“I call that handsome,” Requiescat said, admiring the bright green knot upon his shoulder from every direction, craning his head nearly upside down, and even Majestatis did not quite manage to affect his usual degree of amused disdain and kept glancing back sidelong at his own: it was in red, to go against his cream-and-black, and looked almost as fine, Temeraire thought, as his own pale blue matched set: he of course had needed two.
“Yes, and if anyone should be particularly clever at helping you to manage, you may make them lieutenants, and they may have a smaller one,” Temeraire said. “So that is all settled,” he added to Laurence, “and for the rest, let us take some Yellow Reapers. Messoria and Immortalis, of course, because they are our wing-mates, and also the two best of our unharnessed, and that will do very well, because I also want Perscitia: she is very clever, and,” he confided, “if I leave her here she will offend someone, I am afraid. Anyway, we may need to manage some artillery.”
The Reapers quarrelled it out amongst themselves, and finally settled that Chalcedony and Gladius should come, and Cantarella should take charge of the rest staying behind, and have an epaulette. Moncey got one for command of the couriers—it was nearly as large as his head but pleased him very well—and Minnow also.
So there was no quarrelling or ill-feeling at all in the end, which Temeraire felt a credit to his arrangements. “We are a very handsome company, are we not?” Temeraire asked Laurence, hoping to find him satisfied. “It is a pity about Iskierka, but no-one could quarrel with our choices, otherwise, I am sure.”
“Yes,” Laurence said.
“I have only been thinking,” Temeraire said, with a sidelong look; he hoped it would not seem selfish, “that it would be just as well, if we got back the rest of our crew: not that we are not perfectly comfortable as we are,” he added, “but a few more bellmen to manage some bombs, and it might be convenient to have Winston back, to help Fellowes—”
“Those who wished to return have done so,” Laurence said. “I cannot require any man to serve with a traitor.”
“Oh,” Temeraire said. “But—” and stopped. It had not occurred to him that the crew had chosen not to come back: that they had rather be elsewhere, on another dragon, and with another captain. It seemed very strange to him, when he was now a commodore, and must surely have been more impressive, if anything. He wondered if perhaps Laurence was mistaken, or only shy of asking for them: perhaps they did not even know that he and Laurence were free. “But surely Martin, at least, or Ferris, would come,” he said.
Laurence was very still a moment, and then he said, “Ferris has been dismissed the service,” only because, it seemed, the admirals imagined that Ferris had been of some help, even though he had done nothing at all.
“But then where is he?” Temeraire asked. If Ferris were not with some other dragon, it stood to reason he would rather be with them; but Laurence said with finality, “Any communication from me must be wholly unwelcome.”
Temeraire did not press him further, but privately he thought that perhaps he would write to Ferris: if he could get Emily or Sipho, perhaps, to take down a letter for him, and find out Ferris’s direction; and then a dragon he knew a little from Dover, Orchestia, landed in the courtyard. She was back from a patrol, and his own midwingman Martin was with her crew, his bright yellow hair standing out against his green coat.
“Mr. Martin,” Temeraire called out, seeing him go by, thinking perhaps to ask him over; and see if he knew, that Temeraire had been made commodore; and whether he was quite sure he would not prefer to go with them, on their own particular mission—
Martin started a little, at being named, and looked over; but then he turned his back and walked on into the citadel with the rest of Orchestia’s crew—not even a word, or a gesture, and he had always been so very friendly.
“Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you will oblige me very greatly if you will make no such gesture again.”
“No, I will not,” Temeraire said, much subdued; it was not only that Martin had ignored them: he had done it so very openly, as though he wanted everyone else to know he meant to do it. There was something particularly unpleasant to it: anyone might not feel like conversation, of course, but this was showing away how little he wanted it with them, in particular. “But,” Temeraire said to Laurence, slowly, “does that mean he does not approve, that we took over the cure? Surely he would not have wished to see all those dragons dead—”
“Between two evils, he might have found that the lesser than treason,” Laurence said, without lifting his head from the book which he was reading.
“Oh! Then I am not sorry,” Temeraire said defiantly. “He may stay with Orchestia, for all I care; if she wants him.”
He felt rather wounded, though, for all his bravado: and he had not yet understood the worst; he did not realize the implication of what they had done to poor Ferris, until that very afternoon: all of them assembled and ready to fly, his harness rigged out and his epaulettes bright in the thin wintry sunshine, and a runner had come to let them know they might go to Edinburgh, and he said, “Mr. Laurence, your orders, sir, from the admiral,” handing him the packet.
“Yes,” Laurence said, and did not correct the boy; he only took the papers and put them in his coat pocket; and for the first time Temeraire realized, looking closely, that Laurence was not wearing the gold bars upon his shoulders, which the other captains wore.
Temeraire did not want to ask; he did not want to hear the answer, but he could not help it. “Yes,” Laurence said, “I have been struck the service, too. It does not matter now,” he added, after a moment, when of course it mattered, as much as anything. “We must away.”
LAURENCE STOOD BY THE PARAPET, looking out to sea, in the upper court of Edinburgh Castle. Temeraire lay somewhere in the dark covert below the castle, a great yawning darkness in the side of the illuminated city, which stretched out around the castle and down to the River Forth. Ships rose and fell uneasily on the water, and the wind blew sharp needles of frozen rain into his face. In the far distance he could see a handful of lights moving, too high for ships, too bright for stars: a few dragons on patrol.
“Another three hundred thousand of them buggers lying along the coast from Calais to Boulogne, just waiting for their chance,” a sergeant of Marines said to his fellow soldier, as the two of them came by on their round, and he spat aggressively over the parapet towards the sea, as if he might hit the distant enemy.
They had not yet seen Laurence. Wellesley and his staff were inside the tower chambers; he had been left outside until called for, despite the night cold and wet, the stones slick with ice, and room enough in the antechamber for him to wait inside: a deliberate slight. The damp penetrated his cloak and his leather coat effortlessly. But he had chosen to stand at the limit of the parapet, out of the lantern light, so he could see farther out. It was only a romantic impulse: he could not see anything of real significance at this hour.
“He’ll squeeze over another thousand to-night,” the sergeant went on. “Every dark night, those fucking Fleur-de-Nuits carry them. The Navy shot one down two days ago, though,” he added, with vindictive satisfaction. “Down into the ocean like a stone, and two hundred Frogs on its back, I hear: but more often than not they can’t be seen.”