“Should you not come to Prussia, Jane?” he said, low. The Admiralty might think to send Jane as a comforting fiction drawn over his presence, but Laurence knew her abilities; and Excidium, with his long and storied career, and a Longwing’s deadly vitriol, would easily command the respect of any fighting-dragons. Temeraire had been willing to defer to him before now. “If he is to be defeated, he must be beaten in Germany.”

“No, Laurence,” Jane said firmly. “He must be beaten in France.”

He fell silent. To fight Napoleon back across the Rhine and the Pyrenees both, step by hard-won step, taking back all the victories fifteen years of war had won him: it loomed an impossible project.

Jane set her glass down, after a final swallow to toss down the rest, and drew open one of the rolled maps littering the table between them. “Don’t look quite so gloomy. I dare say you have no notion how many men he is losing in Spain. The numbers from the battlefields don’t tell the tale, but my scouts see it from aloft. The guerrillas nibble nibble nibble, like little mice, and his armies melt away on the road.”

She drew her finger along the map, the jagged mountain-lines marking the borders between France and Spain, and then let it go to roll up again. “We will have Soult by next Christmas, or call me a liar. But it has taken Wellington three hard-fought years to stitch up this army, and it is held by frayed thread and dull tacks. There ain’t someone to take my place in the air. I left Crenslow in charge this week, and you would have thought I was sending the poor man to the gallows, from the looks he gave. At that, there were seven Spanish and Portuguese officers at my heels clamoring for his head by the time we took flight.

“I don’t say that you won’t have troubles of your own in Germany, but the Prussian dragons have good cause to love you, and the Tsar can make the rest of them dance to his tune. So you must get across the Rhine without me, and we’ll meet again in Paris, by and by,” she finished.

“Granby would do better,” Laurence said.

Jane snorted. “Iskierka won’t,” an inarguable return. “Besides, you can give him ten years on the list and more. No, their Lordships haven’t any other choice. Aside from everything else, we are all hoping for some Chinese beasts to appear. Unless, could they put this Hammond fellow in charge?”

Laurence almost smiled at the thought of Hammond made an aerial commander, and that gentleman’s certain dismay. “His dragon might do. She has forty years’ experience as an officer with the Incan armies.”

“If you wanted a prospect less likely than their Lordships’ making you admiral, giving the command to an Incan dragon will do nicely,” Jane said. “Not that the creatures don’t know their business, I can tell you: we have had a dozen of them to worry about since last August, and they are worth three times their fighting-weight in other beasts. The only saving grace is they hate to lose even a single crewman, and if we manage to heave over a boarding party of four or five, well-secured, we can bargain them out of the day’s fighting just to save a single bellman’s life, even if they outnumber us three to one. Well-secured being the real difficulty: they are quick as lightning at throwing us off, otherwise. You will have a wretched time with those thieves in the Commissariat, by the bye,” she added. “It has been nothing but bales of rotting leather and rusted buckles, and what they call oilskins I call barley-sacks,” as though he were already in command.

She paused, seeing his look, and added, “You won’t refuse it?”

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, I will not refuse.” Whatever his quarrels with the men of the Admiralty, there was in his own understanding of duty a wide gulf between the necessary defiance of an immoral order, and refusing to undertake a task only because it was difficult, or demanded any private discomfort. If he could have proposed a man better fitted for the urgent task, he would feel the matter differently, but from that escape he was barred by the continuing resentment of all the ministers and officers he had offended: they would argue far more vigorously than he for the virtues of any conceivable substitute. If he were offered the command, he might be sure he was the only choice.

“But Jane,” he said abruptly, “I will not—I cannot accept unless they reinstate Ferris, and promise him his chance. I cannot. That I should be reinstated, promoted, appointed to command, and he still bear the stain of the crime which I committed, entirely without his knowledge—it is intolerable to every feeling.”

“Oh, I dare say that can be managed,” Jane said. “His is an old family in the Corps, and they have a great deal of influence. The wolves were howling for blood too loudly at the time for them to make any difference, but this will change matters. I will write old Admiral Gloucester, who served with Ferris’s great-uncle, and we will set the wheels turning.”

They discussed the command a long time onwards; she gave him names of men to search out and others to avoid, both in the Commissariat and in his officers—as best he could; Laurence knew better than to suppose he would have much power of choice save among Temeraire’s own crew, and perhaps not even there. The Admiralty was certain to name all the beasts of his company. But he made note of the men she recommended and spoke against; on the battlefield, the Admiralty would be far away, and the decisions his.

He had written a sheet both sides and crossed it, full of her good advice, and the clock had struck ten; then Jane said, “You may as well stay the night, if you like,” and he was staring at a meaningless scratch of ink, his mouth gone abruptly dry with want. He had not permitted himself the license of hoping—of coming near enough hope even to think of—

“Jane,” he said, all at once vividly aware of her bare hand on the table between them, strong and square, thinned a little by the years but deeply known, familiar, save for the yellow-jeweled signet and the white scar running between the two last fingers down the back, which had not been there before—before the shattering of his life. It had been late summer, an August night hot enough that they had left off the coverlet and lain naked together with the windows open, a devil’s bargain between the London stench and the stifling heat. The next night he had betrayed her, and his country, and flown with Temeraire to take the cure to France.

He had not touched her since. Nor any other woman. Not from loyalty—loyalty a word he had no right to use with her—but a deadening of some inward vital part, necessary to desire. They had spoken together; he had even been alone with her. But the door had been closed. He had not conceived that it might ever again open. “Jane,” he said again.