‘You are back,’ Iskierka said, looking at Laurence. She was wide awake, picking over the charred remnants of her breakfast, and watching the sluggish camp with a disgruntled eye. ‘Where is Temeraire? He has let you get into a wretched state,’ she added, with rather a smug air. Laurence could not argue, he was a pitiful sight indeed. His coat was ragged and his shoes were starting to open at the seams. The less said of his stockings the better. ‘Granby,’ she said, looking over his shoulder, ‘you may lend Laurence your fourth-best coat, and then you may tell Temeraire,’ she added to Laurence, ‘that I am very sorry he cannot give you nicer things.’

However, Granby was wearing his fourth-best coat, as the other three were wholly unsuitable for actual fighting. They were ostentatiously adorned with the fruits of Iskierka's determined prize-hunting. It would not in any case have been a very successful loan, as Laurence had some four inches in the shoulders, which Granby had instead in height. But Granby sent word out, and shortly a young runner returned carrying a folded coat, and a spare pair of boots.

‘Why, Sipho,’ Laurence said. ‘I am glad to find you well; and your brother, also, I hope?’ He had worried what might have become of the two boys, brought from Africa, who had helped them there. He had made them his own runners by way of providing for them, but had then found himself unable to be of further assistance.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sipho said in perfect English, though less than a year before the child had never heard a word of it. ‘He is with Arkady, and Captain Berkley says, you are welcome to these, and to come and say hello to Maximus would you, if you are not too damned stiff-necked. He said to say just that,’ he added earnestly.

‘You aren't the only one who owes them,’ Berkley said, in his blunt way, when Laurence had come and thanked him for assuming responsibility for the boys. ‘You needn't worry about them being cast off anyway, we need them. They can jaw with those damned ferals better than any man jack of us. That older boy talks their jabber quicker than he does English. You'd better worry about them getting knocked on the head instead. I had a fight on my hands to make the Admiralty let me keep this one grounded for now. They would have put him up as an ensign, if you like, not nine years of age. Demane they would have no matter what I said, but that is just as well. He fights,’ he added succinctly, ‘so he may as well do it against the Frogs, where it don't get him in hot water.’