It had been a little difficult: everyone remembered the sequence a little differently, and for a moment they were at a standstill, until she hit upon the notion of making a tally, of which order everyone recalled, and then taking the most popular. By evening they had successfully launched their first round-shot across the camp with a bang, to the great startlement of all the other dragons napping full of pork and satisfaction.

‘If we could only work out a way for it to slide properly, there is no reason you might not take it aloft,’ she said wistfully that evening, coming to join the discussion with her old sense of assurance restored. She would happily have kept working, but her men having grown sufficiently used to her—their remnants of fear had at last been outweighed by their fatigue—had rebelled and demanded a chance to sleep and eat. ‘At least, maybe Requiescat might, and it could perhaps be set off upon his back; but the recoil, that is the difficulty.’

‘What to do next, that is the difficulty,’ Temeraire said, and bent his head over the information which Moncey had brought and sketched out into maps, wondering how they might learn what the French would do next, and how soon he might bring them to another battle.

Chapter Six

‘Sir,’ Hollin said, ‘I don't like to make you think of it, but with him loose this long, gone this far off from the grounds, it stands to reason he isn't flying wild—He has gone to look for you.’

‘I know,’ Laurence said.

If Temeraire had gone to Dover, he had flown straight into the arms of Napoleon's invading army. And Laurence could not follow: Jane's very justification for retrieving him from prison had been to keep him out of French hands. Already he was four days overdue in camp, or generously three, and their absence would reflect on her just when she most needed all forces of persuasion aligned in her favour to prepare for Napoleon's inevitable march on London.

He knew what duty demanded he do: return, report his failure, and wait until some word at last came in of Temeraire's fate; to sit in gaol endlessly, with no notion of what had happened to Temeraire. Laurence did not know how he would bear it. But there was no other alternative. Already he had likely injured Hollin's career, if prior association with him had not been tarnish enough; just as he had injured Jane, and Ferris, and so many others. As if he had not already done enough harm.

‘We might go another day,’ Hollin suggested. ‘Work our way back towards London, sir, asking along the way, and maybe see what anyone has heard about the French. It stands to reason the generals will want to know that anyway, sir.’