Archive of Our Own

 1.

Tharkay’s return late in October of the year seven was heralded by a cacophony of screeching in the great courtyard at the Dover covert, rather as though a cat had been dropped into a sack full of other cats with exactly one fish carcass to go around. To Jane, it was a heavenly choir. She stood from her desk and ducked her head through the window, and was greeted by the sight of six — seven — eight unfamiliar ferals, all with the same lean, ropy look, descending upon the three members of Arkady’s gang who had been napping on the flagstones.

“Admiral!”

Straightening, Jane cracked the back of her head against the window-sill. There was a runner panting in her doorway, all of nine years old and shining-eyed.

“Begging your pardon, sir, I’m to tell you that a man with your warrant is waiting for you in the courtyard and he’s brought a dozen new dragons with him!”

“It is not quite so many,” Jane said, rubbing her skull. “But thank you, Mason. I will be down directly.”

By the time she emerged into the courtyard, members of several different ground crews had gathered on the perimeter and the new ferals were facing off with Wringe, Gherni and Hertaz across the heated flagstones, all of them mantling their spines and spitting at one another in Durzagh like a pair of London street gangs. A figure in a stained, dusty overcoat appeared on the back of the largest of them and climbed down in two haphazard drops, addressing them firmly in their tongue, which to Jane’s ears sounded a great deal like he was trying to cough and sneeze at the same time.

The largest new feral answered, surly, bobbing her head up and down on her neck in the same manner a horse might stamp its feet in restlessness, her eyes firebrand-orange and baleful as a snake’s. Tharkay admonished her once more, then gestured for her to step forward, across the flagstones.

Jane knew a cue when she saw one. She stood with her hand on her sword-grip and her eyes narrowed, allowing her posture and her medals to speak for her. Having witnessed these proceedings twice before, the ground crews prudently hung back, and the other new ferals clustered behind their leader in similar fashion.

Tharkay spoke to the leader grandly and expressively in Durzagh, probably identifying Jane as the one who would be supplying them with outrageous amounts of cattle to eat, then turned to her and said formally, “Admiral, may I present Kozoïde of the Pamirs?”

Jane inclined her head. “I am happy to make your acquaintance,” she said, raising her voice for the benefit of their audience. “I understand that you and your fellows have agreed to join the Aerial Corps in defense of England.”

Tharkay translated, and Kozoïde, whose dappled green-and-brown markings would have rendered her invisible against forested mountains such as had been shaved off the face of the British Isles three hundred years ago, tossed her head proudly.

“She says,” Tharkay said, “that they have agreed on the condition that they be provided the same shelter as is given to your own dragons, and each have one goat to eat per day.”

“Hm.” Jane ran a sergeant’s eye over the motley company. “That will depend. How well can they fight? And will they obey her as their commanding officer?”

This produced what appeared to be some final, half-hearted whines and complaints from Kozoïde’s companions, who were summarily hissed into submission. Kozoïde looked back at Jane and spoke again, nose in the air. “They will,” said Tharkay.

“And Kozoïde must in turn obey the captain assigned to her, and the chain of command of the Corps. Is that understood?”

Hearing this translated, Kozoïde nodded importantly; and after only a little more negotiation, purely for show, Jane felt she could safely announce: “Very well; then on behalf of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps, I bid you welcome to Dover. Your first orders are to rest for an hour and wait for the captains and myself to return with further instructions. We will need to test your abilities before you begin your duties.” She paused to allow Tharkay a moment to translate, then turned to address the officer hovering a few steps behind her. “Lieutenant Fairholme, would you and Wringe be so kind as to make some further introductions, and show them where they may have a drink and a meal?”

Fairholme, who had a year ago been judged young and quick enough to learn Durzagh and be assigned to fly with Wringe, said smartly, “Yes sir,” and translated clumsily to his companion. This triggered another explosion of draconic chatter as Wringe, scarcely having the time to establish herself to the newcomers, was swarmed by Gherni and Hertaz, eager to prove themselves the dominant personalities of the covert and quite uncowed by her having been so singled out for leadership.

The issue of their management being decided for a time, and the noise enough to cover any conversation, Jane and Tharkay crossed to each other and shook hands. “Admiral,” he said.

“Glad to see you alive and well, Mr Tharkay. Did the continent give you any trouble?”

“Less so than previously, but that may be owed to our not having traipsed around for weeks in a Prussian winter. How fares the Corps?”

The Corps would be faring excellently if it weren’t bracing itself for an invasion it did not have the strength to turn back. “Reduced,” Jane said, after a moment. “But in better health than you saw it last.”

Tharkay looked over his shoulder at the Winchester curled up in a small purple heap on the other side of the courtyard. “We were greeted by a border patrol, who I believe sent you a courier with my safe-conduct. Most of the dragons among them were ill the last time I saw them here. Laurence’s party found the cure, I take it?”

At that moment, Wringe propelled herself off the flagstones and into the sky, her furious wingbeats producing a gust of wind and dust that billowed out in all directions. Gherni, Hertaz and the whole yammering mass of the ferals flung themselves after her. Tharkay glanced up at them, leaving Jane, spared from having to answer at once, to stare at him in dismal understanding.

Of course. Scarcely two months had passed since the trial, and in any case they would have crossed the last few hundred miles on dragonback. He could not have stopped in any city nearer than Belgrade for resupply, let alone for fresh news of the war. Not with eight feral dragons to manage.

“Perhaps I ought to tell you a little of who I have saddled you with,” Tharkay remarked, watching their newest recruits disappear over the courtyard walls.

“Yes,” Jane said.

Something in her voice alerted him; he caught her gaze, and his amused expression smoothed out as if polished. Knowing that her own exposed what she felt, Jane added grimly, “We had better talk upstairs.”

They did not speak on their way up to the third floor of the fortress. Not because she did not know what to say; if she had been at liberty, she would have asked with no less apprehension than amusement, Which of the lot gave you the most trouble on the way? And however did you manage to negotiate them down to goats? But to speak of anything before they spoke of the cure would be worse than silence. In any case, Tharkay seemed willing to do the same; perhaps he assumed that nothing more awaited him than a debrief behind closed doors.

Perhaps nothing more did.

When they reached her office, she went to her desk and tapped it twice with her fingertips, thinking. Then abruptly she said, “Would you be so good as to shut the door?”

Tharkay shut it. 

Jane seated herself and gestured at the opposite chair. He unclasped his hat from around his chin and sat with it under one arm.

“You would not have heard, I suppose,” she began, as though she had not dragged him up three flights of stairs to answer a rhetorical question. “But yes, they found the mushroom and brought it back. None too soon, I might add; more than half of the Corps had died by then. We were starting to hear of it appearing in France, which likely meant it was cropping up in the rest of Europe and we simply hadn’t had word.”

He did not speak here, though he had the opportunity, so she went on: “We made our account to the Admiralty —” And halted, clenching her jaw.

“They were pleased, I take it,” Tharkay said.

It had been a long time since Jane had had to admonish herself for avoidance of any kind. Here was a man in the service of the Corps who had risked his neck to deposit several priceless new recruits into their laps, and moreover someone who knew Laurence personally, who had been his confederate on the long overland journey from Macao and rescued him and a garrison of fifteen thousand men from the siege of Danzig. Even if there were a purpose to omitting news that had already made national headlines — even if it were not her duty as Laurence’s superior officer to own what he had done, and what the Admiralty had tried to do — Tharkay ought to learn of it from her.

“Well, we were none of us put to court-martial. It amounts to the same thing,” she said. “But then they informed us … They let it be understood that they had allowed an infected French courier to escape, and return home to his fellows. And that the cure would remain in British hands only.”

There was a pause.

Tharkay said, “I see.”

Jane did not trust herself to tell the rest with anything approaching impartiality. She opened her top right-hand drawer and, fishing it out from under a calculatedly disorganized heap of old paperwork and broken quills, proffered a two-month-old newspaper to him across the table. “You’ll want the second page,” she said.

Tharkay took it from her and unfolded it.

Jane had read the article in question on the morning that it was delivered to her door and then consigned it in disgust to her drawer, as to an oubliette; as she had been forced to do with everything else she felt about the business. Yet as she watched Tharkay scan the opening lines, she found that she could still perfectly recall them to mind.

LONDON, September 15.

COURT-MARTIAL

of

CAPT. WILLIAM LAURENCE

Yesterday the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, convening in the Old-Bailey, commenced the expected court-martial of WILLIAM LAURENCE of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps, who was convicted on this the 31^st of August for that he, being a subject of our Lord the King, not having the fear of God in his heart, nor weighing the duty of his allegiance, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil; on the twenty-fifth day of July, in the county of Inverness-shire, maliciously and traitorously conspired to deliver into the hands of Napoleon Buonaparte & the Kingdom of France the cure for the Dragon-Plague; and by force and subterfuge stole the cure from our said Lord the King and fled to Paris, that the Aerial Forces of France might be restored to health at the expense of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps and of all England.

Tharkay’s face altered as he read. From across the room it would not have been visible, but at close quarters and with nothing else to look at, one could see plainly the tightening about his mouth; and the sudden corporal stillness, perceptible only thanks to a vanishing, like the stars at night, of all those small and unconscious movements that ordinarily marked any man’s repose.

Jane waited with her hands tented in front of her mouth, her gaze unfocused and fixed low to provide at least a semblance of privacy. When he folded the newspaper and placed it back onto the desk, she half-expected some dry remark to the tune of, So he has finally gone and put his neck into a noose. Ought we truly to be surprised? None came. They sat together in mutual silence until at length she said, “As far as we know, he was moved from gaol to the brig of the Goliath on the Channel. One can only presume that their Lordships hope to turn Temeraire’s wrath upon the French when Bonaparte makes the crossing, rather than upon Whitehall.”

It was a reckless comment to make, certainly insubordinate, yet Tharkay did not so much as blink at her tone. The veneer of indifference was gone: his gaze went through the table between them as if through water, and his face was blank as washed slate.

After another half a minute, Jane said quietly, “May I offer you something? — A glass of brandy?”

Tharkay stirred; took a breath. “No,” he said. “Thank you.” And with thoughtless certainty added, “He could not have done it alone.”

“No,” she said. “Of course he and Temeraire went together. I doubt it was even Laurence’s notion to begin with.”

“What has happened to him?”

“To Temeraire? They sent him to the breeding grounds at Pen Y Fan. Under threat of an expedited sentence,” Jane added when Tharkay looked up, apparently in surprise at this proof of draconic cooperation. “That we will have need of him when Bonaparte tries again is all that has stayed their hand so long.”

“It might suffice for longer,” Tharkay said. “Their Lordships are not in the habit of throwing away what may be of use to them.”

“They may as easily choose to hang him quietly amidst the confusion, and deceive Temeraire about it for as long as ever they might. We cannot be sanguine.” Jane clasped her hands together on the desk. “You have come in very good time with these ferals. We have perhaps half an hour before they come back from the feeding grounds and must report to Celeritas; suppose you tell me what we may expect from them, and how best they may be prepared for duty in the time that we have.”

Tharkay accepted the change of subject with no further comment, and spoke enough of Kozoïde and her band of rascals to compensate quite for his earlier and, as Jane suspected, inadvertent silence. Before they left her office, he even asked if he might borrow the newspaper for a time. “I believe I shall be staying, if Bonaparte is truly on the point of invasion,” he said. “It would be as well to know what I have missed.”

This permission given, he tucked it into his travel-stained coat, leaving Jane bitterly grateful that, if she did not insist on having it back, she would never see that blasted headline again.

 
 2.

The rustle of the canvas flap roused him from a foggy half-sleep; and he murmured without opening his eyes or even really waking properly, “If that is you again, Will, pray excuse me: I have no stomach,” and then listened to the embarrassed silence that followed his visitors into the tent.

“I am sure Laurence would be the last man to force you,” Granby said bracingly. “Only — Tharkay, I am sorry to say it, but you look as though you have been starved. If he tried, I should not like to stop him.”

At that, Tharkay opened his eyes. Blue dusk-light filtered dimly through the canvas flap, soothing the animal part of him that yet feared to wake in a torchlit chamber. Granby and Laurence had come in together, the former with a sympathetic expression and the latter with a bowl of congee in one hand: the same meal, Tharkay thought ruefully, that he had been eating twice daily since General Chu’s forces stormed the cave system, and keeping down half out of spite for death and half out of consideration for Laurence, who had silently asserted himself as his sickbed attendant as soon as he was brought to camp. Laurence, who had supported him out of those caves with Tharkay barely conscious, and leaning on him so heavily that his bare feet dragged sideways over the stone. “You depart for Peking at first light tomorrow,” he said, squinting up at Granby.

“With the egg,” Granby confirmed. “Iskierka’s bullied one of my midwingmen into scribing for her so she can lord the whole business over Temeraire — hatched in a palace on silken cushions, and so on. She’ll never be gracious, but at least — oh, Lord, let me help you.” Tharkay had tried to prop himself up on one elbow and fallen back again, hissing through his teeth. “You’ve got at least two broken ribs,” Granby said, gathering an arm about his shoulders. “Give me a hand, Laurence, I’ve only got the one left. Are there any spare blankets?”

“And a bedroll,” said Laurence, putting the bowl of congee down and out of the range of accidental kicks. “Allow me, John.”

He took Granby’s place with an arm supporting Tharkay, and Granby, one-handed, propped him up with the bedroll Laurence had begun sleeping on two days prior. Such gallantry could not be allowed to pass unremarked, but with no hat to tip and not wishing to hear the strain in his own voice, Tharkay said only, “Gentlemen,” half ironically as he was permitted to relax against it.

“You look a fright,” Granby said, sitting back. “How fare the hands?”

The hands were so heavily splinted, they looked like a child’s attempt at making a raft with sticks. “They are certainly better than they were two days ago.” 

“You will get the use of them back, won’t you? What did the surgeons say?”

“To avoid the harp and the bagpipes,” Tharkay said.

“To apply the salve twice daily and give them time to heal,” Laurence corrected, with nursemaidly sternness. “And to keep up your strength.”

The bowl of congee had reappeared in his hands. Relenting, Tharkay stretched forth his wrists, and Laurence held the bowl between them until he had pinioned it securely.

There had been a moment two days ago when, freshly watered, cleaned and bandaged, he had been brought a bowl of food and ordered by the surgeon to eat. Laurence had been present, as he seemed to be every time Tharkay surfaced from his fever, and had seen the surgeon hold the bowl and chopsticks and say crisply, “If you permit it, sir, I will assist you.” He had seen Tharkay’s automatic flinch, and he had moved forward — a very little, as if by reflex, as if to offer a species of help that no one had offered Tharkay since old Mary Blyth had fed him possets and gruel on his four-year-old sickbed; as though to receive it from Laurence would be preferable.

Tharkay had said, “Give it to me like this,” and held his wrists out to the surgeon. It had taken only a brief staring contest for the other man to decide that if he was well enough to be proud, he was well enough to deal with the mess he made feeding himself, and do as he was bid.

Hence Laurence and Granby politely turning aside and speaking to one another while he tipped the bowl to his mouth. “Speaking of wounds, you’ve stopped bleeding through your bandages,” Granby was saying. “I don’t suppose that knock on the head is what returned you your memory?”

“No, that was Tharkay,” Laurence said.

Tharkay choked. “What! How?” Granby said, reaching around as if to pat him on the back, then winced and pulled away from the whipping-bandages. “Tharkay, you fox, however did you manage that? Do you know how long the lot of us were praying for him to remember everything?”

Tharkay demurred by setting the bowl aside and burying his coughing fit into the crook of his elbow. “It was nothing that he did,” Laurence elaborated, in the totally unselfconscious accents of a man discussing yesterday’s weather. “I suppose I saw him and — simply knew him, as though I had never forgotten him to begin with.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes. I have lost details in between, ones I am not sure I will ever perfectly recover, but I assure you I recall everything of consequence since Temeraire’s egg was captured. Tenzing, the canteen is just to your left; make free of it, I beg you.”

“I am quite well,” Tharkay managed, emerging at last. “Only have a care what you tell me, Laurence. I am not quite yet recovered enough to hear you credit me with miracles.”

“In all fairness, we have seen you pull many a miracle out of your pocket,” Granby said. “Not the least of which is bringing us this news of the Grand Armée. We ought to make Government heap you with your own weight in gold, once we are home.”

“It would be little enough return,” Laurence added.

“Pray do not trouble yourselves. It is you who have worked wonders for me on this occasion,” Tharkay said, reflecting privately that if it came down to just reward, he would settle for the inheritance and his father’s estate. “But while we are on the subject, Laurence, exactly how much had you forgotten? I was under the impression that it was a short-term loss.”

Laurence glanced at Granby. Granby said, “Seven years, no? Give or take?”

“My memory had gone as far back as a few months before Temeraire hatched,” Laurence confirmed, looking back at Tharkay. “When I came to, the last thing I could recall was the Reliant.”

Tharkay asked, “And were you so different a man then?”

“In some respects,” Laurence said, with a startled look at him. “But in others, perhaps —”

“In others, you were exactly the same. A martinet to the core,” Granby said. “I beg your pardon for speaking so — it wasn’t your fault, and I don’t blame you — but it was maddening to look you in the face and know you, and see plain as day that you didn’t know me, nor anything about dragons, the Corps or your own damned self. You wouldn’t leave your rooms without your coat buttoned and a fresh neckcloth, and Heaven knows you were never unkind to Temeraire, but you were marching to a tune you’d stopped listening to the day you took the cure to France.” Having expressed so much frustration, he gave Tharkay a half-embarrassed, half-rueful look, as to a comrade-in-suffering. “I daresay you would have felt the same. It was wretched, watching him.”

“Then I must be glad to have been spared,” Tharkay said wryly.

Granby winced. “No — of course there are worse things. Damned sorry, Tharkay; I ought to think before I speak,” but Tharkay shook his head, and was able with a few firm words to dispel any concern that the remark had been taken ill.

Some time later, after he and Laurence had left to have a word with the senior officers who would lead the way to Peking and Russia respectively, and Tharkay had once again applied himself to the congee, now cold, Laurence reappeared in the tent entrance. “Are you comfortable?” he asked, hovering with one arm supporting the flap as if prepared to fetch the surgeon at a moment’s notice. “Shall I have some tea brought?”

Tharkay, who had tasted perhaps two flavours over the course of his imprisonment and neither of them wholesome, was not too proud to admit that tea would be welcome. Laurence ducked out again to call the surgeon’s assistant, then re-entered and sat an arm’s length away on the edge of the cot. “I am sorry we cannot give you more time to rest,” he said. “By all rights, you ought to be kept in hospital for a month, if not more.”

“Bonaparte will not wait a month,” Tharkay said. “I shall do very well, if you continue to help me on and off Temeraire, and presently I shall be able to latch myself on with a thumb or two.”

Frowning, Laurence gestured to the nearest of Tharkay’s hands, resting in his lap upon the covers. “May I?”

Tharkay lifted his hand, and Laurence, careful not to jostle the splints, let it be placed on his two open palms and tilted it into the light of the lantern, inspecting the ties of the bandages and the angry tint of the skin beneath, glistening with salve. “Are you in a great deal of pain?”

“Some; but that can hardly be cause for alarm under the circumstances.”

“And your fever has gone down?”

“It seems so.” Attentiveness such as this was bemusing in a man ordinarily never given to anything like fussing. “You will put the surgeons out of a job. I am not likely to perish from anything now, apart from the Russian cold — and a loss of pride,” Tharkay added ruefully. “It has been half a lifetime since I have found myself in a sickbed for any reason.”

“I beg your pardon. I do not mean to smother you,” Laurence said, laying his hand back down and letting go. “I was not as afraid as I ought to have been, when Arkady found us. Now I suppose I must be fearing for you retroactively.”

“To no purpose,” Tharkay observed. “There should not have been any reasonable window for fear, if you remembered all when you found me — although why that should have had any effect, I cannot fathom.”

“No.” Laurence’s gaze was distant, his brow creased. “I am at a loss to explain it myself. Perhaps you were only the final piece, if I may, of those seven years with whom I had not yet been reacquainted.” Here he hesitated, as if even he did not really believe that such was the case. “Or perhaps you simply have the knack of recalling me to myself when the need for it is greatest.”

In three years, he had never once alluded to what he had done in the English countryside on Wellington’s orders, nor what had ultimately roused him from his state of detachment. That he remembered this period of time with more than ordinary shame, Tharkay had always guessed; but that was owed more to their long acquaintance than to any outward symptom betrayed by Laurence himself. It was too ugly a subject to touch upon without cause. Now the invitation had been made, and in such grave tones that alarm bells rang deep in his consciousness, just as they had six years before by the overgrown fountain when, covered in slime and refuse, Laurence had looked at him and said, I think you like to be doubted. “You recalled yourself,” he said lightly. “Do not give me credit where none is due.”

“If it was not deliberate on your part,” Laurence answered, “it does not necessarily follow that no credit is due.” And abruptly, low, contemplating his clasped hands: “I never thanked you, Tenzing. I owe you my life many times over, and my honour, or what was left of it after we repelled the invasion. You have been as a guardian angel to me and Temeraire, and what we have done to deserve it, I shall never know. I can only thank God for setting me into your path all those years ago, and for returning you alive and well to me now. To us, that is,” he corrected himself hastily, as if catching in these words an unjust exclusion. “Temeraire feels as I do, and considers you quite as part of his crew. He would have been as grieved as myself had we arrived too late.”

It was at this moment that the surgeon’s assistant tapped on the tent supports and ducked inside with a steaming tray. Laurence thanked him and when asked, gave assurance that nothing else was presently wanted: the fever had not returned, and they would both soon be retiring for the night. Tharkay was thus accorded a few moments’ grace, and by the time the assistant vanished and left them alone again, had recovered his countenance tolerably well.

“Will this do?” Laurence asked, turning to him: he had wrapped the teacup in a rag, so that it would not scald the bare wrists if so handled.

Countenance was one thing, and composure another. Guardian angel, indeed; if it had been anyone, anyone else on the whole wretched face of the planet who had said this to him, he could not possibly have taken it seriously. Unable to so much as open his lips for a yes or no, he took the cup awkwardly between his wrists and then held it there on his knees, knowing that that was not what had silenced him at all.

“Have I said something amiss?” Laurence asked quietly.

“No,” Tharkay said, his gaze fixed on the dark red tea. “It is a comfort to know that my absence would be regretted.”

It sounded too much like something he would have said to deflect censure during that first journey to Istanbul, but Laurence did not press him; apart from his own deeply ingrained sense of tact, he too had developed over the course of their acquaintance an inconvenient instinct for Tharkay’s sincerity, when it was present and to what degree. Graciously he offered, “Perhaps you had better get some rest; I will leave you to sleep, if there is nothing that would make you more comfortable at present,” and stood. “Pray hail the surgeon or myself and Temeraire if you need anything: we shall be in direct earshot.”

“Thank you,” Tharkay said.

When it became clear he would say no more, Laurence nodded and pushed through the tent flaps, leaving them to fall shut with a rustle of canvas.

Tharkay looked down into his tea for a long time. Then he closed his eyes and, very softly, swore.

3.

“Very well, Captain; you may go,” said Viscount Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty. 

He and two other members of the board were arranged behind the crescent-shaped boardroom table like buoys in wigs, alternating red and white. Tharkay, standing to Laurence's right in polished boots, pressed trousers and the gold bars on his dark green lapel marking him as a captain of the Aerial Corps, said, “I beg your pardon?”

“You may go,” Melville repeated, so nasally that it came out rhyming with dew. “We would like a private word with Admiral Laurence.”

Laurence said, “Sir, our account is not yet concluded. We have yet to tell you of the part Long Tian Ning played in the battle of Reichenbach, and what ultimately swayed her in her decision to go to China.”

“We have read your accounts,” said Vice Admiral Yorke, looking down his nose at the sheaves of paper on the table in front of him. “It would hardly be a good use of time to continue to ask you to repeat yourselves; plainly what you have told us is in accordance with what you have written. We commend your diligence. Now we have a matter to raise with you alone, Admiral — unless, of course, there is anything else Captain Tharkay would like to bring to our attention.”

This was so abrupt and perfunctory a dismissal that Laurence’s shoulders stiffened in reaction. But Tharkay only said, “As you wish,” with a shallow bow, careless and courteous. “Good day, gentlemen.” He turned on one heel and in passing caught Laurence’s eye, as if to say, It makes no matter. Then his footfalls were resounding off the marble floor, and the great double doors clanged shut behind him.

“I will be plain with you, Admiral,” Melville announced before the echoes had even faded. “This whole business with the Celestial-Kazilik hatchling was most grievously mismanaged.”

“Mismanaged, sir?”

“In the first place, it ought to have been transported to England directly it was laid,” drawled Sir Graham Moore, from where he sat to Melville’s left.

“As Captain Tharkay and I have explained, sir,” said Laurence, “we were on the other side of the world at the time, in Japan, and had no choice but to bring it with us on the diplomatic mission to Peking.”

“Yes, and after the mission was concluded?” said Moore. “The Celestial and the Kazilik are British fighting-dragons. Their offspring is the rightful property of the Crown. It was your duty, and the duty of every other English captain present, to see the egg here as soon as possible, rather than leaving it in the hands of a nation which, if not our enemy, is equally not our ally, and which has no claim whatsoever upon the hatchling. How curious that you and all of your fellow captains seemed not to share this perspective.”

Given that this perspective cheerfully ignored the imminent invasion of Russia by Napoleon, and the necessity of Laurence and Temeraire’s presence there for the coordination of General Chu’s forces with the Russian army; that it made light of transporting a fragile, newly-laid egg across three continents beset by winter, warfare and scant food supply, and dismissed the far superior care that could be provided by the Imperial Court in Peking to the offspring of one of its own Celestials; and that it did not pay the meanest consideration to the personhood of dragons and their rights to determine the fate of their own hatchlings, Laurence did not find it curious in the slightest, and only felt his temper rising at this fresh evidence of willful stupidity. Before he could object, however, Melville raised a hand to interrupt.

“Be that as it may, Admiral, the salient point is this: you, Captain Tharkay and Captain Granby retrieved the egg from Fontainebleau and were present at its hatching, and none of your reports address why no attempt was made to harness it.”

Laurence stared. For a moment only: then speech returned, and with it a tidal wave of exasperation. “Sir,” he said, “from the first moments of Ning’s existence, she made plain to us that she would never submit to harnessing, and would regard any such attempt as an insult to her intelligence. Even if we had been foolish enough to try — even had Temeraire and Iskierka not been strongly opposed to the idea — we were escaped prisoners; we had no harness and no man to offer it.”

“You had belts on your person, did you not?” Yorke said contemptuously. “Makeshift harnesses have answered perfectly well in the past, as I understand it.”

“More to the point, you had Captain Tharkay,” Moore said. “You and Captain Granby were not at liberty, of course, but why did he not step forward to do his duty to his country, as you yourself once did?”

They were at last approaching the point of this pitiful excuse for a martial review. Laurence said, feeling heat creep up his nape and into his face, “If you are suggesting that his failure to attempt to impose harness upon an unaffiliated and clearly unwilling hatchling, who had just destroyed in a single breath the palace of Fontainebleau, in any way constitutes a failure to do his duty —”

“Our concerns are manifold, Admiral,” Melville said, cutting him off sharply, “and must be addressed.”

“Captain Tharkay has a right to answer for himself.”

“He shall. At a later date,” said Yorke. “Now, sir, if you would be so good: was he ever left alone with the hatchling on your journey to England?”

Laurence kept his voice level only with difficulty.  “I beg your pardon?”

“We understand that they are the most impressionable in their first week or so. Was it ever left alone with Captain Tharkay for any period of time?”

“No, sir.”

“Did he ever speak to it of China, or England for that matter?”

“No more than Captain Granby and myself, and that only as much as was necessary for the journey.”

Yorke pursed his lips. “And after you reached Britain?”

“After we reached Britain,” Laurence said coldly, “we were too much occupied in the business of marshalling the alliance against Bonaparte, and Ning herself in observing as a neutral party for her own purposes. May I ask to what these questions tend?”

Moore waved a lazily illustrative hand in the air. “Every report we have had of this dragonet concurs that it is intelligent, independent and highly dangerous. It might have gone anywhere it liked in the world, if it is as uncontrollable as you say. Why should it have chosen to render its services, and this incendiary ability, to the Chinese, to one day perhaps be turned against England, if it was not under a measure of influence by one who was present at its hatching and who surely possesses … divided sympathies?”

“Divided sympathies,” Laurence repeated, through his teeth.

“Is Captain Tharkay not half Oriental himself?” Moore said, peering at him over his spectacles. “Has he not spent his entire career with the East India Company wandering all over Creation, in China and with the Ottomans and Lord only knows where else?”

“He has been embroiled in a dispute over his late father’s estate for upwards of fifteen years,” Yorke put in meaningfully.

“Just so,” Moore said. “Any resentment harboured toward England may well have transmitted itself to the hatchling in those first weeks, creating so favourable an impression of China, and so unappealing a picture of Britain, that it may well have decided how to act once Bonaparte was defeated on the strength of this early bias — and that in the best case, of wholly unconscious influence.”

Laurence could tolerate no more.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a voice so tightly controlled that his chest shook with the effort of it, “if you presume that a dragon cannot act independently of, and contrary to, the will of men, you commit the same grievous error of judgment which nearly cost us the war with France. Ning emerged from the shell with a mature understanding of the world around her and was perfectly capable of withholding her support from every party involved until she knew what would be most advantageous for herself. She cannot be worked upon, and she cannot be led. To think otherwise is to mistake both her and the grounds upon which all future relations between our nations must be built.”

Melville said sharply, “I hardly think, Admiral —”, but Laurence barrelled over him, his voice rising passionately.

“And you mistake me, sir, if you believe that I may be applied to for cooperation in what is clearly an effort to find a scapegoat for her not having chosen to stay in England, particularly when your chosen course is to slander a man who has time and again contributed materially to the struggle against Bonaparte, and risked life and limb to advance his country’s interests. Without Captain Tharkay,” he continued, ever louder, easily overriding Yorke’s half-spoken interjection, “the mission to Istanbul to retrieve the Kazilik egg would have failed a hundred times over, and we would never have had a fire-breather to rely upon. Without Captain Tharkay, fifteen thousand men would have been killed or taken prisoner in the year six at Danzig, and all the feral dragons he brought into our fold would not have been there to support the Corps when Bonaparte crossed the Channel.”

“And what might have prevented that, sir?” Yorke interrupted, pouncing on the half-moment’s pause. “Might you recall?”

Laurence disdained to answer this. “It was Captain Tharkay who hazarded, and indeed underwent, capture and torture to bring us advance intelligence of Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia. It was he who told us of Ning’s egg being taken in the first place, that we might recapture it from France.” He knew he was shouting loud enough to be heard out in the corridor, and that haranguing the highest Lords of the Admiralty in the middle of Whitehall would not improve his reputation, Tharkay’s case or Temeraire’s hopes for Parliament, but at that moment he would have surrendered all his worldly possessions for the liberty to challenge them for this insult. “He has been as constant an agent of Britain’s interests as any of yourselves, if not more, and the implication that he would stoop to malign persuasions of the kind you are attempting to ascribe to him is too offensive to be tolerated. I must demand that you withdraw it.”

“You cannot possibly imagine that you may demand any such thing,” Moore said.

“I can and I shall, sir, when this line of questioning seeks to ruin the good name of an honest Englishman, with no just cause and to no great purpose.” Here Laurence made a great effort to check the thundering vehemence of his voice and finished, low, “I must beg to be excused: I will not answer any more questions of this sort.”

“Perhaps you are right, Admiral,” sneered Yorke. “Perhaps it was not Captain Tharkay’s influence which swayed this Ning hatchling at all.”

“If you wish to try someone near to hand for her choice, sir, then by all means, try me,” Laurence said. “I would rather that than hear impugned to my face the honour of one of the best men I have ever known, and a truer friend to Britain than she has been to him.”

Melville, who had by now fairly reddened with outrage himself, said flatly, “That you have grown accustomed to thumbing your nose at the chain of command,  I am well aware, but this is beyond the pale. Refuse to answer and you will face the severest possible sanctions.”

“Indeed?” Laurence said. “I am sorry to hear it. I will submit to whatever your lordships deem most suitable. But I will not cooperate.”

There was a silence as the three men behind the table chewed over this.

“By your leave, then, sir,” Melville said at last, darkly. “We have heard everything we need; and we must not keep you.”

Laurence gave a single stiff bow, turned on his heel and stalked out.

To his dismay, Tharkay was waiting just outside with his hands clasped behind his back, not at a safe distance down the hall but directly in front of the doors, between the two redcoats standing guard; all too easy for him to have feigned incomprehension when asked to leave, and said enough, in heavily accented English, to imply that he would understand nothing of what he overheard. Laurence stopped dead as the doors shut behind him, and Tharkay looked back at him with an expression that Laurence had never seen him wear before: almost incredulous.

One of the redcoats cleared his throat significantly. In silence, they set off together down the corridors, passing secretaries in starched neckcloths and bureaucrats with their papers, runners in street-going clothes bearing packets and the occasional marine or naval officer formally dressed in coat, stockings and buckled shoes, talking together under the framed portraits and seascapes. Laurence was unhappily aware of the less-than-dignified display he must have made, leaving the room crimson-faced and furious after speaking of Tharkay, behind his back, at a volume that would have rendered the words audible from bow to stern of the late Allegiance, and in so impolitic a manner as to create fresh difficulties with Government for all three of them. But it was a greater mortification still to know that Tharkay had heard every baseless accusation made against him; every false, cowardly, gratuitous word.

“Forgive me,” he said under his breath, as they descended the staircase that spilled out into the great vestibule. “I ought to have made them call you back inside, or demanded that your superiors in Intelligence be present. They had no right to suggest such a thing — no grounds whatsoever.”

Tharkay made no sign that he had heard, but led the way across the vestibule and out of Whitehall, into the din of the city, and started down the street so as not to be run over by anyone hurrying in and out of the building. Then, abruptly, he stopped.

Laurence came to stand beside him, and looked at him without attempting to conceal it. He could not have said what had earlier given him the impression of incredulity, only that it had vanished; but Tharkay had halted mid-stride as if he wished to say something, facing forward without really seeing, and his mouth twisted: what in another man would have been an outright laugh. It was almost more alarming to find him without a ready scathing word to deliver.

Across the street, a young boy about nine years of age was hawking newspapers, visible here and there through gaps in the milling passerby. “Paper for a bob!” he called, waving one around and holding the rest stacked together under the other arm. “Latest news for your dinner, kind sir? Just a bob — thank you! … Paper for a bob! Dragons running for Parliament, three for the London District alone, five for Scotland, and two in Wales … Paper to share with your ladies, ma’am? Much obliged …”

But Laurence need not have fretted: after another moment, Tharkay turned to face him and repeated, with cool, withering emphasis on each syllable, “‘An honest Englishman’?”

“Oh,” Laurence said, blankly. “I beg your pardon, I …”

“Never mind,” Tharkay said. “I am honoured that you would provoke the Admiralty to defend my character, Will, but I do not answer to them; I never have. They did not even come out in full force to cross-examine us.”

“They insulted you.”

“They ordered me out first. That is not a court-martial — it is an attempt at striking a back-alley bargain, however ill-judged on their part.”

He was right. Of course he was right: they had as good as offered to let him direct the blame for Ning’s departure in the most convenient direction, away from himself. And whatever happened now, it could not be decent to act in anger when Tharkay himself had no such liberty. “Yes,” Laurence said. “Forgive me, Tenzing. I ought not to have lost my temper. Though I scarcely know how I could have answered them differently.”

“No,” Tharkay said dryly, “nor do I.” And with a tilt of his head down the street, “Come, Temeraire is waiting; and your nieces and nephews at home. I will walk you as far as the covert.”

He started down the street again at a decided pace, and Laurence had nothing left to do but fall into stride with him, dwelling on his earlier choice of words in silence.

4.

“Duman.” 

“Fumée,” Temeraire said. “That is too close to the Russian for fog; something more difficult, if you please.”

“Very well,” Tharkay said, amused. “Kyslytsia.”

“Sauerampfer,” Temeraire said, after a moment’s consideration. “That is easy too; they both start with sour. But where did you learn the word for sorrel, Tharkay? I only learned it because we had to forage so much with the Prussians in the year six.”

“The East India Company had us use a bouquet of code words during the war,” Tharkay said. “I shall tell them to you, if you like, but they are rather disparate, and may not be as useful to you in your work for Parliament.”

They were flying down the southwestern coast of Ayrshire beneath a lemon-yellow sky, shading in gradual stages to periwinkle and violet as dusk encroached upon Scotland; and the game was one they had developed months ago as a means to challenge and, if necessary, improve one another’s memory for language. The latter was mostly for Tharkay’s benefit, as Temeraire did not forget anything once he had learnt it, but it was still very pleasant to volley words back and forth with someone who had as much of a gift for it as anyone could, who was not a Celestial. As they winged their way over the forests toward home, Tharkay tested Temeraire’s Turkish, his Durzagh and his Cantonese, which he had had little opportunity to absorb during their travels in China, before they were lulled into silence by the steady beat of his wings.

Beneath them were grassy slopes melting into tide-washed beaches, and rocky promontories jutting here and there from the coastline. It was June, and the sea salt air brisk and pleasantly ticklish in the nostrils; and when at last they turned inland, the warm updraft carried them for a few miles as if in cheerful parting. Temeraire, luxuriating in all his senses, had just begun wondering idly if he and Laurence ought to begin Udolpho for their nightly reading when Tharkay said something, a single word swallowed up by the voiceless whistling of the wind. “Pardon?” Temeraire said, angling his head around to better see the sole passenger crouched by his shoulder.

Tharkay was gazing out at the prospect before them: a darkly forested hillscape, and to the east, lake water gleaming like steel in the fading light. “Akaasa,” he repeated.

Puzzled, Temeraire rolled the word around in his mouth and found that no tongue he knew would answer. “What language is that?”

For several wingbeats, there was no response.

Then Tharkay said, “Nepali,” terse and scarcely audible. “My mother tongue.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said. He did not speak Nepali. And Tharkay was certainly aware of that, which meant that he had not been playing the game or speaking to Temeraire at all. “What does it mean?”

“‘Sky.’”

Temeraire mulled this over, absently angling his wings to catch a stronger current of air.

Laurence had chided him more than once for prying into the personal affairs of all their mutual acquaintance. Any particulars, he firmly believed, which did not concern them and were not willingly volunteered, ought never to be encroached upon; and while Tharkay might have spoken whimsically at first, he did not seem inclined to pursue the subject, and he had never mentioned Nepali in Temeraire’s hearing before. It was certainly a private matter into which Laurence himself would not have presumed to inquire.

But such principles could not apply in this case: Tharkay knew all their private affairs, and if he did not wish his own to be encroached upon, then he would not have invited them to come and live on his estate. And Laurence was not here, anyway, so if there was ever a time to pry a little, it ought to be now. Buoyed by this rationale, Temeraire asked, “Tharkay, will you teach me to speak Nepali? I am sure it would be very interesting, and we could practice together the next time Laurence catches cold and cannot come flying with us.”

“I have no objection,” Tharkay said, with a slowness that belied his words. “But I must warn you, I will be a poor instructor.”

“Whyever should you be? It is your mother tongue.” This seemed to Temeraire, who had always acquired languages directly from native speakers thereof, an advantage that trumped all other possible considerations.

Tharkay said, “And I have had no one to converse with in it since I was a child. Men may lose their fluency in any language they do not put to use, particularly if it is confined to a single small country on the other side of the world. But perhaps it would be as well for us to make conversational partners for each other,” he added, with a jauntiness too abrupt to be convincing. “I will do what I can. And should you ever encounter another speaker who knows enough to lay bare all my deficiencies, you will forgive my having in any way misled you.”

“I did not know that one’s mother tongue could ever be lost,” Temeraire confided to Laurence that night, having coiled himself up neatly by the open balcony doors. “It would be very inconvenient if I forgot Chinese or English and could not easily learn it again, and there was no one nearby to correct me if I got something wrong.”

“Temeraire, wait,” Laurence broke in, a little thickly: he had spent the day recovering from a fever contracted after falling into the river during an early summer thunderstorm, when the cook’s young son had gotten lost on the Strathvagan property and he and Tharkay had gone out looking for him. “I hope I am not ungracious in the asking, but are you quite certain that none of this was in the nature of a confidence?”

“Why — no,” Temeraire said, sitting up in surprise. “Why should it have been?”

“Well,” Laurence said, “he does not in the ordinary course of our days speak of anything so close to his heart. He may have wished to vouchsafe something to you and rely upon its not reaching my ears.”

“He knows there are no secrets between us,” Temeraire pointed out. “If he did not want me to tell you, he ought to have said so.”

“We are his friends.” Laurence glanced sidelong at the balcony doors, one suite over, which belonged to their host: dark, all the candles within snuffed out. “We owe him our discretion, not only in the midst of larger society but with each other. He may have reservations about sharing something with me which he would not have with you.”

“But why? We already know everything about the estate and his spy work and all his unpleasant relations. And it is not as though you did not know about his mother being Nepali,” Temeraire said. “You could have worked out for yourself what his mother tongue must be.”

“That is not what I meant,” Laurence said. When Temeraire twitched his ruff in silent prompt, he hesitated, frowning down at his hands where they clasped the blankets together, before reluctantly continuing. “On some subjects, I can offer no more than a willing ear; and sympathy, if it will be accepted. You, however, have a greater understanding of what it is to be divided between nations, and to have your liberties curtailed as a consequence of how and where you were born. If Tenzing wished to speak of such things to you, it would hardly be my place to intrude.”

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, “I think even you must realize that you are being over-scrupulous.” He put his head down over the balcony railing, to which Laurence responded not merely by stroking his muzzle but by leaning himself bodily against the bridge of Temeraire’s snout: sure proof of some inward anxiety. “He has already agreed to teach me, and we were hardly going to have our lessons in secret.”

“No, I suppose not,” Laurence said.

“You ought not worry about our intruding anymore,” Temeraire added meaningfully.

“Indeed not. I am sorry to keep bringing us round to the same question, my dear.” Laurence turned to lean his cheek against Temeraire’s scales. “I only wish I could be as certain as you are.”

In spite of these qualms, he made a tentative inquiry the next morning at breakfast, which the three of them had gotten into the habit of taking by Temeraire’s pavilion in fair weather. Tharkay answered crisply and with no apparent compunction. “Yes, whatever fluency I may have retained will soon be Temeraire’s also. Today I would like to review the southern parcel, but tomorrow I am for Edinburgh to speak to my banker, and if Temeraire has no pressing business and will consent to take me, we may have our first lesson on the wing.”

“Of course,” Temeraire said. “And it is good that you are going to see your moor-land — the heather there is very much overgrown. I had hoped that you would notice.”

“I saw it yesterday as we were flying out,” Tharkay said. “Mrs Hornsby is going into town today with the notice for the groundskeeper’s post. But once we have one, I think I will ask him not to take too much off the heather; it would be a pity to undo fifteen years of free growth in a day.”

“And it does no harm to anyone,” Laurence agreed. “Shall we set off directly? I will just shift into something less likely to tear.”

This proposition, made as it was in an impressively congested voice, was met with silence. Then Temeraire began, disapprovingly, “Laurence —”

“Had you not better stay and rest?” Tharkay asked.

“I had much better get some fresh air and exercise,” Laurence said firmly. “It is ridiculous to be laid up with a cold in June. How you escaped without so much as a sniffle, I will never understand.”

“You may credit it to my not having taken an impromptu swim,” Tharkay said. “But if you are fit to go, I would of course be obliged to you for your company.”

Laurence’s shoulders had relaxed. Temeraire, who had never had any doubt that his learning Nepali would and ought to be an open subject between the three of them, and who moreover knew that this surveying amounted to little more than taking a pleasant stroll amid the hyacinth and hawthorn and then deciding that it would do very well just the way it was, relented also; he was due to make the rounds among his constituents that morning, and had some letters to dictate besides. Tharkay could be trusted not to let Laurence’s health deteriorate in any fatal direction.

He proved to be an able enough teacher, despite the attempts at demurral: his Nepali was well-preserved, and though swathes of vocabulary were missing, the structure, the instinct for it remained. His delivery became smoother by degrees as Temeraire grew able to match him in conversation, and so proportionally did his reticence diminish. During one of their early, simple exchanges, Tharkay told him that he had sojourned in that country only twice during his career: once on his own prerogative, to locate and pay his respects to his mother’s family, and once, very briefly, on Company business, which opportunity he had taken to ferret out any printed literature that he might bring back home with him. “There was precious little to be had, then as now,” he said. “I was only able to buy a copy of a few old myths at a monastery, from a monk who likely was not supposed to have them in the first place.”

He brought it out of the library to show it to them: a roll of paper softened and rendered alarmingly fragile by many years’ travelling through dry and humid climes. Temeraire — and Laurence, who had begun to join the lessons, more for their society than because he hoped to learn himself, Temeraire suspected — peered over Tharkay’s shoulder as he showed them the compact script, and drew the characters large for Temeraire in his sand-table.

“I have searched the library,” Laurence said to Temeraire the next evening, seated comfortably upon Temeraire’s foreleg in the lantern-lit pavilion with Udolpho open in his lap. “Everything is in English or some other European language; there is certainly nothing else in Nepali.”

“Well, it must have been very difficult to obtain anything while he was there,” Temeraire said. “And even if he had wanted to, he could not have carried very much back with him.”

“No,” Laurence said.

Having put paid to this line of conversation, he ought to have picked up the book and begun reading, but he only thumbed at it ruminatively, staring out across the grounds “What is it?” Temeraire asked.

“He smiles during your lessons,” Laurence said, almost to himself. “I have never seen him so unguarded under any circumstances — in any other language.”

It had never even occurred to Temeraire that Tharkay might still be restraining himself in their company. “I suppose,” he lied.

“I scarcely know if such a thing would be feasible,” Laurence said, “and I do not mean to disparage your abilities or his in the slightest, but have either of you considered seeking an introduction to another native speaker? It may well advance your studies; and Tenzing has remarked several times that there is much that he does not remember.”

“Ah,” Temeraire said wisely, perking up at once. “I am far ahead of you, Laurence. I have already written to Mei, and I expect I will soon hear from her as to whether it can be done.”

Laurence looked up, confused. “Whether what can be done?”

“I will not say, just yet. It is a surprise for Tharkay,” Temeraire said. “If nothing comes of it, I will just have to try something else, quietly. But pray, begin reading: Miss Morland has been asking me daily if I have started yet, and if I disappoint her again she might refuse to take my next letter. Or simply tell me the whole book off by heart and spoil it,” he added under his breath.

*

Yet something did come of it, as quickly as anyone might have hoped. Summer, autumn and a bitter winter passed, during which Laurence’s and Tharkay’s hands began to smell pungently of medicinal salve whenever either reached out to pat Temeraire’s nose or stroke his scaled cheek; Laurence’s discreet inquiries into the presence of any speakers of Nepali living in London all returned negatives; and their new groundskeeper, an old mustachioed fellow by the name of Burnish, began nursing the estate back to health. Temeraire’s lessons hit a standstill when Tharkay began casting about for every possible subject on which to converse, and declared after much experimentation that they had come up against the limits of his memory: what he did not know, he would never now remember.

“I am sure we know everything of importance,” Temeraire said stoutly. “Why, I do not know the word for shark in German or punctilious in Turkish; why should I, when it was not relevant at the time and likely will never be? And anyway, many things can simply be described with other words.”

“Certainly,” said Tharkay, but with a rueful twist to his smile.

Later that evening, he joined them in the pavilion and listened to Laurence read with his head tipped back against Temeraire’s foreleg, gazing expressionless into the dark. After an interminable, dreamy hour in which the lantern-light began dancing before his eyes, Temeraire thought he heard Laurence close the book and slide off. “I think that may do for tonight,” he said. Another shuffle, as of a man choosing to sit upon the floor, and his familiar weight re-materialized against Temeraire’s foreleg beside Tharkay’s. “How do you like the novel?”

“Plainly nothing good will come to him, having cheated God,” said Tharkay, meaning the English doctor with the German name. But his tone was distant, and he offered no further comment, though on previous occasions he had derived much amusement from Temeraire’s newly acquired taste for sordid Gothic literature.

After a while Laurence asked, “Does something trouble you?”

Temeraire’s lids kept opening and then drifting closed again, glimpsing Laurence, shoulder-to-shoulder with Tharkay, who did not meet his gaze but stared out across his estate as if at the featureless horizon of the sea. There was a long silence during which Temeraire must have fallen asleep, disturbed only by Tharkay’s murmur.

“— realize how much I did not know.” His tone was soft and laced with bitterness. “I am three and forty, and I can say less than a boy of twelve. It is a victory that my cousins will never know they have won.”

Laurence said, “Surely it is not their victory, but yours, for having retained and, indeed, improved upon a language which was denied you nearly all your life.”

“Perhaps,” Tharkay said, noncommittal. “Forgive me, Will: I am morose.”

“Not at all.”

Temeraire drifted half-asleep, lulled by their voices and by the lantern-light. At length Tharkay commented, “It would have been something, I suppose, to have a real book — poetry, or a novel. Something of beauty. But if there is a printing press in the Himalayas, I have not heard of it, and nothing is likely to be published in Nepali anywhere else in the world.”

The next week, a trio of dragons appeared in the sky to the southeast: two of the crimson fighting-dragons which comprised the Chinese aerial forces and one wholly unfamiliar, striped black and yellow down the lean length of his body with a black crest rising from the skull, like a feathered comb. “Aha!” Temeraire cried, setting down upon the grounds; he and Laurence were just returning from their morning’s flight. “They have come at last; I kept thinking it ought to be today, and then they would not come, and I did not know how much longer we would have to wait. I must think of some way to thank Mei, some favour I may do her. Pray, Laurence, do not be distressed — this fellow is my guest, and Tharkay’s if he will agree to it.” And calling out in Nepali, “Good morning! Are you Acharya?”

“I am,” said the black-and-yellow dragon, once each party had landed, and once his Chinese escort had paid their respects to Temeraire — who inclined his head graciously — and to Laurence, who looked pained yet managed a bow. “Long Tian Xiang — your Imperial Highness — I thank you with all my heart for receiving me here; it is an privilege to make your acquaintance,” and so on went the pleasantries, with Laurence too polite to ask Temeraire what the devil he was about and the other three perfectly unconscious of having descended upon a stranger’s home without prior warning, and then Tharkay himself was striding out of the house, straightening one of his cuffs as he approached.

They had switched into Chinese for the introductions, and it was in this tongue that Acharya now greeted his host, thanking him elegantly for the invitation of which, Temeraire realized belatedly, Tharkay was hearing now for the first time. He ought to have been warned, of course, when Mei’s answer arrived, but Temeraire had been too intent on the lovely surprise of the thing and put it off; and indeed even now he nearly trembled with suppressed excitement before finally bursting out in Nepali, “Tharkay, Acharya is a great translator and poet, and he has come to have a look at our printing presses. There is one nearby at Maybole, is there not?”

Tharkay looked surprised at him, and then at Acharya; and Laurence laid a hand on Temeraire’s side in sudden understanding.

“There is,” Tharkay answered, slowly, in the same language, and glanced but once more at Temeraire before turning his full attention onto his guest. “We are tolerably familiar with the family who owns it; they have been printing pamphlets for the dragons in our constituency. I would be very happy to introduce you.”

Acharya looked equally taken aback at being answered in his native tongue, and then said, apparently with equal parts disbelief and delight, “Why, you have a Tanahun accent yourself! Of course, I would be very much obliged to you for the introduction, and for the opportunity to carry back the knowledge of how it may be constructed and operated. We must have one; we must have written texts, literature, when so much of what the monks and Bahuns have is in Sanskrit, which no one else can read. I have already nearly finished translating the Ramayana; if we can only contrive to have it printed, it ought to reach households and schools if not the priesthood. But I am being rude, my lord: pray where does your family hail from? I myself grew up in Chundi Ramgha, though much of my education placed me on the Ganges.”

“A poet,” Laurence repeated, once they had drawn a little ways off; the escort dragons had been settled for a rest and a meal in Temeraire’s pavilion, but Tharkay was still deep in discussion with Acharya, who had with the boldness of a fellow countryman plunged into the interrogation which the two of them had tactfully avoided for a decade. “It is beyond anything. How long is he to stay?”

“A few weeks at most,” Temeraire said. “Do you think Tharkay will mind?”

“I suppose this is what you meant last summer when you said you wished to surprise him. He is a lightweight,” Laurence said dryly. “He ought not to deplete the herds. But, my dear, Tenzing might have preferred a little advance warning in order to make his guest more comfortable, and settle his affairs for the month. What if he should not be at liberty to have as much intercourse with him as he should like?”

“Then we would assist him with his affairs until he was at liberty.” But Temeraire was conscious of having blundered, and lowered his head to say contritely, “You are right: it was not politic, and I shall apologize. But you do think he is pleased, Laurence?”

They both looked; or rather, Temeraire lifted his whole head, and Laurence glanced discreetly in the same direction. At this distance they could not see Tharkay’s expression, only that his posture had at present nothing of the aloof composure that was second nature to him, when faced with human strangers. But they were not long held in suspense: Acharya crouched and sprang aloft, wheeling toward the nearby woods, and Tharkay turned and crossed the lawn toward them.

“He will remain a month,” he called as soon as he entered into earshot, “or as long as he requires to obtain a draft of the printing press, and Long Shao Wei and Jiang will escort him back across Europe,” and stopped before them with his hands clasped behind his back. “I understand that I am to assist him in instructing you in Nepali, as payment for having been conveyed at Imperial expense halfway across the world for a machine he could have found five times over in India, let alone anywhere on the Continent.”

“Well, perhaps he could not be sure of finding a proper welcome in India, or anywhere on the Continent,” Temeraire said, which feeble excuse was only worth giving up immediately. “Oh, I am sorry, Tharkay; this is your home, and I have imposed three dragons we do not know on you without warning. But I did not know when exactly they would arrive, and I wanted to repay you somehow for everything you have given us; and Laurence said our lessons made you so very happy.”

Tharkay’s gaze slid to Laurence’s face, and rested there. “Did he?”

“My dear,” Laurence stammered — stammered, and Temeraire looked down at him in surprise; he was not the one who had committed the solecism of throwing a guest upon another man’s hospitality — “my dear, I said no such thing; I said only that Tenzing seemed to enjoy them very much. It is his mother tongue, it was not — it could not have been an academic exercise for him, as it was for you.”

“It was not an academic exercise,” Temeraire said, baffled still more at this incoherent and totally unnecessary defense. “Tharkay can speak all of my first languages, and I cannot speak his: that is why I wished to learn. And now we shall be able to learn all the words we do not know, and perhaps Acharya will even teach me Sanskrit and Hindi — and Tharkay, too, of course,” he added guiltily. “And Laurence, but,” lowering his head again to rumble in his ear, “perhaps you ought to practice your characters first before starting on another language, just to be sure you have not forgotten anything important,” and Laurence, evidently chagrined by the reminder, ventured no further remark on the subject.

This reluctance to speak evaporated shortly, however. They were only into their first week of lessons with Acharya, interspersed with flying tours around Ayrshire, when Laurence emerged from the house late one evening with a determined expression and came to the pavilion, where their guest had begun quietly teaching Temeraire Hindi. “Sir,” he said to Acharya, in heavily accented but passably comprehensible Chinese, “I understand that you are a translator as well as a writer by profession. I would value extremely your opinion, and Temeraire’s, on the viability of a project I have in mind which may find a willing audience here as much as in your country,” and described it for them, sounding half as though he expected to be told it was pure foolishness.

“But what a splendid idea!” Temeraire said jubilantly, and at once Laurence laid a finger to his lips and glanced over his shoulder, at the lit windows of the house. “Oh, of course it must be a surprise. And certainly I will help,” Temeraire added, in a much lower voice. “The Druckers will bind it for a commission, I am sure. Acharya, we would be happy to negotiate one with you as well, if you think it will be interesting work.”

“Consider my price a copy of the blueprints and several sketches of the press,” Acharya said, without even making a pretense of deliberation. “You will receive a share when I have it printed back home, naturally, as a co-author. You will have to do all the English yourself, I am afraid; it is far too late in life for me to be learning a new tongue.”

“And Laurence can read us poetry and help choose the best ones,” Temeraire finished.

Laurence looked relieved, if somewhat disorientated, to hear the whole of it so neatly disposed of, and with so little application to himself for linguistic assistance. “Then we ought to begin here, tomorrow, at the same hour,” he said. “Lord Strathvagan is in the habit of writing letters at this time, and I shall contrive to hint that you are only tutoring me in Chinese.”

*

None of them had accounted for the difficulty of so much translation in their originally allotted time for the visit, and so it was rather two months later that Acharya departed from the estate with the promised blueprints, sketches and secret manuscript tucked into his belly-netting, escorted by his honour guard. The two Chinese dragons had been entertained very nearly as well as the poet himself by Temeraire, who was conscious of his obligations as a host and ravenous for news of Peking, and of that upstart Ning, who by the sound of it was shaping up to be the tyrant he himself could have become if not for his moral principles and which Iskierka would certainly have become if she had anything resembling common sense. “You have been a more than gracious host,” Acharya said, bowing his head deeply to Tharkay, who had come to see them off and hand over a stack of letters destined for his mother’s family. “I will give them your direction when I find them, and the happy news.”

Tharkay bowed in return and added to the general farewells, “You will be welcome here should you ever find yourself back in Scotland,” despite the unlikelihood of such an event. Watching him, Temeraire could not have said if he looked different speaking Nepali, as Laurence had claimed a year ago, but he certainly sounded different: his language was less courtly, almost candid. “If you write to us when you have finished your epic, we would be glad to buy a copy from you.”

“I will send you a copy myself,” Acharya said, and with a final bow to Laurence and a wink to Temeraire, he and Wei and Jiang sprang aloft with a great beating of their wings. The imperial safe-conduct, and the alliance with China, would see him home by the equinox.

That autumn, a package arrived for them from Maybole. Laurence brought it to Temeraire first, to admire and to ensure that no mistakes had been made which could be corrected at the last moment, before wrapping it back up with paper and twine; and that evening, on the great central balcony adjacent to the third-floor sitting room, high up enough that Temeraire did not need to hunch to participate in the exchange, he presented it to Tharkay.

“Thank you,” Tharkay said, his tone more interrogative than appreciative: he could scarcely avoid guessing that it was a book, from the shape and heft of it, and they were none of them much in the habit of giving gifts to one another. “Should you like me to open it now?”

“If you please,” Temeraire said.

Glancing round at them both again, Tharkay untied the string and unwrapped the package. Laurence took the wrapping from him, and Temeraire watched eagerly as the small leather-bound volume appeared in his hands. No title was imprinted into the cover, and it gleamed unbroken where it caught the rays of the setting sun. Tharkay half smiled — almost smiled, rather, with the corner of his mouth — and opened it; and the smile vanished.

Temeraire squashed his first, instinctive dismay: this was not a man who went into throes of delight over anything. Better to covertly watch Laurence for cues, as he would certainly be the first to sense if the gift were well received and how the reverse case should be managed.

Yet Tharkay’s aspect did not change in any other indicative respect. He looked down at the title page for a long time without speaking, and then carefully, with the tips of his fingers, as one would for spider-silk, began turning the pages.

Laurence had chosen a few poems in French for the collection, but mostly in English, and Acharya and Temeraire had added several of those they knew by heart in Chinese. Half the book fit nearly fifty of these, with the original on the left and a translation in Nepali on the right; the second half was reversed, with nearly all Acharya’s memory for Nepali poems, including his own, translated. And all of it, every painstaking line written in Laurence’s own hand, elegant in English and French, passing fair in Chinese, and mortally, scrupulously careful with the Nepali script, so new and unfamiliar to him that he had written the characters over and over in the sand-tables until he had mastered them to Acharya’s satisfaction, and probably on paper in his own rooms as well: Temeraire had seen the windows of his suite shining late at night for the past several weeks. They had decided on the first night that there was no question of creating a new movable type for the project, and so they had translated, and Laurence had scribed, and by now Temeraire was so familiar with the poems they had chosen and in what order that he knew precisely which one Tharkay had turned the page to, and when.

… O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company …

Tharkay’s lips parted as he read, and moved once or twice, just shy of whispering aloud to himself. He did not linger on any poem — still conscious, perhaps, of being observed, some answer expected — but he kept turning the pages methodically, one after the other, spellbound and silent.

Earth has not any thing to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning, silent, bare;
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
 Open unto the fields and to the sky,
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air …

Laurence was quiet too, watching Tharkay read without any visible intention of interrupting, holding the crumpled paper and string in both hands as though he had forgotten about it. There was no sound but that of a robin singing somewhere over the grounds, to gild the dying afternoon light.

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it …

“It was all Laurence’s notion,” Temeraire ventured at last, uneasy at the lack of reaction: he did not know what they would do if Tharkay turned out to be indifferent to poetry. “He said you ought to have something new to read in Nepali, and I thought perhaps you and I could read from it together, for practice. Acharya and I did the translations, but Laurence found a great many of the poems for us in English — and he wrote it all out himself, which was a great deal of work,” he added, because any such scholarly impulses ought to be encouraged in Laurence now that he was retired. “The Druckers only bound it for us, as we could not do it ourselves. I think his Chinese penmanship has improved remarkably, do you not?”

“If it is at all legible, I shall count it a success,” Laurence said quietly.

Tharkay turned the book over in his hands and closed it. His lips were pressed together again and his expression recomposed, but when he lifted his face to theirs, and regarded Laurence, Temeraire belatedly heard the silence like a struck bell: he was not indifferent, at all.

“I hope we do not presume too far,” Laurence began, awkward, but Tharkay shook his head once, and without a word stepped forward and embraced him.

Perhaps it was all he could do. Even then it was clearly intended to be brief, and so it would have been had Laurence not returned it at once, with the warmth of twelve years’ acquaintance and all the startled pleasure of taking a liberty unexpectedly offered. They held one another a few moments more before breaking apart, and Temeraire, who felt that some verbal acknowledgement of the other author of this gift was called for, said a little plaintively, “But is it to your liking, Tharkay?”

“Yes,” Tharkay said, in a voice oddly roughened. “Very much.” When Temeraire put his head over the balcony railing in invitation, Tharkay laid a hand on his scaled muzzle, and held it there. “Thank you both,” he said.

And Laurence, flushed to the roots, turned and watched the sun disappear over the forested horizon.

5.

The collected ballads were for the most part not to Temeraire’s taste, though he had picked them out himself from the Edinburgh bookshops. “But that’s ridiculous,” he would often burst out, interrupting Laurence, who was tucked against him within the pavilion and well sheltered from the snow and frost of early January. “Why should he,” or more often she, depending on the story, “agree to answer some silly riddles in order to mate, when if he is so great a lord, he should be able to find someone else who is just as beautiful and not so difficult? It would be one thing if she wanted to be sure he was not simple or uneducated, and set him some mathematical problems — and I suppose the bit about the cherry without the stone was clever,” he added grudgingly. “But then she added six questions onto the first three, and he did not even challenge her for being false.”

After the third such objection, Tharkay, who had joined them for the night’s reading, remarked idly, “I suppose the founding presupposition is that a lord may be induced to do anything for love of a lady, and the reverse.”

“But that is not even true,” Temeraire grumbled. “All these poems have them doing nothing but lying and breaking promises to one another, and more often than not they both die in a very stupid way that anyone could have prevented if they cared to.”

He was better satisfied with the tale of a Lady Isabel who slew the elven knight trying to rob and murder her. As soon as Laurence read, “‘Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man / Lie there instead of me / For if six pretty maidens thou hast drowned here / The seventh has drowned thee,’” Temeraire declared, “Well, that is something more like,” and went on to hope aloud that the next ten ballads would also conclude with justice being done by the downtrodden to the rich and powerful. These prayers not being answered after another half-hour, he told Laurence, with an air of disappointment and mild disgust, to put the book away and bring out the Nepali translations.

This Laurence was not sorry to do, for it meant that he could rest his voice and listen to Tharkay read instead, coolly measuring out stanzas and metred lines as though he sat at a pianoforte and not in a dragon pavilion, sheltered beside him beneath the great black wing.

“‘… But thundering as he came prepared,
With ready arm and weapon bared,
The wily quarry shunned the shock,
And turned him from the opposing rock;
Then, dashing down a darksome glen,
Soon lost to hound and Hunter's ken,
In the deep Trosachs' wildest nook
His solitary refuge took.’”

He has a fine voice for it, Laurence thought; and tipped his head back against Temeraire’s flank.

A moment later — what seemed only a moment — he blinked awake to see Tharkay standing, having already tucked the small volume back into his pocket. “No, I am awake,” he said automatically, even before properly registering that Temeraire had whispered the question. “I beg your pardon, my dear. Shall we have another?”, a nonsensical offer, when they had brought only the two books.

“No, thank you, Laurence,” Temeraire said. “You and Tharkay had much better go inside; I can see you are getting tired.”

Laurence would have disputed this if he did not need to brace himself on Temeraire’s side to clamber up. “Are you warm enough?”

“I will call for Burnish to heap up the coals for me,” Temeraire said, with a flick of his ruff against the brass bell they had rigged for him on one column of the pavilion: not much smaller than what would be found in a moderate belfry. “I shall be perfectly comfortable.”

So they made their good nights and returned inside through the back door. Tharkay went upstairs, and Laurence to the kitchens to build the banked fire back up and settle the kettle over it: Mrs Hornsby’s duty usually, but she was on leave to Liverpool to see her daughter, who had just been delivered of her first child. He did not mind shifting for himself. Perched on a low stool, he stared into the glowing hearth, breathing red as the heart of the otherwise shadowy kitchen, and found himself brooding over the same familiar problem.

For three years now, they had been living together upon the Strathvagan estate: three idyllic years which Tharkay had spent in repairing the damage and neglect inflicted on it by his prodigal cousins, Temeraire in the affairs of Parliament, and Laurence himself in enjoying the quiet retirement he thought to have forfeited a thousand times over from the moment he took that first makeshift harness into his hands. Three years of peace and happiness with those he loved best in the world, and he thought … he hoped that such was Tharkay’s sentiment also. He could not be sure. Tharkay did not presently wish them gone, but if he ever decided to marry, their continued residence would begin to present difficulties. Temeraire was already grown too much attached to Strathvagan; Laurence had had to correct him only that morning when he had blithely referred to it as “our estate.” If they were going to depart at all, they must depart soon. Hospitality had its limits.

Of course, there was one road by which he could discover, at a stroke, whether and with whom Tharkay wished to pursue his prospects of domestic felicity, and if answered to the contrary neatly exile himself and Temeraire from his society for ever. But to impose himself so, and to run the risk of such a conclusion, he could not bear to contemplate; and he could never quite persuade himself that it was his duty to speak rather than to quell his feelings.

When he came upstairs some time later with the jar of salve warming inside a pot of the boiled water, he found Tharkay in the armchair by the hearth, idly working the rings off his fingers. “I begin to think we ought to arrange a permanent sitting room for ourselves by Temeraire after all,” he remarked, setting them aside. “Or sacrifice a few cushions; I think there are yet some in my cousins’ former quarters that I would not mind putting to use.”

With this Laurence, who was yet stiff from sitting on the pavilion floor, could only agree wholeheartedly. He took his usual place on the padded footstool, with the pot set carefully down on the rug beside him, and wiped the jar off on his breeches before opening it, a fragrance of linseed meal, laudanum, beeswax and honey wafting out. It was a low enough seat that when Tharkay extended his denuded left hand, Laurence could comfortably take it between his own and begin as he always did, working his way from the wrists through the lumbrical muscles, and down through the joints of the fingers.

Silence grew, gently, the salve heated through and oily on his palms, easing the glide of callused skin. Tharkay’s hands were weathered from years of rough travel and scarred by his succession of avian companions, and now as familiar to Laurence as his own. His anxiety could not but ease in the warmth and companionship of the present moment. There was nothing, truly nothing, that he wanted more than this: to be of service, and for his assistance to be accepted as a matter of course by a man who, liberated from the torture chamber, had refused to be fed by any hand but his own.

At length Tharkay broke the silence. “You said this morning there was something you wished to discuss.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, without looking up: he was busy kneading slow, meditative circles into the base of Tharkay’s thumb. “Temeraire intends to visit China again, for their New Year if he can. His mother’s last letter carried the invitation.”

The opportunity to celebrate on his home soil this cardinal holiday — which they had only ever seen once before, shipboard — was one inducement. Temeraire wanted to see his mother and Mei, and all the friends he had made in the army during the Russian campaign; and if Laurence guessed correctly, to compare the station of dragons in China with their improved conditions in Britain. The disparity between the two would still be a significant one, but it would remind him of the pinnacle to which he and all his fellows could and ought to aspire, and refresh his determination to advance their rights as full private citizens of the state. Besides that, there was the matter of the newly ascended emperor and his fearsome new companion, for whose “unscrupulous behaviour,” as Temeraire darkly put it, he still felt personally responsible.

Britain’s few dragon transports were yet the property of the Navy, however, and their captains could not be commissioned for a journey without the Admiralty’s approval. Tharkay observed as much, adding, “Temeraire will be received with no little fanfare, I presume. You will have to make it a bona fide diplomatic expedition.”

“It could scarcely be anything else,” Laurence agreed. “Apart from the expense of outfitting the transport, their lordships would never allow Temeraire to go unchecked and unchaperoned at court.”

“I imagine not, with his progeny all but sitting on the throne.”

“Mm.” The greater part of Laurence’s focus was on Tharkay’s fingers, the joints of which always grew stiff in cold weather and swelled around the long-healed breaks; the rest was spent on gratitude that the task required him to keep his head bent and his gaze lowered. He ought not to have let himself go so far, earlier tonight, as to reconsider making a confession. He was not a good enough actor to disguise his feelings. And Tharkay was no fool: if he saw Laurence blush now, he would know, just as he had known within five minutes of meeting Edith Woolvey that she and Laurence had once been attached.

“May I inquire as to how long you propose to stay?”

“A few months at most, I should think,” Laurence said, reaching for more of the salve. “Though I have not yet discussed it with Temeraire, and our diplomats might have their own opinions on the subject. We would be back within a year, or a year and a half.”

“Well, you will be missed.” Tharkay’s voice carried a tinge of amusement. “But so long as you do return, I shall not hold your absence too much against you.”

Partway through his own speech, Laurence had gestured mechanically for Tharkay’s other hand, which Tharkay now gave him as though he had said nothing out of the ordinary. “Pardon?” Laurence said, forgetting his embarrassment long enough to look up at him. Then all at once the embarrassment came flooding back and he protested, awkwardly, “If we are welcome, then of course we shall return. We are so very happy here — we would not part company with you, if your patience is not yet exhausted.”

“Will, no,” Tharkay said. “I am referring to the assassination attempts I have heard so much about. And it is not a question of patience, as I have told you before.”

“Ah,” Laurence said.

“Though it is gratifying to know how little tired you are of me,” Tharkay added, eyes glinting.

“Yes,” Laurence said hastily, and bent back to his task. “I will certainly try to avoid any such outcome. But Tenzing, while we are on the subject” — a wholly different subject, pray God — “we wished to extend the invitation to you as well, if your affairs must not necessarily keep you in Scotland.”

“Whether it is to be a family visit or a diplomatic mission, I should be superfluous.”

“Not in the least.” Laurence had reddened despite all his resolutions to the contrary, but he was ruefully aware that he was already prone to flushing at awkwardness or indelicacy, whether committed by himself or another: there would be nothing to note in it. “You would be our guest; and if you are willing, we may make company for each other while Temeraire engages with Ning and the rest of the court.”

“I would by no means withhold any moral support that is in my power to provide,” Tharkay said wryly, “but let us defer it until we know how you are to make the journey and under what authority. In the meantime, I shall see what I can do to set my affairs in order for a long absence.”

His hand was very hot between Laurence’s palms. “I cannot deny that I will want moral support,” Laurence said. “I fear …”

It felt disloyal to even think it. He turned Tharkay’s hand over and began massaging careful circles into the knuckles, prolonging the exercise for his own comfort as much as Tharkay’s. Then he finished, quietly, “I fear even now that he may wish to stay.”

“In China?”

“We are no longer at war; he is at liberty. He agreed to return all those years ago only for my sake, and in order to improve the situation of his fellows. If he expressed a desire to remain and establish himself …”

“You would feel bound to establish yourself there also?” Tharkay’s fingers twitched a little, involuntarily, brushing against Laurence’s wrist. “It is not an unjust fear. But it is, I think, not to be answered. Temeraire cares too deeply about the dragons of Britain to abandon them to any less gifted advocate, and he is a great subscriber to the philosophy that when something ought to be done and done well, it ought to be overseen by oneself — rather like another gentleman of our acquaintance.”

Laurence shook his head. “Before he died, Prince Yongxing attempted to persuade me to leave Temeraire by arguing that it was in his best interests to ascend to his birthright as a Celestial. I could not but despise the purpose of his argument, but Temeraire does have a right to the greater honour of his station in China, and to the attending scholarship and military experience.”

“He has had scholarship and military experience,” Tharkay pointed out, “and will have more. The reason for Temeraire’s first being sent away from Peking has not materially changed: his remaining would contribute too great an unknown to the court, and a potential struggle for power between himself and Ning.”

“I suppose it would,” Laurence acknowledged. 

“That aside, it is not in his character to leave his work unfinished for any temptation of fame or gold, any more than it is in yours. He will not choose a luxurious life on the other side of the world for himself when there are yet dragons denied their rights here.” Tharkay tapped the backs of his fingernails against Laurence’s wrist again, this time deliberately. “You taught him the better part of his scruples; and if you are not Lady Isabel, to abandon your duty and your family for love of a lord, then neither would he ever be.”

Laurence could not but smile to hear himself so described. “No,” he said. “But then, he is my family. And I have no lord but you.”

It might have passed for a quip had he not, by some too-honest reflex, frozen in place, his hands going still.

Tharkay said nothing.

The wind outside had died, leaving only snow drifting past the window-panes. For an eternity, or perhaps only a minute, or a scant few frightened heartbeats, there was no sound apart from the crackling of the hearth, and the roaring in Laurence’s ears as he stared through the floor in an agony of mortification and dismay.

It was too late. It was done. He had given himself away, not by speaking so but by flinching from it; Tharkay’s hand, clasped between his, had contracted, an infinitesimal muscular change that would not have been visible from arm’s length but was perfectly tangible thanks to its imprisonment. Laurence ought to have at once withdrawn his own hands, and the words with them, but the spirit in which they had been offered remained; he was not sorry for it, not yet. And though he might have resumed the conversation and thereby drawn a decent veil over the lapse, such bald-faced pretense recommended itself to him still less.

It was too late. Very well. He had made the remark, and there was only one course open to him now: he would not profess half of what he felt, having inadvertently done so much. Laurence swallowed, thinking, his heart in his throat. Then he covered Tharkay’s hand with one of his own, and bending his head, pressed his mouth to the knuckles.

Tharkay took an uneven breath.

It was a courtesy barrier, no more; ordinarily the gesture required gloves. Laurence knew he had turned a foolish crimson at so using his own hand, but that was preferable to making any unwanted physical advance. He lifted his head and found Tharkay looking down at him with his lips compressed, but no outrage, no distaste, and thank God, no pity, only a tender suggestion of colour and discomposure in his aspect. “Tenzing,” Laurence whispered.

Tharkay made a visible effort to master himself, but whatever had stopped his tongue was evidently too powerful to permit him to speak at once. And when he did, equally quietly, it had not even the counterfeit of indifference, nor of his customary self-command.

“Will, what are you doing?” Each word was little more than a puff of breath on the lips: scarcely audible. “Do you know what you are doing?”

“Giving you the truth,” said Laurence.

Tharkay’s eyes were deep wells in the firelight. “What truth? Tell me.”

Laurence gazed up at him, his heart thundering against his breast: all at once he felt absurdly, wildly hopeful, as he had never had cause to before; and was adequate to nothing but increasing the pressure of their clasped hands, as if he might thereby convey his sincerity.

Tharkay placed his free hand over the whole. “Or show me,” he said. “If you feel yourself equal to it.”

For once his expression did not require deciphering. With the greatest care, Laurence rose and bent forward over the armchair, placing his free hand as he did upon Tharkay’s shoulder, tentatively. Tharkay tilted back his head. At such close quarters, one could just make out the pulse beating hard in his throat.

“If I may,” Laurence began, blushing furiously red, and Tharkay reached out and caught him by the waistcoat lapels and pulled him down; and for a while after that, there was no need for anybody to speak at all.

1.

“Dunno how he’s got the nerve to prance around that there dragondeck, with no work and all the room in the world to stretch a man’s legs for himself. You lads know I’d be shamed to show my face if I were a good-for-nothing waster and a traitor too, hiding behind that monster’s skirts,” Seaman Marlowe declared as he lay cable by the foremast, and several of his mates made a great noise of agreement and spat demonstratively over their shoulders, into the sea.

Having observed this coarseness with one eyebrow raised, Tharkay suggested a round of cards below to his fellow occupants of the aforementioned dragondeck. “I would like to,” Granby said ruefully, sounding as though he truly meant it: the sun was setting, and he clearly wished for a little peace and quiet to cap the evening. “Only —”

“Granby!” Iskierka shrilled, her voice piercing clear through two miles of ocean. “Look what I have caught! Is it not splendid?”

She was flying back toward them with an enormous grey-and-white shark thrashing in her claws, scattering blood and guts in a wide radius around her. “Oh, Lord,” Granby said, low, and then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Very splendid, love, only pray eat over the water; we won’t have the deck holy-stoned again until tomorrow.”

It was the third of May, and they had most recently sailed past the Cape Verde islands and crossed the equator. Without any prospect of stopping for resupply at any of the former British ports on the western coast of Africa, nor at the Cape of Good Hope, Riley had asked the dragons to hunt for themselves as much as was practical. Temeraire had therefore left the Allegiance an hour ago to search out his own supper, which ought to have left his captain at liberty. Tharkay looked at Laurence for confirmation, but Laurence had joined his fellow aviator in regretfully watching Iskierka approach, as though with Granby necessarily occupied in defending the ship from his dragon’s slovenliness, the invitation must be null and void for him also. “Laurence?” Tharkay said, prompting.

Laurence looked at him with but a moment’s surprise, quickly masked. “I would be very happy; thank you,” he said.

It had been thus since they had left Britain. He was not so far given to self-recrimination that he would refuse their company or goodwill, as he might have done before, on the grounds that he had no more claim upon their friendship or the name of gentleman; but while he seemed to have no difficulty in accepting any expression thereof from Granby, who had formed one of his party during the hunt for the French irregulars, he only quietly answered the same from Tharkay, and spoke to him with the tact and reserve of a fresh acquaintance. There was no coldness in his manner, nor diffidence — nothing but a deep consciousness of what had passed between them in the command tent that day, and a complete lack of expectation that Tharkay should wish to have anything whatsoever more to do with him.

He did enter into conversation more easily as they climbed down the hatch and sat to their game in Tharkay’s quarters, which were rather better situated than his own bunk by the prison hold. “Though I do very well,” Laurence amended after the second round, sorting through his cards again. “It is luxurious by comparison with many other berths I have had in the Navy.”

“Hammocks and cupboards, I am told,” Tharkay said.

“Yes, with your head in one corner and your knees in the next, if you are lucky. So you see, I cannot complain of my present situation.” Laurence consulted his hand. “Five spades?”

“No good. Seven.” Tharkay added this much to his mental tally. “You may not complain, but I imagine Temeraire will continue to protest for your sake.”

“I will likely be spending most of my nights with him in any case,” Laurence said. “He is frustrated, to be frank with you; as am I. It is a criminal waste to have him imprisoned on the other side of the world.”

Tharkay glanced at him curiously. “Would you have stayed, then, if your sentence had been commuted to labour in England?”

“Certainly, if such a thing were possible. I would rather be of service in any way that I could, instead of …”

Laurence stopped. Through the window behind him came the rhythmic slap of waves against the hull, and Temeraire’s voice mingled with Iskierka’s, squabbling, and then the familiar lurch of the ship as he landed upon the dragondeck.

“Yes,” Tharkay said. And to close the subject, “Four hearts.”

The glow of good humour had faded. From then on Laurence played without looking him in the eye, and rather desultorily answered the one further remark Tharkay ventured to make in the face of his reticence. Piquet involved enough speaking cues to help them along, but it was a party game designed for much intermediate conversation and distraction, not for speed and focus; and upon his withdrawal, they began progressing too quickly to make it a truly convivial exercise.

It was less amusing than Tharkay might once have expected to find oneself in tête-à-tête with a man acutely conscious of his own lack of a right, or what he believed was his lack of a right, to the esteem of his interlocutor. What could he say that would be believed? Yes, I was witness to your shame, and I am not in disgust of you? He would be lying if he swore to forget that Laurence had wept, and had spoken to him, begged him, from the deepest pit of despair he had likely ever known. It did not materially change anything. Again and again, Tharkay had entrusted his life to Laurence, and on one memorable occasion, some portion of his dignity, and he would probably do it again if their acquaintance progressed; he knew himself well enough to see that. But Laurence did not. Laurence still felt, it seemed, the cut of what Tharkay had said to him that day, of the reproof that should not have required to be made.

“I am sorry, Tharkay,” Laurence said, after a full few minutes had passed in which he simply contemplated his hand in silence, though it was his turn to lead the trick. “I am dull company tonight. I shall be a great deal easier in my mind when we next put into port for resupply.”

Tharkay studied him across the cramped little table, unsmiling, in consideration. Then he looked back down at his own cards and said, “Tenzing.”

There was a brief silence as the two syllables registered as a name.

“I — beg your pardon?” said Laurence, faltering.

“My name is Tenzing.” Tharkay’s tone was cool and even. “You may use it; I have no objection.”

He was aware, in his peripheral vision, of Laurence staring at him in inarticulate astonishment, as he had not done even upon coming face-to-face with Arkady and his motley band at Danzig. Of course he had never presumed to ask; he might have proceeded with their mutual association for years without ever even finding out. Most of what he already knew of Tharkay of a personal nature, he had learned by accident or from others, not from Tharkay himself. He knew the store Tharkay set by his privacy. He of all men would be profoundly sensible of the privilege; and of the implicit regard behind the offer, however insouciantly made.

“Your trick, I believe,” Tharkay added, when it became clear that this had been entirely forgotten.

Laurence stammered out some unspecific thanks and turned his attention once again to his cards, and the game was resurrected, without much more conversation than they had had before. But when the lamps were lit and they had thrown down the last card, and the time came for him to return to Temeraire for the night, he stopped at the door and said, with rather less oppression of spirit, “Good night, Tenzing,” hesitating only slightly on the final word, as if it were fine china and not to be handled roughly.

Tharkay did not care to wait for the reciprocal offer. “Good night, Will,” he answered, and thoughtfully considered the door long after it had been drawn shut from the other side.