‘No matter how mean and scrawny they are,’ Jane said, entering the room without ceremony and stripping off her gloves, which were stained by the sour-milk odour of dragon mucus, and acrid smoke. ‘Pray don’t think me ungrateful, Laurence,’ she added, coming to warm her hands at the fire, ‘it is a miracle you should have brought us Iskierka and one egg whole, considering the way Bonaparte has been romping about the Continent, much less our amiable band of brigands with them; but I would be a good deal happier to have another twenty at such a price.’
Laurence would have been a good deal happier to have the first twenty ferals more manageable; a quality they were not more likely to gain after Tharkay’s departure. ‘I will pray for your safe return,’ Laurence said, and offered his hand in farewell. He could not object, it was hard to imagine that Tharkay’s pride might allow him to remain as a supernumerary, even if mere restlessness did not drive him on.
‘What an odd fellow you have found us, Laurence,’ Jane said, when Tharkay had gone. ‘I ought to give him his weight in gold, and would, if the Admiralty would not squawk. Twenty dragons talked out of the trees, like Merlin; or was it St. Patrick? Never mind, come to my rooms, if you please. This place has a cursed draft, and my maps are there.’
The map of Europe was laid out on her table, covered with great clots of markers, representing dragon positions from the western borders of Prussia’s former territory all the way to the footsteps of Russia. ‘From Jena to Warsaw in three weeks,’ she said, as one of her runners poured wine for them. ‘I would not have given a bad ha’penny for the news, if you had not brought it yourself, Laurence; and if we hadn’t had it from the Navy, too, I would have sent you to a physician.’
Laurence nodded. ‘And I have a great deal to tell you of Bonaparte’s aerial tactics too, they have changed entirely. Formations are of no use against him; at Jena, the Prussians were routed, wholly routed. We must begin devising counters to his new methods at once.’
But she was already shaking her head. ‘Do you know, Laurence, I have less than forty dragons fit to fly? Unless Bonaparte is a lunatic, he will not come across with less than a hundred. He shan’t need any fine tactics to do for us. For our part, there is no one to learn any new defence.’
The scope of the disaster silenced him: only forty dragons, to patrol the south coast, and give cover to the ships of the blockade.
‘What we need at present is time,’ Jane continued. ‘There are a dozen hatchlings in Ireland, preserved from contagion, and twice as many eggs due to hatch in the next six months. We bred a good many of them, early on. If our friend Bonaparte is good enough to give us a year, the rest of these new shore-batteries will be in place, the young dragons brought up, and we’ll have your ferals knocked into shape; not to mention Temeraire and our new fire-breather.’
‘Will he give us a year?’ Laurence said, low, looking at the counters. There were not many near the Channel yet; but he had seen first-hand how swiftly Napoleon’s dragon-borne army could move.
‘Not a minute, if he hears anything of our pitiable state,’ Jane said. ‘But our troubles aside, well, we hear he has made a very good friend in Warsaw, a Polish countess. They say she is a raving beauty, and he would like to marry a sister of the Tsar. We will wish him good fortune in his courting, and hope that he takes his long leisurely time about it. If he is sensible, he will want a winter night to make a crossing, and the days are already growing longer.
‘But we can be sure that if he learns how thin we are on the ground, he will come posting back quick as lightning, and damn the ladies. So our task of the moment is to keep him properly in the dark. In a year’s time we will have something to work with; but until then, for you all it must be—’
‘Oh, patrolling,’ Temeraire said, in tones of despair, when Laurence had brought their orders.
‘I am sorry, my dear,’ Laurence said, ‘very truly sorry; but if we can serve our friends at all, it will be by taking on those duties which they have had to set aside.’ Temeraire was silent and brooding. In an attempt to cheer him, Laurence added, ‘But we need not abandon your cause, not in the least. I cannot write my father, as relations between us stand; but I will write my mother, and those of my acquaintance who may have the best advice to give, on how we ought to proceed—’
‘Whatever sense is there in it,’ Temeraire said, miserably, ‘when all our friends are ill, and there is nothing to be done for them? It does not matter if one is not allowed to visit London, if one cannot even fly for an hour. And Arkady does not give a fig for liberty, anyway; all he wants are cows. We may as well patrol; or even do formations.’
This was the mood in which they went aloft, a dozen of the ferals behind them more occupied in squabbling amongst themselves than in paying any attention to the sky; Temeraire was in no way inclined to make them mind, and with Tharkay gone, the few hapless officers set upon their backs had very little hope of exerting any form of control.
These young men had been chosen for their language skills. The ferals all far too old, in draconic terms, to acquire a new tongue easily, so their officers would have to learn theirs instead. To hear them trying to whistle and cluck the awkward syllables of the Durzagh language had quickly palled as entertainment and become a nuisance to the ear. But it had also to be endured; no one aside from Temeraire knew the tongue fluently, and only a few of Laurence’s younger officers had acquired a smattering in the course of their journey to Istanbul.
Laurence had indeed lost two of his already-diminished number of officers to the cause: both Dunne, one of the riflemen, and Wickley of the bellmen had a good enough grasp of Durzagh to translate basic signals, and were not so young as to make command absurd. They had been set aboard Arkady in a highly theoretical position of authority; the natural bond which the first harnessing seemed to produce was absent of course, and Arkady was far more likely to obey his own whimsical impulse than any orders which they might give. The feral leader had already expressed his opinion that flying over the ocean was absurd, he proclaimed it a useless territory for which no reasonable dragon would have interest, and the likelihood that he would veer away at any given moment in search of better entertainment seemed to Laurence precariously high.
Jane had set them a course along the coastline, for their first excursion. There was no risk at all of action, so near to land, but at least the cliffs interested the ferals. The bustle of shipping around Portsmouth had drawn their eye, and they would gladly have investigated further if not called to order by Temeraire. They flew on past Southampton and westward along towards Weymouth, setting a leisurely pace. The ferals resorted to wild acrobatics for entertainment; swooping to heights that should have rendered them dizzy and ill, save for their habituation among the loftiest mountains on the earth. They plummeted into absurd and dangerous diving manoeuvres, skimming the sea so closely that they threw up spray from the waves. It was a sad waste of energy, but the ferals now were well-fed by comparison to their previous state, and they had a surfeit which Laurence was glad enough to see spent in so unrestrained a manner, even if the officers clinging sickly to their harnesses did not agree.
‘Perhaps we might try a little fishing,’ Temeraire suggested, turning his head around, when little Gherni abruptly cried out above them, and then the world spun and whirled as Temeraire flung himself sidelong; a Pêcheur-Rayé went flying past them, and the champagne-popping of rifle-fire spat at them from his back.
‘To stations,’ Ferris was shouting, men scrambling wildly; the bellmen were casting off a handful of bombs down on the recovering French dragon below while Temeraire veered away, climbing. Arkady and the ferals were shrilly calling to one another, wheeling excitedly; they flung themselves with eagerness on the French dragons: a light scouting party of six, as best Laurence could make out among the low-lying clouds, the Pêcheur the largest of the lot and the rest all light-weights or couriers; both outnumbered and outweighed, therefore, and reckless to be coming so close to British shores.
Reckless, or deliberately venturesome; Laurence thought grimly it could not have escaped the notice of the French that their last encounter