking quarrels and making difficulties, like you, all to grab more and more: this is for everyone every day who does their duty, like proper soldiers, and it is fair.”

The other dragons were generally of his mind, if Iskierka continued to sulk, and agreed they were satisfied with their lot. But Laurence himself felt not a little disgusted, on having stooped to such back-room negotiations, at such a moment: maneuvering for personal interest, while Bonaparte marched into London and the French followed on their heels, felt more like treason to him than any of the acts for which he had been charged. “We must see to your dinners,” he said, more out of an urgent wish to put an end to the gloating noise. “The Army will march at first light, and we must be ready.”

In the morning, when the dragons had breakfasted and gone aloft, the first regiments were already out on the road, their pace sluggish enough that Requiescat remarked, near dinner-time, “Now, this is what I call a pleasant flight, no fussing or hurry.” Temeraire only sighed.

“We might go over to them and offer to carry them, at least a little way, as many as could climb aboard us?” he suggested to Laurence. “I am sure they could go faster.”

“Not without orders,” Laurence said; he could well imagine Wellesley’s reaction, or Dalrymple’s, if the dragons should begin to fly towards the ranks, and likely panic some of the men and cavalry-beasts into running, after all the difficulty in forming them back into their regiments.

“It is only so dull: we might fly to to-night’s rendezvous and back again three times over, before they have got there,” Temeraire said, “and some of us more than that. What if Requiescat and a few of the others should stay pacing them, and we go ahead—or perhaps,” he added, ruff coming up with enthusiasm, “we might go back, and see if we cannot pay Napoleon back a little, for everything which he has done.” He peered back over his shoulder, to see how this was received.

“It is not your place even to propose such a thing, anymore,” Laurence said. “You have accepted a commission; you are obliged to preserve discipline, not to undermine it—” Hearing himself thus condemned from his own mouth, Laurence abruptly stopped; he did not know how to speak to Temeraire of duty anymore, without being a hypocrite.

“I suppose,” Temeraire said, regretfully. “It is not always so pleasant to be an officer. And I am sure Iskierka will complain, all night, and say more cutting things about going slowly, and running away, and not getting treasure.” He snorted, and looked, and then said doubtfully, “Where is Iskierka?”

She had been flying sullenly to their rear all the morning, amusing herself by occasional wild darts into the heavy low clouds above, where her flames made gold and crimson and purple flashes through the white and grey, like a sunset in mid-morning. But Laurence did not remember her doing it the last two hours and more. Arkady was gone also, with a handful of the other ferals, and when questioned, Wringe had a guilty twist to her neck, even while she professed surprise and confusion.

Temeraire did not miss it, either. “But how am I to make Wringe tell me where they have gone?” he asked Laurence, and batted her reaching talons away from a bleating sheep. He had brought them down in a broad meadow, the better to interrogate the remaining ferals, and the other dragons were driving the luckless resident herd in towards them all, so they should make a meal while they worked out what Iskierka and the others had done. “No, you may not eat, until you have told me: they have made a great deal of trouble for all of us.”

“I call that hard,” Requiescat said, mumbling around a sheep. “It ain’t as though we will not outstrip those redcoats anyhow, and nobody minds a snack, either.”

“You may find it less pleasant when we have had to fly thirty miles back to catch Iskierka up, and then sixty on to the rendezvous,” Laurence said grimly; and that the very best outcome they could hope for.

“Hum,” Requiescat said, licking his chops thoughtfully, “that’s so, but I don’t see as we have to go finding her at all. She and those fellows know where the rendezvous is as well as anyone, and they have some men and their compasses with them, if they should get themselves lost like hatchlings. We can just go on and let them catch us up.”

“They must know we would miss them, after they have been gone so long,” Temeraire said, “so I expect that they have got themselves into a fight, and are probably all dying somewhere full of French bullets.” He did not sound as though he would be very sorry to find as much the case.

Wringe squirmed as Temeraire pointedly translated this for her, but still said nothing. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, low, “it is not only foolishness on her part; this is a challenge to your authority.”

“Oh!” Temeraire said, and, having told Wringe as much, he added, “so now you will tell me, or else,” and when she continued mute, he drew a great expanding breath and roared out, over her head.

“Payom zhe reng!” Wringe said, flattening herself to the ground, and everyone jumped. A gentle pattering like rain came from the trees in the path of Temeraire’s roar, old acorns shaken loose into the dead leaves, and a few small birds dropping stone-dead. Gong Su promptly went in after them while Wringe muttered her confession: the miscreants had gone back towards London with a notion of taking some of Napoleon’s army by surprise, winning either treasure or accolades. There had been no very well-formed goal; they had gone looking for a fight as much as for any practical reward.

“We ought to go on and leave them to catch up,” Temeraire said, panting a little, still ruffled and angry, “just as Requiescat says, except then I dare say she will come back with two eagles or something like, and there will be no living with her at all.”

Laurence did not like to ill-wish aloud, but if Iskierka had so overridden Granby as to make herself a deserter, she was unlikely to be guided in any other respect of sense, and he thought Temeraire’s earlier expectation was the more likely to be met.

But Temeraire brightened after a moment and added, “Anyway, I do not suppose anyone can blame us for going after her, to fetch her back, Laurence? After all, she is very important; or so everyone says.”

The roads beneath them were empty as they flew back towards London, warily and quick. The haze of dust which the British soldiers raised had already settled, and no sign of French pursuit. No-one much was to be seen out of doors, except farmers and herdsmen at their husbandry: cattle and crops cared nothing for Napoleon or politics, and implacably demanded all the same attention. But even these few men kept their heads low, and hurried through their work as much as could be done; by late afternoon the countryside seemed nearly deserted, with the sun yearning impatiently to its rest.

“We ought to see her miles off, if she is showing away as she always does,” Temeraire was saying ungraciously, as they flew, and then he pricked up his ruff: a small speck in the distance, coming closer, had emerged from the clouds and begun to resolve itself into wings.

It was Gherni: a much-battered Gherni, panting with the speed of her flight, and her face mazed with a trickle of blood she ineffectually tried to rub off against her shoulder, now and again, only smearing it about into a brick-red film overlaid on her blue hide. Tharkay was with her, and he leapt down to Temeraire’s back from hers mid-flight, like a boarder, but tethered by a long double strap of thick leather. He unclipped it from his own waist as soon as he had landed and latched on to Temeraire’s harness; Gherni caught up the snapping-free loose end, which jangled loudly with small clapper bells, and wrapped it around her own forearm a few times.

“What is that?” Temeraire said, with interest, craning his head to see.

“I had it made in Istanbul, my last journey,” Tharkay said, and to Laurence said, “Iskierka has been taken.”

He led them to Arkady and the other deserters, huddled and licking their wounds in the shelter of a tall hill that shielded them from the road, casting an afternoon shadow long enough to conceal them from cursory observation from aloft. The red-patched feral roused when Temeraire came in to land, and mantled his wings defensively.

“That is enough, you shan’t bristle at me,” Temeraire said. “You knew very well you were behaving like a—” He paused, for consideration. “—like a scrub, or else you shouldn’t have sneaked, and if you have been served out as you deserved, it is no-one’s fault but your own. You had better to be sorry and promise not to do it again, than hiss.”

“They broke away a little before noon,” Tharkay told Laurence, as they squatted down and scraped clean a patch of dirt, for him to sketch out the action. “Well-managed: they had been going into the clouds all morning, and making a noise with their singing, so by the time we realized they had turned us around you were all far out of ear-shot. Granby’s gunners shot off a few flares, but it was a hopeless effort.

“From there our luck was as evil as it might have been: two hours flying towards London without any challenge, so we were on Bonaparte’s doorstep by the time we came on any other beasts; and then it was Davout’s advance guard out gathering cattle: two Grand Chevaliers and another half-a-dozen heavy-weights. Of course all of them went directly for her; I think I saw sixty men jump for her back at once. Arkady grew remarkably less deaf to me, after that, and we managed to get away; but the French already had Granby trussed like a chicken on one of the Chevaliers and were racing him away as fast as they could go, with Iskierka flinging herself madly after them.”

“I knew I ought never have let her have Granby,” Temeraire said stormily. “Now look how she has lost him, and not even in a real battle. We ought to get him back and leave her to them, and good riddance.”

Laurence exchanged a glance with Tharkay: it was by no means good riddance to lose their one fire-breather to the French, no matter how recalcitrant. “Did you see where they went?” Laurence asked, low.

“Straight for London,” Tharkay said.

Chapter 10

I AM AN OFFICER NOW, though,” Temeraire said, “so I do not see why I must wait.”

“You might be a general, and it will not make you any smaller,” Laurence said. “A twenty-ton dragon must give over trying to sneak, and that is our only hope at all of getting Granby out.”

“But what if you should be captured,” Temeraire said, “and then I would be just as bad as Iskierka: it is my duty to keep you safe.”

They had fought very nearly this same battle before, however, in Istanbul, and his protests were rather an expression of unhappiness than fresh and determined objections. “We have not time to quarrel; Granby’s very life if not his liberty may depend on quick action,” Laurence said gently, and Temeraire sank to his belly with his ruff pinned back, threshing the matted straw of the meadow uneasily with his claws and raking up dust and furrowed earth with it.

Laurence was grateful for the established habit of the conversation, if a little guilty, for it allowed him to practice a degree of deceit: he knew under ordinary circumstances, he would not in this same situation go, however much he might wish to. If he were captured, Temeraire would be prisoner, and in their already dire straits the risk could not be run, not for so slim a chance as they faced to bring out Granby and Iskierka.

The circumstances were not ordinary. Laurence was a man already dead in law. He could not value preserving his own life very high; and so long as he were killed instead of captured in the attempt, which he had some right to hope might be arranged, Temeraire would not be lost to Britain: he had made the agreement with Wellesley, and now was bound directly, not only through Laurence himself.

And there was no-one else to go. Iskierka had been the only one of their motley company with a proper crew, and all of them had been captured with her: lieutenants, midwingmen, even her ground crew all aboard. All that were left now were Laurence’s small handful of crew, and for senior officers only Dunne and Wickley, former midwingmen of Laurence’s crew who had acquired enough of the ferals’ language to be useful as translators. A handful of other officers had been similarly placed with the ferals for a gift with languages more than any other quality; most of them were young, very young: nearer fourteen than twenty, and not to be sent on an expedition little better than a dice-throw.

Tharkay shook his head at the lot of them, and said to Laurence, “Better if we go alone.”

Tharkay had taken a commission with the Corps, at least for the moment; but this was not something which any service could require. “You are not obliged—” Laurence began.

“No,” Tharkay agreed civilly, with one raised brow, and Laurence bowed and left it there.

Laurence exchanged his bottle-green coat for Blythe’s leather smock, with its pockets large enough to conceal a multitude of sins: two pistols and a good knife, and one of Blythe’s hammers. Tharkay gave him a handful of dirt to apply to his face, already rubbing more into his own hands and beneath his nails.

Dunne watched their preparations at a distance, sidelong and hesitating, with occasional glances at the other officers; but he did not say anything. It was not cowardice. He had made sufficient proof of his courage, in previous service, that Laurence did not doubt it now. Dunne’s reluctance had a source less palatable: plainly he did not wish to serve with Laurence again. There could be no harm to Dunne’s career from such cooperation here—some, indeed, might occur if he chose not to go and Laurence did not return—so the objection was one of principle.

Laurence bent his head over the fresh loading of his pistols, and did not see more of Dunne’s struggle than he had to; the sense of disapproval did not weigh upon him so greatly, now. He felt himself a righted ship, heaved off her beam-ends and into a course dangerous but for the immediate distance clear, even if there was a lee-shore off his bows and impenetrable murk ahead. He might be dashed on rocks, if the wind turned against him, but at least for the moment he knew what must needs be done, and he was free to do it.

They were ready in less than ten minutes, and would have gone at once, but Gong Su came and offered them a makeshift plate of bark with two small skewers upon it, tiny hearts and livers, still steaming from a makeshift butchering, and raw. Laurence regarded it with dismay. “A little of the divine wind inside,” Gong Su explained: they had come from the birds which Temeraire had inadvertently slain. “That makes good fortune.”

Laurence was not superstitious, but he ate; they could hardly refuse any advantage whatsoever. Tharkay took his own dose, pulled up the hood of his cloak over his face, and they went out to the road.

“THEY MAY ALREADY have sent Granby to France, of course,” Tharkay said to him, in Chinese, while they sat in the back of a drover’s cart.

“I hope not risk the Navy,” Laurence said, fumbling in his turn through the difficult language, which he knew he made nearly unintelligible, despite Temeraire’s many despairing attempts to correct his pronunciation. It at least gave them a privacy nearly impossible to breach, even by the hungry curiosity of the drover, who for a couple of quiet shillings had agreed to take them along to market with the cattle the man hoped to sell before they should be confiscated.

Tharkay nodded. If Napoleon were sure enough of his grip on London, or at least on enough of it to establish a prison, he might choose rather to be safe, and keep his valuable captive penned within it instead of risking Granby’s death in a crossing under fire, and the resulting frenzy of a Kazilik unleashed upon his forces. They could hope for at least a brief delay while the question was considered, during which Granby would be held nearby. They had to hope: otherwise there was no chance at all.

The last two crawling miles to the city were infuriating, when they had flown fifty this morning in what seemed less time, and the outskirts of London sounded already like a province of France. Tens of thousands of soldiers were busy making encampments, calling to one another and to the dragons who were helping them dig ditches and move stones and even widen roads, and those local shopboys more industrious than patriotic were running up and down the lanes of the camp, plying food and more commonly drink in high carrying voices and awkward, badly accented bits of French: “Une frank, monser” and “s’il voo plait,” but they were already improving.

“He is not shy of permanent alterations,” Tharkay said, indicating with a jerk of his chin the buildings which were being put up: large stones were being laid into the ground and pressed down by dragons, to make a raised platform once mortar had been poured over and between them, and logs sunk at the corners. There were no walls to the shelters, but as they came nearer the city Laurence saw one already finished and in use: dragons sleeping on three sides, and soldiers crammed into the sheltered space between them. They would sleep warm despite the coming winter; warmer than the British soldiers would. The work bore all the hallmarks of a long occupation; Napoleon was not planning any immediate campaign, Laurence realized grimly, but rather to entrench himself, and to let time and use dull the intolerable into the everyday.

The lowing cows plodded along after the cart, driven on by the drover’s boys, the sour grassy smell and the dust of the road rising up thick around them. Their shillings and tried patience did at least buy them an easy entry into the city: the French sergeant on duty on the Aldersgate road brightened at the sight of the cattle and waved them in with only a cursory question or two for the farmer and his companions, pointing them towards Smithfield and the slaughterhouses. Laurence and Tharkay stayed in the cart a little longer, until it had turned a corner towards the marketplace, the herd and the boys momentarily out of sight, then Tharkay touched Laurence’s elbow, and quick and unannounced they slipped from the back of the cart and into a narrow alleyway.

Newgate Prison was their target. A few coins at a pub bought Laurence a healthy dose of gossip and rumor, most of it worthless and irrelevant, but for the information that Bonaparte was staying in Kensington Palace, and “that unnatural white beast of his lying in Hyde Park like some overgrown eel, with those horrid red eyes,” and much shuddering all around.

Tharkay had better fortune, if so it could be called: some prisoners were indeed being kept at the prison, but there had been no new arrivals to-day: not that anyone had seen, and without prompting they had mentioned Iskierka’s appearance in particular. She had been seen in Hyde Park also, and eating two cows and setting the entire city ablaze, if some of the reports were to be believed; but one street-sweeper at least swore that no British aviators or crew had been brought to Newgate that day.

“In consolation,” Tharkay said, “neither have they been shipped to the coast. No large dragons have gone, since she came in, and certainly he has not been sending anyone by boat.”

“He might have Granby in Kensington Palace,” Laurence said after a moment.

“It would be very convenient for us, certainly,” Tharkay said, dryly.

“It sounds like folly, I know,” Laurence said, “but if I may be pardoned for forming an opinion on the grounds of one meeting, I would say that Bonaparte is unreasonably fond of seduction, to the point that he likes to believe he has a chance of persuasion where rationally anyone would see there is none. He will never miss a chance for a grand gesture, if he thinks he might coax Granby into service.”

Tharkay listened and shrugged. “We may as well take the chance; the trail is cold otherwise.”

It was dark by the time they reached the outskirts of Mayfair. Here and there the life of the city continued, at a muted tone, alehouses spilling warmth and the smell of fresh beer onto the dirty cobbles, and firelight gleamed from behind closed shutters, those who had not fled the city, whether from unwillingness or from inability. In the fashionable section, Laurence took the lead from Tharkay—these streets he knew well, going past his father’s house and those of his friends and political acquaintance, of men Laurence had known in the Navy, all of them shuttered and dark. Laurence did not hesitate: he had expected silence, abandoned houses, perhaps even wreckage and looting; he moved on steadily and did not look to see what damage might have been done, until he came into Dover Street, and was at last surprised: to find it crammed with carriages, ten linkmen standing at the door of one great town-house, fine young ladies and their chaperones, British gentlemen, French officers all going up the stairs and a great bustling noise of music and laughter and dish-clattering spilling down.

He stopped in the street, appalled, and had to be drawn back from the lights by Tharkay. “We will not get past that soon,” Tharkay said. Laurence did not immediately answer, too choked with anger. He had never been a visitor in the house, but thought it was let to a member from Liverpool, a man who might have voted with his father on occasion. Laurence mastered himself and drew Tharkay along the street a few doors to another house still occupied, but quietly so: a few subdued lights gleaming out from between shutters, not a party to welcome the conquerors. Waiting by the gate they might pass for footmen or grooms, and be dismissed from notice; with any luck the owner and his family were already abed.

They stood nearly an hour, stamping a little to warm their feet, and drawing back against the sides of the house now and then as another carriage reached the door to disgorge its passengers. Every minute brought a fresh cause for indignation: the smell of hot beef, a burst of singing in French, a lady waltzing with a French officer past the open balcony doors. The carriages thinned out only a little over the course of their wait: a sad crush, with the King fled to Scotland and thousands of British soldiers dead and prisoner.

And then a troop of horses came down the street: Old Guard, in their tall hats and pomp, shouting to clear the way and muscling the remaining carriage-horses aside with cool indifference to the protests of their drivers, making room for the great coach to come rolling along through the crush: an eagle painted in gold upon the door. It drew up before the house, and through the ranks of guards lined up the stairs, Laurence saw Napoleon emerge from the carriage and mount up to the house: in trousers and Hessian boots and a long leather coat more suited to mid-air than a drawing room, though splendid with gold braid and buttons, and dyed richly black. Another man was beside him, one of the Marshals: Murat, Laurence thought, the Emperor’s brother-in-law; they went up the stairs together, and applause welcomed them inside.

“Disgusting,” a man said, nearby, low, and Laurence started and looked around: while he had been watching the spectacle, two gentlemen had descended a carriage at the very door of the house where he stood. They were presently between him and Tharkay, who had drawn back a little into the shadow of the house. “Do you know, I heard Lady Hamilton was going to attend?”

“Her and half the other women of quality left in the city,” the second gentleman answered him, a voice vaguely familiar. “You there,” the man raised his voice to address Laurence, “what do you mean, loitering on the street gawking as though you were at a play? They don’t need any damned encouragement,” and Laurence in sinking sense of disaster recognized him: Bertram Woolvey, a distant acquaintance and the son of a friend of Lord Allendale’s.

Woolvey had married Edith Galman, if any better cause were needed for lack of love between him and Laurence, but they had never been friends even before that event. Woolvey was a gamester and a spendthrift, with the one saving grace that he could afford to be, and their circles had always been very different: Laurence knew nothing good of him besides his choice of a wife. And now Woolvey was stepping closer, frowning at the lack of an answer. Laurence was out of the street-light circle, and his face obscured by the smudged dirt he had applied. But in a moment he should be recognized, and all at an end: the slightest outcry would bring ten men from the guards outside the party, whether Woolvey meant to draw them down on him or not.

Laurence took two quick steps to Woolvey’s side and gripped him by the arm, covering his mouth with another hand. “Say nothing,” he said, hissed and low, to Woolvey’s staring eyes. “Do you understand? Say nothing; nod if you understand me.”

Woolvey’s companion said, “What are you—” and stopped: Tharkay had caught him from behind and clapped a hand over his mouth also.

Woolvey nodded, and when Laurence took away his hand said at once, “William Laurence? What the devil are you—” and had to have his mouth covered again.

The door of the house opened, a footman looking out, puzzled. “Into the house,” Laurence said. “Quickly, for God’s sake,” and half-pushed Woolvey up the stairs, before they should draw attention. The footman backed in at a loss before their awkward rush, Tharkay and Woolvey’s companion—a gentleman Laurence vaguely recognized, a Mr. Sutton-Leeds—directly on Laurence’s heels.

Tharkay let go Sutton-Leeds as soon as they were inside, and snatched the door away to shut it again. “What on earth,” the man said, “is it thieves?” more incredulous than alarmed.

“No, stay there, and for God’s sake do not stir up the house any further,” Laurence said sharply, to the footman who was edging towards the bell-pull. “Enough of a muddle as it—” and stopped; Edith was on the stairs, in a dressing-gown and cap, saying, “Bertram, may I beg you to be as quiet as you can? James is only just asleep—”

There was a moment of general uncomfortable silence, until Woolvey broke it, saying pompously, “I think you had better explain yourself, Laurence, and what you mean by this invasion of my house.”

“Nothing,” Laurence said, after a moment, “but to keep you from drawing attention from the French on the stoop: we may not be discovered.” His hand was closed and hard upon the pistol in his waist, for no good reason. The fool, the damned fool, keeping his wife and child in the middle of an occupying army. Laurence had no right and knew it, but he could not help but ask, “Why in God’s name have you not left the city?”

“Measles,” Edith said, from the stairs: she had come halfway down, from the landing. Her face was composed, but her hand gripped tightly on the railing. “The doctor said the baby might not be moved.” She paused and added quietly, “The French have not troubled us: one officer came to question us, but they have been perfectly civil.”

“Not that we are sympathizers, and if you mean to suggest as much—wait,” Woolvey said, “haven’t I heard—you were—” He stopped, and was plainly stuck for an explanation which Laurence had not the slightest desire to try and give him.

“You must pardon me, I do not know what you have heard,” Laurence said. “I am most heartily sorry to have troubled you, but we are on an urgent errand, and it is not of a nature to be discussed in your front hall.”

“Then come into the sitting room: discuss it there,” Sutton-Leeds said: he was more than a little drunk, if not to the point of slurring. “Secret mission, splendid: I have been aching to do something against these damned Frogs, prancing through the city as though they owned it.”

Neither was Woolvey sober, or perhaps it was belligerence, but he with more suspicion seconded this demand, and added, “And I tell you, Laurence, I expect some better answers. No, you shan’t go, unless you do want me to set up a shout. You cannot accost a man in the street in times like these and then claim it is all secret missions and go bounding away, you with this Chinaman in tow.”

“I beg your pardon,” Tharkay said, in his most frigidly aristocratic accents, and drew their stares. “I do not believe we have been introduced, gentlemen.”

“What the devil are you doing made up like a Chinaman, then,” Sutton-Leeds said, peering at Tharkay’s face, as if he expected to find some artifice responsible for his features.

In the brief distraction, Laurence caught Woolvey’s arm and said low and sharply, “Do not be a damned fool. If they take us in your house, they will take you up as a spy, do you understand, and if they care to be suspicious your wife also. Forget we were ever here and pay your servants to do the same: every moment we stay here, we put you all in danger, to no purpose.”

Woolvey wrenched himself free and returned, as coldly, “That you take me for a fool, I very well know, but I am not so simple as to take the word of a convicted traitor—yes, I have heard—that you are skulking loose in the streets, the day after Bonaparte marches in, and all for the benefit of the King.”

“Then I am lying and a turncoat for the French,” Laurence said impatiently, “and if you interfere with me likely I could have you all arrested: either way you had better let me go.”

“I am not a coward,” Woolvey said, “and if you are on some black business for that Corsican, I will stop you if I have to blow a hole in you to do it, yes, and go to prison for it too, damn you.”

“Gentlemen,” Edith said, breaking in to this charged atmosphere, “I beg you go into the sitting room before you wake all the house,” and there was nothing to be done for it.

SUTTON-LEEDS WAS DISPOSED of by means of a substantial glass of brandy, which dose left him snoring in an armchair. The credit was Edith’s: they had scarcely gone into the room before she had come down again, hastily dressed, and taken the decanter around at once. But though Woolvey accepted his own glass automatically, he then looked at it and set it down, and said, “I will have coffee, my dear, if you please,” with determined mien, and waited for the cup with his arms folded across his chest.

Laurence looked at the clock: nearly eleven. While Bonaparte and so many of his entourage were engaged at the party, surely gave them their own best chance of success, and every minute was now doubly precious.

Tharkay caught his eye, and said low, “He has horses,” with a jerk of his head at Woolvey: a suggestion which Laurence did not in the least like. He saw no better alternative, but every feeling rebelled against putting his life, all their lives, in Woolvey’s hands, and he did not trust Woolvey’s servants not to listen.

They remained standing all in silence, except for the continuing low snuffles of Sutton-Leeds’s snoring. A maid brought the coffee service, and took a long while arranging it on the table, covertly glancing up at them all. They made an absurd gathering: Woolvey in his evening-dress; Edith in a soft high-waisted morning gown of clear lawn, without stays: she must have snatched it from the closet and put it on alone. Tharkay and himself, in their rough workman’s clothes, smudged with dirt and stinking, no doubt, of cattle and of the docks.

“Thank you, Martha,” Edith said at last, “I will pour,” and bent over the table when the maid had gone. She gave them cups, or Woolvey and Laurence; she hesitated a moment, and then finally poured another for Tharkay.

Tharkay smiled with a faint twist at her doubtful gesture towards him. “Thank you,” he said, and drank the coffee quickly; then setting down the cup he went to the door and opened it again. The maid and footman lingering outside made shift to vanish quickly. Tharkay glanced back at Laurence and, meaningfully, at the clock, then he slipped into the hall, closing the door behind him: no-one now would be able to come near and eavesdrop.

Laurence put down his own cup of excellently strong coffee, and looked at the dark square of the casement window: framed with thick curtains of velvet in pale blue, with elegant gold tasseled cords. He had the unreasonable desire to simply smother Woolvey with one of them, and leave him trussed on the floor while they fled; but of course he would begin to shout at once, and Laurence could not put Edith in such a position.

“Well?” Woolvey said. “I am not going to be put off, Laurence, and if you keep me waiting any longer I have a dashed notion to have my footmen put you in the cellar, and there let you sit until morning.”

Laurence compressed his lips on the first several answers he wished to make. He was aware he was unjust. Woolvey had no more reason to love him than the reverse, and no reason to believe him. “We do not have until morning,” he said, at last, shortly. “Earlier today a British officer was captured, a dragon captain—”

“What of it? I hear ten thousand men were captured yesterday.” Woolvey spoke bitterly and with real feeling: one sentiment at least which Laurence could share.

“It means his beast is taken prisoner, too,” Laurence said. “He is hostage for her good behavior: and his beast is our fire-breather—our only fire-breather.”

“Oh,” Edith said, suddenly. “—I saw her, this morning. She came down in Hyde Park.”

Laurence nodded. “And there is some little chance he is yet held at the palace itself,” he said. “Do you understand now our urgency? While Bonaparte—”

“I am not a simpleton,” Woolvey said, interrupting, “but why only you and this havey-cavey fellow with you—”

“One good man is better than a dozen of lesser ability, in such an expedition,” Laurence said. “We were the only ones nearby enough, to make the attempt. No: enough questions,” he added sharply. “I am not going to waste time answering whatever sequence of objections you can dredge up. If you mean to continue this blundering interference, where you have no understanding of the situation, you may be damned: we will take our chances in the street with Bonaparte’s guardsmen.”

Woolvey looked still undecided. “Will,” Edith said, quietly, and they both looked at her, “will you swear on the Bible that you are telling the truth?”

This gesture did not entirely satisfy Woolvey, but Edith took him by the arm and said, “Dearest, I have known Will since we were little children: I can believe he would have managed to get himself convicted of treason, but not that he would lie under oath.”

Sullenly he said, “Still; it is all a dashed rum affair if you ask me.” He drew away from her and poured himself a second cup of coffee, in an irritable tension that splashed it across the china and the polished wood, and did not bother to put in the cream but drank it straight from the cup, a few swallows only, and set it down again with a clatter. “So what is it, do you mean to rescue him?” he said abruptly, with a new note of something even more dangerous than suspicion: enthusiasm.

“If we can,” Laurence said, and forced himself to ask, “If you can spare us your carriage-horses—”

“No,” Woolvey said after a moment. “No, I will take you, in the carriage. Lord Holland’s servants know me, and his grounds march with the palace gardens: it is not a mile from his house. If you really mean to get yourselves into the palace, and it is not all a phantasy, I will see you there. And if it is all a pack of nonsense, and you have some other thing in mind, I dare say with the coachman and a couple of footmen we can just as well put paid to your notion.”

Edith flinched. “Woolvey, do not be absurd,” Laurence said. “You have not been brought up for this sort of work.”

“Driving you an easy couple of miles, to the house of a gentleman of my acquaintance, and then a stroll through his park?” Woolvey shot back, sarcastic. “I dare say I will manage somehow.”

“And then?” Laurence said. “When we have gone into the house, and taken Granby out, and a hue and cry is raised after us?”

“I am certain I know Kensington Park a damned sight better than you,” Woolvey said, “so as for getting out, I have a better chance than you of doing it. What is your next objection? I am ready to be as patient as you care to be, Laurence, you are the one insisting on a hurry.”

Woolvey went upstairs to change his clothes, having first taken the precaution of calling down two footmen to watch them, while the coach was pulled around. “Can you not persuade him?” Laurence asked Edith, low, in a corner: she had her arms folded about her waist, hands gripping at the elbows.

“What would you have me say?” she returned. “I will not counsel my husband to be a coward. Will this not be of assistance to you?” He could not deny it, and she shook her head and looked away, her lips pressed tight, and Laurence could not work on her any further. “I had thought I was done with these fears, anyway,” she added, low and unhappily, but he knew how little her personal feelings would be permitted to sway her judgment: as little as he would have allowed himself.

He moved away from her, as Woolvey came down the stairs and went to bid her farewell. The two of them stood talking low a little while, hands clasped, and then he bent his head to hers.

Tharkay was watching the scene with a dry interest. “I beg your pardon for embroiling us so,” Laurence said.

“In a practical sense, we could ask for nothing better,” Tharkay said. “We are not likely to be stopped in a blazoned carriage bowling away down the street in open view of everyone. Noticed, certainly, and he may find his neck in a noose for it afterwards, but that is his concern, and those who would weep for him.” He looked at Laurence. “Although those may be of interest to you also.”

Laurence was sorry to be so transparent, and sorry even more to be shut up in a carriage for half-an-hour with Woolvey for the drive to Holland House. There was no conversation of any kind; there could be nothing said between them, the rejected suitor and the husband. Laurence was silenced further by a difficult, inchoate sensation, which had no place in the present circumstances and yet insisted on making itself felt.

He had never thought very much of Woolvey before; he had dismissed the man as a spendthrift idler, but in fairness, Woolvey had never been given impetus to his own improvement. With nothing to do but spend money, he might easily have fixed himself in a vicious character, a deep gamester or a selfish coward. But he had chosen instead to establish himself respectably, with a wife no man could blush for; and no coward had acted tonight as he had. If he were a little dull and mulish when he was in drink and angry for his country’s humiliation, that was not the worst thing that could be said of a man.

And Edith had looked very well. Not happy, no-one could be happy with an army at the door and a quarrel in the entrance hall; but that she was contented with the lot she had chosen was plain. She did not regret.

Laurence wholeheartedly wished her happy: his feeling had not that envious quality. But it was uncomfortable to think Woolvey had brought it about, and, Laurence was painfully aware, he had not. He had kept Edith on the shelf with expectations, when she might have had more advantageous offers; and their last interview, he could not remember with anything like satisfaction: all selfish petulance on his side, the gall even to make her an offer which could only be unwelcome, after he had pledged himself to the Corps. He looked at Woolvey, who was staring out the carriage window. What had Edith to regret? Nothing: she had rather to congratulate herself on a lucky escape.

The coach drew to a stop. Holland House was dark, and the horses stamped uneasily, warm breath steaming in the air, while a footman came rubbing sleep from his eyes to hold their heads. “Yes, I know the family are away,” Woolvey was saying, already climbing out as another opened the door for him. “Be so good as to stable my horses and bring Gavins out, I want a word with him.”

He gave airy excuses, for his presence in the city, and for his visit: the baby ill and squalling, the wife impatient, “and I thought to myself what I needed was a walk in the fresh air, and to have a look at the stars—too many lights in Mayfair—sure Lord Holland would not mind—”

It was a bizarre proposal, at midnight, with an army in the streets and two men in rough clothing behind him, but Gavins only bowed: familiar with the odd starts of gentlemen in their cups, and too well-trained to show it, if he were puzzled. “I must advise you, sir, not to go too close to the east end of the park, if you should walk beyond the gardens,” he said. “I am afraid we have several dragons sleeping there.”

“Oh,” Woolvey said, and when they had been let into the park, he said in a low undertone, “What are we to do about the beasts?”

“Walk by them,” Tharkay said, blowing out the lantern which they had been given.

“There is no need for you to come farther,” Laurence said. “You have done us a great service already, Woolvey—”

“I am not afraid,” Woolvey returned, angrily, and strode on ahead.

Tharkay shook his head, and when Laurence looked at him said quietly, “It would be difficult to follow an officer of some public repute, in the affections of a woman who loves courage.”

It had not occurred to Laurence, that Woolvey meant to display to advantage for Edith’s benefit, or in any sense of competition with him. “My reputation is hardly such as any sensible man would covet.”

“It does not call you a coward,” Tharkay said. “Whatever has Bertram Woolvey done?”

THE GROUNDS IMMEDIATELY near the house were wooded, cedar trees fragrant around them amid the silent denuded oaks and plane-trees, all crusted with frost. These yielded to broad meadows, hard-frozen, and their boot-heels crushed the grass like sand underfoot. If their object really had been to observe the stars, they would have been served well: the night was clear and cold and still; the wind had died, and no moon.

The dragon interlopers were peacefully snoring, if so could be described a noise like mill-wheels grinding, audible at a quarter-of-a-mile. It did not have that same hollow-chest resonance of the voices of the great combat-weight beasts; there were not many men about, and no fires: it looked to be a company of smaller dragons, couriers, with their solitary captains sleeping huddled up against their sides.

As a practical matter it ought not to have been difficult to simply evade them. Laurence thought himself well used to the company of dragons by now, and he had not minded the streets of Peking, or the pavilions where the great beasts slept in vast coiled heaps; but in the near-absence of light, the persistent low churning noise magnified, and he yet could not wholly repress the shudder which climbed his back as they walked from one stand of trees to another, crossing the meadows where the dragons slept.

The intellect might know these were thinking creatures, who would rather capture than kill him, but his belly did not: it knew only that here nearby were a dozen beasts or more, which he could not see if they chose to move, and which in the ordinary course of animal life would have made an easy meal of him. They were oddly all the more alarming for their smaller size: a man could not be of as much interest to the larger dragons as a meal.

So he informed himself, in cool reasoning terms, and nodded back, the whole exchange wholly divorced from his body’s involuntary response, where every outline became a dragon, and every grumble of rustling leaves a prelude to attack, and they had yet to keep moving on steadily, through pitch impenetrable enough that Laurence put out his hand before his face, to keep from running into any branches.

Woolvey’s breath rasped loud ahead of him, ragged short breaths, and he stumbled occasionally; Tharkay had taken the lead from him. But he kept moving. Laurence paced breath to footsteps and doggedly followed: as near to blind as he ever hoped to be. A flicker, or not even so much, only some vague impression of movement, made his head snap sideways, and he stopped a moment watching, trying to make anything: a hopeless attempt, except for what might have been a dark snaking blot reaching into the sky, wherein no stars showed.

He quickened a few steps to stop Woolvey, and gave a soft hiss to make Tharkay turn and come back again. They waited crouching, listening. The dragon heaved a great yawning sigh and murmured something in French: then a quick flurrying leap, a leathery flap of wings, and it was up and aloft. They did not move while it was audible overhead, and stayed a while longer afterwards, meek rabbits huddling out of the hawk’s sight, before they could make themselves resume.

It seemed a very long time walking before they came at last to another broad rustling stand of trees, comforting, and the ground underfoot abruptly became the loose crunch of finely graveled and sanded road: they had reached the end of the estate. Across the road, the broad hedge of the palace garden rose like a great blank wall before them, and the gleam of lights distantly visible at either end of the lane, small as fireflies: the guards on watch. But there were none directly ahead, the patrol idling near their sheltered posts.

Tharkay motioned Laurence to wait with Woolvey, and after a moment came back to silently guide them to a place he had found by the hedge: a low rock butting up near the wall, and a thick elm-branch above: he had already rigged a cord hanging down. Laurence nodded, and taking off the thick leather apron threw it over the top of the hedge. The scramble was as quiet as he could make it, one hand for the rope and arms and feet thrusting inconveniently into the thicket of yew, breathing in the fragrant smell of the needles, and then well-clawed he rolled over its broad flat top on the protective sheet of the apron, and dropped directly into the garden on the other side, jarringly.

Woolvey came after him, with some delay, panting heavily and in disarray: the fine buckskin of his breeches, better suited to more decorous use, was torn and bloodied. Tharkay last, silently and quick, and the great palace lay across a narrow lawn before them: windows full lit, shadows passing back and forth before the lights, and another half-a-dozen dragons in the way: not sleeping, either, but couriers wide-awake and waiting for messages.

“The stables,” Woolvey whispered, pointing: the dragons were as far from the low outbuilding as could be managed. “There is another door, on the side, and from there across only a narrow gap to the servants’ entrance, to the kitchens.”

The horses whickered at them uneasily, and stamped, watching with liquid terrified eyes; but this was evidently no change in their behavior with the dragons at the door: no one stirred or came to look in at them. Tharkay paused at the far door, fingertips resting against the wood: from outside voices came clear, surly and English. Through a crack Laurence peered at a pair of workmen, who were trundling manure to the heap without any evidence of pleasure.

“Hst,” he said, softly, when they came close, and the men jerked. “Steady now, men, and quiet, if you love your country.”

“Aye, sir, only say the word,” one said whispering back, an automatic touch of the forelock: a man badly wall-eyed, and with blue ink on his bare forearms, sure mark of the sea. He scowled at the lanky younger fellow with him, whose ready protest subsided instead into silent fidgets and darting sideways looks at them.

“Is there a prisoner here kept,” Laurence said, “who would have been brought today: a man not thirty years of age, dark-haired—”

“Aye, sir,” the seaman said, “brought him in with a guard like he was the King, and to the finest bedroom but the one old Boney copped for himself: there was a noise about it right enough: and that beast of his out front wailing fit to end the world. We thought she would have us all on fire: she said she would. She has only gone quiet this last hour.”

Laurence risked it: a quick dash to the corner of the house was enough to confirm Iskierka’s presence. She was lying miserably coiled before the house in what had been an elegant formal garden adorned with statuary, and now was a heap of rubble. She no longer wailed, but was gnawing sullenly upon the remnants of a cow, steam issuing from her spines, and she was not alone. Lien was sitting up on her haunches beside her, saying, “You must know that he cannot be given back to you, unless he gives his parole and swears never to take up arms against the Emperor again. There is no sense in your lying here and being uncomfortable. Come away to the park, and you may have something more to eat.”

“I am not going away anywhere without my Granby,” Iskierka said, “and he will never do any such thing, and as soon as I have him back I will kill you, and your emperor, and all of you, only see if I do not. Here, you may keep your nasty cows,” and she threw the mauled remainders of her dinner in Lien’s direction.

The white Celestial put back her ruff in displeasure, for just an involuntary moment, and then nudged up a mound of dirt over the carcass with one talon, careful never to touch the offal. “I am sorry to see you insist on being unreasonable. There is no reason we should be enemies. After all, you are not a British dragon. You are a Turkish dragon, and the Sultan is our ally, not Britain’s.”

“I do not give a fig for the Sultan: I am Granby’s dragon, and Granby is British,” Iskierka said, “and anyway I have stolen thirty thousand pounds of your shipping, so of course we are enemies.”

“You may have another ten thousand, if you would like to come and fight for us, instead,” Lien said.

“Ha,” Iskierka said disdainfully, “I will have another thirty thousand instead, and take the prizes myself; and I think you are a spineless coward, too.”

The nearest troop of guard were staying back, prudently, and the couple of courier-beasts also, all of them with a nervous eye for whatever Iskierka might take it into her head to do, and so a clear path lay open from the house towards her. “If we can only get hold of him,” Laurence said quietly to Tharkay, creeping back to the stable door, “and get him out to the open, even an upper window might do, anywhere she might reach us—”

“As soon as we are seen by anyone, looking like ragpickers, they will set up a howl,” Woolvey said.

“Begging your pardon,” the seaman said, “but there is six of them cavalry-officers sleeping upstairs over the stable, in their clothes.”

The nervous stableboy they set to watch the door, and Woolvey to watch him. “Darby, sir, but Janus they call me,” the seaman said, “on account of a surgeon we shipped in the Sophie, a learned bloke, saying I saw both ways like some old Roman cut-up by that name; and there I would be still, but my girl in the city losing her mum, and taking sick, and her with three, four mouths to feed,” he added, his excuses with an air defensive and vague: likely it had been not one girl but several, and the general lack of them aboard, which had induced him to quietly abandon the sea.

“Very good, Janus,” Laurence said, and gave him a pistol. They put out the one lantern, swinging by the door, and at a nod from Tharkay the three of them went up the ladder into the loft one after another, swift on bare feet. The men lay breathing the regular sighs of exhausted sleep, half-sunk into broken-open bales of hay, with their sabers and pistols beside them: one after another Laurence woke them, a folded pad of leather over their mouths, Janus to pin their heels and Tharkay with a pistol steady in the man’s face, and they were turned over and trussed quickly with straps, heaved up onto the stack of bales.

The fourth man opened his eyes too soon, and managed to drum his heels as they reached for him; the other two roused sluggishly and groped for the missing swords and pistols, which Tharkay had already collected away, three of them thrust into his waistband in piratical fashion. It was a short but brutal struggle, even numbers and the necessity of silence driving them: Laurence went for his knife and grimly put it into the unarmed man’s throat as the Frenchman tried to wrestle himself up from the ground. The man sank back limply, staring up empty and blind at the ceiling, blood spilling from his neck to soak into the straw. Laurence took up a sword and killed another, quickly, while Janus held him. Tharkay dispatched the last.

The horses below were stamping again, whickering at the smell of blood. “Are you all right?” Woolvey whispered, putting his head up into the loft, and stopped with his mouth a little open.

“Yes,” Laurence said shortly, his heart still hammering. “Go below, and keep that fellow at the door.”

Whether because of some note in his voice, or the scene, Woolvey made no protest but obeyed in silence, vanishing again below. The trussed men fought and kicked as they were turned over and stripped of their coats and cuirasses, and one of them made a low moan behind the gag as his eyes fell on the dead men lying straight. Friends, or brothers, perhaps; Laurence closed his mind to the thought.

Or tried: Woolvey’s shocked expression lingered. The hard use, the necessary brutality of the service, were not of the same world as England, as home; and it was that division which might let a man be a gentleman and a practical soldier both. But now he was in the stables of Kensington Palace with his palms wet with blood, on a spy’s errand: yet as necessary as any military action. No-one could deny its necessity. Let it only take place in Paris, or Istanbul, or China, and Woolvey would read of it in the papers and applaud, though the act were the same, or bloodier. But it did not belong here, a black rotten canker taken root in the warm sour horse-smell of the stable attic, above the peaceful gardens.

They made shift out of the four scavenged uniforms not overly stained with blood, and Laurence threw a stable-blanket over the men now stripped and bound again, against the chill. The coat sat uneasily on his shoulders, warm from a dead man’s body, as he climbed down the ladder and gave the last coat to Woolvey.

“We will bind you also,” Laurence said to the boy, “unless you will come along, to the rescue and to the dragon—” but the boy shook his head vigorously, and preferred to be bound up and thrown into the loft also.

“Perhaps half-an-hour now,” Tharkay said, meaning how long they might hope for, before discovery: Laurence himself made it likelier a quarter.

“We go in quickly, then,” he said. “Not running, but with purpose: do you know where he is, Janus?”

“Well, sir,” Janus said, shrugging awkwardly inside his coat, and looking a poorer match for it than Tharkay, “the maids will sometimes take a fellow up to the better rooms to see, and I don’t say I haven’t had an invitation or two; but which his room will be, I am sure I can’t say.”

“There will be no difficulty there,” Laurence said. “It will be the door that is guarded.”

He went first, with Woolvey beside him: a quick glance would see their faces and perhaps miss the others behind them; Tharkay had a handkerchief up to his face as if to catch a sneeze, for some more concealment. They went up the back staircase, and at Janus’s whisper turned off the landing into the hallway.

Some eight or nine men stood in the hall talking near one of the doors, of a room facing onto the rear of the house. Undoubtedly there would be more guards within. Laurence did not pause, but kept walking steadily towards them: the men not stiff at their posts but talking and lounging freely, unalarmed: some sitting on the floor in a game of cards, others crouching by to observe, only a few standing. A maid was coming down the hall past them, loaded down with washing, and picking through the knot of them had a moment’s awkward struggle to win past one over-enthusiastic sergeant, who caught at her waist.

“Keep off your hands,” she said coldly, and jerked expertly free with a twist of her hips, while the other officers roared with laughter at their fellow’s expense. She won past them at last, cheeks angry with color and her eyes downcast; Laurence was nearly even with her now, and as they passed one another he seized one of the sheets from her pile and snapped it open over the entire company.

A confused babble of shouting arose at once: they all four rushed the swathed men, toppling the standing men over. The door to the room opened and another man looked out: Tharkay shot him, and kicked the door wide. Granby, warned by the commotion, took the opening at once and came rushing out of the room, with a bruised cheek and a bandaged arm. “Thank God, give me a pistol,” he said, and threw off the sling.

“The window,” Laurence said, and turning at the report of a shot, received Woolvey into his arms. There was a startled look on Woolvey’s face, and a great stain spreading already through his shirt, visible beneath the swallow-wing lapels of his coat. Another shot fired and another, bullets coming wild through the sheet, small fires catching in the linen in their wake. The maid, screaming, had fled down the hall.

“Iskierka!” Granby was shouting: he had dashed into the room across the way and was leaning out the window.

A look was enough to be sure: the light was already gone from Woolvey’s eyes; he was dead weight sliding to the floor. “Laurence,” Tharkay said, and shot the first French officer struggling out of the tangled sheet.

“Damn you,” Laurence said, not very certain if he meant Woolvey, or the man who had shot him, or indeed himself; he, stooping, worked the wedding-ring from Woolvey’s hand, and went after Tharkay into the bedroom. They shut the door and barricaded it with a wardrobe overturned. It would hold only a moment, but they needed no longer: Iskierka’s talons were already seeking at the window, scrabbling and tearing away glass and masonry and brick in great shattering blocks.

Chapter 11

IT WAS NOT at all pleasant to wait, and wait, and keep waiting: Temeraire paced, and then went aloft to look in case there should be any sign, and then came back down and paced a little more.

“There is no one coming, is there?” Perscitia asked, a little anxiously, worried in another direction entirely. “No French dragons? Perhaps you should stop going up so much: someone might see you, and,” she added quickly, “if we had to move, or had some fuss, it would make it hard for Laurence to find us again, on his way back.”

Temeraire tried to settle; he could not help but see the sense in this remark, but he shook his head at her offer of a haunch of cow: the smaller dragons had gone out quietly hunting for all of them, but he did not have much appetite.

“It was not very fair of those dragons,” Arkady said, “all coming on at us at once like that. If you ask me, they are all cowards. We should go fly in and get Iskierka out ourselves.” He had recovered his spirits and was eating a sheep, which Lester had gone and fetched for him, with great cheer.

“We are not going to do any such thing,” Temeraire said. “There are four times as many of them as of us, with guns and soldiers, and they will only have us down. Anyway that would not help us get Granby back: they will shoot him,” and maybe Laurence, too, he added silently, anxiously. It was all the more unpleasant to have Arkady making such reckless suggestions, when it was all that Temeraire wished to do himself.

“What are we going to do, then,” Arkady returned, “if they do not come back?”

“If they do not come back,” Temeraire said, and paused, and lamely finished, “then we will think of something,” not liking to imagine the prospect. He had thought Laurence was dead, and it had been just as dreadful in every way as if Laurence really had been dead. It made one unsure of the distinction between the event imagined and real, and therefore, Temeraire felt, any sort of unnecessary speculation perhaps a little bit of a risk. Laurence thought such concerns foolishly superstitious, Temeraire knew, but it seemed to him a danger not worth courting.

“What is he saying, the scalawag?” Gentius asked, scowling at Arkady milkily, in great disapproval: he was not very happy with the extra flying, which he had to endure on Armatius’s back, or the uncomfortable state of their camp. “I hope he is properly ashamed of himself.”

“No,” Temeraire said, “he is not, at all, and he is making foolish suggestions, too.”

“Well, pay no attention to him,” Gentius said. “Now,” and he lowered his voice, “I don’t like to make you worry, Temeraire, but have you thought about what we will do, if they don’t come back right off?”

Temeraire flattened back his ruff and, unable to repress the desire, went aloft to look again. It was beginning to grow dark, out towards the eastern edge of the sky, when he went high: there was a vague watery sort of moon near the west horizon ready to set, and a few plumes of dust here and there, herds of cattle. Not a sign of Laurence though, or of Iskierka; and then he looked back the other way and saw a Winchester in harness flying towards them.

Elsie landed panting. “Oh, we thought we would never find you: what are you doing here? Scotland is not this way; you are going back towards London.”

“We are not lost!” Temeraire said, rather coldly: he did not much like Elsie. Hollin had been a very good ground-crew chief. Fellowes did his best, but he was perhaps not quite as attentive to the way the harness lay against one’s hide, or as prompt in getting it off, in the evenings—not that Temeraire had much harness anymore at present, but it was the principle of the thing—and Fellowes was a little dull, if one were alone in the evening, and wanted a little conversation; besides, Hollin had been first—in short, Temeraire had not ceased to regret the loss. “We have not gone the wrong way,” he repeated. “We are only waiting here for Laurence and Tharkay to rescue Granby: Iskierka has got herself captured.”

“Oh, Lord,” Hollin said, sliding down from Elsie’s back. He had a satchel over his shoulder. “When did they go?”

“Hours ago,” Temeraire said, despondently, “though Laurence said, they should likely need most the day to reach the city, on foot, and then if they could find where Granby was, they would not try and get him out, until it was dark, and nearly everyone asleep. So they are not late, at all; they are in good time,” and did not mention that he had so lately been aloft looking for them, despite these facts.

Hollin rubbed a hand over his mouth and said, “I have a dispatch—”

“How large is it?” Temeraire inquired, and Hollin took out a folded snippet of paper from his satchel, handsomely sealed with red wax, and not quite so small that Temeraire could not see it; but as for reading, no. “You will have to read it to me out loud,” Temeraire said.

“I am not sure I ought to,” Hollin said, apologetically. “It says it is for Captain Laurence, you see here.”

“I am sure Laurence would want us to know if it is anything important,” Temeraire said. “Anyway, if it is orders for us, then I suppose that is just a mistake in addressing it by someone who does not quite understand that I am colonel of the regiment, myself.”

Hollin hesitating looked around the clearing at the other men: none of them in rank higher than lieutenant, and that dubious.

“Stop looking at them,” Perscitia said irritably. “It stands to reason that it is orders for us, and we cannot carry them out without knowing what they are; so either you had better tell us, or go back and see what this Wellesley fellow wants you to do: but if you ask me, he would only be annoyed you had wasted so much time going back and forth.”

Hollin shrugged helplessly, but this argument carried the day: he broke the seal and read aloud, “‘You are requested and required, to proceed without the loss of a moment to Coventry, and resume your duties in guarding the withdrawal, instead of—’” He paused in his reading, and then clearing his throat finished, “‘—instead of whatever damned fool start you have gotten into your heads now. If you have forgotten the end of our last conversation, I haven’t, and if you want pay for your damned beasts, you will keep them at their work.’”

“I do not see why everyone assumes that we are just dashing off madly, without thinking where we are going,” Temeraire said, exasperated. “Of course we would be doing that, if Iskierka had not got herself captured, but she has, so Laurence has had to go rescue her; and we cannot go right away, because they are not back yet.”

“Some of us might go back and join them?” Perscitia suggested, rather hopefully.

“No, we are staying all together from now on,” Temeraire said, “and Arkady and Iskierka and all of the other ferals will fly out in front where all of us can see them, as they cannot be trusted to behave properly,” and he translated this for Arkady’s benefit.

“Bah,” Arkady said, with a dismissive sniff, “you would have done the same, if you were not trying to play at being a human, and flapping along as slow as if we had to creep on the ground like them. They have nothing to complain of, we did not leave them in any danger. We would have seen if this Napoleon’s army were chasing them as we came towards London, and there has not been any sign of them.”

“I would not have done any such thing,” Temeraire returned smartly, “because I would have had better sense than to go wandering off for no good reason and no particular notion of what to do, just to please myself—”

“We had very good reason,” Arkady said, “we went to bring food back for everyone, that the French were stealing—”

“You did no such thing!” Temeraire said outraged. “Wringe told us, you went to get prizes for yourselves, and you did not mean to share with anyone at all.”

Arkady had just enough grace to look momentarily uncomfortable, but no more than that. “Well, it was Iskierka’s idea,” he said, with a flip of his tail, and Temeraire snorted in disdain.

“But anyway,” Temeraire said, turning back to Hollin, “that much is true: we have not seen Napoleon’s army on any of the roads at all to-day, and we would have, flying back this way, if they were in pursuit. So he needn’t worry…” He trailed off; Wellesley might not need to worry, but Temeraire realized he himself had every cause: Napoleon’s army must be somewhere, and if it were not on the road to London, most likely it was all in London: where Laurence was, and Granby.

Of course he still could do nothing but fret: even if they had set off right away, there was no chance of getting to London before it was quite dark, and he did not need Perscitia’s anxious whispered hints to know that it was mad to go trying to fly into a French camp at night when they had Fleur-de-Nuits about. “But in the morning—” he said, and then put down his head without finishing. There would still be guns, and thousands of men, and who knew how many dragons: it would still be quite useless.

“Perhaps he will be back before morning,” Perscitia said in a tone so gloomy it left no doubt of her skepticism on that point.

“Well,” Temeraire said to Hollin, “you had better go back and tell Wellesley that we will come as soon as I have got Laurence back, and he should not worry about the men, unless of course Napoleon has flown all his soldiers ahead to attack him,” he added, hopefully: perhaps that was what had happened.

“We should have seen them going by, if that is what they were doing,” Perscitia pointed out depressingly.

After Hollin left, the hours dragged. Temeraire slept fitfully and uneasily, rousing at every rustle or whisper to peer into the darkness, seeing nothing, and before dawn he was awake for good and uncomfortable, an unpleasant sharp ache in the underside of his jaw and all along his neck to his breastbone, where the knotted scar bothered him. He tried to crane his head down to rub his nose against it, but could not quite manage it: his neck felt very strange when he tried, and crackled as he stretched. He could not make his foreleg bend to it either, inward, and at last he sighed and laid himself back down upon the cold ground, thinking wistfully of the warm stone at Loch Laggan, or the pavilions in China.

There was a faint orange glow of coming sunrise in the distance, to the west; and then he raised his head again realizing that was quite impossible. “Oh, oh!” he cried, “wake up, everyone—” and flung himself aloft as Iskierka came blazing towards them, turning now and again to fire flames off into the face of her pursuit: some seven or eight dragons, trying to get near enough to board her again: there were a handful of men on her back struggling already—“Laurence!” Temeraire cried, straining his eyes to make him out among the dim figures.

She shot by overhead and the French pursuit all of them backwinged as Temeraire rose into their path, scrambling to avoid running into him. Temeraire opened wide his jaws and roared furious thunder on them, a Pêcheur-Rayé point-blank in front taking the brunt of the attack. The French dragon wavered a moment mid-air, and then a great gush of blood came pouring out of his nostrils, his eyes bloodshot and strange. He sank from the sky tumbling over himself, and his wings broke beneath him like kites as he smashed into the ground.

Majestatis was coming up beside him and Ballista: the other French dragons, all middle-weights, turned tail and fled. Temeraire hovered a moment longer, panting with frustrate energy and confusion. Requiescat was rising, too, complaining, “What is all the noise for? It is too dark to fight.”

“We do not have to fight,” Temeraire said. “They have all run away.”

“Oh, cowards!” Iskierka said, circling back. “They did not mind fighting when they outnumbered me.” She turned her head back anxiously, glaring hotly at the French boarders upon her back. “Granby, you are well? Are you sure I should not just kill these men?”

“No: they have surrendered, and now they are our prisoners,” Granby said. “There is head-money for prisoners,” he added, wearily.

“I would rather kill them than have money,” Iskierka said. “They hurt you.”

“You have hurt him,” Temeraire said, angrily, “and after I gave him to you, too,” and he reached out urgently to take Laurence off her back. “Are you quite well?” he said anxiously.

“Yes,” Laurence said briefly, in the way that meant he was not well at all, but he did not like to say anything where anyone else might hear. Temeraire sniffed at him surreptitiously: he did not think Laurence was bleeding, but it was so dark he could not be sure he was not missing some injury. “We must away at once,” Laurence added, “they will bring more pursuit, and we have neglected our duty too long: we will have been missed.”

“We have been missed, and Wellesley sent a very rude note, too,” Temeraire said to him, turning his head back to talk, when they had all gotten under way, “which was not very sensible, but we have worked out that the army has all gone back to London: how did you get Granby away?”

“We had help,” Laurence said. He was looking at something very small in his hand, which glittered a little, golden, in the early dawn light.

“Is that a prize?” Temeraire asked in interest, cocking his head to look at it.

“No,” Laurence said.

The flight to rejoin the British Army was long, but at least uneventful: Iskierka gave no more trouble. If she was not much chastened, she was at least very solicitous of Granby, and willing to do nearly anything only to please him, and Temeraire had rearranged the order of flight, in any case, so she was directly under their eyes.

The ring was like a coal in the small breast pocket inside Laurence’s coat, which his hand kept returning to touch: heavy beyond its weight, while Woolvey’s blood dried cold and stiff on his stolen shirt. Laurence tried not to think of Edith, how she would learn the news, or what her fate would be, widowed and alone with a small child in the occupied city.

“He was a brave fellow, sir,” Janus ventured: the old sailor had climbed over to Temeraire, who was lighter-burdened than Iskierka, for the trip. “Bad luck we had, there.”

Laurence only nodded. He could not go back; his duty lay ahead.

They caught up Wellesley’s corps that afternoon, and paced them the rest of the long way to camp outside Coventry, with a bitter wind blowing south: a taste of the weather they would have in Scotland. The men came marching dully along the road, falling out of step into quicker shuffling as they came at last to the cold comfort waiting for them: ground frozen solid as stone, covered with drifting flurries of snow. At least the waggons rolled easily, wheels clattering: the muddy road had frozen into uneven ridges.

“I don’t see why we must be staying up here,” Requiescat said, gliding into another slow circle. “There is a nice clearing here below us: we could see just as well from there if anyone attacked, which they won’t, as we would have seen them sometime the last hundred miles.”

“We mayn’t land until the infantry are settled,” Temeraire said, but then turned his head back and murmured, “Laurence, why mayn’t we?”

“They have less comfort marching than do we aloft,” Laurence said tiredly, “and will sleep in worse: the least we can do in solidarity is protect them until they have established the guard-posts, and lit their fires. If you went to your leisure while they yet struggled, it would only arouse envy and discontent.”

Temeraire said, “Well, I can hover, but it is not very easy for the others to stay up: we had much better go down there and help them. We could pull up trees for them, for firewood—”

Laurence opened his mouth to say it would throw the men into a panic; but looking down at those slow and weary ranks, he did not think they had the energy to run, even if they had been half-dead with fear. “The smaller dragons, perhaps, might begin.”

Temeraire turned and spoke to the ferals, and Gherni led down a handful of them, smallest, to go and pull out the old dead trees from the forest, shaking needles and dirt and squirrels out of the logs as they lifted them up, and carried them by twos and threes to the camp. The men mechanically breaking up the ground for ditches did not at first even notice the activity at their backs, and then only flinched when the first logs were put down: they stared up at the dragons with their shovels and pickaxes clutched in their hands. Lester, who had just landed, stared back at them curiously, and then poked his head over to look at the ground and asked them something in his own tongue.

“He wants to know why they are digging,” Temeraire said, and, “No, no—” he called, and then went down himself, a descent which did send the men stumbling haplessly away, to stop Lester from picking one of them up: evidently with the plan of shaking him for answers, as if this would enable the man to speak the dragon-tongue.

“It is for a midden, stop being so foolish,” he informed Lester, and then turning his head back to Laurence added, “and I suppose we may help them with this also: I can do what Lien did at Danzig.”

She had used the divine wind there as the French dug their siege-trenches, to break up the frozen ground and make it easier for the men to dig. But it took several attempts, and the ruin of some fifty trees brought down by excess, for Temeraire to manage the same effect. “It is not,” he panted, having taken a moment to breathe, “quite so easy as it looks. It seems to me it ought to be easier to roar just a little, than all-out; but it is not. I do not understand why. Not,” he added hastily, “that I cannot do it perfectly well: if Lien can do it, so can I.”

“Since you are having trouble, I will help, too,” Iskierka announced, landing beside them, and before anyone could stop her, she had put her head down and blasted flame out onto the ice-packed ground.

A great cloud of hissing steam arose in the center of her strike, but for the most part the flames licked and billowed away to either side over the hard icy surface. Happily the ditch-diggers were by now established at a safe distance, watching rather nervously with their officers, and were not singed; but the fire caught in the heap of fallen trees which Temeraire had knocked down.

“Now see what you have done,” Temeraire said. “Quickly,” he called up, “fetch dirt, and put out the fires.”

“Wait,” Perscitia said, landing. “If we lay the logs down where you mean to dig the ditches, they will melt the ground, and the men can get warm while they wait.”

“See, it has all worked out for the best,” Iskierka said to Temeraire, brazenly adding, “I meant it so.”

He flattened his ruff and said, “Then you may help put the logs in place, since you have so very cleverly set them on fire before they were lined up properly.”

Laurence dismounted as they worked, and went to speak to the sergeant and his men and explain the scheme. “They won’t come this way?” was all the man wanted to know, wiping a nervous dirty hand over his blond moustaches, and leaving them streaked and muddy.

“If they do, they will do you no harm,” Laurence said, with no more patience, “and they are saving you an afternoon of hard labor after marching. When the fire in the logs has died down, you will find the ground easier to dig, and you may chop up the remains for tinder and sleep warmer tonight than you had any hope of doing.”

Wellesley rode up on his dark horse, wrestling to keep it under control, the animal skittish and shy of flames and dragons both. “What the devil are you doing, then?” He did not wait for an answer, but threw an eye over the works and snorted. “Clever as foxes, I see. Well, don’t stand there, man,” he said to the sergeant. “Go and clear the rest of that brush. Goren, we’ll have the wounded over here, nearest the fires. At least they can’t get up and run away from the dragons like ninnies: half of ’em haven’t legs anymore. And as for you and that beast of yours,” he added to Laurence, grimly, “finish here and be at the clearings in an hour, no more: I have words for you I don’t care to have interrupted.”

The horse and the general wheeled away, aides in train, and Laurence went back to Temeraire, who was pushing the last few logs into place with a broken-off branch, to save his talons from singeing: the fire was still very hot. Demane was already off his back and vanished, as he was wont to do given even five minutes in reach of the ground. “Roland, go and fetch him out,” Laurence said, and waited tapping his thigh until she came out of the woods some ten minutes later, half-dragging Demane along: he had a string of rabbits and squirrels already gathered from the wreckage the dragons had made, and looked surly to have been interrupted.

“Go set up a tent in camp, if you can,” Laurence said, “and then see what you can do in the way of forage for the dragons. Janus, I am sure you can be of use to Mr. Fellowes, or Mr. Dorset.”

“Aye, sir,” Janus said.

“You may keep working here until it is done,” Temeraire said to Iskierka, rather smugly, “since it was all your notion,” and carried Laurence over to the clearings, where Ballista was already improving their comfort by smashing up shrubs and thornbrake with her barbed tail. Perscitia had managed to establish a remarkable bonfire, by setting several of the fallen trees into a tent-pole shape, and using the crushed and pounded wreckage for tinder, although she was now eyeing the towering blaze a little nervously: it had grown a good deal higher than her head.

“A handsome signal,” Wellesley said sarcastically, when he came. “It is kind of you to spare Bonaparte the trouble of having to find us in the dark.”

“You have a dozen fires lit just over the hill in the other part of camp, so I do not think it makes much difference that this one is a little bigger,” Perscitia said, in defensive understatement. “And,” she added with sudden inspiration, “this is so bright the Fleur-de-Nuits cannot come near us: it will hurt their eyes too much to see anything else around.”

Wellesley only snorted at this justification, and turned to Laurence. “And I suppose you have another such clever explanation you would like to feed me—”

“Sir,” Granby said, breaking in, “the fault was mine, for letting Iskierka run away with me—”

“I imagine there is no shortage of blame to parcel out among you,” Wellesley said cuttingly.

“It is not Granby’s fault at all!” Iskierka said, overhearing. “He did not like our going, and I am sorry now to have disobliged him; but I do not see why we ought to flap along after you like chickens, with no-one to fight all day. If we are supposed to protect you, we would do much better to go find someone who meant to attack you, and kill them before they did; so what I did was perfectly sensible, and it was just bad luck we got captured. And even so it has all come right in the end, so you haven’t any cause to yell.”

“Yes, I begin to see your captain might be wholly innocent,” Wellesley said, eyeing her. “Granby, is it?”

“Yes, sir,” Granby said, miserably.

“The next time this creature disobeys, you will cut her loose,” Wellesley said. “You and your crew will be reassigned; as for her, I do not care if she goes in the breeding grounds or flies across the sea; if she won’t follow orders, she is useless, and worse than useless when she induces others to risk good beasts after bad.”

“Oh!” Iskierka said, jetting a hissing cloud of steam. “Oh, I am not useless! I have taken more prizes than anybody, I can beat anyone who tries to fight me—”

“Brawling does not impress me,” Wellesley said. “We are here to win a war, not a single battle or a private mill; and any one dragon, like any one man, is expendable. The nation has managed without a Celestial or a fire-breather this long, and we will manage again without you if we must. If you are spoiling for a fight, you will have one when we are ready to give it to the French; until then, you are going to behave, or you can give up your captain and get you gone: we will find other work for him.”

“Granby, you would never,” she appealed, and poor Granby stood white and wretched and looked at Wellesley, and then he said, low, “Dear one, I am an officer of the King.”

Laurence looked away. He did not know he could have passed a similar test. Temeraire was not willful, in the same fashion; his disobedience had been more deliberate and more grave than Iskierka’s—but that was an excuse. If Wellesley, if any superior, ordered him to leave Temeraire, a simple plain order to go to another duty, and not as a means to abuse—

Iskierka made a low dreadful keening noise in her throat, and hissed out a whistling of steam so thick it clouded the ground around her feet; then she leapt away across the clearing and huddled herself into a heap of coils. Arkady sprang to her side and began speaking to her hurriedly in the dragon-tongue.

“I would not care if she did go away with them,” Temeraire said, listening, “and if you ask me, it serves her just right. I should be very happy to have you back myself, Granby,” he added.

“I beg your pardon,” Granby said, looking wretched, and ran across the clearing after her.

“You have damned little room to criticize,” Wellesley said to Temeraire.

“I am not always running off to please myself!” Temeraire said. “I have never disobeyed, except when someone tried to take Laurence from me, or hurt him, first; and when the Government tried to murder all the dragons in the world.”

“So you have only been insubordinate or treasonous a dozen times or so, is that all?” Wellesley said dryly. “—No, save your breath and the rest of your excuses. Carry on this way again, under my command, and I will treat the promises I have made you as cavalierly as you do your duty: do you understand me? Both of you,” he added, “as I see I cannot lay the guilt on your handler’s shoulders alone; but I will be damned if I try and apportion the guilt.”

“Yes, sir,” Laurence said quietly.

“But we have not done anything wrong to-day: that was all because Iskierka ran off,” Temeraire protested. “It is not my fault, or Laurence’s.”

“It damned well is, if you are her commanding officer,” Wellesley said. “Do not let me hear you blame one of your subordinates again.”

“Oh,” said Temeraire, quelled, and looked a little ashamed.

“Now,” Wellesley said, “if you have finished with this back-talking: since you have spent half the day flying hither and yon, I mean to profit by it, at least. Where is Davout bivouacked, and how many soldiers does he have on the road in reach of us?”

“But I told Hollin to tell you,” Temeraire said. “They have all gone back to London.”

“There were thirty thousand men behind us yesterday morning,” Wellesley said. “I don’t care if Bonaparte is chasing them with whips from morning to night and using dragons for supply, they cannot all have got back to the city in a day: you must at least have seen some sign, pickets or fires—”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “there was no sign that any of us saw, either the beasts which flew off earlier, or when we pursued them; we saw Davout’s regiments making camp around London, and Murat was in the city also.”

“And I have already told you all,” Temeraire said, “they can go fifty miles in a day, we have seen them do it, so—”

“It is one thing to move a brigade or two by dragon-back,” Wellesley said impatiently, “another to move an army: you cannot put much more than two hundred men even on the largest beasts.”

“That is not how they do it,” Perscitia put in, unexpectedly. The other dragons had all been listening in to the conversation and the lecture with gossipy interest, though hanging back a little; now she put her head forward to interject. “They do not just take a hundred men and fly with them straight, all day. They take a hundred men and carry them as far as they can in an hour, and put them down, and those men start marching from there. And then the dragons go back and get the next hundred men, who you see have been marching all this time, so they are not all the way off, and the dragons take them forward for—”

“Wait, they fly back?” Requiescat said, and with much irritation Perscitia had to interrupt to claw a picture into the dirt, showing how the companies would each in turn be carried leap-frog over those in front of them, each receiving two hours of the dragons’ time.

“And so on, until they have carried everyone a little way, and given them all a rest,” Perscitia said, “and so the men can walk thirty miles instead of twenty, and the dragons fly everyone twenty miles on top of that, so the whole company has moved fifty miles, together.”

She finished triumphantly, and Requiescat said, “Well, it seems like a lot of bother to me, just for an extra twenty miles; even I can make that in an hour or two,” and she huffed in indignation.

Wellesley had a better appreciation of her explanation, however, and studied the diagram with a fierce, hawk-like intent. “So this is what Roland has been going on about, then?” He looked at Laurence and said sharply, “And can your beasts manage the same?”

“If the men would go aboard,” Laurence answered him.

“They will go aboard if I have to shoot them,” Wellesley said.

For all his harsh words, however, the next morning he took the Coldstream Guards apart, and addressed them personally; the seven Yellow Reapers and three Grey Coppers were lined up some distance behind him, facing away so their jaws and teeth could not be seen. They had been rigged out with rope and sackcloth, and his aides were all busily climbing over the dragons—to no purpose but the dramatic, as the rigging had already been thoroughly tried by the dragons themselves tugging on it.

“Men,” Wellesley said, “this is a damned sorry state of affairs we are in. That Corsican upstart sleeping in the King’s bed, and his bully-boys stealing cattle and wrecking the harvest: it is more than any red-blooded Englishman can bear, and we are not going to bear it, either, for much longer.”

“That’s right,” a couple of men called back; a “hear, hear” and scattered mutterings of agreement.

“Every one of you knows they cannot outfight you, and we have learned they are not outwalking you, either: it is all one of Boney’s tricks. Those damned lazy Frenchmen are being carted around half the day on dragon-back, that is how they have been getting the jump on us,” Wellesley said, jerking his head back towards the dragons. “It is time we put a stop to it, and your colonel has solicited the honor for your regiment to go first.

“It is no treat to go aloft, so I rely on you all to make an example for the rest of the corps to follow. When your sergeants give the word, you are to go aboard the dragons, one to a company, one column to a side, filling the rigging from front to back. The first company which is aboard in good order will have the honor of carrying the flag when we give Boney his well-deserved drubbing, and an extra ration of rum in camp to-night.

“And I hope there is no man here more faint of heart than a Frenchman,” he added, “but if there is anyone here who is too craven to go aloft for an hour, he may say so now, and be excused.” He nodded to the colonel of the regiment, and himself turned and walked over to the dragons, to make a show of speaking with Rowley. No-one spoke, and the men filed in perfect order—with something even of a hurry—aboard the beasts; the rest of the army had been roused up to see it happen, and the dragons lifting off with the soldiers all aboard: with only a little prodding from the sergeants, the men aboard all jeered cheerfully at the regiments marching below as the dragons sailed away.

The first few days were a confusion of trying to match the supply to the men, at the end of the day, and more than one set of rations went astray; they did not manage to go more than ten miles beyond the usual distance, and the brigades on the road became a wretched muddle, with some regiments on each others’ heels, and others separated by miles. The dragons were also not very pleased. “One of them poked at me with a bayonet,” Chalcedony complained, indignantly, “and when I turned around and told him to stop, he shrieked: he is lucky I did not toss him off.”

But a semblance of order was gradually imposed on the proceedings, and in the end, the march which ought to have taken a long slow month was completed in two weeks: the advantage of air transport told all the more as they came through the mountains, where the dragons carried the men over the worst stretches, anywhere snow and ice had made the road impassable. Winter was now upon them in earnest, and they flew deeper into it as they went north; until the Cairngorm range reared up startlingly close, one clear morning, and the frozen black waters of Loch Laggan, with the citadel looking down upon it from the heights.

“Oh, at last,” Temeraire said, with relief, looking down at the courtyard with its heated stones dark and bare of snow.

But Laurence was looking at something else: there was a dragon already in the courtyard, a Papillon Noir gorgeously ornamented with iridescent stripes of blue and green, curled comfortably upon the stones with a flag of parley and a tricolor upon its shoulders.

Chapter 12

IT WAS A VERY great relief to let off his last load of men and supply. Temeraire understood the necessity of moving as quickly as Napoleon, of course, and if he had been disposed to doubt it, Perscitia’s calculations showed plainly how quickly the difference of thirty miles a day, even if it seemed only a few hours’ flying, would add up day by day. But it was so very tedious to be going back and forth on these short hopping flights, an hour in the air, then letting men off, then flying directly back to have another load put on. It was impossible to fly quickly or freely with men clinging aboard to the makeshift rigging, and then there was all the unpleasantness of their dirt. His own crew were well able to handle such matters without getting him spattered, even little Roland, and since the passengers were only an hour or two at most aboard at a time, Temeraire felt it was not too much to ask that they show some restraint, even if they were crammed aboard. But some of them simply could not manage it, and if he only dived a little to catch a better air current, or twisted to keep on an updraft, he was sure to be soiled. All very well to say, he had scales; it would take a week of bathing before he felt at all clean again.

But the lake was frozen solid, so for the moment he had to content himself with rolling in the thick snow on one of the neighboring hills, until he was wet and cold all over. The encampment had been going up all day as they delivered men by air, and by now the officers were coming up the hill in irregular clusters to eat in the citadel, leaving their horses stabled away at the foot. Loch Laggan had an ample herd, and all of them having eaten, the unharnessed dragons began to circle down, negotiating with complex aerial maneuvers their respective landing places on the hill, whether within the desirable courtyard or near it, or in the clearings farther out.

“Do you suppose,” Temeraire said to Laurence in an undertone, as he settled himself gladly down onto the deliciously baking-hot stones, “do you suppose that Celeritas will have forgiven me, for lying?” He put his head up over the squirming of dragons: middle-weights trying to fit themselves between and around him and Requiescat and Ballista, and Armatius, who smugly had claimed a place, with the other heavy-weights, thanks to Gentius drowsing yet upon his back. The light-weights and couriers were perched up on the walls and battlements, waiting for the outmatched middle-weights to give up before they began their own squabble over who would have a place.

Majestatis had ignored all the struggle, and taken himself a place just on the other side of the courtyard wall, to the south; Temeraire could hear Perscitia arguing with him indignantly. “You ought to go take a place in the courtyard,” she said.

“I am very comfortable here,” Majestatis returned placidly.

“You would be more comfortable in the courtyard,” Perscitia said, “and you can have a place there if you only make a little push for one: you do not need this one.”

“But I like this one, and I did not have to push to have it,” he said. “The ground is warm.”

She gave a sulky hiss. “I dare say you do not even know why.”

“The hot water for the baths runs under this part of the hillside, too,” Majestatis said.

There was a brief silence. “Yes,” Perscitia said, “it must, because this is the lower side of the slope, and it must drain away somewhere, but how did you know that?”

“There is steam coming out of that crack in the ground there.”

“Oh,” she muttered.

“I am going to sleep now,” Majestatis informed her. “I don’t mind if you want to share.”

“I do not want to share,” Perscitia said, but a low deep rumbling breath was the only reply, and after another fit of grumbling she evidently reconciled herself: both of them were audible in their snores before the rest of the quarreling had even resolved itself into a settled order for the courtyard.

But there was no sign of Celeritas. The old training master did not sleep in the courtyard himself, of course, but in a private mountain-side cave; but he might come out to see them all, Temeraire thought, with some anxiety. He was not easy about having lied to Celeritas, when they had come to steal the mushrooms, and he had never had the chance to apologize properly. He was quite sure Celeritas would have understood and approved of the mission—at least, he was as sure as he could be, because anyone could take an odd start; but Celeritas might still be angry over being lied to and tricked into having let them in, unchallenged.

“He is not here anymore,” a Winchester said: not anyone Temeraire knew, a small bright-eyed courier-beast, in harness; he was perched upon the wall behind them, out of the way of the confusion with all the new dragons coming in. “I think he has gone to the breeding grounds in Ireland.”

“But whyever would Celeritas go to the breeding grounds,” Temeraire protested; the little Winchester only fluttered out his wings in a shrug. “It is very boring in the breeding grounds,” Temeraire said to Laurence. “I do not understand why he should have left his post here.”

Laurence did not say anything for a moment, and then he said, oddly without conviction, “Perhaps he grew tired of the work.”

He said nothing else, nothing more reassuring, and Temeraire looked at him sidelong: Laurence was sitting upon one of the low benches by the wall, looking again at the gold ring which he had brought back from London. He had not said where it had come from, and Temeraire felt a little shy of pressing him. Laurence seemed so very unhappy, and Temeraire did not understand properly why: they were together, not pent up anywhere, and soon they would have a splendid battle to take back their territory; and then the Government would pay them money. So there was nothing to be sorry about, except perhaps that they had retreated in the first place; but the rest would make up for that.

Temeraire sighed, and informed the squabbling Reapers, “You had all better leave some room. Maximus must be here soon, and the rest of the Corps; and ought not Lily be here already?”

Laurence raised his head. “They all ought,” he said. “They were ahead of us.”

He went into the citadel to try and find out where the others were, from the other officers; and meanwhile Chalcedony and Gladius and Cantarella finally won out over the other Reapers and settled themselves down, so the Grey Coppers and the Winchesters and the ferals could now squeeze themselves in amongst the rest, and then they were all warm and snug on the heated stones. Moncey and Minnow had settled themselves on Temeraire’s back; he felt quite comfortable, ready for a proper drowse, and then the Papillon Noir raised his head and said, “How pleasant it is here! It is almost as nice as the pavilions the Emperor has built for us in Paris.”

He spoke in English, with a curious accent, and many of the other dragons pricked up in interest. “Those are much larger, of course,” the Papillon continued, “so no-one has to sleep outside if they do not want to; and there is a charming little stream which runs past them, so if one wants a drink, one only has to stretch out one’s neck. But these are just as warm; at least, if it is not raining, or snowing.” A little drifting snow was indeed coming down in that moment, and slicking the stone.

“I expect,” Temeraire said, rather coolly, “that he is imitating the pavilions from China, which are very splendid.”

“Yes, exactly,” the Papillon said enthusiastically, “although Madame Lien says, he has made them even nicer. And we each have a box at the pavilions, where we can put our treasure, and the palace guard keeps watch over it when we are not there.”

“Hum, and I suppose they don’t take it,” Gentius said, skeptically, cracking one luridly orange eye.

“No, never,” the Papillon said. “I have three gold chains and a ruby there, and they are always just as I have left them; the guards will even polish them for me, if I ask them.”

Everyone was very wide awake now, at “three gold chains and a ruby.” “I have earned them,” the Papillon said, seeing he had his audience, “by helping to build some roads, and for some fighting: and I have been promoted to captain for it, see,” and showed off a handsome badge pinned to his harness: a round disk of some shining metal. “So can anyone, who likes to serve the Emperor,” he added, significantly.

Temeraire laid back his ruff. “Certainly, if they do not mind helping someone who goes about stealing other people’s territory, when he already has plenty of his own, and kills heaps of men and dragons to do it,” he said coldly. “Anyway, we are getting pay, too; and I have been made colonel.”

“I congratulate you!” the Papillon said. “How much have you been paid so far?” When Temeraire had made an awkward, sputtering explanation, the Papillon went on, “Well, I am sure the Emperor would pay you right away, and give you even higher rank, then.”

There was a low thoughtful murmur going around. Temeraire put his head sidelong to nudge Roland, who was grudgingly doing lessons with Demane and Sipho—less of her own volition than at Sipho’s insistence: he was beginning to outstrip her as well as his older brother, as Roland had never been very interested in studying. “You had better go and tell Laurence, that the French dragon is making all sorts of promises, which I am sure are lies, if only we would agree to serve Napoleon; and pray let him come and put a stop to it,” he finished plaintively; he did not know how to answer the French dragon, who after all was offering just what he himself had asked for; except he did not want it from Napoleon, who had invaded England and made so much trouble for everyone, and who let Lien do as she liked.

“Oh, I will go at once,” Roland said, with relief, and left; Demane said, “I will go too,” and went after her.

“But who is going to check my work,” Sipho called after them unhappily.

LAURENCE HAD NOT GONE farther than the great hall of the citadel: many officers were standing in scattered clumps, talking in low voices that the great vaulted ceiling blended with echoes into hollow unintelligible murmur, and he hesitated in the entryway a moment: few faces he knew, and fewer he chose to impose himself upon; then he saw Riley, in a corner of the room.

Riley wore a look half-dazed with exhaustion, and he said wholly tactlessly, “Hello, Laurence, I thought you were in prison,” in a tone more puzzled than condemnatory. “I have a son,” he added.

“Give you joy,” Laurence said, and shook his hand, ignoring the rest of the remark: Riley gave it full willingly to be shaken, and gave no sign he noticed the omission. “Is Catherine well?”

“I haven’t the faintest notion,” Riley said. “The lot of them took off like a shot for the coast three days ago, and she insisted she could not be spared, if you will credit it: thank God we had already found a wet-nurse from the village, or I dare say she would have gone anyway, and let the child starve. Do you know, they must be fed every two hours?”

He did not know why the dragons had gone or where; what little attention he had to spare from the new child was devoted to the Allegiance: he had left her in dry-dock in Plymouth, recovering from their voyage to Africa, and with Bonaparte and his army now between him and the port, he fretted about her fate. “I am sure the Navy will keep him out of Plymouth,” he said, “I am sure of it; but if he should somehow get a hold on the whole south, then—”

“Sir,” Emily said, and Laurence looked down; she was panting at his elbow, and Demane beside her. “Sir, Temeraire sent me—very well, us—to tell you: that French dragon in the courtyard is preaching sedition, and trying to bribe everyone to go over to the Emperor, with pavilions and jewels and such: he can speak English.”

“Where is the envoy?” Laurence asked Riley. “Do you know who they have sent?”

“Talleyrand,” Riley said.

The conference was under way upstairs, in the little-used library chamber; Wellesley had gone to join the discussion, directly on their arrival, and he was, Laurence thought, the best hope of finding a senior officer who would appreciate the threat. But the room was barred off by guards and aides, among them ten Frenchmen in uniform like cavalry officers but altered for flying with long coats made of leather and heavy gloves in their belts. Laurence did not know how he might get word inside, until he caught sight of Rowley and called to him.

Rowley’s personal disdain had not subsided, but he had just seen a month shortened to two weeks, on dragon-back, and though unsmiling he heard Laurence out, and said shortly, “Very well; come with me,” and took him into the room by the side door.

Talleyrand had not come alone: he sat along one side of a long table, laid on for the occasion, with a Marshal sitting beside him: Murat, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. An odd pair: Talleyrand’s long aristocratic face under his thinning fair hair almost washed out and pale next to Murat, who had thick curly hair and bright blue eyes in a face ruddy with weather and work, above a powerful frame: in his person every inch the soldier. Murat’s clothing was of almost absurd splendor, seen close up: a coat of black leather with gold embroidery and gold buttons, over snowy stock and shirt, with gloves of black leather and gold on the table beside him; Talleyrand’s of an elegance more quiet and correct.

Opposite them sat half-a-dozen ministers, in nothing like the same state, all of them marked with the long and hasty retreat from London, and the discomfort they must have felt at being, effectively, in a military camp: Perceval, the Prime Minister, looked especially drawn and unhappy. His Ministry was a shaky and doubtful matter to begin with, a collection of lesser evils and men he had cajoled into their posts: his predecessor Lord Portland’s government had collapsed under the weight of the disaster in Africa, and the old man had refused to try and build another. Canning, the last Foreign Secretary, had tried for the post himself and, failing, had both refused to join the new Ministry himself, and blocked the Secretary of War Lord Castlereagh’s joining it: leaving Perceval to make do with Lord Bathurst and Lord Liverpool; good men, but now more than any other time he needed the most gifted there might be, and though Lord Bathurst had been sympathetic to the cause of abolition, Laurence could not but acknowledge he was not the man anyone would choose to have sitting across from Talleyrand at the negotiating table.

Lord Mulgrave, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had preserved his post; Dalrymple sat with him, an old fat soldier, and neither of them looking a match for the Marshal. The weight of power and energy and composure was all on one side of the table: all the refinement and sophistication of the Ancien Régime married to the brutal strength of the Empire. Wellesley only, sitting at the other end beside Lord Liverpool, did not look half-defeated; and he instead was in a glittering temper: his jaw set coldly.

Rowley bent to whisper in his ear; Wellesley looked at Laurence and then leaned forward and interrupted the conversation going on in French to say, “What the devil is this? You come here under cover of a flag of truce, and meanwhile your dragon is in the courtyard trying to bribe our beasts with trinkets?”

Murat exclaimed at the accusation, and said, “I am sure there has been some misunderstanding. Liberté has much enthusiasm, but he would never mean to so offend—”

“I am sure General Wellesley does not mean any insult.” Lord Eldon jumped in with apologies. “Surely Your Highness”—Bonaparte was fond of making his family princes—“must be familiar with the frank address of soldiers—”

Talleyrand watched all the discussion with half-lidded eyes, which flicked to Laurence a moment. He leaned back to one of his aides with a quick curled finger for a whispered consultation; then when the first exchange had died down, intervened to say, “Perhaps Marshal Murat and I will go and have words with Liberté, to ensure there is no more confusion: we have been speaking long, and a little rest, a little time, would do well for all of us.” He pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, bringing the rest out of their chairs, and leaning a little towards Perceval said, “I hope we will have an opportunity to speak again; this evening?”

Bowing precedence to Murat, he let the Marshal leave the room, and limping out after him paused at the door to turn to Laurence and say, in a clear carrying voice, “Allow me to express again the thanks of His Imperial Majesty’s government, Monsieur Laurence; and to assure you that you have a claim on the gratitude of France which the Emperor has not forgotten.”

The graceful words cut him worse than knives. It was a pain dealt incidentally, Laurence was bitterly sure: Talleyrand had aimed rather at the ministers at the table, to discredit any report which Laurence might be bringing them. “Your government, monsieur,” Laurence said, “owes me nothing; I did not act for their sake.”

Talleyrand only smiled gently, and half-bowed again before he left the room.

“By God, the impudence,” Wellesley said savagely, scarcely waiting until the door had shut, and in no low voice. “That arrogant pig—son of an innkeeper and a whore, and married to another; that, to be King of Britain—”

“They have made no such suggestion,” Lord Eldon began; he was Lord Chancellor, having risen to the peerage as a notable lawyer, and thence to the Tory government for his steadfast opposition to Catholic emancipation.

“Do you imagine any of that upstart parvenu’s circle mean to be content with something as mealy-mouthed as governorship?” Wellesley said. “Give him six months, and it will be King Murat, as soon as he has taken the Army and the Navy to pieces.”

“No, the terms are unacceptable,” Perceval said, without great conviction. “But these are a beginning position—”

“They are an insult from first to last,” Wellesley said, “and ought to be rejected out of hand.”

“One of his proposals, at least,” another minister interjected, “gentlemen, I beg we consider, on its own merits, apart from any other: may I urge that a swift decision indeed be taken to send Their Majesties to Halifax, with all haste and all necessary considerations for their security?”

“Defeatist nonsense,” Wellesley snapped. “Bonaparte is not coming anywhere near Scotland before spring, no matter what we do.”

“All our scouts report his soldiers are all over the north of England already.”

“Foraging,” Wellesley said, “in small parties. We have two dozen outposts and garrisoned castles between London and Edinburgh, and he cannot march his army past them.”

“Surely the least risk ought not be run. Bonaparte went from Berlin to Warsaw on the eve of winter—”

“Because half the garrison commanders threw up their arms and surrendered at nothing more than a fanfare at their gates. I have more faith in our officers than that.”

“The King is not a young man,” Perceval said, breaking into the increasing heat of Wellesley’s exchange with the minister, “nor in the best of health—”

“No-one proposes he should expose himself upon the battlefield,” Wellesley said, “but he can still address the troops.”

Perceval paused, and heavily, quietly said, “The King is not in the best of health.”

No-one spoke a moment; then someone said to Wellesley, in a conciliating tone, “If the Prince of Wales stays; or Prince William, and the King goes—”

Wellesley shrugged it away, a tight angry motion. “If you are determined to send him away, send him; and if you mean to give away his throne, too, make a parcel of it with whatever else these snakes are asking for, and let them preach sedition to the troops direct; why not?”

“Come, General Wellesley, this is surely overreaction—”

“If you believe for an instant they did not know perfectly well what the beast was about—”

“I hope we are not going to be distracted by some notion that Talleyrand, if not Bonaparte himself, seriously concocted a plan of subterfuge to be carried out by one dragon among others,” Eldon said. “I have heard the idle chatter of the beasts; let us not read into it conscious and deliberate intent—”

“Sir,” Laurence said, and bore the looks which he received for having the temerity to interject, “perhaps you are not aware that dragons learn their tongue in the shell, and do not ordinarily acquire another; it cannot be by coincidence that they brought a beast which could speak English, and easily communicate anything to our own.”

“So let them be fed a second time, and it will drive any seditious thoughts out of their heads, if any managed to get in,” Eldon said. “What else could Bonaparte possibly offer the creatures anyway?”

“Respect, if nothing else,” Laurence said. “If you cannot see the neglect and disdain with which they have been treated has left them open to the meanest approach, the least offer of courtesy and reward—”

“That is enough from you, Laurence,” Lord Mulgrave said icily. “You have done more good for Bonaparte than Talleyrand and Murat and any ten yammering dragons could achieve here, if we gave them every opportunity in the world.”

Laurence flinched, and hoped he did not show it. Mulgrave had approved the fatal plan to send the sick dragon to France, in the first place; he had led the inquiry where Laurence had learned of it by accident; he had chosen the men for the court-martial, and personally overseen it, with deep venom.

“A man may be a wild enthusiast even without being a traitor,” Mulgrave said, “and you are both; if you have been allowed to live a little longer, by counsel other than mine, you are certainly the last man on whom anyone of sense would rely.”

Wellesley said sharply, “This is the distraction; and I dare say if Talleyrand could listen in he would congratulate himself on its success. Sir,” he said to Perceval, “throw him out, I beg of you, and Murat with him. Every minute that flag of parley sits before the eyes of the army, you cut a little more of the heart out of my men. We ought to be speaking of the counterattack, not debating terms of surrender: that is what these are, however you like to dress them up.”

“General Wellesley, you and General Dalrymple will forgive my bluntness,” Lord Liverpool said, breaking in, “but unpleasant as these terms are, we may find them preferable to the ones he offers us in March.—I hope my remarks are taken as no reflection upon the Army. It is a plain fact that Bonaparte has beaten every army that ever took the field against him, the Russians, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Turks, and we ourselves. It seems to me we might well agree to whatever he wants, so long as the Army and the Navy are preserved a little while, and the King is safe; anything that will get him out of London and back to Paris. Then we can manage Murat—”

“Are you—” Wellesley cut himself off, and in a flat tone said, “While Bonaparte is in England, we can end this with a single victory—not only the invasion, but the war, this whole ten years and more of conflict. The last we want is to see him go; the only damned thing to be thankful for is he has put himself in our reach. In a month we will have fifty thousand men here; at Edinburgh another sixty, and a hundred and fifty fighting beasts, on our own ground; in a month—”

“Half the Grande Armée is sitting on the coast of France waiting their turn to come over for a share,” Eldon said. “In a month, Bonaparte will have two hundred thousand men, or more.”

“No, he shan’t.” The door banged, and Jane Roland came in, stripping off her bloody gauntlets: more blood streaked her face and hair, and stained her coat. “What?” she said to their startled questions, and looked at herself in the glass on the wall. “Oh, I look a fright. No, it isn’t any of mine, I suppose it is that poor damned Frenchman’s: I broke a sword on the fellow.”

She took the glass of brandy anxiously offered her anyway, and drank it off straight. “Thank you, sir,” she said, setting it down, “that puts life in one’s breast. I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for coming in my dirt: I am fresh from the coast. He tried another landing at Folkestone: but he did not have as much luck as he would have liked, I imagine. We have settled his trick of harpooning: our smiths have give us some sharp wire, and by twos the courier-captains can cut up the ropes in a trice. Here are dispatches,” she added, as Frette, trotting in behind her, laid packets down on the table in front of Mr. Perceval, “from Admiral Collingwood: taken six, sunk four, burnt two, of ships-of-the-line; and not a thousand men landed of sixty.”

The noise her intelligence produced was extraordinary both in volume and in the change of tone, out of proportion perhaps to a victory that only left them no worse off, than they had been before. But even a small taste was sweet to those who had been so long deprived; Eldon was silenced, and Wellesley sprang up to shake her hand, before he had quite realized what he did.

“So he cannot bring over any more—how many men does he have, now?” Perceval said, urgently.

“He can still bring them by air, at night,” Jane put in. “We can patrol, and so can the Navy, but we won’t catch every Fleur-de-Nuit that slips over the Channel: they can carry as many as two hundred at a shot.”

“He may send ten of them every night for me,” Wellesley said. “He cannot make up more than our forces, before we are ready to meet him. Sir—gentlemen,” he said, turning to sweep his eye over all the table, “no war was won at the conference table, but many have there been lost. Let me not see this a room of cowards, but of Britons. Give me your confidence and a hundred thousand men, and I do not fear Bonaparte. Will you?”

There was a pause; several men looked at Dalrymple. “Perhaps, a joint command—” one man started.

“No,” Wellesley said, cutting him off short. “If you have not faith in me, choose another man.”

The silence fell again, a moment’s hesitation, but Wellesley had chosen his moment well; the glow of victory, of success, yet lingered, and carried the day: Perceval stood and put his hands flat on the table. “So be it. Lord Bathurst, you will inform our guests the parley is at an end. General Wellesley, you have the command, and may God be with you.”

Not a minute later, Wellesley was halfway down the corridor outside, saying, “A wretched waste of time and spirit, but at least it is over, and no irreparable harm done. Roland, I need a hundred dragons, for transport—”

“I can’t hand you off a hundred beasts when I have five hundred miles of coastline to watch,” Jane said, matching his stride.

“I have another thirty thousand men to get here, and forty to Edinburgh,” Wellesley snapped.

“Tell me where the men are to be found and where you want them landed, and I will contrive,” she said, “with what dragons are on patrol, in flying distance.”

“Well enough.” He gave her a curt nod. “Rowley, get her the list of garrisons,” he said, over his shoulder. “Tell me, what sort of supply do you imagine Bonaparte needs?”

“For the beasts? A hundred bullocks a day,” Jane said. “More if he is heavy on fighting-weight beasts, and they are working for their supper. He is managing it, though: has foragers out, of course; and we have fewer dragons south of the mountains to eat up the supply.”

He nodded. “Very good. I must get to Edinburgh, and get the rest of this army into order—”

“Wellesley,” Jane said, “before you go, you will pardon me for saying: I can put the men wherever you need them; but I can’t make Bonaparte come and meet you there. He is pretty well dug in at London, now, and come spring we are going to begin to have some trouble with supply ourselves. Scotland’s herds can’t support this number of dragons forever: we will be eating into the breeding stock.”

He shot her a hard look. “You will oblige me,” he said, “by not mentioning that particular difficulty in front of their Lordships. Damn, but I miss Castlereagh!”

She snorted. “I don’t need a lecture on managing politicos who don’t know a damned thing about my business.”

“No, I imagine not,” Wellesley said, grudgingly. “Well, bring me the army, and let me worry how to get the Corsican out of London.”

Returning to the courtyard, Laurence found Temeraire in glad convocation with Maximus and Lily, also freshly returned from the coast: the two had unceremoniously displaced several disgruntled Yellow Reapers and a much-offended Ballista to claim places on the warm stones beside him.

“Yes, the egg is hatched,” Lily was saying, “but it is not much use to anyone: only lies there and squalls all day, and I do not like the way it smells, not,” she added loyally, “that any of that is Catherine’s fault: I am sure that awful sailor is to blame. I ought never have let him marry her, and now she cannot even make him divorce her.”

Harcourt was standing by them, with Berkley, but Laurence did not hesitate to approach, even inwardly: too weary and too soiled to dread anymore yet another awkward meeting. Catherine did not say anything at all, however, but gave him a handshake which he thought she would have liked to make heartier than her strength could presently manage. She looked fragile as an eggshell and nearly as white, so her pale red hair stood luridly against her skin, and the blued rings beneath her eyes. She had still the little thickness at the middle she had gained in her pregnancy, but her arms were thin of muscle and of strength: she ought to have been resting.

She caught his eye, and said sharply, “Pray let me not hear lectures; Lily cannot be spared at a time like this. He tried to land another sixty thousand men, did you hear?”

“I did, and I congratulate you on the victory,” Laurence said: he did not have a right to speak, in any case, as Riley might. “And on your son,” he added.

“Oh; yes,” she said, despondently. “Thank you.”

The French embassy was leaving: a small sheltering tent in domed shape was put up on the Papillon Noir’s back, and Talleyrand was handed into it, clambering cautiously and slowly into his place; but Murat went up like an aviator to the life born, and latched himself on at the neck. The Papillon made a great show of shaking out his dappled iridescent wings and showing off a small but flashy medallion on his breast to the other dragons, as he was boarded, and he called cheerfully, “Good-bye! I hope you come and visit me, any time you like, in London or in Paris,” before he leapt aloft.

Arkady made a rude noise, after him, and nosed his own dinner-plate medal, which Jane had awarded him a year ago by way of incentive for patrolling. “Yes, and good riddance,” Temeraire said, looking after the vanishing French dragon with a cold eye. “I am sure it is all a hum, and he hasn’t any rubies or gold chains at all.”

Laurence was as glad to see them gone, but they left behind a long shadow, which would not be lifted save by a victory that seemed at the moment distant and unlikely. The terms Bonaparte had offered now would be generous by comparison, if he managed to maintain his occupation until the spring. One by one the outposts throughout England would be starved out, or pounded into surrender; then he would turn the besieging troops upon the port cities, and begin to cut off supply for the Navy. Meanwhile his dragons would be eating up British cattle, while their own beasts began to go hungry, and the melting snows would open up all the mountain passes to easy avenue of attack by his infantry. He had only to stay easy, enjoying the comforts of London, and wait.

“We are going out again on patrol to-night, along the North Sea,” Maximus said to Temeraire. “Are you with us, this next run?”

“Patrolling,” Temeraire said, with a sigh, “but yes, of course we shall go together; shall we not, Laurence? And at least,” he added, “it is better than ferrying.”

“You may have other duties, to your regiment,” Laurence said.

It was no easy matter to organize the whole company of unharnessed dragons into patrols. Temeraire insisted the Yellow Reapers should be allowed to all go together, as they seemed to prefer, even though by the general rule they would have been used for balance in mixed groups; and Arkady’s ferals, on the other hand, he divided up among many bands, even though they could not speak a word to the other dragons. “Yes, but they do not need to speak out loud to understand enough for patrols,” Temeraire said, “and otherwise they will fly off adventuring, especially,” he added darkly, “if Iskierka is let anywhere near them.”

“She is a good deal improved, though,” Granby said to Laurence and Tharkay, over dinner snatched one night, while they were all encamped near Newcastle. A little way back from the fire, Temeraire and Iskierka were squabbling at volume, and Arkady throwing in his occasional piece. “She makes as much noise,” Granby added hurriedly, “but she has turned perfectly obliging: has flown all the patrols as neat as a pattern-card, and no haring off after prizes at all, or a word of complaint; for as much, I would gladly be captured five times over.”

Laurence looked down at the fire; he yet felt too strongly, what Granby’s capture had cost: he had heard nothing of Edith, though he had stooped so far as to beg Jane to make inquiry of the intelligence-officers. Spy reports came in by the dozens each day from London, but the arrest—even the execution—of a solitary British gentlewoman might be too insignificant to mention.

Tharkay said to Granby, “I would not for the world diminish your satisfaction, but perfectly obliging invites caution: a smaller improvement might be more secure. No creature in the habit of freedom is easily persuaded to adopt discipline,” he added, giving a gobbet of meat to the kestrel, who observed their roasting rabbit with a cocked and eager eye.

“I am, too, disciplined,” Iskierka said, overhearing. “I will not run off at all; and I am very happy to carry more,” meaning cattle: they were each carrying half-a-load of supply along with their crew, Jane’s compromise between transport and patrol. Half-a-load was enough for a party of even middle-weight dragons to move a full company with their officers, or to bring in supply for themselves, without weighting the dragons too much to fight; their own party was presently coming up along the North Sea coast, and gathering what supply they could find. Iskierka was already responsible for the transport of a dozen large black hogs, presently penned up outside the camp and squealing occasionally through their drunken haze; they had been dosed with the easiest drug to supply, strong liquor, and smelled powerfully of spirits.

“If you ask me, it is only an act,” Temeraire said, disdainfully, “because you are trying to show Granby he ought not leave you. You know perfectly well we haven’t any more.”

Deer could not be successfully transported, panicking themselves to death before they could even be drugged, and fish did not keep; they were only good for feeding the dragons on the wing. Already cattle had begun to grow scarce, along the coast, and the more time they spent inland searching, the more risk of leaving an opening in their patrol where a substantial number of soldiers could be brought over: Bonaparte had dragons loaded down with men flying along the Channel and the coast, daily, waiting for just such a chance.

Tharkay said, “We will find more tomorrow,” a puzzling degree of confidence; but the next evening he took Arkady into the lead and flew directly to an estate with several handsome dairy farms, which yielded two dozen bullocks; he watched the stupefied animals loaded onto the dragons with an odd, wry expression, which made Laurence wish all the more to ask how he had known; and equally made such an inquiry impossible. They were just over the border into Scotland: Laurence knew Tharkay had been embroiled in a law-suit here, although none of the details, and if Tharkay did not choose to volunteer them, respect dictated they could not be pursued.

The cattle completed their tally, but only just, and they found nothing more the rest of the way on their patrol, and on the flight to deliver their supplies to Loch Laggan: the farmers were grown adept at hiding their diminishing herds.

“Damn the lot of them and Boney, too,” Jane snapped, when Laurence gave her the news, and rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. “Tell him we have one week less of supply than I said,” she told the aide hovering at her desk, the young man, an Army officer, at once nervous and impatient, shifting his weight side-to-side. “And no, he mayn’t have twenty, he may have ten, and not all of those heavy-weights, either. Wellesley wants you,” she added to Laurence, and tossed him a wax-sealed packet from among those upon her desk, “and as many as I can spare, in Edinburgh.”

Laurence broke the seal and unfolded the orders, a single sheet, a few lines only, hastily and informally written, with no signature: Bring that fire-breathing monster, and however many more Roland will give you; the best fighters you have, and the more vicious the better.

He read it over slowly, and then folded it back up again; vicious was a cold indigestible presentiment in his belly. Jane, he thought, had not seen the contents; she would object as strongly as he would, and he looked up.

She had scarcely interrupted her work. “Frette, have Rightley take himself and five middle-weights to Inverness, and send a note to that damned colonel that if he don’t get his men on board tomorrow night when the beasts land, I will have him up for a court-martial the next morning. We haven’t time to waste on this nonsense,” she said, handing off three orders at once. “Laurence, you may choose your beasts, anyone you like; formations make no nevermind.”

He could not burden her. “We may have ten?” Laurence said. “Wellesley wants Iskierka,” he added.

“Yes,” Jane said, distracted, “you may as well take her; Lord knows it is a waste to have her patrolling, if there is skirmishing to be had. Oh, and here,” she added, giving him a letter dug out of many others on her over-burdened desk, “you may read that here, although I cannot let you take it.”

A hand had written, broadly and with many misspellings and stray capitals:

The letter had no signature. He read the section over twice, and gave it back again. “Thank you,” he said only, and bowing left; he did not trust himself to say anything more.

TEMERAIRE WAS VERY PLEASED to be so singled out for a particular assignment, and even more to be let off the job of patrolling, and ferrying men about, however important it might be. The only difficulty was in deciding who should be chosen to come along. “Wellesley wants the best fighters you have, and the most enthusiastic,” Laurence said, which was only fair, anyway, as those had the most right to be doing something more exciting than carrying the infantry back and forth. But there were more than ten deserving, and anyway it was only eight, because of course he should go himself, and another would be Iskierka, even though she did not merit the privilege at all.

It was this showy fire-breathing, which was not anything particularly extraordinary: anyone could set things on fire, if only you had a little bit to start with. Temeraire sighed, but anyway she was not of much use: she had already been let off carrying people, because it was difficult for many people to sit upon her with all her spikes jetting off steam as they did. So he had to put up with her; and then of course Maximus and Lily had to be asked, although to Temeraire’s startled dismay, Laurence tried to speak against the choice.

“But it would be very unhandsome of me not to invite them for some real fighting, when I may,” Temeraire protested, looking over his shoulder, lest Maximus and Lily should overhear, and be offended. Fortunately, Maximus was solidly asleep and snoring, under a blanket of nine Winchesters and little ferals, and Lily was presently encamped outside the far wall of the citadel just below Captain Harcourt’s window, jealously: Catherine was gone inside to see to the baby.

“Harcourt is not well, I find,” Laurence said.

“Yes,” Temeraire said, “Lily thinks so, too, and that is as much a reason to ask her as any: she is quite sure Catherine must do better to go south, and have some real fighting, than all this flying back and forth in the wet. She takes cold so easily now, and ought not be so long aloft.”

“Berkley don’t take cold easily, because he is so fat,” Maximus said sleepily, cracking open an eye, “but I would also like to go and fight.”

So that was settled, but for the rest, Temeraire scratched his head a little. “Gentius may as well come with us, without counting against our tally,” he said at last, “because it is not as though he can carry anyone or patrol: he is only staying here in Loch Laggan and sleeping. And we shall have Armatius to carry him. That would do very well for heavy-weights. I do not think I ought to take Majestatis or Ballista, for they are so very handy at managing the others, and I am not quite sure that everyone would mind so well, carrying the soldiers back and forth, if they were to leave also; and Requiescat, because no-one who is not a heavy-weight will argue with him, even if he must be told what orders to give.”

He was a little puzzled how to leave them behind without giving offense, however, until he hit on the notion of giving them rank instead. “You do not suppose Wellesley can mind?” he asked Laurence.

“It is a capital scheme,” Admiral Roland said in amusement, when Laurence had inquired of her. “Your militia had better be shifted under command of the Corps in any case, so we will make you a commodore instead of a colonel, and your officers shall be captains; although it will be damned difficult to manage epaulettes for them.”

“Oh, epaulettes,” Temeraire said, eagerly. A party of seamstresses had been recruited from the local villages around Loch Laggan to help sew carrying-harnesses, for the transport of the soldiers, and they were now induced to make up rosettes out of some of the leftover silk and leather. The results were not very like real epaulettes, nearer instead to enormous mop-heads of the brightest colors, with a little cloth of gold at the knotted center for some flash, and a great many ties to attach them to a bit of harness. But no-one minded that, in the least.

“I call that handsome,” Requiescat said, admiring the bright green knot upon his shoulder from every direction, craning his head nearly upside down, and even Majestatis did not quite manage to affect his usual degree of amused disdain and kept glancing back sidelong at his own: it was in red, to go against his cream-and-black, and looked almost as fine, Temeraire thought, as his own pale blue matched set: he of course had needed two.

“Yes, and if anyone should be particularly clever at helping you to manage, you may make them lieutenants, and they may have a smaller one,” Temeraire said. “So that is all settled,” he added to Laurence, “and for the rest, let us take some Yellow Reapers. Messoria and Immortalis, of course, because they are our wing-mates, and also the two best of our unharnessed, and that will do very well, because I also want Perscitia: she is very clever, and,” he confided, “if I leave her here she will offend someone, I am afraid. Anyway, we may need to manage some artillery.”

The Reapers quarrelled it out amongst themselves, and finally settled that Chalcedony and Gladius should come, and Cantarella should take charge of the rest staying behind, and have an epaulette. Moncey got one for command of the couriers—it was nearly as large as his head but pleased him very well—and Minnow also.

So there was no quarrelling or ill-feeling at all in the end, which Temeraire felt a credit to his arrangements. “We are a very handsome company, are we not?” Temeraire asked Laurence, hoping to find him satisfied. “It is a pity about Iskierka, but no-one could quarrel with our choices, otherwise, I am sure.”

“Yes,” Laurence said.

“I have only been thinking,” Temeraire said, with a sidelong look; he hoped it would not seem selfish, “that it would be just as well, if we got back the rest of our crew: not that we are not perfectly comfortable as we are,” he added, “but a few more bellmen to manage some bombs, and it might be convenient to have Winston back, to help Fellowes—”

“Those who wished to return have done so,” Laurence said. “I cannot require any man to serve with a traitor.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said. “But—” and stopped. It had not occurred to him that the crew had chosen not to come back: that they had rather be elsewhere, on another dragon, and with another captain. It seemed very strange to him, when he was now a commodore, and must surely have been more impressive, if anything. He wondered if perhaps Laurence was mistaken, or only shy of asking for them: perhaps they did not even know that he and Laurence were free. “But surely Martin, at least, or Ferris, would come,” he said.

Laurence was very still a moment, and then he said, “Ferris has been dismissed the service,” only because, it seemed, the admirals imagined that Ferris had been of some help, even though he had done nothing at all.

“But then where is he?” Temeraire asked. If Ferris were not with some other dragon, it stood to reason he would rather be with them; but Laurence said with finality, “Any communication from me must be wholly unwelcome.”

Temeraire did not press him further, but privately he thought that perhaps he would write to Ferris: if he could get Emily or Sipho, perhaps, to take down a letter for him, and find out Ferris’s direction; and then a dragon he knew a little from Dover, Orchestia, landed in the courtyard. She was back from a patrol, and his own midwingman Martin was with her crew, his bright yellow hair standing out against his green coat.

“Mr. Martin,” Temeraire called out, seeing him go by, thinking perhaps to ask him over; and see if he knew, that Temeraire had been made commodore; and whether he was quite sure he would not prefer to go with them, on their own particular mission—

Martin started a little, at being named, and looked over; but then he turned his back and walked on into the citadel with the rest of Orchestia’s crew—not even a word, or a gesture, and he had always been so very friendly.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you will oblige me very greatly if you will make no such gesture again.”

“No, I will not,” Temeraire said, much subdued; it was not only that Martin had ignored them: he had done it so very openly, as though he wanted everyone else to know he meant to do it. There was something particularly unpleasant to it: anyone might not feel like conversation, of course, but this was showing away how little he wanted it with them, in particular. “But,” Temeraire said to Laurence, slowly, “does that mean he does not approve, that we took over the cure? Surely he would not have wished to see all those dragons dead—”

“Between two evils, he might have found that the lesser than treason,” Laurence said, without lifting his head from the book which he was reading.

“Oh! Then I am not sorry,” Temeraire said defiantly. “He may stay with Orchestia, for all I care; if she wants him.”

He felt rather wounded, though, for all his bravado: and he had not yet understood the worst; he did not realize the implication of what they had done to poor Ferris, until that very afternoon: all of them assembled and ready to fly, his harness rigged out and his epaulettes bright in the thin wintry sunshine, and a runner had come to let them know they might go to Edinburgh, and he said, “Mr. Laurence, your orders, sir, from the admiral,” handing him the packet.

“Yes,” Laurence said, and did not correct the boy; he only took the papers and put them in his coat pocket; and for the first time Temeraire realized, looking closely, that Laurence was not wearing the gold bars upon his shoulders, which the other captains wore.

Temeraire did not want to ask; he did not want to hear the answer, but he could not help it. “Yes,” Laurence said, “I have been struck the service, too. It does not matter now,” he added, after a moment, when of course it mattered, as much as anything. “We must away.”

LAURENCE STOOD BY THE PARAPET, looking out to sea, in the upper court of Edinburgh Castle. Temeraire lay somewhere in the dark covert below the castle, a great yawning darkness in the side of the illuminated city, which stretched out around the castle and down to the River Forth. Ships rose and fell uneasily on the water, and the wind blew sharp needles of frozen rain into his face. In the far distance he could see a handful of lights moving, too high for ships, too bright for stars: a few dragons on patrol.

“Another three hundred thousand of them buggers lying along the coast from Calais to Boulogne, just waiting for their chance,” a sergeant of Marines said to his fellow soldier, as the two of them came by on their round, and he spat aggressively over the parapet towards the sea, as if he might hit the distant enemy.

They had not yet seen Laurence. Wellesley and his staff were inside the tower chambers; he had been left outside until called for, despite the night cold and wet, the stones slick with ice, and room enough in the antechamber for him to wait inside: a deliberate slight. The damp penetrated his cloak and his leather coat effortlessly. But he had chosen to stand at the limit of the parapet, out of the lantern light, so he could see farther out. It was only a romantic impulse: he could not see anything of real significance at this hour.

“He’ll squeeze over another thousand to-night,” the sergeant went on. “Every dark night, those fucking Fleur-de-Nuits carry them. The Navy shot one down two days ago, though,” he added, with vindictive satisfaction. “Down into the ocean like a stone, and two hundred Frogs on its back, I hear: but more often than not they can’t be seen.”

“I heard as he burned Weedon to the ground,” the young soldier with him ventured. “I heard, he set dragons on it, sent the whole place up.”

“Fucking Jacobin buggers,” the sergeant said gloomily. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, seeing Laurence and touching his hat.

He nodded to them, and they fell silent, taking their post. A door opened in the side of the tower, and raised voices came drifting out while it sighed gently shut again: more heated argument, strategy and sacrifice. Laurence looked, but it was not Wellesley or one of his aides; it was an old man in nightshirt and bed slippers, muttering to himself as he came into the rain. His hair was grey and thinned out, matted without a wig, and he walked with the uneasy hitch of rheumatism as he groped his way towards the chapel across the courtyard.

“Is it the vicar?” the young Marine whispered.

“At this hour?” the sergeant said, doubtfully, and they both looked at Laurence.

Laurence crossed the courtyard to go to his side: the old man did not seem steady on the wet icy stones, and he was talking to himself, a stream of low unintelligible speech, which remained incomprehensible even as Laurence came close enough to make out the words. “Horses,” the old man said, “horses and mules, and three weeks’ grain, and Copenhagen; the fleet in Copenhagen. Thirty-three pounds.”

He did not seem to notice Laurence’s approach at all; until Laurence said, “Sir, should you not go back inside?”

“I will not,” the old man said, querulous. “Is that you, Murat? Is that you?” He peered at Laurence’s face, touched his coat, and, evidently satisfied, nodded. “You are not Napoleon; you are Murat. Are you here to kill me? Give me your arm,” he said, abruptly peremptory, and, taking a grip on Laurence’s arm, leaned on him heavily. He had fixed his gaze on the chapel, and started determinedly to limp on towards it. “They all mean to kill me,” he told Laurence, confidentially. “They are in there talking of it now. My son is with them.” He sounded neither indignant nor afraid, more as though he were sharing a piece of interesting gossip.

Laurence looked back at the tower, and then at the old man again, at his profile; and recognition came. “Sire,” Laurence said, low and wretchedly, “may I not help you inside? You ought not be out in this weather.” He dragged at the ties of his own cloak, and shrugging it off managed to put it over the King’s shoulders.

“I will go to Windsor,” the King said. “Napoleon is not there. Why may I not go to Windsor?” He continued his unsteady progress towards the chapel, and Laurence had either to pace him or let him go alone. “He is in London, he is in London. He is not in Windsor. I need not go to Halifax. It would be cowardly to go. Do you want me to go to Halifax?” he demanded. “My son wants me to go. He wishes me to die on the ocean.”

“I would wish to see you safe, Sire,” Laurence said, “as I am sure would he.”

“I will not go,” the King said. “I ought not go. I will die in England.”

The door flung open again: frightened servants hurrying with cloak and umbrella to hold over him, and coax him back within; they gave Laurence no more than a glance, and he stepped back to let them work. The King’s voice rose in protest over their guiding hands, and then died away again into muttering confusion. He let himself be drawn gradually back inside.

“Poor old fellow,” the sergeant of Marines said, coming close to peer after them, for a glimpse inside the tower. “Gone out of his head, I suppose. Who was he?”

Laurence stood in the courtyard behind the closing door, rain running down his sleeves and his face like blood; stood and said aloud, “O God, I wish I had not done it.”