Temeraire would have objected strongly if anyone else had suggested that Laurence owed any more than he had given; but he could not very well quarrel with Laurence himself on the subject, if he had liked to, when he owed Laurence a debt, too. Only, he wished they were not going so very far. Already the days had begun to drag intolerably.
“Wing, two points off the larboard stern,” the lookout cried, and Temeraire roused hopefully: perhaps it would be a battle; or perhaps Volly, coming to call them back to England; or Maximus and Lily, come to bear him company, so they should all go together.
“But it is none of them; it is Iskierka,” he said, disgruntledly, when she had come close enough he could see the thin cloud of steam trailing her; she was flying a little sluggishly and tired, and she thumped down upon the dragondeck in much disarray: she did not have even her full harness on, and none of her crew, only Granby latched on to her neck-strap.
“What are you doing here?” Temeraire demanded, while she thirstily drank up two barrels of his water.
She settled herself more comfortably, looping her massive coils in a very inconvenient way, half-sprawling over the deck and some of them dangling over the sides, so that Temeraire could not help but notice that in reaching her full length she had grown longer than he was, himself. “I am coming with you.”
“No, you are not,” Temeraire said. “We are transported, you are not; you had better go back at once.”
“Well, I cannot,” she said. “I am too tired to fly back now, and by tomorrow morning it will be too far; so we may as well go on.”
“I do not see what you want to come for, anyway,” Temeraire said.
“I told you that you might give me an egg, when we had won,” Iskierka said, “so I have come to keep my promise.”
“But I do not want to give you an egg, at all!” Temeraire said. “I do not want you aboard the ship, either: you take too much room, and you are damp.”
“I do not take any more room than you; at least, not much more,” Iskierka said, to add insult to injury, “and I am warmer; so you needn’t quarrel.”
“And,” Temeraire said, “you are disobeying orders again, I am sure of it: Granby would never let you come.”
“Oh, well,” she said, “one cannot always be obeying orders. When will we be there?”
“IT IS THIS DRATTED EGG,” Granby said to Laurence. “She is set on it having fire, and the divine wind; I have tried and tried to tell her it don’t work so, but she will not listen, and now here we are.”
“You may take her off at Gibraltar,” Laurence suggested.
“Oh, yes, if she will choose to go,” Granby said, and sat down upon an emptied cask of water, limp with defeat.
Iskierka, having been given a pig to eat, had already in satisfied complacence gone to sleep; her steadily issuing cloud of vapor went spilling over the bow and trailing away along either side of the ship, as though to illustrate their steady pace, farther away from England. Temeraire had pushed her mostly to one half the dragondeck, as best he could, and now sat coiled up and disgruntled, with his ruff flattened against his neck.
“You may be glad of the company, before we have crossed the line,” Laurence said, by way of comfort.
“I will not, even if I am very bored; any more than I would be glad of a typhoon,” Temeraire said, broodingly. “And I am sure she will be a bad influence upon the eggs.”
Laurence looked at Iskierka, and at Granby, who was presently drowning his sorrow in a glass of rum; Tharkay had come on deck and prudently caught one of the runners, to send for a bottle. “At least you need not fear for their safety,” he suggested.
“Unless she should set the ship on fire,” Temeraire said; a good deal too loudly for the comfort of any sailor in ear-shot, which might have omitted those two decks below, or in the stern.
“Then I am afraid you must study philosophy,” Laurence said, “and learn to bear the misfortune. I hope the arrangement is at least preferable to the breeding grounds.”
“Oh! Anything might be better than that, and still be dreadful,” Temeraire said, and with a sigh settled his head down forward. “Pray, Laurence; let us have the Principia Mathematica, as there is nothing better?”
“Again?” Laurence said, but sent Emily down for the book. She returned scowling, at the state of his quarters, but with a shake of his head he dissuaded her from any word to Temeraire. “Where shall I begin?” he asked, but he did not immediately hear the answer, as he looked down and put his hands on the book: his fingers caught on the delicate pages, and traced the embossed lines of the heavy cover, leather stamped with gilt. The same book under his hands, the salt wind in his face, Temeraire at his side; nothing changed outwardly, and yet in his essentials he felt as wholly altered as if he had been reborn, since the last time he had set foot upon the deck of a ship: a tide coming in, high and fast, which had swept clean the sand.
“Laurence?” Temeraire said. “Would you prefer another?”
“No, my dear,” Laurence said. “I do very well.”
Acknowledgments
So many, many thanks to my fabulous beta readers for this one: Sara Booth, Francesca Coppa, Alison Feeney, and especially Georgina Paterson. I also have to say a big thank-you to my copy editor Laura Jorstad for all her hard work, and especially for the lovely, lovely timeline, which was ever so much more splendid than my sad Excel worksheet.
Special thanks to my agent, Cynthia Manson, and to my very patient editor, Betsy Mitchell, who did not heap too many coals of fire on my head as the deadlines crept quietly away from me. (They do this in the night. Tricky creatures, deadlines.) And to my sister, Sonia, who put me up when (on more than one occasion) I had to flee the dangerous temptations of my home Internet connection and shiny desktop in order to get the book over the finish line in the last nick of time.
I also want to take advantage of my little soapbox here this time to say a special thanks to the whole fan community. I’ve been participating in this community and writing fan fiction since my teens, and I wouldn’t be anywhere near here without that experience and all the incredible people I’ve met thereby. I’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of different beta readers, and serving as one myself for many fellow writers, and I’ve learned tremendously from each and every one. Though I can’t thank them individually and knew most of them only by their online names, I still want to say a heartfelt thank you to them all, and to all the amazing volunteers that I’ve been working with this last year on the Organization for Transformative Works.
And last and first, all my gratitude and love to Charles, my very best reader, whom I trust and who trusts me with the priceless gift of honest critique, and the even better gift of happiness.
About the Author
NAOMI NOVIK is the acclaimed author of His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, and Empire of Ivory, the first four volumes of the Temeraire series, recently optioned by Peter Jackson, the Academy Award–winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A history buff with a particular interest in the Napoleonic era, Novik studied English literature at Brown University, then did graduate work in computer science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Novik lives in New York City with her husband and six computers.