This was not a little outrageous, considering that Wellington had managed to stage a battle of two hundred thousand men, three hundred dragons, and two dozen ships-of-the-line; and successfully hold worse ground against a better-trained and better-equipped army than his own, until the fog had loosened its grip enough for the ships to make their way in close enough to shore to begin the bombardment: nearly three hours longer than planned. ‘Damn your impudence,’ he growled; but Perscitia only flipped her wings at him a little, and loftily went back to her pavilion.

It was mid-morning on the seventeenth of March. Some three weeks had passed since the battle and its immediate aftermath. Lassitude and confusion mingled over so great a triumph and disaster. The survivors had, man and beast sunk, to the ground and slept where they stood, uneasily, listening to the chorus of the low sighs of the dying upon the field; men awoke with cries whenever a greater wave came crashing upon the rocky shore.

The next day, without direction, they had begun the immense effort of clearing away the dead. Temeraire and his cohort had attended to the dragons. Not all were dead; many lingered, broken and slowly bleeding, dull-eyed and surrounded by the shattered bodies of their crew. Some were coaxed with much nudging and support back onto their feet, to limp away over the ground to the surgeons' clearing. Others, worse injured, could only be given a merciful end. Some of the aviators had survived, too, shielded from the worst of the impact by their dragon's body, and had to be taken away to join the other prisoners.

Chalcedony's body lay stretched upon a green hill; whole, it seemed, until they turned him over and saw the shattered red ruin of his chest. The Yellow Reapers nudged their shoulders beneath him, and in a knot carefully lifted him up to carry off the field.

‘But where will we take him?’ Gladius said, much subdued.

‘We will take him to the old quarantine-grounds,’ Temeraire said, ‘near Dover, where the sick dragons were buried.’

They had laid Chalcedony and their other dead to rest in another of the great barrow-mounds rising in the quarantine valley. Early green shoots were climbing valiantly from the softening cover of snow, and the earth smelt richly moist as the dragons turned it over to raise the mound.

They had flown on to Dover looking for food, more from habit than any conscious decision, but habit served well enough. Many dragons of the Corps had returned to their own clearings, and the ground-crews and herdsmen were bringing in what cattle could be rounded up and shared out.

A week later Lloyd, the grounds-keeper from the old Wales breeding ground, appeared at Temeraire's pavilion looking bedraggled and leading a string of cattle.

‘Why, Lloyd,’ Temeraire said, ‘where have you got these cows from?’ He did not wait for an answer to begin eating.