but he did not press any further for explanation; he only curled himself around Laurence, and offered the comfort of his companionship. Laurence seated himself heavily upon the dragon’s foreleg, grateful, and read the letter over again so he might at least have the pleasure of being unhappy with those whose unhappiness he had caused.
“I am sorry, Laurence; I do not suppose he could have heard that your fortune was restored,” Temeraire said, looking over at the wagon-cart, still piled high.
“He would have known me restored to the list,” Laurence said, but this was only a sop to Temeraire’s feelings. He knew that neither his fortune, nor his pardon and the reinstatement of his rank, which might restore him in the good graces of the world, would have weighed at all with Lord Allendale. That gentlemen could more easily have brooked his son’s public execution, on a charge he knew to be false, than to see his son laureled with gold and praised in every corner, and known to him as a traitor.
He might have told his father that worldly concerns at least had not weighed with him; he had acted only as his conscience had brutally required. But he had not seen his father since his conviction; he had not presumed to write, even after his sentence had been commuted to transportation, nor since his pardon. And they would now never speak again. There would be no opportunity for defense or explanation.
And Laurence could not but regard Temeraire’s extravagant hoard with dismay, although the Russians had been more astonished by his being willing to return any part of the treasure than by his keeping it entirely for himself. Laurence had asked how and where they should surrender the pillaged goods; the other aviators had only stared uncomprehending, and asked how he had managed to persuade Temeraire to surrender even the Tsar’s paintings, which could not have had a plainer provenance. He knew perfectly well what his father would have thought of a fortune obtained with so little character of law to the process.
But there was something too much like bitterness in that thought. Laurence made himself fold up the letter, and put it away in his pocket. He would not dwell upon what he could not repair. They were still at war; the French Emperor might have escaped, but the French army was yet strung out between Vilna and Berlin, what was left of it, and there would surely be more work to do soon enough.
There were other letters; letters from Spain: one from Jane Roland and one from Granby, with an enclosure addressed to Temeraire directly. Laurence meant to open them, but Temeraire said tentatively, “Laurence, I suppose you must begin to dress: Hammond will be calling for you in a quarter of an hour. Roland,” he called, “will you pray bring out Laurence’s robes? Be sure you do not track them in the dirt.”
Too late, Laurence recalled the conversation he had not attended; too late, protest sprang to his lips. Emily Roland was already with great ceremony and satisfaction unfolding the immense and heavily embroidered robes of silk which belonged to the son of the Emperor of China, and not to that of Lord Allendale.
When Laurence had gone, Temeraire brooded, watching the celebrations get under way. Even the magnificent display of fireworks which opened the evening did not please him: a stand of trees blocked a great deal of the covert’s view, which he felt might have been taken into account, and the faint drifting smoke only reminded him that he and every other dragon had eaten nothing but porridge and burnt horse for months.
“And it is not as though they did not know any better, anymore,” Temeraire said resentfully. He had refrained from making any remarks, while Laurence might be distressed by them any further, but after he had left for the celebration, Temeraire could no longer restrain himself. “It is not as though they had not seen, for themselves, that dragons should like to eat well, or live in a more orderly fashion; they have seen the arrangements of the Chinese legions.”
Churki, Hammond’s dragon—or rather, the Incan dragon who had decided, quite unaccountably in Temeraire’s opinion, to lay claim to him; Hammond by no means wished to be an aviator, nor even liked to fly—lifted her head out of her ruffled-up feathers; she had huddled down to await his return. “Why do you keep complaining we have not been invited to that ceremony? Plainly it is a gathering of men: how could any dragon come into that building where they are holding it?”
“They might make buildings large enough for us to come into, as they do in China,” Temeraire said, but she only huffed in a dismissive way.
“It is inconvenient for people to always be in buildings built to our size; it means they have too far to go to get from one thing to another,” Churki said, which had not occurred to Temeraire before. “Naturally they like to have places of their own; there is nothing wrong in that, nor that they should hold their own celebrations. And as far as I can tell, you are the senior dragon here; who else should be offering thanks for victory, and arranging the comforts of your troops, but you?”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, abashed. “But how am I to arrange any comforts, when we are only thrown upon a miserable covert, and have nowhere else to go?”
Churki shrugged. “This does seem a poor city,” she said, “and there are no large plazas of stone where dragons would ordinarily sleep or gather; but something may always be contrived! There is good enough timber in those woods there, and it would not be more than a few days to put down a floor of split logs, if you sent all those Russians to fetch a few dozen. Then you must pay men and women, if you have not enough in your own ayllu to carry out the work, to prepare ornaments and a feast. I do not see that there is any great puzzle about it,” she added, rather severely.
“Well,” Temeraire said, and would have protested that the woods were certainly property belonging to someone or another, but he could not help feeling it would be really complaining, then; the sort of complaining that shirkers did, when they did not want to work. Laurence had a great disgust of shirkers. “Ferris,” he called instead. “Will you be so good as to go into town for me, and make some inquiries? And pray can you see where Grig has got to?”
The crush of the ballroom would have been sufficient to stifle a man wearing something other than heavy silk robes. Laurence endured grimly both the heat and the attentions of the company. The robes were meant for a man presumed by their makers to be the natural center of any gathering he attended, and in this setting they had the happy power of ensuring him that position; he certainly outshone every man present, and most of the women. Hammond was aglow with delight, presenting him without hesitation to men of the highest rank as their social equal, and presuming upon the association to address himself to them. Laurence could not even check him, in public as they were, when Hammond was the King’s representative.
And the solitary one here, even though he was not even properly an envoy to Russia at all, but to China—but no other British diplomat had managed to keep up with the Tsar during the tumult of both retreat and pursuit. Lord Cathcart had been forced to flee St. Petersburg early on when Napoleon’s army had seized it; the ambassador in Moscow had decamped that city shortly before its fall, and Laurence had no idea what had become of the man. Only Hammond, with the benefit of a dragon as traveling-companion, had been able to stay with headquarters all the long dusty way.
“I am entirely reconciled to Churki’s company—entirely; I cannot overstate the benefits of having made myself so familiar, to the Tsar and his staff,” Hammond said, in low voice but with a naked delight that Laurence could not help but regard askance. “And, quite frankly, they think all the better of me, for being as they suppose her master; they value nothing so much as courage, and I assure you, Captain, that whenever we have caught them up, and I have been seen dismounting her back, and instructing her to go to her rest, without benefit of bit or harness, I have been received with a most gratifying amazement. I have arranged to have it happen in sight of the Tsar three times.”
Laurence could not openly say what he felt about such machinations, or about Hammond saying, “My dear Countess Lieven,
