He retreated before her finality, and she paced a little distance into the courtyard and back, her wings rising and falling from her back to fan her skin against the heat of the sun; it was a little painful, but not more so than the sensation of insult. She scarcely knew how to comport herself properly. She had been used from her hatching to be gawked at sidelong by small and superstitious minds, for her unnatural coloration; and had suffered the pain of knowing that their unease had injured the advancement of her prince. But the stupidest courtier would never have dared to offer her such an offense. Lumière landed before her, returning from a short flight: could he truly think of her in such a way? she wondered, and hissed at him.
“Why are you are bad-tempered again?” he said. “It is a splendid day for flying. Why do we not go see the Seine? There is a nice stretch outside the city, where it is not dirty, and also,” he added, with an air of being very pleased with himself, “I have brought you a present, see,” and held out to her a large branch covered with leaves of many colors.
“I have been the companion of a prince,” Lien said, low and bitterly, “and I have worn rubies and gold; this is your idea of a suitable offering, and yourself a suitable mate?”
Lumière put down the branch, huffily, and snorted. “Well, where are they now, then, if you have all these jewels?” he objected. “And this prince of yours, too—”
She mantled high against the sharp cruelty of the question, her ruff stretched thin and painful to its limits, and her voice trembled with deadly resonance as she said, “You will never speak of him again.”
Lumière mantled back at her in injured surprise, thin trails of smoke issuing from his nostrils, and then one of his companions, clinging to the harness on his back, called loudly, “Mon brave, she has lost him; lost her captain.”
Lumière said, “Oh,” and dropped his wings at once, staring at her with wide-pupiled eyes. She whirled away from the intrusion of his unwanted sympathy and stalked back across the broad courtyard towards the front of the palace, still trembling with anger, and ignoring the yelled protests of the servants seated herself in the broad, cobblestoned drive directly before the doors, where she could not be evaded.
“I am not here to be a broodmare,” she said, when Lumière followed and tried to remonstrate with her, “and if that is all your emperor wants, I will leave at sunset, and find my own way out of this barbaric country. If he desires otherwise, he may so convey to me before then.”
She remained there for several hours with no response; enough time, under the painful sun, to consider with cold, brutal calculation the likelihood that she would elsewhere find the means to overthrow a fortified island nation. It was the same calculation that had driven her to these straits in the first place. With her prince dead and his faction scattered, her own reputation tainted beyond all repair, and Prince Mianning given an open road to his false dreams of modernization—as though there was anything to be learned from these savages—she was powerless in China.
But she would be equally powerless as a solitary wanderer across this small and uncivilized country. She had considered going to England itself, and raising a rebellion there, but she could see already that the dragons of these nations were so beaten down they could not be roused even in their own service. It could almost have made her pity Temeraire; if there were room in her heart for any emotion at even the thought of his name but hatred.
But unlike her poor, stupid young companions, he had chosen his fate even when offered a better one; he had preferred to remain a slave and a slave, furthermore, to poison-merchants and soldiers. His destruction was not only desirable but necessary, and that of the British he served; but for that, she required an external weapon, and this emperor was the only one available. If he would not listen to her—
But in the end, he did come out to her again. In the daylight, she could make out a better picture of his appearance, without satisfaction. He was an ugly man, round-faced with thin unkempt hair of muddy color, and he wore the same unflattering and indecent tight-legged garments as his soldiers. He walked with excessive energy and haste, rather than with dignity, and for companion he had only one small slight man carrying a sheaf of paper, who did not even keep up but halted several paces further back, casting pale looks up at her.
“Now, what is this,” the emperor said impatiently. “What is wrong with these three we have given you? They do not satisfy you properly?”
Lien flattened her ruff, speechless at this coarseness. One would have thought him a peasant. “I did not come here to breed for you,” she said. “Even if I were inclined to so lower myself, which I am not, I have more pressing concerns.”
“And?” the emperor said. “De Guignes has told me of your preoccupation, and I share it, but Britain cannot simply be attacked from one day to the next. Their navy controls the Channel, and we cannot devote the resources required to achieve a crossing while we have an enemy menacing our eastern flank. A fortified island nation is not so easily—”
“Perhaps you are not aware,” Lien said, interrupting him icily, “that I was zhuang-yuan in my year; that is, took the first place among the ten thousand scholars who pursued the examinations. It is of course a very small honor, one which is not worthy of much notice; but if you were to keep it in mind, you might consider it unnecessary to explain to me that which should be perfectly obvious to any right-thinking person.”
The emperor paused, and then said, “Then if you do not complain that we do not at once invade Britain—”
“I complain that you do nothing which will ever yield their overthrow,” Lien said. “De Guignes brings me here with fairy-tales of invasion and an invitation to lend my services to that end, and instead I find you marching uncounted thousands of men away to war in the east, with the best part of what little real strength you have left behind, eating unhealthy and expensive quantities of cattle and lying around in wet weather, so exposed there is no use in even trying to make eggs. What is the sense in this absurd behavior?”
He did not answer her at once, but stood in silence a moment, and then turning to his lagging secretary beckoned and said, “You will have General Beaudroit and General Villiers attend me, at once; Madame,” he turned back, as the message was sent, “you will explain to me how dragons ought to be fed, if you please; Armand, come nearer, you cannot make notes from there.”
The generals arrived an hour later by courier beasts: and at once began to quarrel with her on every point. On the most basic principles of the balance necessary for health, they were completely ignorant and proud to remain so, sneering when she pointed out the utter folly of giving a fire-breather nothing but raw meat. By their lights, dragons could not be fed on anything but animal flesh; and so far as she could tell, they believed the quantity ought to be proportional to a dragon’s volume and nothing else.
They refused to consider any means for inuring cavalry to the presence of dragons, nor even the proper function of dragons in the work of supply, which baffled her into a temporary silence, where General Villiers turned to the emperor and said, “Sire, surely we need not waste further time disputing follies with this Chinese beast.”
Lien was proud of her self-mastery; she had not given voice to an uncontrolled roar since she had been three months out of the shell. She did not do so now, either, but she put back her ruff, and endured temptation such as she had never known. While Villiers did not even notice; instead he went on, “I must beg you to excuse us: there are a thousand tasks to be accomplished before we march.”