Granby listened willingly enough as Laurence began to outline the situation for him, but Laurence did not reach the question: no sooner had he explained Mianning’s need than Granby broke in, snorting, and said, “Oh, Lord! Yes, Hammond will be after you straightaway, I am sure; I dare say their Lordships would give him a peerage if he managed anything so neat as giving them a treaty and being shot of Temeraire all at once.”
Laurence stared: shocked, silenced; Granby caught his eye, and a slow crimson flush overspread his cheeks. “Well—” Granby said after a moment. “Well—he is too independent by half; he’s thought too clever for his own good—a little troublesome, perhaps—but you see,” he added hurriedly, “you must see I’ve no room to criticize. Iskierka is a demon and a half, and it’s not as though Temeraire hadn’t any provocation, for that matter, you know—”
Laurence made him no reply; he could not conceive of any reply which should be fitting. He did not know: he did not know at all, that he was the captain of a troublesome beast; he did not know that the Admiralty should have been glad to see the back of his dragon, though Britain was desperately short on heavy-weight beasts, even ones of less remarkable capability.
Granby made a hasty and threadbare excuse of having to go see to Iskierka; Laurence mechanically said, “Of course,” and rising left Granby’s quarters. A fine thin rain was presently falling. Granby and the rest of the formation were quartered in one of the guest palaces to the south of Mianning’s personal quarters, where Laurence had been invited to stay; the dragon-wide pathway between the buildings was grey and misty, blurred, and deserted but for a handful of servants, errand-boys, dashing quickly through. Laurence stood beneath the eaves; across the path another great palace stood, with a dragon’s-head as gutterspout giving out a steady clear stream of water washing over the paving-stones.
The guards behind him, Mianning’s chosen escort, shifted their weight behind him; he heard the creak of their armor, their boots on the stone, the nearly stifled sighs. The scene was wholly unfamiliar, wholly strange; in the distance was the great blue bulk of a dragon crossing the pathway, its wings half-furled to its back. It was something from a fairy-tale, nothing he would ever have imagined into his life. It gave his mind no purchase. He did not know, he did not remember, what could have made Granby ever say such things.
Laurence had never studied—to his recollection—to know much of aerial combat or of dragons, beyond learning the signals to bespeak them from his ship, but this much he remembered from the battle of the Nile: the formations wheeling, like flocks of birds, above them in the sky. In modern warfare, dragons fought in formation; and yet Temeraire did not seem to have a place in one. Laurence had not thought on it before: but a dragon so gifted, so powerful, so agile—he must have been placed in formation, if it could be done. If the dragon were not—were not a recalcitrant, mismanaged beast.
He had always prided himself on being a reliable captain, one who did his duty with honor, neither haring off after prizes or unreasonable glory nor guarding his ship too jealously from danger; he had prided himself on a well-run crew. It now bore in on him with sudden force that his crew was strangely depleted, and of a peculiar nature; he had paid little mind to that, struggling as he did merely to learn all the names of those men he did have, but by comparison to the complement Maximus bore, Temeraire had not half so many. His ground crew consisted entirely in a dozen men—several of them, Laurence now realized, former sailors. His officers were a motley and an awkward lot: Forthing, his first officer, was not a gentleman, nor of any particular brilliance which should excuse the same.
Laurence could scarcely imagine whom he might approach on the subject; Granby had certainly been most unwilling to speak. His subordinates he could hardly insult in such a manner, either, as to ask them whether they served on an inferior crew, and why.
Finally he strode out into the rain and returned to his own quarters, to speak with Temeraire himself: if he could not ask for a direct answer, he could ask where they stood with the Admiralty, together, he and the dragon. If Temeraire had some memory of chastisement, some punishment—
Temeraire was awake, in his courtyard, awake and spangled a little by the rain, which he shook off with a rippling shiver of the scales. “Laurence!” he exclaimed with relief. “I wish you had not gone away when there are assassins about: I was on the point of going to look for you. Wherever have you been? Surely you might have stayed here with me, and waited until I woke?”
He sounded an anxious mistress more than anything else, an odd mixture of plaintive and accusatory. “I left word,” Laurence said, a little surprised. “I have been speaking with Captain Granby—”
“Granby had much better come and visit you,” Temeraire said, “than the reverse: no-one is trying to assassinate Granby.”