‘We shall see each other tomorrow in the fighting, anyway,’ Temeraire said, with satisfaction, and curled himself up to sleep with a sense of great contentment.

He was jarred rudely awake an hour later by the queer muffled booming of falling bombs, and the popping voices of the pepper-guns answering them.

He put his head up, but he could not see anything more than the occasional white blooming of powder-flash from the ground, where the artillerymen were firing and the great yellow bursts of flame as the bombs struck and burst. When there was no firing going on, he could only make out the faintest shadows of the handful of lightweights circling. They were mostly mongrels with better night-vision than most, Minnow and some other of the ferals, who had been organized into shifts to give some semblance of resistance to enhance the ruse.

‘You ought to go back to sleep,’ Laurence said, rousing, and Temeraire lowered his head to nose at him carefully. How good it was not to be alone, and to know Laurence was with him and safe; it would have been better still if only they might have gone fighting together.

‘I will, in a moment,’ Temeraire said, privately hoping that the Fleurs would realize the trick at any moment, and they might have to go and join in. But the French dragons were flying too high, and the fires on the ground and the explosions of their own bombs dazzled their sensitive eyes too badly, particularly with the flash powder being shot in their faces whenever the fighting detachment, including Arkady and some of his ferals with their small crews, could manage.

He sighed and put his head down again, twitching as yet another of the bombs went off.

Silence woke Laurence a little while before dawn: the bombardment had stopped. He rolled off Temeraire's arm and went to wash his face, breaking the crust of ice in the bowl and scrubbing as best as he could: there was no soap. Smoke still rose from the decoy field, but the sky above was empty and lightening quickly. The French would be on the move by now; an hour, perhaps and they would see them.

A bell began ringing, distantly, a frantic note in its voice; others picked up the alarm, coming nearer and nearer, sounding all over the camp, and Temeraire put his head up and said exultantly, ‘It is time to fight.’