Wellesley's spies had reported already a dozen raiding bands or more, moving through the North Country, stealing from farms and seizing cattle. Laurence had marked them on his map, as best the reports could place them, but the enemy provided them also with a convenient beacon of smoke, easily visible ten miles off. It was a thin black coil turning lazily upwards from the roof of a great farmhouse, the fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived. The rest of the village stood empty, when they came down, but for two men in homespun. They were villagers, not soldiers, and had been laid out in the road dead, with stab wounds flower-red upon their bellies: bayoneted.

‘The villagers shan't come out while we have the dragons here,’ Harcourt said. ‘If we leave them outside—’

‘No,’ Laurence said; he did not meant to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons tear down the houses until you do.’

There was no reply, no stirring. ‘Temeraire,’ Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the end of the village lane. ‘Bring it down, if you please.’

Temeraire looked at it, and said uncertainly, ‘Shall I roar?’

‘However you choose,’ Laurence said.

‘Should I bring it down all at once?’ Temeraire asked, turning his head to inspect the cottage. He darted a look back at Laurence, as if trying to gauge his real intent. ‘Perhaps, if I just took off this chimney—’

‘Oh, you are taking too long,’ Iskierka said, and promptly blasted it with fire, the dry thatched roof catching alight in a crackling instant.

It burned fiercely; the flames licking eagerly towards its neighbours. Laurence sat waiting, and after a moment a cellar door creaked open and a few men came forth, ‘Put it out, for God's sake put it out,’ one of them begged gasping. ‘All of the village will catch—’

‘Berkley, if you will be so kind,’ Laurence said. Maximus took off the burning roof, and after laying it on the ground scraped some soil over it with a clumsy swipe, leaving it half-buried. Laurence looked back at the villagers, who stared up at him pale and sweating. ‘Which way did the French go?’

‘Towards Scarrow Hill,’ the older man said, his voice still trembling. ‘With all our cattle, every last one—’ The faint lowing of a cow from the woods made him a liar on that point, but Laurence did not care. ‘They left not an hour—’

‘Very good. To quarters, gentlemen, and let the riflemen make ready,’ Laurence said over his shoulder, to the other captains. ‘Aloft, Temeraire, along the road.’