The roads beneath them were empty as they flew warily back towards London. The haze of dust, which the British soldiers raised had already settled, and there was no sign of French pursuit. No one was to be seen out of doors, but farmers and herdsmen: cattle and crops cared nothing for Napoleon or politics, and implacably demanded the same attention in war and peace. But even these few men kept their heads low, and hurried through their work; so by late afternoon the countryside seemed nearly deserted, with the sun yearning impatiently to its rest.

‘We ought to see her miles off, if she is showing away as she always does,’ Temeraire was saying ungraciously, as they flew, and then he pricked up his ruff: a small speck in the distance had emerged from the clouds and begun to resolve itself into wings.

It was Gherni: a very battered Gherni, panting with the speed of her flight, her face mazed with a trickle of blood she ineffectually tried to rub off against her shoulder, now and again. Tharkay was with her, and he leapt down to Temeraire's back from hers mid-flight, like a boarder, but tethered by a long double strap of thick leather. He unclipped it from his own waist as soon as he had landed and latched on to Temeraire's harness. Gherni caught up the snapping-free loose end, which jangled loudly with small clapper bells, and wrapped it around her own forearm a few times.

‘What is that?’ Temeraire said, with interest, craning his head to see.

‘I had it made in Istanbul, my last journey,’ Tharkay said, and to Laurence said, ‘Iskierka has been taken.’

He led them to Arkady and the other deserters, huddled and licking their wounds in the shelter of a tall hill that shielded them from the road and cast an afternoon shadow long enough to conceal them from cursory observation from aloft. The red-patched feral roused when Temeraire came in to land, and mantled his wings defensively.

‘That is enough, you shan't bristle at me,’ Temeraire said. ‘You knew very well you were behaving like a—’ he paused, for consideration ‘—like a scrub, or else you shouldn't have sneaked, and if you have been served out as you deserved, it is no one's fault but your own. You had better to be sorry and promise not to do it again, rather than hiss.’

‘They broke away a little before noon,’ Tharkay told Laurence, as they squatted down and scraped clean a patch of ground, for him to sketch out the action. 'They had been going into the clouds all morning, and making a noise with their singing, so by the time we realized they had turned us around you were all far out of earshot. Granby's gunners shot off a few flares, but it was a hopeless effort.