“We must try and pen them in,” Laurence said, looking at the narrow pass, “and ask the ferals to make something of a screen above them. If it is not a Fleur-de-Nuit, we may well take them by surprise, and they will not be sure the size of our party; caution may persuade them to surrender the egg. You are sure the other dragon will not think of harming the egg?”

“Unless it is Lien, herself,” Temeraire said venomously. “She would do anything, I am sure, even to a helpless egg: you see what she has done already!” He twisted his neck about to look as another feral landed, to chirp a new report: their quarry was perhaps ten miles distant, coming quickly.

They could not use the divine wind against the mountain-side for fear of warning the oncoming dragon; but Temeraire’s weight and fury served well enough to tear down a great heap of stone and ice and snow to block the far mouth of the valley: still a terrible noise, but not an unfamiliar one in those mountains. On the ledge, Laurence cleaned and loaded his pistols, and the rifle he had brought with him from Vilna, and put fresh wicks on his pair of incendiaries. They would not do much to bring down a heavy-weight, but they might do to make a convincing show of arms; he lined the guns up in a row, ready to be fired off as quickly as possible. Tharkay also added his own pistol and rifle to the collection.

And then Temeraire returned to his perch, and they all held stiff and cold and silent, listening for the rhythmic flap of wings. The ferals—another five or so had joined them—gathered on either side, but in a much more celebratory spirit; they were quiet but chirping softly to one another, and Laurence caught more than once the exultant word for treasure passing among them.

But their voices fell silent, soon, and then they were listening, too: their prey was close. The Alpine ferals all sat up alertly, their narrow heads giving them a look of eager greyhounds trembling for the sign to spring. Laurence heard the dragon coming: if Granby had been here, he might have been able to say what the breed was, by the wing-gait. Laurence could not guess, but the beast that passed below their ledge was certainly a heavy-weight and a large one, throwing a long sinuous shadow blue on the blue snow, with drifting scraps of cloud clinging to its sides.

Temeraire managed to restrain himself until the dragon had gone through the pass; then he flung himself off the cliff in a leap, twisting as he did mid-air to come about, and then he roared—not in the dragon’s direction, which might have threatened the egg, if the other beast was carrying it, but at the rock face.

The shattering force of the divine wind blasted the snow-laden peak on the other side of the pass, and an avalanche came roaring down: rock, snow, ice all together, a great cloud. Laurence squinted through his flying-goggles as snow spattered his face; the Alpine ferals had all jumped aloft and were keening their high-pitched hunting song as they went in circles over the valley, forming a ceiling for their trap. The cloud of snow and ice hid the other beast. Temeraire roared again, not the divine wind this time, only a challenge; he was hovering mid-air, darting a little to one side and then another, waiting for an opening to dive in.

Laurence glimpsed the shadow of the other dragon as it twisted around upon itself wildly, taken by surprise, turning towards them, and then a long painfully brilliant gout of flame came erupting through the cloud, dissolving the blizzard into boiling steam. A tongue of fire licked at the mountainside, and Laurence and Tharkay dived into the snowbank as the flames came spilling up the rock and past their ledge, heat and cold both intolerable at once. The dragon came roaring out behind its flames and struck Temeraire mid-sky, and the two beasts rolled, twisting around each other, hissing and furious. Alarmed, Laurence dug out of the snow, squinting uselessly: Flammes-de-Gloire did not travel alone; they were too rare for that; were there more beasts coming? He could see almost nothing of the struggle: his eyes were streaked with dazzle from the flames, and a handful of trees and scrub in the valley below had caught like dry tinder, blazing small suns that made the night around them into pitch.

But he did not need to see: he heard the snarling of the fire-breather’s voice saying, in clear wrathful English, “Oh! How dare you leap on me out of the dark, like a coward! I will tear you into pieces, see if I don’t!”

—

“Whatever are you doing here?” Temeraire said, struggling with a crushing sensation of disappointment. But if the egg had not come this way, surely it had gone another; he turned without waiting for an answer to Bistorta, who had at last crept cautiously back: the other ferals had scattered in high alarm at the torrents of flame. “What do you mean, setting me on Iskierka?” he demanded. “She is not a French dragon, at all; and where is the egg?”

Bistorta defended herself smartly. “How were we to know she was not a French dragon?” she said. “They have so many peculiar kinds; and anyway, you did not say you wanted a French dragon, you said you were looking for a heavy-weight and a fighting-dragon, and you cannot say she is not that.”

“What am I doing here?” Iskierka said, paying no attention to their conversation. “I am here for my egg, which you promised me and promised me would be perfectly safe in China, and should have an emperor as companion, and now only look what has happened! Why are you jumping out upon me out of nowhere like this? Granby, did you put him up to it? I did not think you would betray me so,” she added reproachfully, her head swinging around.

“I didn’t, but you may be sure I would have done it in a heartbeat, if I had any notion of his being anywhere near,” Granby said without even a little hesitation as he clambered down her side. “Hell-bent on going straight into France, and bearding Lien in her den,” he told Laurence and Tharkay, as he shook their hands. “Nothing would hold her, when she knew. It was all I could do to persuade her we had to swing out over the Med, and not fly straight across over every Frenchman and French gun in Spain.”

He sat heavily down upon a boulder and rubbed his arm across his forehead. The golden hook which had taken the place of his left hand gleamed with reflected flame: half a dozen bushes and scrubby trees were still alight, where they clung to the walls of the mountains. His brown hair was unbraided and in a wind-tangled mess, his clothing disordered and his face unshaven, as though he had been flung dragon-back without any warning and dragged across Europe for days, very likely the case. He gratefully accepted the offer of Laurence’s canteen.

“Well, that is quite absurd,” Temeraire said, “for if ever Lien gets the egg, she will have it well-hidden, and any number of soldiers and dragons guarding it.”