“It is not absurd,” Iskierka returned. “Of course we must go to her, if she has the egg. What use is there going anywhere else?” Which had an uncomfortable ring of truth to it, Temeraire had to admit; only that was plainly hopeless, so he could not allow Lien to have the egg, yet.

“When I have scorched her a few times, I dare say she will turn it over,” Iskierka continued. “What good did you suppose it would do for you to leap upon me?”

“I did not mean to!” Temeraire said. “We have been laying a trap for the dragons who are bringing the egg back from China.”

Iskierka snorted. “I see how well that plan has worked. If you cannot tell the difference between me and an egg-stealing French dragon, I do not see how you ever expected to get the egg back this way.”

“It is dark!” Temeraire said. “And I could not go and look closely at you, or else the element of surprise,” on which he laid especial emphasis, as a point of strategy that surely even Iskierka might understand, “should have been lost.”

She remained unimpressed. “It was certainly a surprise, because it was a ridiculous thing to do. What if the egg-stealer should be one of those night-flying dragons? I dare say she should have flown straight around you. I saw one of them yesterday evening at a distance, while I was trying to work my way around these wretched mountains, and I thought I should make her show me the way; but as soon as it was dark she managed to lose me, even though I should have had her in an hour in daylight—”

“What?” cried Temeraire, seizing upon this intelligence. “Where did you see her?”

“You are not paying attention; what difference does that make?” Iskierka said crossly, but when Temeraire had made her understand that a Fleur-de-Nuit had stolen the egg, and very likely it was the same one she had seen, she ceased to be quarrelsome at once.

There was no sense in retracing her steps, but Laurence, dear Laurence, had brought his maps; Temeraire remembered with a moment of shame how he had privately resented Laurence’s taking those few moments, when they had been leaving the crevasse, to take them down and pack them up: how useless they had seemed in the moment! And how priceless now, as Laurence drew them out and laid them before Granby, who squinting by the light of a torch found the place where Iskierka had sighted the Fleur-de-Nuit. From there, they found the nearest pass she would have taken through the mountains, perhaps twenty miles distant. Their best chance—Temeraire refused to name it their only chance—was to catch her on the western side. Inside the borders of France.

“The ferals cannot match your pace,” Laurence said, as he rolled the maps up again. “But ask them to follow us, so long as they are able and willing: we may well be grateful of their aid at the end; or they may sight her coming out of another pass, if we have mistaken her course.”

He did not say, This Fleur-de-Nuit may only have been a patrol-dragon; you must not raise your hopes, or It has been a day and a night; the egg may already have been carried deep into France, or Iskierka was sighted, they are looking for us; we are sure to run into a French patrol.

Laurence said none of these things, and nevertheless Temeraire was unwillingly conscious that Laurence might have said them. He did not wish to think these things; he struggled not to think of anything so much like despair and surrender, but the long dragging weeks of fears and searching had worn away at his own blind determination. It seemed his mind would fix upon them, no matter how he tried to evade the thoughts.

“If you would prefer to leave us,” Laurence was saying to Tharkay, low, “we might bribe the ferals thoroughly enough, I think, to buy your passage back to some company of the Russian army: the Cossacks were already nearing the Oder.”

“That is a sufficient distance to make it likely I should meet a company of Frenchmen, first,” Tharkay said.

They were in headlong flight by then, Iskierka outpacing him badly; a circumstance which on any other occasion would have been deeply mortifying. At present, Temeraire did not care. Iskierka might outfly him by a hundred leagues, so long as she reached the egg before the Fleur-de-Nuit reached the ominous mark upon Laurence’s map: the great network of caverns just beyond the Alps labeled simply, L’ARMÉE DE L’AIR: the training grounds where the French aerial corps hatched most of their beasts, and trained their recruits.

Temeraire’s wings ached, but he fixed determinedly on the thin pale cloud of steam that trailed Iskierka’s flight and pressed onwards. To the east, the edge of the mountains, ragged like an unsharpened knife, steadily grew more visible. The sun was coming.

—

The sky was deep rose-grey when they finally climbed over one last gasping ridge of mountains and plunged gratefully into the pass, an hour later: Iskierka still in the lead, but Temeraire had caught up a little, navigating the higher elevations; he had grown more used to the thinness of the air. Still he was dull and laboring, and he only distantly heard Tharkay say, “Laurence,” and then a moment later, after the click of the spyglass, Laurence replying, “I see it.”

He said nothing more, and Temeraire only flew on; slowly his mind turned it over and over and finally he said, “Laurence, what is it?”

Laurence did not immediately answer, and then gently said, “There is a small camp in the valley directly behind us, with the remains of a dragon’s meal, I think.”

“But that is splendid!” Temeraire cried, and meant to call to Iskierka with the news; but the tone of Laurence’s voice held him. “Surely we are on their trail?” he added uncertainly.

“The fire is cold, my dear,” Laurence said. “The Fleur-de-Nuit would have spent her day there; she will have been on the wing since nightfall.”

They were a full night’s flying behind her, then. Temeraire’s heart sank, but then Iskierka gave a sudden roar, and even jetted a gout of flame: he jerked his head forward and saw in the distance a small dark figure against the sky, sunlight breaking over the crest of the mountains and catching its wings, and the dragon ducked its head away from the light, as if it disliked the brilliance, and dived back into shadow.

“Oh!” Temeraire cried aloud, and flung himself after Iskierka, all worry, all fear forgot; he beat desperately on even as she stretched herself out her full length, coils unraveling into a single red-and-green banner and steam hissing furiously from every spike. “How far, Laurence? How far?”