“If you like; but what do you mean to do with it?” Temeraire said. “It is nearly half-a-day’s flight away from here, now; and I suppose the meat cannot be good anymore, as we did not preserve it.”
“I don’t want the meat; I want the blubber,” Iskierka said, and insisted she did not care that the blubber would surely have taken on all the flavor of the spoiled meat; which Temeraire did not understand in the least, until she came back again at the end of the next day, stinking and sooty and triumphant, and fell upon her share of the provisions which the town now daily made them.
“Granby has asked for you twice,” Temeraire said, reproachfully, and flattened back his ruff, “and you might sit downwind; what have you been doing?”
“I have been rendering down the whale,” Iskierka said, tearing at her sheep, “for some of those traders: one of the sailors showed me how to go about it, and now I am rich again; and I am going to buy Granby a golden hook.”
“One might think she would be above trickery,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “not, of course, that I begrudge Granby anything at all; but it was my whale: mine and Kulingile’s, and she might have said so if she knew we might get gold for it.”
He could not stifle resentment when he saw the result, and had to watch as Granby came down from his sickbed at last several days later, to be presented by Shipley—whom Iskierka had recruited as her deputy in the matter and was all smiles in a fine suit of black cloth, bowing as he held out the box—with the truly splendid hook: shining gold on black velvet.
“It will be too soft for use, you know,” Granby said, when he could speak again, “so we will have to put it by for special occasions—”
“Not at all,” Iskierka said, “for I thought of that; and so they have made it out of steel, really: it is only gold on the outside; the rest of the funds went for the diamonds.”
“Yes; I see,” Granby said, staring at the shining faceted gems which gleamed all around the base of the hook in even rows.
“Put it on, at once,” Iskierka said, audibly hissing steam in her excitement, and then Granby put down the lid of the box and said, “No.”
Temeraire raised his sullen head, blinking, to watch as Granby said, “No. I am done with this, Iskierka, do you hear me? I am done with being dragged about, and made into what a lunatic might call a fashion-plate, and married off—”
“But you are not married, at all—” Iskierka protested.
“No fault of yours if I am not,” Granby said, which was very true, “and I dare say if I let you go on as you have been, you will try again, soon enough as you have found some princess or duchess or other lying about—” Iskierka twitched in what Temeraire could only call a guilty fashion. “—and I shan’t put up with it anymore: you aren’t fresh out of the shell any longer, and we are going to have a little more sense. Or you may take your leave of me, and find a captain who will swallow all your starts, and let you do just as you like—”
“Never, never!” Iskierka said, bristling wildly. “Oh! How can you be so cruel, when you must see very well that I am only thinking of you.”
“What you mean is, thinking of how you can show me off to your best advantage,” Granby said bluntly, “which isn’t the same thing, at all.”
Iskierka coiled on herself uneasily. Temeraire felt a smart of anxiety for his own part: but, he told himself, it was not at all the same thing, to wish Laurence to be recognized for his own abundant merits; and after all he did not insist on Laurence’s wearing his robes, but only proposed it, now and again, when it seemed to him most appropriate, and when Laurence’s natural modesty should from time to time require a push to overcome.
“Well, I mean to think only of you,” Iskierka said in her defense, “and surely you must like to have splendid things, and have everyone see how particularly important you are—”
“The most splendid thing I am ever like to have,” Granby said, “is a Kazilik dragon, dear one. All I have ever wanted is to call myself a captain, in His Majesty’s Corps, and if you should manage to make me into a lord or an emperor or a rajah, I shouldn’t know in the least what to do with myself.”
Iskierka grumbled deep in her throat, but said grudgingly, “Well, if you very much dislike the idea of being a prince, I suppose I will give it up; but you do want a hook—”
“I should be very glad of a serviceable hook, of good steel, with no gewgaws to catch a blade upon in battle,” Granby said firmly, “and as for the rest of the money, we will put it to provisioning, as the whale was caught for all our benefit,” which Temeraire brightened at, as repairing the injustice of Iskierka’s selfishness. “And if you should ever take another prize in future,” Granby concluded, “we will put it into the Funds.”
“What are those?” Iskierka said.