Grig landed near the pits and said loudly, “Is there any chance of an early bite?” which brought Iskierka’s head up for a warning snort of flame. “I don’t mean anything by it, I’m sure,” he said, with a small hop that brought him over by her head, to make an apologetic bob, and then he pitched his voice very quiet and said, “Temeraire, what do they mean to put the poison in, have you heard?”

“What?” Temeraire said.

“I will not blab,” Grig said hurriedly. “Not to anyone you don’t like—”

Temeraire put his head down and nudged Grig firmly back towards the outer ring of trees. “Now you will explain yourself at once,” he said, and everything came spilling out: a few of the small Russian dragons of Grig’s acquaintance had eavesdropped upon a conversation among their officers, and passed the word to him, in hopes he might be able to learn how to avoid the traps.

Temeraire heard out the hideous plan, first with bafflement—it could not be, it was too infamous—but when he recalled that it came from those same men who had kept their beasts chained, hobbled, all in order to make them starved prisoners in breeding grounds, he ceased to doubt, and a settled, wrathful calm descended.

He had all too much confidence in their power of achieving such a dreadful goal. Everyone was so very hungry now—there was not enough food anywhere, it seemed, and ferals did not even have the advantage of porridge, to stretch what there was. If men only put out some cooking-pits full of food, in the pretense of keeping the ferals from raiding, many would eat, and sicken, and die. And with their numbers broken by this first slaughter, still desperate with hunger, the remainder would be easier prey for all the forms of entrapment that men could devise. Temeraire remembered with a shudder the burning frame so close around him, the crowding pitchforks—and those had only been peasants; those men had not had guns.

“Yes, I understand,” he said, when Grig trailed off at last. “I understand very well.”

“Then you see why I would like to know—” Grig began, but Temeraire rumbled a warning, and silenced him.

“I would certainly give you no private hints, if I had them,” Temeraire said, speaking clearly, to be heard and understood by all the other dragons, who had been already listening in with interest, stretching to overhear. “I will not be satisfied, nor should any right-thinking dragon, to escape destruction only for myself and my personal friends—I will not stand by, and see such a project carried out. And neither will Laurence, you may depend upon it.”

He was angry, and his voice betrayed it—Grig cowered away from him and the rising thrum. Temeraire closed his jaws until the urge to roar had subsided. He would not blame Grig, who had been raised so badly, and had never learned to trust any other dragon, or had any person worthy of trust, either.

“We will certainly put a stop to the entire business,” Temeraire continued, when he trusted himself to speak again. “And any dragon, who does not care to be poisoned or shot for the convenience of men, may help us, if they choose—that is all I have to say on the subject, and when Laurence comes back, he will certainly agree; he will never obey such a command.”

“Oh,” Grig said, a little doubtfully. “But did you not say that you lost ten thousand pounds by it, the last time?”

This gave Temeraire a sharp moment, a painful start—and after he had only just restored Laurence’s fortunes!—“I will lose as much again,” he said, with an effort, and immense resolution. “I will do it again, if need be; if I really must. Even that consideration will not stop me.”

Having made this painful declaration, Temeraire went aloft and returned to his own clearing, to pace its confining limits round and round and making distracted apologies if he should knock over a tree, to the inconvenience of his crew. Laurence had certainly gone to stop the whole business—Temeraire saw it now. Laurence meant to stop it, and to tell Temeraire after the whole monstrous plan had already been averted, exactly to spare him the distress of the prospect which now lay so horribly close before them. If Laurence did not succeed—Temeraire shied away from too much contemplation of the consequences.

He turned his attention, rather, to the nearly as daunting consideration of how they should proceed, if the worst were to come to pass. They could not chase all over the Continent, themselves, to warn everyone. “We shall have to pass the word through the ferals,” Temeraire said aloud, but what if not everyone should believe them? He turned around again, sweeping over two tents without really noticing. “I had better speak to Ricarlee—and I must try and get word to Bistorta, and to the ferals of Lithuania.”

He was so engaged in planning out this network of communication that he did not pay any attention to movements outside his own clearing, until with a start he raised his head at several shadows moving in perpetual circles over his clearing, rudely, and looking around found Obituria and Fidelitas and their formations gathered closely around him, with their wing dragons circling overhead.

“What is it?” Temeraire said to Fidelitas, who ducked his head away with a queer, jerking unhappy movement, but said nothing.

“Why, I don’t know,” Obituria said maddeningly. “I have only come along on orders: we are to take up stations around your clearing. Is there going to be a battle? I did not get to fight, last time,” she said glumly.

“I should not think so, for Napoleon was three days off, yesterday,” Temeraire said, puzzled, but Granby was coming down the path—Granby, in a rage, halting where Captain Poole and Captain Windle had gathered with their officers, across the entrance to Temeraire’s clearing.

“What the devil do you mean by this?” he snapped. “You will explain yourselves, gentlemen; you will dismiss your dragons, and explain yourselves, at once.”

“We will do no such thing,” Poole answered, very coldly—he looked very pale, with red splotches come out upon his forehead, “and I hardly would have supposed that explanation would be required by an officer of His Majesty’s Corps—a loyal officer; I do not think any such man could entertain the least confusion, after the performance to which so many of us were witness not an hour since, about our actions, or indeed their necessity.”

“By God, I will see you broken the service for this,” Granby said. “You have deserved it twice over before this, in one campaign, and this crowns all—”