“Sir, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, unable to restrain himself. “That a lack of decision plagued the Prussian army, I cannot deny; but they were outfought, sir, on open ground—”

“With this trick of horse-blinders you have gone on about, in your report,” Dalrymple said. “You may set your mind at ease,” he added, in ironic tones, which said without a word how little he trusted Laurence’s anxiety, “we have not discounted what of your intelligence could be confirmed; our horses have their own damned hoods now, and if Bonaparte thinks he will stampede us with a few dragon-charges, he will soon learn otherwise.”

“And this time, Bonaparte has let his thirst for speed outpace his sense,” another general said. “All the scouts agree, even the beasts,” he added coldly in Jane’s direction, before she had said a word, “that he has not brought up all his army yet. He has some thirty thousand men, not fifty; we are not far short of him even without our levies and reinforcements.”

“You will be a damn sight shorter by morning,” she answered, “if you mean to lie here and be bombarded. And my scouts have made thirty thousand, but that does not mean there are not more to come.”

“You have caterwauled without a stop how we must have these sixty more dragons,” another officer, a colonel, said belligerently, “and swallow treason and unhandled beasts to have them, and now you talk as though we have nothing to do but sit and bear it while the French drop round-shot on our heads. If they are of no use here, they are of no use at all.”

“We have seen a great many of the French along our way from Wales,” Temeraire said, putting in his own oar, “and of course we can stop the Fleur-de-Nuits, if we can only see them, but at night that is difficult.”

“Difficult? So is winning battles difficult,” General Dalrymple said, scowling, and not looking up. He beckoned to his aide and thrust out a map to Laurence. “You will take the beasts here, a mile out past camp,” he said, “and hold the Fleur-de-Nuits there, until morning—”

“That is very silly; the Fleur-de-Nuits will go right around us if we are a mile out,” Temeraire said.

“A couple of rounds against Lefèbvre’s rear-guard, and now you try to tell us our business,” Dalrymple said to Laurence. “By God, I have half-a-mind to—you will obey orders, damn you; you will do as you are told and be grateful for the chance—”

“If I had done as I was told,” Temeraire said, “you should have sixty less dragons, and Lefèbvre would have a good deal more food, and tomorrow Napoleon would likely beat all of you for good. So that is a very stupid thing to say. Whyever ought I do as I am told?”

“If you do not, we will hang—” the belligerent officer began, and Jane said, “Maclaine!” too late, and Temeraire growled, deep in his throat, and lowered his head with his ruff up sharp.

Briefly, he had perhaps become to them only another voice in their deliberations, if a queer, more resonant one, speaking from aloft. But what contempt the little familiarity had produced, vanished in the face of that growl, the great glossy lowered head with the eyes half-a-foot across and glittering yellow-slitted like lamps, over a jawful of serrated teeth with the smallest the size of a man’s hand. It was too palpable a reminder that they were in the presence of a creature who could have, with a stroke, killed them all, and with very little effort to himself. To Laurence, Temeraire could never seem viscerally a threat; but he had handled the dragon from hatchling to maturity, and remembered him a creature scarcely larger than a dog.

“Laurence has oaths and duty to you, and he would let you hang him, although I do not understand why,” Temeraire said after a moment, low and angrily. “And I cannot make him come away with me, against his will, because that would also be wrong. But I will not let him be parted from me again, and if you do hang him, then I will take my friends and go; but not back to China. I will go to Napoleon, and I will tell him he may have my territory, if only he destroys you all, and I will give him any help he wants of me to do it. Now threaten me again, if you like.”

Laurence stood wretchedly, helplessly. He ought to have expected it. Lien had done as much, for the death of her companion, Prince Yongxing; had gone and put herself freely into Bonaparte’s hands, with nothing at the time but contempt for him and all the West, and even though a Napoleon the master of Europe might turn his eyes against her own nation, someday. And what sense of loyalty Temeraire might have begun to acquire to Britain, whatever Laurence might have been able to instill in him, had been undone thoroughly first by the Admiralty’s plan, to infect and kill all the dragons of the West, reserving the cure for British use; and by their later imprisonment and the death-sentence on Laurence which had been used as a bludgeon against him: and now used once too often.

To think his execution would leave Temeraire not free to make his own way back to China, but a devoted enemy of Britain, was a fresh agony; Laurence had no doubt that such a threat would only make the generals despise him and the dragon all the more, and see in it his own scheme for preserving his neck by blackmail. They might choose not to provoke Temeraire again, while Napoleon had men on British soil, but that, he hoped profoundly, was only a temporary state, and then—

Laurence did not discount, as Dalrymple did, Temeraire’s achievement: without experience or training for the task, or anything but will, he had persuaded sixty lazy, well-fed dragons to go with him to war; and had won two victories already, against the French army. That Lefèbvre was not the best of the Marshals, that he had no great number of dragons with him, that Temeraire had only engaged with small companies, meant very little next to the greater success that he had managed to keep his force together and fed. But these men might shortsightedly think themselves happy to be rid of Temeraire and any dragons recalcitrant enough to follow him; and if they did not, they would only take this as still more cause to try some low scheme of murder against him.

“Temeraire,” he said, low, trying, into the silence which lingered, “Temeraire, you cannot say such things; you are a serving-officer now—these are your superiors; you may not make threats, or growl at their orders—you must withdraw the remarks.”

“I did not growl at the orders,” Temeraire said after a moment, still low and angrily, but drawing away his head a little, and all around the circle one might see chests rising with postponed breath. “I did not growl at the orders, and will not, no matter how stupid they are; but as for hanging, if anyone should try to take you from me again, I shall growl at them, and worse, and it is no use telling me I ought not.”

“As one might expect—” Maclaine began, a little faintly, only to be interrupted by Wellesley.

“Damn you, Maclaine, stop baiting the damned bear to see it dance.” Wellesley seized the moment, and addressed the others, still silent and shaken. “This is all nonsense. I do not believe for a minute that Bonaparte has come up with a man less than all his army, whatever phantasy the scouts have brought you. We can get forty thousand men at Weedon, with their guns and supply, and if we give Bonaparte one of his precious pitched battles without every last one of them, we are a pack of fools.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” Dalrymple snapped. “Stand aside and wave him on to London?”

“London was lost three days ago,” Wellesley said, “if not two weeks ago, when Nelson was sent to Copenhagen with twenty ships, and Bonaparte saw his main chance. The sooner we swallow it, the better. Get the men on the road tonight, at once. They have been lying about with nothing to do but get drunk and gamble and whore for a week, they can give up a little sleep—”