very small, and it felt like bullying to say no to him.
‘That is quite enough,’ Temeraire said at last, forcing himself to be firm. ‘Lloyd, we are not going to hurt you or take away your food or your property, so you have no right to carry on at us in this way, only because we do not like to stay.’
‘How you talk; I'll be dismissed from my post for certain, and that's the least of it,’ Lloyd said, almost in tears. ‘It's as much as my life is worth, if I let you all go out wandering wild, pillaging farmers' livestock every which way—’
‘But we are not going pillaging, at all,’ Temeraire said. ‘That is why I am asking you where the cows come from. If the Government would feed them to us here, they are ours, and there is no reason we cannot take them and eat them somewhere else.’
‘But they come from all over,’ Lloyd said, and gesturing to his herdsmen added, ‘the drovers bring a string every week from a different farm. It is as much as all of Wales can do, to feed you lot; there's not one place.’
‘Oh,’ Temeraire said, and scratched his head; he had envisioned a very large pen, somewhere over the mountains perhaps, full of cows waiting to be taken out and carried along. ‘Well,’ he decided, ‘then you all will have to help: you will go to the farms and fetch the cows and bring them along to us. That way,’ he added, with a burst of fresh inspiration, ‘no one can complain to you, or sack you, because you will not have let us go off at all.’
This solution did not immediately promote itself to the herdsmen, who began to protest: some of them had families, and none of them wished to go to war. ‘No, that is all stuff and nonsense,’ Temeraire said. ‘It is your duty to fight the French as much as it is ours; more, because it is your Government, and it would press you if you were needed. I have been to sea with many pressed men; I know it is not very nice,’ he added, although he did not entirely see why they did not like to go; anywhere was better than this loathsome place, and at least they would be doing something, rather than sitting about, ‘but if Napoleon wins, that also will not be very nice, and anyway, I dare say the Government will stop your wages if they learn that you are sitting here with no dragons about. And if you come, we will give you a share of the prizes we take.’
Prizes proved to be a magical word with men as well as dragons, as did the general conviction, arrived at through a deal of quiet muttering, that if they did not go with the dragons, they should certainly be blamed for the desertion; but no one could complain they had not done their duty if they followed the beasts. Or at least, it would be more difficult to find them.
‘We might be ready soon as next week,’ Lloyd said, with one last gasping attempt. ‘If you'd all just have a bite to eat, and a bit of sleep first—’
‘We are leaving now,’ Temeraire said firmly, and rising up on his haunches called out, ‘Advance guard, aloft; and you may take your breakfast with you.’
Moncey and the small dragons gleefully leapt onto the herd, first for once, and went eating as they flew; it was perhaps a little messy, but much quicker to eat as one went. Minnow swallowed the head of her cow, and waved a wing-tip. ‘We will see you at the rendezvous,’ she called down. ‘Come on then pips, off we go,’ she said to the other courier-weights and they all stormed away rapidly northwards and east, along the planned route.
‘Now can we eat?’ Requiescat said, watching after them plaintively.
‘Yes, you may all eat, but have half now and take the rest to eat along the way, otherwise you will fly slowly, and be hungry again anyway at the end of it,’ Temeraire said. ‘Lloyd, we are going to Abergavenny, or outside it, anyway; do you know where that is?’
‘We can't drive the herd all that way by tomorrow!’ Lloyd said.
‘Then you will have to bring them as close as you can and we will manage somehow,’ Temeraire said; he was done listening to difficulties. ‘I have seen Napoleon's army fight, and within a week they will be in London, so we must be, also.’
‘We are a hundred fifty miles from London,’ Lloyd protested.
‘All the more reason to travel fast,’ Temeraire said, and flung himself into the air.
Bewildered, Laurence stood in the empty grounds and called Temeraire's name a few times. There was no answer but the mumbled echoes that the cliffs gave back and the momentary attention of a small red squirrel, which paused to look at him before continuing on its way. Elsie landed again, behind him. ‘Not a wing in the sky, sir,’ Hollin said.
Elsie carried them up to a cave, reaching deep into the mountain face. Though the light was failing rapidly, Laurence could trace with his fingers the letters of Temeraire's name, carved deeply into the rock. so he had at least been here, and was well enough to leave this mark. They managed to fashion a torch to inspect it, but the cave was too tidy, inside, to guess when his habitation had ended: no bones or other remnants of food.
It had been only two days since the French landing, but many dragons lived in the breeding grounds; if the herdsmen had abandoned their posts and the regular delivery of cattle interrupted, the provisions would quickly have been spent. The dragons must surely have scattered from hunger, and likely in all the directions of the rose.
‘Well, let us not borrow trouble,’ Hollin said, consolingly. ‘He is a clever fellow, and it cannot have been so long since they left. There are some fresh bones down by the pen, from only this morning by the look of them.’
Laurence shook his head. ‘I hope he would not have been so foolish, as to stay to the last,’ he answered, low. ‘So many foraging dragons will undoubtedly be consuming all of the local supply, and he must have more food than a smaller beast.’
‘I am a smaller beast,’ Elsie said, a little anxiously, ‘but I must have something to eat too, and there is nothing here.’
They went to Llechrhyd, the nearest settlement they could find, and bought her a sheep from a small cottager, who told them that the village, by some lucky chance, had not been raided. ‘Flew off east, all of them, this morning,’ the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly ate her dinner behind the stable, ‘like a plague of crows. It was dark for half an hour, with all them passing over and us sure they would fall on our heads in a moment; more than that I can't say.’
‘Hollin,’ Laurence said, when he had turned away disheartened, ‘I cannot tell you what your duty is; we have no very good intelligence, I am afraid, and if he is flying to feed himself, we cannot well imagine where he may have gone.’
‘Well, sir,’ Hollin said, ‘they said to bring you back with him, so I suppose those are my orders until I hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or as good as. It's not as though he's so easy to miss.’
But this course did not reckon with the confusion of dozens of beasts flung out upon the countryside at once. Certainly, dragons had been seen everywhere – dreadful marauding beasts – and no one knew what things were coming to when they were just allowed to go flying around loose. But as to one particular dragon, black with a ruff, no one had anything to say.
One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were
