“We will make a single trial, at least,” Laurence said.

“Perhaps it may be a small trial?” Temeraire said, with an anxious look over at the porridge-pits.

Laurence gathered the greys together, and with Temeraire and Grig as interpreters laid his intentions out for them. “You shall be responsible not merely for carrying the army’s supply, but for knowing its state,” he added, “and in particular its state after you yourselves have eaten; you must deduct your own share and eat first, to save the cost of carrying your own day’s food.” He emphasized this point with some calculation: he knew very well it would recommend the duty to all of the greys, irregularly fed as they were.

“And you must all keep in mind,” Temeraire added, with a far more narrow and stern look from his lowered head, swept in a suspicious circle across the assembled dragons, who shrank away a little, “that anyone who should steal food will of course never again be trusted with so important a task. We have made these special sashes to mark those dragons allowed to receive supply,” here he nosed at a heap of rather ragged strips of fabric, each embroidered with something approximating the shape of a number, which had been hastily produced by the hands of many ground crewmen, “and anyone who steals will have their number revoked at once.”

The greys asked many skeptical and repetitive questions—“We may eat every day? Even if we do not fight? We may eat first? Truly, every day?”—which illustrated so well their miserable state, and how little expectation they had of anything better, that Laurence had an effort not to upbraid Ilchenko, when he muttered none too quietly that the food would be thrown away.

Ten beasts were chosen for the first run, and returned the next morning full-bellied and heavily laden with sacks full of wheat and pendulous nets of stupefied pigs, much to the envy of their fellows. A second trial sent twenty along with the first ten; the third day saw sixty more gone, and by the fourth day all of the greys had been spread out across the Continent, bringing in supply on so steady a pace that the aerial forces for the first time exceeded their own requirements, and Laurence’s supply-officer Lieutenant Doone was jubilantly reporting himself able to offer grain to the infantry, instead of enduring the scowls and mutters of their quartermasters for begging it of them.

Laurence received the news in his cabin with grim satisfaction, as he studied his maps urgently: two days only remained of his precious week, and a battery of small red flags, presently scattered along the line of the Caucasus Mountains, marked the still-distant positions of the Chinese legions. “How many more dragons of middle-weight size might we support?”

“Forty comfortably, sir, I should say,” Doone answered.

Laurence nodded. He had not dared to ask the legions to send him any troops, when he could not supply them; now the time was short, but he thought not insurmountably so. He had to write at once, but Temeraire was their drillmaster now, and Laurence did not mean to distract him for even a moment from that task. Every fighting dragon of their force, and all the ferals who now steadily came in to join them, had been delivered to his rather ungentle care, and no small effort was required to bring them into any kind of unified order.

“Send me Midwingman Roland, if you please,” he said, and sent Winters to find him a narrow paintbrush, and paper large enough to support a letter to a dragon.

Roland knew more of writing Chinese than any of his other men, and together they made an attempt. The result, Laurence had to admit, was not very graceful. “We might ask Ning if she can make it out,” Roland suggested doubtfully, when they had finished.

Requiescat had flatly refused to carry Ning any further, after the battle of Dresden; he had been responsible for carrying two long guns, the whole day, as well as a great number of infantrymen. But she had only said, “I can fly for myself now, I expect, and I will catch you up if I must fall behind.”

“And why haven’t you been doing it before now, I would like to know,” Requiescat said indignantly.

Ning had indeed managed to mostly keep pace with the company throughout their retreats, appearing perhaps a few hours after they made camp. She had established herself on a smallish outcrop on the heights, adorned by a delicate waterfall trickling over mossy rocks and exceptionally difficult to reach on foot, which gave her an excellent view of the maneuvers of the beasts under Temeraire’s tutelage.

After Laurence ordered some flags waved in her direction, she flew down. “How energetic they all seem!” she remarked, landing. “I must congratulate Temeraire on his efforts. I wonder if he has noticed that those large and quarrelsome dragons from Russia are flying in an awkward way?”

Laurence laid the letter before her, and Ning regarded it as sorrowfully as a master gardener presented with a scraggly and unwatered seedling. “It is decipherable,” she said, in tones of enormous generosity, “but perhaps you might wish to fix that character, in the second row: I do not believe you mean to say that you will attack the legions’ supply.” She drew the corrected version in the dirt, which omitted one careless streak of ink.

“It is indeed to be hoped that some part of the legions will arrive in time,” Ning added thoughtfully, as she watched Emily repair the letter. “I have noted the increase of your ranks, and the improvement in your supply, but from what I have seen of Napoleon’s forces, I still fear he must defeat you in battle, if you do not have any of the legions. Do you suppose they will come?”

“I cannot allow your conclusion,” Laurence said, although he felt a disquieting pang at Ning’s certainty: their position would indeed be markedly more vulnerable, without the legions, although he did not subscribe to such a degree of pessimism. “But I think there is every likelihood of their arriving in time.”

He climbed the heights after to observe their forces at drill. They were certainly improved already; Laurence could give himself the pleasure of believing that much. But he saw, also, what had inspired Ning’s certainty: their forces were heavily slanted towards the separate ends of draconic size, light-weights and heavy-weights; looking upon them he could almost see the hollow space which that trained core of middle-weight beasts would neatly fill.

Well, the message had gone, and there was nothing more that could be done to bring them. He went down from the heights, and refused to permit himself dismay. Two days remained.

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