Souci landed panting not a quarter of an hour later. They had come down near a large building incongruously like an ancient temple: as though a Roman troop had marched out of the dim reaches of the past to erect it, then marched away again leaving it planted here in the French countryside. It was all of a piece with Napoleon’s affecting the trappings of Caesar, and yet not impractical, Laurence realized, as Temeraire and Iskierka came pouring out between the enormous columns, eager for a glimpse of them.

He was asked to stand up, and Granby also: the guards held lanterns near their faces to make them visible. Laurence raised a hand hoping to reassure: they were too far distant to speak. Even so, the dragon nervously took a nimble hop back when Temeraire and Iskierka would have approached a little. “That’s enough, then,” the little beast said, too hastily: Laurence would have liked some more reassurance himself of Temeraire’s health. There were a few lanterns hung on the pavilion, but these showed very little of a black dragon in the dark, and Temeraire did not spread his wings.

But Souci would not linger; he thrust himself into the air again, with that same storm of flapping, and as quickly as they had come dashed back across the camp. When they had dismounted, he indulged himself in a shudder of his whole body. “That is more than I undertake to do again!”—this to the admiral, in reproachful tones. “Those two monstrously large beasts! Going right up to them like that and dangling their captains in front of them just as if to say, Look what I have got, ha ha! I am all astonishment they did not leap upon me at once. I hope they did not get a clear look at me. If ever they saw me again I am sure they would not let it pass.”

“I beg you not to repine upon it,” Laurence said. “Temeraire understands well that orders must be obeyed, and will not hold it against you; he knows it was not in your power to deliver us to him.”

“Well, but it was,” Souci said, not conciliated, and Granby said nothing reassuring at all. Iskierka did not allow of assurances of her behavior, good, evil, or otherwise.

They were returned by their polite but firm escort to their rooms, and Laurence did not try to speak with Granby, both silent with their own shared and private unhappiness, and shared anger as well. Laurence had in some sense felt they deserved to be captured: that it had been the only reasonable outcome of skulking about on the very borders of France. That feeling had spared him real regret, like a gambler at the table who had staked all upon one unlikely throw, knowing all the while it would not come, and even in despair had accepted the natural course of the event. But now the trick dice had been uncovered: indignation burned in his chest, the resentment of having been taken by what felt a low cheat.

He slept well, despite it all. He could have slept for a month. In the morning, he was asked to the admiral’s rooms for breakfast, and met with a bow. “Captain Laurence,” Thibaut said, “I hope to gratify you,” and handed to him a letter; Laurence steeled himself to meet with a reply which, however generous, could only stoke his still-hot indignation.

But surprise banked the fire. The letter was addressed to Thibaut and written in the neat hand of a secretary, but the words, abrupt and decisive, were all Napoleon: Tell me you have shown him every courtesy! Nothing is too good for such a man, adding the phrase, il a bien plus de valeur que les perles, a phrase which Laurence, half-amused despite every will to be otherwise, recognized as the description of the virtuous woman.

Napoleon continued,

We have sent an escort to bring him and his companions to Fontainebleau, and the dragons as well: let them depart at once. Here they will see the egg in its safe repose, and arrangements will be made for their comfort.

NAPOLEON

“I have sent to ask M. Tharkay and Captain Granby to join us for breakfast,” the admiral said, “while the dragons of your escort make their own. You will leave immediately.”

“YOU WILL FORGIVE THE Emperor’s absence,” Empress Anahuarque said, in quite fluent English, improved still further beyond what she had acquired at great effort in her own country; she had evidently kept up her studies.

Laurence had last met her in her own court at Cusco, dressed in the Incan style in bright-woven wool and adorned in gold; yet she seemed not a whit out of place here in the sitting room where they had been received, nor the least uncomfortable in a morning gown of white made elaborate by gold embroidery, striking against her dark-brown skin, and her black hair bound up behind a tiara of diamonds: overdressed perhaps for a private visit, yet not inappropriate to an empress. Laurence was surprised to find the crown prince of Prussia in her company: a gangly young man of seventeen, who bowed and spoke to them in very fluent French. Her own child, a handsome and sturdy-looking boy with a cap of dark hair and large dark eyes, was playing upon a blanket in the corner of the room. He was overseen by a trio of nursemaids and a fourth just outside the house: the massive feathered head of an Incan dragon, one of the sleek and venomous Copacati, peered in through the barn-wide glass doors at the end of the chamber.

Laurence offered his congratulations on the child, as a little more awkwardly did Granby: difficult to know how to behave to a woman to whom he had so nearly been forced to pay his addresses—and who had ordered an attack upon them, while they had been guests in her court. She seemed not the least conscious of any awkwardness herself, however, and merely inclined her head accepting those congratulations as her due; then she said, “There will be another in the fall,” with a calm complacency.

Laurence bowed again; there was nothing else to say, although any enemy of Napoleon might feel some regret at his finding so much success in securing his dynasty, and his alliance with the Inca.

“My husband wished to be here to greet you, but matters in Paris demand his attention for a few days more,” Anahuarque continued. “But I greet you in his stead, and I assure you that you will be made comfortable. Although the unhappy state of war between our nations makes you our prisoners, feeling must make you our guests,” a pretty sentiment, though of course meaningless.

She sat with them a quarter of an hour—unusually gracious, particularly as a heap of letters upon the writing-table and a silent and hovering pair of secretaries made plain there were many demands upon her time. It fell to Laurence to carry the conversation on their side; Granby was stifled by embarrassment and by the surroundings, and Tharkay only sat observing with a sardonic expression in his eye. But the Empress was well able to supply her own share, and when Laurence had asked her how she liked her new home, she recounted with charming frankness several amusing stories of the misunderstandings that had plagued her on arrival, and laughed at her ongoing travails in learning to read and write: the Inca had been used to rely instead upon a system of knotted cords to communicate.