“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.

“BY GOD, 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.