Of course he could do nothing but fret. Even if they had set off right away, there had been little chance of reaching London before it was quite dark, and he did not need Perscitia's anxious whispered hints to realize that it was madness to fly into a French camp at night when they had Fleur-de-Nuits about. ‘But in the morning—’ he said, and then put down his head without finishing. There would still be guns in the morning, and thousands of men, and who knew how many dragons. It would still be quite useless.

‘Perhaps he will be back before morning,’ Perscitia said in a tone so gloomy it left Temeraire in no doubt of her scepticism.

‘Well,’ he said to Hollin, ‘you had better go back and tell Wellesley that we will come as soon as I have Laurence back, and that he should not worry about the men, unless of course Napoleon has flown all his soldiers ahead to attack him,’ he added hopefully: perhaps that was what had happened.

‘We should have seen them going by, if that is what they were doing,’ Perscitia pointed out depressingly.

After Hollin left, the hours dragged. Temeraire slept fitfully and uneasily, rousing at every rustle or whisper to peer into the darkness, and before dawn he was awake for good and uncomfortable. He had an unpleasant sharp ache in the underside of his jaw and all along his neck to his breastbone, where the knotted scar bothered him. He tried to crane his head down to rub his nose against it, but could not quite manage it. His neck felt very strange when he tried, and crackled as he stretched. He could not make his foreleg bend to it either, and at last he sighed and lay himself back down upon the cold ground, thinking wistfully of the warm stone at Loch Laggan, and of the pavilions in China.

There was a faint orange glow of approaching sunrise to the west; but then he raised his head again realizing that it was quite impossible. ‘Oh, oh!’ he cried, ‘wake up, everyone!’ and flung himself aloft as Iskierka blazed towards them, turning now and again to fire flames into the face of her pursuit. Seven or eight dragons were trying to get near enough to board her again, and there were a handful of struggling men on her back already. ‘Laurence!’ Temeraire cried, straining his eyes to make him out among the dim figures.