The air was colder and cleaner as they rose out of range, and more clouds streamed past to divorce them from the noise and fury of the battlefield below. Their own struggle was quieter, the whistling air and the muffling clouds stealing all but fragments of roaring, and the occasional pop-pop of rifle fire. The French had abandoned their trees and netting, encumbering them too greatly against a determined aerial defence. Laurence felt more discouraged than pleased, however, by the speed with which the experiment had been adopted, tried, and cast off.

He could feel Temeraire's energy flagging. They had been fighting now for six hours, and there was little chance to pause and rest. Many of the soldiers below were lying upon the ground, out of the way of cannon-fire; Wellesley had ordered they might do so, when not engaged. There was nowhere similar for the dragons to land, except the coverts where they had slept, a mile away. Behind the British lines there was only the roar of the sea, invisible beneath the blanketing fog, and on either flank the cavalry horses stood nervously shifting, pawing at the earth.

The French had abandoned cavalry entirely. It ought to give away an advantage: dragons would not be risked on charges in the face of artillery, as the cold calculation of warfare allowed horses to be, and the British horses were all hooded now, blinders cupping their eyes so they could only see straight ahead, with fragrant sachets over their nostrils so they could not smell the dragons. A little past noon, Laurence heard the drumming of the first charge below.

The heavy British cavalry were splendid in their rush, all of them shouting furiously and waving scimitars, the standard flying out behind them. They were sent at a battalion of the French infantry, a manoeuvre to gain some breathing room. Nearly every French company now pressed steady fire against the Coldstream Guards, which Napoleon had evidently marked as the linchpins of the British centre. The French battalion did not break, instead they formed square themselves; a peculiar square, double-sized, with a great empty gap in the centre.

The cavalry committed to their charge. They flew across the gap, in the face of the steady musketry, horses falling with terrible human shrieks, men flung off and crushed beneath the hooves of their own mounts. ‘Laurence, where is that Pou de Ciel going?’ Temeraire said urgently, pointing. One of the small drab French dragons had broken away from the skirmish and was diving quickly toward its own lines.

The Pou de Ciel landed directly within the French square, and doing so, brought to life the relative nature of their size. Pou de Ciel were a lightweight breed, just barely combat weight, and this one was perhaps only six or seven tons; yet it loomed hugely over the ranks of soldiers, its great taloned claws flexing behind the silver rows of bayonets as it roared with a red mouth full of teeth.