Kulingile took the news more equably. “I did not mean to die, anyway,” he piped—the inflation did not seem to have altered his voice—“but I am glad, if it means I may eat more, and no one will poke at me for it.” He put out his wings and flapped a little, which sent him going up alarmingly quick; Temeraire had to reach out and catch him by the tail-tip, and even then he stayed in mid-air, floating. “Look, Demane, look at me,” Kulingile said, and flapping only one wing managed to spin himself about in a circle.

“It is certainly better than being a great solid lump upon the ground,” Iskierka said, “and I do not mind if I do not have to carry you anymore, but that is a ridiculous thing for a dragon to do; you ought to come down or fly properly,” but Kulingile’s spirits were not depressed by this criticism, and Demane did indeed have to tether him with a rope, which Temeraire allowed to be secured to his harness, as the only rocks about were flat and inconvenient for the purpose.

The only other person displeased by the situation was Sipho, but as he had retreated into the solace of his studies, Temeraire selfishly did not mind that: it was a great satisfaction to him at last to have someone who might read the Analects to him aloud, correctly; if Sipho happened to find a character which he did not yet know, he would scratch it out large and Temeraire could give it to him, which served very well. It went a good deal quicker, and also Temeraire did not need to feel quite so guilty as if he had forced Roland or Laurence to write out a stretch of it for him large enough to see.

“You are getting hunchbacked,” Demane said, disapprovingly, and poked Sipho between his shoulders; Sipho flailed an arm resentfully at his brother and spat, “At least I am not only spending all my time stuffing a fat dragon’s belly, who can’t bother to hunt for himself, even if he can fly, now.”

It was not quite fair to call what Kulingile did at present flying: he had grown so used to dragging about on the ground that Dorset said he had failed to properly develop his instincts, so that now he had it all to learn from the beginning. Quite to the contrary of any natural assumption, it seemed that being so light did not help him at all. He might get off the ground very easily, but he would then float off in quite the opposite direction to the one he desired, and if he flapped too vigorously he would go caroming off anything around, and wrecked several trees in the process. Certainly he was not yet ready to hunt, although no-one could possibly have doubted his enthusiasm for that eventual day; he could not dive effectively at all.

Demane fetched his brother a clout across the ear. “You ought to be helping me, instead of sitting here wearing out your eyes,” he said severely. “You are being very stupid: now we have a dragon, of our own, don’t you understand? When he is grown a little bigger, he will be able to hunt, too, and fight; and then they cannot do anything to us we don’t like.”

“Who?” Sipho said; Temeraire wondered if perhaps Demane meant the bunyips.

“Anyone!” Demane said impatiently.

“Why would anyone do anything to us we don’t like, unless we are going to war, and fighting them,” Sipho said, “and if that is what you mean, then having a great huge big dragon will only mean you have to fight more, and the enemy will try and hurt you anyway, so that doesn’t seem very safe to me at all.”

Demane said, “I don’t mean the enemy. The law has made the captain a prisoner, and taken all his property; what if they would try to take us, too? That is what I mean.”

“Then we would run away,” Sipho said, “except now we have a dragon following us around it would not be hard to catch us. And anyway,” he added, spiteful and contradictory, “I expect they will not let you keep him, now he is going to live and be very big; they will want to give him to somebody else. And I don’t care if they do.”

Demane clouted him again, and stalked away, but later that afternoon he said to Roland quietly, “You don’t suppose they would; take him away from me?”

“In half-a-second,” Roland said absently, without looking up from the pistol which she had taken apart to clean, “if they had any chance of it; I think I heard that scrub Widdlow going on to Flowers about trying something of the sort.” Demane did not say anything, and she looked up. “Don’t be an ass,” she added, “it don’t work that way; ask Temeraire if he would have swapped Laurence, himself.”

“Certainly not,” Temeraire said, “although,” he could not resist adding very quietly, so Dorset should not hear him, “I suppose Kulingile might be more fickle, but if he were, you might find anyway you prefer to remain among my crew; and you would certainly be welcome.”

“That is quite enough murmuring; and inappropriate besides,” Dorset said, without looking up, although Temeraire’s throat felt much better by now, except when it was particularly dry, or they had not found very much water in a day or so. “I would hope that a grown dragon might have a little more restraint than to so resent a hatchling, I might add; I must consider it particularly shameful.”

“What have you been saying to my captain?” Kulingile said suspiciously, picking up his head from his nap, which movement brought him back up off the ground, and trying to swim himself over to Demane managed to accidentally knock him and Roland both over into the sand.

“Nothing,” Temeraire said, because he could not talk any more: Dorset had said so; and anyway he had only been trying to console Demane in case Kulingile should have proven false. If Kulingile remained steadfast, certainly no one would ever interfere, although Temeraire did think it was not quite so bad as Dorset painted it, when one considered that Demane had been his, first.

Laurence found that the resentment towards Demane, which had already been pronounced, easily transmuted itself in form: where the aviators had formerly criticized his daring to preserve a useless beast and thereby slow and threaten the recovery of the final egg, they now without any difficulty objected to his possession of that same beast as undeserved and unsuitable. There was a particularly strong understanding amongst aviators which held in contempt any sort of intrusion into the relationship between captain and beast, but as Laurence himself had known, this understanding might become flexible when the captain was not considered properly an aviator himself.

He remembered with distaste the coarse effort which had been made to separate him from Temeraire early in their relationship and prefer a proven lieutenant into his place, wholly disregarding all that the aviators had known of Temeraire’s likely feelings on the subject, and even resorting to outright falsehood. Laurence himself had been too uninformed to object, at the time; he was now not so, but had no standing to speak even when he heard men muttering enviously and, past convincing themselves that it might be permissible to interfere, well on the way to embracing the idea as a duty.

Demane’s temper was not one which would lightly brook such an insult, either, and he had also the means by which to resent it: though Laurence thought he was not yet fifteen, and a little short perhaps from the inadequacy of his childhood diet, he was filling out rapidly; and he had taken to sword and pistol and rifle with bloodthirsty appetite.

“I will not tell you to swallow it,” Laurence said, “but I do tell you that any gesture, any act, which should demonstrate an uncontrolled temper, or a disdain for the rules of the Corps, can only create a worse prejudice against you, and make all the more unlikely that an official recognition will come; it will not come quickly, that much is certain.”

“They none of them wanted him before,” Demane said, glittering-eyed and angry. “They would have knocked his brains out, and left him to rot, or taken his food—”