He knocked down stalactites from the ceiling, and beat protrusions flat into the floor, and when he was satisfied, he arranged some attractive rocks and dead tree-branches, twisted and bleached white along the sides of his new antechamber, with careful nudges of his talons. He would have liked a pond and a fountain, but he could not see how to bring the water up, or how to make it run when he had got it there, so he settled for picking out a promontory on Llyn y Fan Fawr which jutted into the lake, and considering it also his own.

To finish, he carved the characters of his name into the cliff-face by the entrance, although the letter R gave him some difficulty and came out looking rather like the reversed numeral four. When he was done with that, routine crept up and devoured his days. He would rise, when the sun came in at the cave mouth, take a little exercise, nap, rise again when the herdsmen rang the bell, eat, then nap and exercise again, and then go back sleep; there was nothing more. He hunted for himself, once, and so did not go to the daily feeding; later that day one of the small dragons brought up the grounds-master, Mr. Lloyd, and a surgeon, to be sure that he was not ill. They lectured him on poaching sternly enough to make him uneasy for Laurence's sake.

For all that, Lloyd did not think of him as a traitor, either. He did not think enough of Temeraire to consider him capable. The grounds-master cared only that his charges stay inside the borders, ate, and mated; he recognized neither dignity nor stoicism, and anything Temeraire did out of the ordinary was only a bit of fussing. ‘Come now, we have a fresh lady Anglewing visiting today,’ Lloyd would say, ‘quite a nice little piece; we will have a fine evening, eh? Perhaps we would like a bite of veal, first? Yes, we would, I am sure,’ providing the responses with his questions, so Temeraire had nothing to do but sit and listen. Lloyd was a little hard of hearing, so if Temeraire did try to say, ‘No, I would rather have some venison, and you might roast it first,’ he was sure to be ignored.