Privately he cared only that at last he would have a chance at Lien; who had only sat about watching while everyone else was hurt and killed. But even as he approached, Lien stopped chasing the waves she had raised. Instead, she wheeled some dozen wing-beats back from them. Temeraire was close enough to see the trembling of her breast, and the way her wings wavered. She was very tired. Temeraire pressed on with new urgency. He would have her now, she could not fly away quickly enough.

Lien hovered a moment, drawing great breaths, and then charged after the waves once more. She swept low and level across the water, roaring so loudly that the cannon, still speaking behind Temeraire, were drowned out. A fresh swell rose ahead of her in response, not so high as the others, but low and smooth and moving very fast. Spent by the effort, she fell silent and hung in the air trembling. Her head was almost limp, but the swell ran on without her, to outpace and catch the elevated waves. As it met them, the waves seemed almost to stutter and collapse into it, one after another melting into the whole.

Temeraire heeled back, startled. With scarce warning the wave had reared high enough to block Lien out, thrusting itself directly in his way. His wing-tip cut a line of spray in its face as he wheeled away just in time to keep from being caught by its rising crest. He thought, at first, to climb higher aloft and go over the wave; but he had no time. Behind him the swell was rising, a dark green-glossy wall of water so vast that now small curlers of foam were breaking upon its face as well as its crest, and he was racing it towards the ships.

‘Temeraire!’ Laurence was crying out, ‘Temeraire, can you break it—’

Temeraire darted a look over his shoulder: the wave was still growing. He had never seen anything so vast, and a shudder trembled along the tip of his tail. They had weathered a typhoon once, in the Indian Ocean; a swirling wrath of clouds overhead, and the Allegiance climbing and falling with each terrible rising wave. But this was another thing entirely; almost unworldly in its monstrous size. But Lien had made it, raised it with the divine wind, and so surely he could break it.