Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate. But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses offered for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire's influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.

In the late evening they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly was not unhappy. The dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning some men had passed through with a string of cattle and given him replacements, which he pointed out in their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer's own herd.

The next day, seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps one of them had been black—yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen—no, two dozen— no, a hundred—all numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave them no credit at all.

A few miles further along, Elsie landed them in a torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary pit on the low side away from the water, filled-in but still fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. ‘We must be getting right close, then,’ Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours. The dragons had, one and all, vanished into the air.

‘We will be getting close to the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is dark,’ Temeraire said, ‘and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss.’

The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed Gong Su. It was not that cooked food was so much more pleasant, he did not care about the taste at all at present, but Gong Su could stretch a single cow among five hungry dragons. If only there were a quantity of rice, or something else like to cook with it.