“I thank Your Majesty,” Laurence said quietly.

Napoleon remained with them nearly an hour, talking freely and walking the room as though among intimate friends. Laurence could not but be sensible of the compliment the Emperor paid him with such a degree of attention and time, and perplexed by it; if he had not succumbed to Napoleon’s blandishments five years before, when by so doing he might have saved his own life and Temeraire’s liberty, the Emperor could hardly expect to seduce him now. Or so Laurence hoped, unhappily conscious that he might have given encouragement to such thoughts, in asking a favor, and contemplating with no pleasure the prospect of having to refuse any entreaty which the Emperor might now make him.

But Napoleon asked him nothing, except his opinion on this or that new provision for the dragons of France, which he had under consideration. There were many of these: Napoleon passed freely from schools for hatchlings, to a scheme of using dragons in laying new trails over the Alps—inquiring for Laurence’s opinion on the Alpine ferals as he did so. “They have resisted all our offers most stubbornly,” Napoleon said, shaking his head.

“They have a remarkable bent for independence, I should have said, Your Majesty,” Laurence said.

“Which you admire!” Napoleon said, with a keen glance. “But nothing can be accomplished by one alone and friendless, without support. If I should ride into the field alone, what use would I be? And yet with an army beside me, what can I not accomplish?—They would do much better for themselves to accept the protection of France.”

Laurence refrained from making a remark about the value this protection had been to the Russian ferals Napoleon had loosed and then abandoned. “I think you may find them hard to persuade,” he said only, and Napoleon moved onwards.

His designs ranged almost absurdly wide. He talked of establishing great trade routes by dragon-back even to India and to China; he talked of building pavilions all across the breadth of Europe and Asia. His plans grew ever more ambitious as he spoke, and Laurence wondered. Napoleon spoke not at all of the disastrous reversal he had lately suffered—betrayed no consciousness either by word or look, or even by moderation, of the wreck of a million men, of ruin and defeat. Indeed he spoke of the war only briefly, to complain of his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. “He is too openhearted. He has given you quite a generous gift—the Oder!” Napoleon said. “All because a few Cossacks have given him a little trouble, and a handful of Prussian dragons.” Laurence could not but rejoice at the news: so the Tsar had sent his troops forward after all. But the censure in Napoleon’s voice made not the slightest acknowledgment that he had left that army wrecked, in an untenable position.

There was something dreadful in this determined avoidance, as though Napoleon could not bear to recognize his own defeat and had instead to delude himself, even knowing as he must that his audience in this case knew the truth. Laurence was sorry to see it. He had thought in Russia that the Emperor was not himself—sallow, thickened: he had gained another stone in weight and did not carry it well, his face settling into heavy lines. The grey eyes were dulled; he stared into the fire often as he spoke, and did not meet his listeners’ eyes often.

But he remained Napoleon, for all that. Laurence said, wanting only to escape the painful sense of omission, “We were impressed by your training grounds outside Grenoble, Your Majesty.”

“Ha!” Napoleon cried, turning round. “—you mean, by the number of eggs.” Laurence could not deny it; he bowed. “Yes,” Napoleon said, “for seven years now we have attended the wisdom of the Princess of Avignon—Madame Lien as you knew her—and you have seen the fruits of our labors. There are four thousand eggs laid upon the sands of France, and soon they will come to their maturity.

“The old ways of war are done, Captain. You have seen their death-knell,” Napoleon added. “The army which can bring more power to bear upon the battlefield, more quickly, will always be the victor: the weight of metal and of men will carry the day—if their generals are wise. You were at Tsarevo Zaimische?”

“I was,” Laurence said, surprised to hear the Emperor now at last mention anything of the campaign: although in some wise the battle had been his triumph.

“What a morning that was!” Napoleon said. “A little of my own sauce, as they say: to be woken in the first hours of the day to hear of five hundred dragons coming for me. You ought to have had me! But you could not bring your full weight to bear.” His face was illuminated again with vivid satisfaction; he seized upon a scrap of writing paper and a pen, and with a quick hand sketched out the defensive emplacements, his own forces behind their wall of defensive guns and the narrow corridor left; the Russian Army and the Chinese legions spread wide before it. “—You did not do as you ought. If you had committed your forces decisively, you must have overwhelmed us, and secured a complete victory, the destruction of my army. But you permitted caution to rule you,” he finished, flipping the pen from his fingers with a shrug; and Laurence knew well that no one would ever say the same of this man.

Napoleon stood studying his own diagram a moment longer, then abruptly said, “Come, let us go and take the air—you are no delicate courtier; you are a soldier,” and Laurence had no objection to make; indeed agreed heartily, privately hoping for a glimpse of Temeraire somewhere upon the grounds.

The gardens of Fontainebleau had been expanded and transformed into a covert, but not resembling any Western notion of that word. Large and imposing pavilions were made private by stands of young trees and elaborate trellises of vines, fountains playing among them: something from an imagined pastoral landscape, only with dragons instead of sheep. Dragons of every description: smaller feral-looking beasts, heavy-weights in every color and conformation, until Laurence, at first bewildered by the variety, spied down a narrow walk the heavy sinuous curve of a Kazilik dragon, unmistakably marked by the steam-hissing spines.

But the dragon was not Iskierka: the hide considerably more black-green, and Laurence realized only then that these were not all French beasts. These were dragons from every corner of the world: besides the Turkish beast, he caught sight of several not unlike Arkady and his fellow Pamir-dwellers; over there to the north a huddled group of Russian ferals, lean and savage-looking; in a green-marbled pavilion along their way a pair of dragons conversing in broad colonial English. And as they turned back for the house, Laurence saw a dragon he was sure he recognized: Dikeledi, one of the beasts of the Tswana, whom he had last seen sailing for Africa with a transport full of slaves liberated from the Brazilian plantations.