League of Dragons (26 page)

Laurence was arranging handfuls of dry straw himself, with splinters, to make tinder for the armful of wood Granby set down. The fire would be a fresh risk, but in the half-light of morning the smoke might pass unnoticed: they were a good distance from any road but a half-overgrown track. The night had been cold, and they had none of them been dressed for flying: even huddled with Granby and Tharkay in one of Iskierka's talons, and held against the churning warmth of her belly, a heavy chill had settled deep into Laurence's limbs; he thought they must have a little warmth before they dared sleep.

“What Napoleon would make of her, if she should throw in with him, I don't like to think,” Granby went on. “Of all the dragons to come into the world unharnessed!”

“We will deliver her to Dover,” Laurence said firmly. “I am sure Whitehall will be delighted to restore her to Prince Mianning, and repair the alliance with China thereby. I trust we can rely upon their skill in the handling of dragons, from there, to make her happy to be the future Emperor's companion. You will recall that they do not harness beasts, until later in their lives, at all.”

“I suppose we can't do better,” Granby said. “The Chinese may say what they like, and I am sure it answers for
them;
but I should be a great deal easier if this one had a captain to call her to order from the moment she came out of the shell.”

“You will permit me a little skepticism as to the hypothetical man's likely success,” Tharkay said, coming back into the barn and putting down an armful of potatoes and carrots, which he might as well have conjured out of the air. “There is a vegetable garden against the side of the house; it seemed likely,” he answered their surprised looks. “We are fortunate in our choice of hiding-place, I think: there were some letters inside from a son gone to be a soldier, written to a widowed mother—the latest half a year old, from Smolensk, and unopened. I dare say there are many young men who will not be coming home.”

The sunrise was giving a mellowing warmth to the weathered grey boards of the barn, and gilding the edges of the bare branches. There was a comfortable familiarity to all the arrangements of the farm that made the absence of life all the more disquieting. There ought to have been lowing cows and a gabble of chickens, and a farmer hurrying with half-closed eyes to tend his stock. Instead, empty stalls and silence, and untended fields just beyond the doors: the cost of Napoleon's wars.

They roused Iskierka just enough to start the fire with a gout of flame spat onto their carefully scraped ground; her eyes lidded down again at once. The half-frozen bounty of the garden roasted in the coals as they warmed their hands and numbed feet, and melted snow to drink hot out of a tin pail left hanging on a hook. Laurence scratched in the dirt his best memory of the coastline, and they considered the distance.

“We had better go by sea, if we think they can manage it,” Granby said.

“I will be so bold as to be certain that we are scarcely a hundred miles from Eastbourne, flown north-north-west,” Laurence said, “and once we are fairly into the Channel, most ships of the blockade can throw us out some pontoons if we should get into trouble with a cross-wind. We may have some difficulty signaling, if they do not recognize us.”

“
That
don't worry me,” Granby said. “It would be wonderful indeed if any captain who has been in the Channel since the year seven didn't remember Iskierka, and curse to see her coming to snatch a prize out from under his teeth. They would be heartily delighted to see her drown, but I suppose they shan't turn us away if we appear on their doorstep, as it were. We'll have to go on from there to Dover straightaway, though—there's a covert at Eastbourne, but it is not much more than a courier-stop; they won't like us dropping by with a couple of heavy-weights and a fresh-hatched beast.”

“Do you insist upon making for a covert?” Tharkay said, unexpectedly. “I trust you will forgive my raising a point of concern,” he added, when they looked in puzzlement, “but do you suppose your hatchling likely to be impressed by the conditions she will find at Dover, compared with those she has lately left behind—before she set them on fire, that is.”

“Well,” Granby said, and halted there. Of course he could not without pain admit any evil of Britain's coverts, when held against those of France, and Laurence shared his sentiments of loyalty to the service; but there was no denying that the disparity would be a marked one, unless such changes had been made in their five years' absence as they could hardly hope for. Temeraire had kept up an irregular correspondence with Perscitia, a comrade of his breeding-ground days who had energetically pursued in his absence the liberties—and prosperity—of dragons. Her letters when they came were universally a litany of complaint, cataloguing obstruction in every direction.

“Let us get out of France, first,” Laurence said, after a moment. “We must content ourselves with escaping Bonaparte's borders before we can entertain other concerns.”

Laurence stirred in the late afternoon, conscious of some near presence, and opened his eyes to find the dragonet staring very intently directly into his face, the long arrow-shaped head extended to the full length of her serpentine neck. He could see her colors now, and also the difficulty of making them out: the underlying color of her hide was certainly black, but heavily overlaid with an opalescence of red and green and blue which became dominant at the extremities of limbs and wings, almost casting off a reflection.

“Good,” she said, drawing back to let him sit up. “You have woken up. I am very sorry to be the cause of difficulty, but I am afraid I must have some more food at once.”

She was not wrong about the difficulty. The sun was still well up, despite winter, and neither Temeraire nor Iskierka could possibly go aloft in settled countryside like this and not be noticed at once against the sky. The farmers would certainly raise an alarm, and even if there were no pursuit close enough to pounce upon them immediately, the entire coast in flying distance would be roused against them.

“Over the Channel, Temeraire will certainly be able to get you a decently sized tunny to eat,” Laurence said. “Can you only wait until sunset?”

She looked up at the sky, and then turned back and said firmly, “I cannot.”

“I don't see that we must wait. I would not mind a cow myself, now I think of it,” Iskierka muttered, having been half-roused by the discussion.

“
That
is all we need,” Granby said, rubbing a hand over his own face as he sat up.

“Perhaps we might make some broth, if anything more can be found,” Laurence said.

They all dug in the garden for a few more leavings of vegetables, and Tharkay managed to take a squirrel with a stone, although this was not much to put into their stolen pot. A few handfuls of old barley were the only other addition, found in a cupboard. As they stirred the fire urgently, Granby said to Laurence, under his breath, “Are you sure you don't want to try and put some harness on her? I suppose Temeraire wouldn't like it in the least, but a dragonet's hunger is no joke. Her patience will go hang before we can make this fit to eat, I expect.”

“
I
would not like it in the least, either,” the dragonet said, poking her head up over the rim of the soup-cauldron unexpectedly, having overheard. “Besides, I am perfectly capable of seeing for myself that concealment is of the essence, at present. So that is quite enough of that sort of talk.”

“Oh, Lord,” Granby said, with a start.

“You might hurry up that soup, instead,” she added, in reproachful tones.

“We are hurrying it as fast as ever we can,” Granby said. “And in the meantime, you may as well decide, what are we going to call you? I suppose you can't wait for a captain to hand you a name, if you don't mean to settle for anything short of an emperor.”

“You may call me Lung Tien Ning,” the dragonet said. “That will satisfy the Emperor of China, as he does not expect to name his companion, but requires me to be considered a Celestial; and the Emperor of France may always give me a French name later, if I like.”

“As though she has any right to be called
tranquility,
” Temeraire muttered to Laurence, who could not disagree.

But Granby's pessimistic shake over the soup was at least mistaken: Ning did pounce upon the pot immediately the barley was toothsome enough to chew, but she waited patiently until they had pronounced it ready, and even then drank the soup down slowly in measured delicate swallows, pausing halfway through to demand that they add some more snow to the pot and heat it up again: evidently trying to trick her own belly into a temporary complacency.

“There,” she said at last, having licked the pot not merely clean but dry, “I think I can manage until dark, now. I hope it will be soon!”

She slept again afterwards, and so managed to last until sunset: but then she had reached her limits. She roused Laurence again with a sharp nudge of her head, the sun lowering and golden beneath the tree-tops and a grey chill descending. “How long until I can have that fish?” she demanded.

There were lights clustered ahead of them to the west, gathering more closely as they neared the coast where five years before Napoleon had mustered and launched his invasion. Only a quarter-moon rising, fortunately. Ning hunched on Temeraire's back, restless and scraping the sides of her claws against his scales—a dusty noise that crept forward into Laurence's ears and along his spine.

He had preferred to stay aboard Temeraire for this flight, despite the cold, when they might too easily be separated from Iskierka during the crossing. There was too much uncertain in their position, under British law, for him to be glad to send Temeraire flying alone, without anyone who might more easily be heard by a naval captain who knew more of their disgrace and transportation than of their more recent pardon. Those men might remember Iskierka's pillaging their prizes, but they would remember also the final disaster of the invasion, the sinking of Nelson's fleet, and all accomplished by a single Celestial. The silhouette of the sinuous body, the horns and frilled ruff, had been the subject of many an artist's mourning, and whether dark or light would be unwelcome overhead to any ship or shore battery.

“There is a Fleur-de-Nuit flying out there, I think,” Temeraire said low, turning his head back a little. “I saw someone cross against the stars, there to the south: she may have seen us.”

Laurence nodded. The word would be out for them by now, all up and down the coast. He leaned forward to look down past Temeraire's shoulder, a cupped hand shielding his eyes against the wind: the bobbing of fishing-boats tied up on shore and the lighthouse flashing near Dieppe a firefly-beacon. They were nearly out over the water.

And then a sudden flare going out, mid-air, blue and hissing—in its burst, Iskierka was lit vividly against the flattened black of the sky, her reds and greens made shades of black and grey, and to the south, not three miles distant, were three Fleur-de-Nuit dragons all hunting together. Temeraire stretched out long and flew, as the beacon-fires went up beneath them.

“B
Y
G
OD, TO HAVE
spent two days mid-air for this,” Wellington said. “No, you may
not
have Roland. If you want another admiral in Spain, you may find another general while you are at it, and I will go home and sleep for a month.”

“Your Grace, I beg you will understand the Admiralty's position,” the Prime Minister said wearily. He threw a glance of distaste in Laurence's direction, which would not have had the power to wound him, save that Perceval had known his father, and been welcome in their home: he had only the prior year at last shepherded through the formal abolition of the slave trade, and had even begun to open tentative relations with the Tswana, in the teeth of much opposition from those whose estates, in the West Indies, relied heavily upon slaves. Laurence could not be glad to meet with disapproval in such a quarter, even if he were not surprised.

Wellington only snorted. “I understand well enough: you dislike requiring the services of a man you would rather see hanged. Since you do require them, more's the pity, you must take your bread as you find it and stop asking for pudding.”

“Your Grace,” Mr. Yorke said—the present First Lord of the Admiralty—“surely the urgency of the situation in Prussia—”

“The situation in Prussia!” Wellington said. “I have not fifty British dragons, with three hundred ragged Spanish and Portuguese beasts, most of them half-feral, to match against five hundred trained French dragons, and you want to bleat at me about Prussia. Bad enough you called Roland and myself away for a week: I dare say we will find half a dozen villages reduced to rubble by the time we get back, and the Flechas threatening to burn down Madrid. Now you tell me,” with a sharp wave in Laurence's direction, “that Bonaparte will have four thousand beasts to throw at us in a year, half-trained and half-grown or not. And you want to snatch my aerial commander and waste her as a false front? Nonsense.”

“Nonsense, indeed,” Jane said, later that evening, in her house near the London covert. “Worse than nonsense. I am just as glad they did leave me out of the conference, after all. I do not trust what I would have said to them if I had been there. I have got spoilt, Laurence; I have not had to deal with any foolishness of this sort for a year and more. The Spanish officers would try and fuss me a little, at first, but I have got them flying straight by now.”

She sighed, and reached for the decanter of port. She was incongruous in her heavy boots and aviator's coat amidst the velvets of her sitting-room, which better matched the coronet than its owner. Laurence knew she had applied to his own mother for advice on setting up her establishment, and her house-keeper was familiar to him—she had once been a young scullery-maid at Wollaton Hall and willing to permit a small boy to snatch an occasional pastry when a banquet was in the offing.

An informed taste had left its stamp upon the house, and its comforts were many: the fire laid to the precisely right degree, excellent wine at dinner, and all the furnishings of the best. Jane alone was out of place, and Excidium drowsing in the wide courtyard behind the house: his head was just visible through the windows, with the bone spurs gleaming white in the lamp-light.

“I have gilded the tool-chest, and kept the rusty old hammer inside,” Jane said, reading his face, and laughed at him when he tried to demur. “No, I meant to do just that. The place is my sacrifice to propriety. I have even given a dinner here, if you can conceive it,” she added. “It was your mother's notion, and I felt I owed it to her, after all her efforts on my behalf. I oughtn't have doubted her, either, as it worked marvels: a dozen girls applied to the Corps the week after. They were all ladies of small fortune, who preferred it to going for governesses, except one heiress who preferred it to being sold off like a heifer calf. Their families made a noise over it, but I told their Lordships I wouldn't turn any girl away who could keep her stomach and her feet mid-air, when we have six Longwing eggs in the offing to consider.

“And speaking of which: how does Emily, when you last saw her? I thank you for her step, by the way.”

“Very well,” Laurence said, struggling to decide what to say of Emily's connection to Demane, which had formed under his watch. He had not quite the pain of having failed in his self-appointed duty of chaperonage—although he certainly would have done, if Emily had wished to discard her virtue—but an uneasiness remained; he did not think she was heart-whole. “Has she spoken to you of Demane?”

“She has written volumes of nothing,” Jane said, “but that is all right:
he
has made up for it. He presented himself to me the instant the
Potentate
arrived in Spain, declared that he should make himself worthy, and raved up and down my tent about Emily's graces for a quarter of an hour before I gave up waiting for him to be done and shoved him along—not too ungently, Laurence, you needn't look so worried. I haven't any complaints of the boy. A milder, sweeter-tempered creature than that monster of his, I have never met: it is just as well for Kulingile's captain to have some fire in his belly, when his beast has none. Do you mean to tell me Emily is going to break her heart over him?”

“Not break it, I hope,” Laurence said, but slowly, and Jane read most of what he wished to say in his face. She shook her head a little.

“I never had much sensibility, myself—as you have cause to know, dear fellow. I have found it a luxury beyond my means. But she might as well marry him as not. I put my foot down and insisted they legitimize her, when they put the titles on me: if Wellesley can hand his coronet on to his brats when he spent all of ten minutes begetting them, damned if Emily was not getting mine. But there was quite the squabble over it, and I doubt they'll let it go a second generation. So if she cares to hand it onwards, she will need to marry someone, and Captain Dlamini is respectable enough for anybody, I imagine.”

Jane imagined incorrectly, at least so far as the polite world would see it: an orphan boy from Africa with only a dragon to his name made no match for Lady Emily Roland, the daughter of one of England's great heroes and the heiress to a coronet and a fortune. Of course, that Lady Emily was herself an aviator diminished her own luster a little, but when that service was the source of her titles, much would have been forgiven. Still, Laurence knew those considerations weighed not at all with Jane, who said only, “But she will scarcely see him one year to the next, chances are. Excidium is for Dover, and Kulingile will certainly be for Gibraltar, if ever we muddle our way back to peacetime. Well, it is a hard service.” She rubbed her mouth. “I suppose I may as well keep him with me, and give them more of a chance to forget one another. I had considered sending him along to Prussia, and taking Granby back—but we have the Flechas for fire-breathers, even if they are not so handy as Iskierka, and you may be in want of Granby's advice, in any case. So they are giving you your flag?”

“Yes,” Laurence said, staring into the wine glass. It seemed still to him almost a subtle mockery; he had not understood, until nearly the end of the meeting, that the ministers were arguing with Wellington over naming him to the aerial command, forming now, which would join the allied effort in Prussia. “Or at least, that seemed their intention, by the close; I can scarcely conceive they will do it.”

“Oh, they will,” Jane said. “A little bird has sung in my ear that the Tsar wants you: how did you manage that? I have never known you to ingratiate yourself with anyone whose influence would be really useful to your career, when you could make yourself as inconvenient to them as possible instead.”

“I cannot claim any personal success in the matter,” Laurence said dryly. “I appeared on his borders with an army of dragons when he was in imminent danger of defeat; I suppose it must have produced a degree of warm feeling.”

“Well, we won't hold it against your record,” Jane said. “And he is the man of the hour, make no mistake. I am never quite easy with these God-is-in-my-pocket sorts—begging your pardon—but if it keeps him zealous to be the savior of Europe, I shan't complain. We will certainly never get another chance at Boney, from what news you bring. Four thousand eggs! Our breeders would dearly like to know how he has managed it, and our supply-officers how he means to feed them. For my part, though, I will settle for having good old fat Louis back on his throne before they are grown.”

She reached over to fill his glass: the port had been drunk, somehow. Laurence sat back into his chair, restless. The Tsar's request made the Admiralty's difficulty more clear: if Alexander had asked for Laurence, they must send him; and sending him, they could supersede him only with an officer of greater seniority, who must furthermore by necessity possess a dragon whose stature would outweigh or at least equal Temeraire's in the eyes of their fellow dragons. There were few British officers who could claim either distinction: thanks to Hammond's machinations, Laurence had been fully reinstated, so his seniority dated not from Temeraire's harnessing, but from his being made post as a naval officer, some five years prior to the date.

And yet that was not sufficient argument for his fitness for the task: nearly all his own education at sea, not eight years on the wing, and that spent in an irregular fashion. He could not sensibly recognize himself as anyone's first choice for command, even independent of animus.

“Should you
not
come to Prussia, Jane?” he said, low. The Admiralty might think to send Jane as a comforting fiction drawn over his presence, but Laurence knew her abilities; and Excidium, with his long and storied career, and a Longwing's deadly vitriol, would easily command the respect of any fighting-dragons. Temeraire had been willing to defer to him before now. “If he is to be defeated, he must be beaten in Germany.”

“No, Laurence,” Jane said firmly. “He must be beaten in France.”

He fell silent. To fight Napoleon back across the Rhine and the Pyrenees both, step by hard-won step, taking back all the victories fifteen years of war had won him: it loomed an impossible project.

Jane set her glass down, after a final swallow to toss down the rest, and drew open one of the rolled maps littering the table between them. “Don't look quite so gloomy. I dare say you have no notion how many men he is losing in Spain. The numbers from the battlefields don't tell the tale, but my scouts see it from aloft. The guerrillas nibble nibble nibble, like little mice, and his armies melt away on the road.”

She drew her finger along the map, the jagged mountain-lines marking the borders between France and Spain, and then let it go to roll up again. “We
will
have Soult by next Christmas, or call me a liar. But it has taken Wellington three hard-fought years to stitch up this army, and it is held by frayed thread and dull tacks. There ain't someone to take my place in the air. I left Crenslow in charge this week, and you would have thought I was sending the poor man to the gallows, from the looks he gave. At that, there were seven Spanish and Portuguese officers at my heels clamoring for his head by the time we took flight.

“I don't say that you won't have troubles of your own in Germany, but the Prussian dragons have good cause to love you, and the Tsar can make the rest of them dance to his tune. So you must get across the Rhine without me, and we'll meet again in Paris, by and by,” she finished.

“Granby would do better,” Laurence said.

Jane snorted. “Iskierka won't,” an inarguable return. “Besides, you can give him ten years on the list and more. No, their Lordships haven't any other choice. Aside from everything else, we are all hoping for some Chinese beasts to appear. Unless, could they put this Hammond fellow in charge?”

Laurence almost smiled at the thought of Hammond made an aerial commander, and that gentleman's certain dismay. “His dragon might do. She has forty years' experience as an officer with the Incan armies.”