“Those were not my nearest guard,” Mianning said. “I did not have free choice of my attendants at our meeting, as I told you; I have others whom I can better trust. But in any case, there is no alternative. One who yields, always yields; I will not come to the throne in the minds of my enemies as one who may be moved by threats or danger. I have withstood worse than this, at their hands; far worse. Better if I die than permit them to hold my leash.”
Temeraire thought this an appalling choice of alternatives, and one he scarcely imagined Mianning’s own dragon Chuan would approve. “I cannot think my brother would permit you to go into such danger,” he said. “Why was he not there, to-day? If only he had been by your side, I am sure together we should not have allowed those treacherous lizards to snatch the two of you away: I would certainly have done no such thing,” he added, for Laurence’s benefit, trying not to let his tone convey too plainly his sense of injury, “if only I had had the least notion, before now, that someone should be trying to kill you. I do not think I can be blamed, when we have just arrived, and no-one told me: but Chuan should have known; he should have been on his guard.”
“Lung Tien Chuan is dead,” Mianning said.
MIANNING EVIDENTLY DID NOT care to discuss the matter further. It fell to Gong Su to convey the details: he seemed high in the councils of the crown prince, and spent nearly all the day closeted with his own associates within the government; later that evening he rejoined their small and wary party in Laurence’s chambers, and quietly told them, “Lung Tien Chuan was slain six months ago. He was served with poison in his tea.”
Laurence was appalled by the act: a dreadful waste, and it seemed to him pure cruelty, to punish the dragon for merely loving his master, and over a political quarrel with the latter, which the former should have had very little to say to, he imagined. “There are only eight Celestials in full, are there not?” Laurence said.
“Yes,” Gong Su said. “There is no other to be the prince’s companion.”
Laurence only belatedly took the deeper meaning of this intelligence that evening, when he was alone again: he had been quartered in another part of the Imperial palace grounds under Mianning’s control and surrounded by watchful guards loyal to him.
Laurence had closeted himself to write his report of the strange and convoluted events of the day, which yet he preferred to struggling through more of the letter he had not yet sent to his mother to acquaint her with his condition. But he set his pen down abruptly and, sitting up, looked out the window into the courtyard where Temeraire slept, in arm’s reach—in a dragon’s arm’s reach at least—recovering from his exertions.
Hammond had conveyed to him from the other side the necessity of Laurence’s adoption: a Celestial might only be companion to a member of the Imperial family; and Temeraire’s egg had been sent away from China in the first place only to avoid setting up a rival to Mianning. Therefore—the heir to the throne required a Celestial? Perhaps required was too strong: many things might be bent at the will of the Emperor. But tradition had its own power. If Mianning had no Celestial companion—if he had lost his own dragon—
Shipboard, Temeraire had spoken censoriously to him of Hammond. “I do not say he is not clever, in his own way,” Temeraire had said, “but I am very sorry to say, Laurence, that he is not to be relied upon. When last we were here, he wished to insist upon your giving me back to the Chinese only so they would open another port to us.”
Surely that request would come again, now, Laurence realized, and was disturbed by his own reaction to the possibility—a reaction which owed more to the viscera than clear rational thinking. Sensibly considered, he ought to be grateful for such an excuse to be restored to his respectable Navy career and a ship of his own; and if he were not grateful, if he had not wished to do it, nevertheless it would be no less than his duty. And yet—and yet he discovered he had begun to think of Temeraire as his own man, as it were. Such persuasion, coming from one trusted as a friend, would only be honorable if meant sincerely, if given from the heart and in expectation of its advancing Temeraire’s real happiness.
Laurence did not think he could, even at the direct request of the King’s envoy, consent to deceive a friend. To lie in such a cause would be contemptible, a kind of personal treachery. But Laurence felt himself on unsteady ground. It was surely his duty as a captain in the Aerial Corps to use the bond between himself and Temeraire to be both a check and a goad upon the beast, and that bond was one which many another aviator would willingly have taken on in his stead. Perhaps it was a kind of folly to think of a dragon as a friend, as a companion-in-arms; would he skate perilously close to treason to refuse such a demand?