Blue pins marking the small French companies that daily marched across his maps, were plucked one by one and laid back in their tin, and Laurence rinsed blood mechanically off his hands at the wash-basin. Very little thought was now required, and he was glad of it, distantly.

Their own supply gave them no difficulty. If they landed near a town or a village, meat would somehow be managed for them and the dragons, even if the villagers themselves went hungry as a consequence. Occasionally the French tried again to pursue them, attempts orchestrated from further south, but warning reached them so early that they had merely to draw back a little, and let the dragons sleep, while a flock of little ferals kept watch.

It was the first week of March, and they had been raiding for nearly two months when Arkady arrived in a great flurry of noise, carrying Tharkay and with three of his ferals for escort. He at once began to parade before Temeraire and the others, telling them of his adventures since their last meeting. He had only been patrolling with the others, but by his account he had fought off hordes of French dragons and captured many prizes, and he bragged that they too would do well, now he had come to join them; at which Temeraire laid back his ruff in irritation.

‘I have a message for you, from Wellesley,’ Tharkay said to Laurence, and went inside with him. The implacable maps were laid out upon a makeshift table, a door laid over two old trestles, inside the small cottage where he had sheltered overnight. Tharkay stood in the doorway looking out while Laurence opened the letter. Their camp was a strange, silent place: no prisoners but the one solitary French captain, sitting desolately outside a hut with his hands loosely tied and bound to a stake in the ground, under the guard of a couple of Granby's bell-men. The massacred trees, which the dragons used for their sweeping, lay in a great heap at the edge of camp and the bare branches dark with dried blood. Every man went about his work silently, and without either fuss or satisfaction; they had killed fifty men that morning.

Wellesley's new orders had not much changed. He directed their efforts more particularly towards the eastern coast, and carefully avoided suggesting what those efforts should be; all was left unstated. Wellesley closed with, and you are welcome to this jabbering creature and his fellows, if you can make better use of them.