‘They won't have better houses for us there,’ she said. ‘Whatever you can bring us, we'll thank you for, Captain, and we will manage. They didn't find all there was to find.’ She did not have to say that they also had now fewer mouths to feed.

The Yellow Reapers took a while to return, and eventually came back with an air of grim satisfaction, bloodstained, carrying dead cattle and deer.

‘I will venture a little further,’ Laurence said. ‘We will not make camp yet, we will raid further south, as far as we can fly in and out again in a day.’

‘Just as well,’ Little said, low. ‘Let them look over their shoulders, everywhere in England,’ to a murmur of agreement. The French had reconciled them all to their mission. Few of the captains now looked askance at their attacks, or argued for quarter. Laurence heard it without satisfaction.

‘I am sure I can fly a little quicker, if I try,’ Maximus put in. They held their conferences out in the air, so the dragons might listen in.

Some four days later, summoned by another column of smoke, they found and destroyed another raiding-party at Wollaton. Flying back from the battlefield, the corpses left behind dark and crimson on the snow, Laurence saw the blackened husks of houses he knew. Great houses were burning everywhere. They made ideal targets with their cellars full of wine and brandy and their pantries laden for winter. The Galman estate still stood, but was deserted, with ragpickers' wares strewn all over the courtyard: curtains and carpets, torn and trodden into mud, and more hanging hanged out of the shattered windows. The stables were burnt to the ground, and the old lily-pond, where he had used to walk with Edith, was choked upon the bloated corpse of a horse, torn at the haunches where dogs had got to it.

He knew he must expect to find Wollaton Hall itself burned, and only hoped that his family had managed to flee in time. He was steeled for it, he thought; at least he could contemplate the possibility without a feeling of anything more than a calm and distant regret. Then they came over the lake, and Wollaton Hall stood, gilt and golden, upon the crest of its hill, untouched, with light in the windows and neat thin trails of smoke only from the chimneys. Deer bounded away urgently across the estate grounds.

They landed in the park, and the dragons went to hunt. Laurence climbed a ridge and stood looking at the house with a sense almost of unreality. Twilight was deepening as he watched, and in the muted light the edges of the house were blurred. ‘Well, it is jolly good luck,’ Harcourt said to him, uncertainly.