The fourth man opened his eyes too soon, and managed to drum his heels as they reached for him; the other two roused sluggishly and groped for the missing swords and pistols, which Tharkay had already collected away, three of them thrust into his waistband in piratical fashion. It was a short but brutal struggle, even numbers and the necessity of silence driving them: Laurence went for his knife and grimly put it into the unarmed man’s throat as the Frenchman tried to wrestle himself up from the ground. The man sank back limply, staring up empty and blind at the ceiling, blood spilling from his neck to soak into the straw. Laurence took up a sword and killed another, quickly, while Janus held him. Tharkay dispatched the last.

The horses below were stamping again, whickering at the smell of blood. “Are you all right?” Woolvey whispered, putting his head up into the loft, and stopped with his mouth a little open.

“Yes,” Laurence said shortly, his heart still hammering. “Go below, and keep that fellow at the door.”

Whether because of some note in his voice, or the scene, Woolvey made no protest but obeyed in silence, vanishing again below. The trussed men fought and kicked as they were turned over and stripped of their coats and cuirasses, and one of them made a low moan behind the gag as his eyes fell on the dead men lying straight. Friends, or brothers, perhaps; Laurence closed his mind to the thought.

Or tried: Woolvey’s shocked expression lingered. The hard use, the necessary brutality of the service, were not of the same world as England, as home; and it was that division which might let a man be a gentleman and a practical soldier both. But now he was in the stables of Kensington Palace with his palms wet with blood, on a spy’s errand: yet as necessary as any military action. No-one could deny its necessity. Let it only take place in Paris, or Istanbul, or China, and Woolvey would read of it in the papers and applaud, though the act were the same, or bloodier. But it did not belong here, a black rotten canker taken root in the warm sour horse-smell of the stable attic, above the peaceful gardens.

They made shift out of the four scavenged uniforms not overly stained with blood, and Laurence threw a stable-blanket over the men now stripped and bound again, against the chill. The coat sat uneasily on his shoulders, warm from a dead man’s body, as he climbed down the ladder and gave the last coat to Woolvey.

“We will bind you also,” Laurence said to the boy, “unless you will come along, to the rescue and to the dragon—” but the boy shook his head vigorously, and preferred to be bound up and thrown into the loft also.

“Perhaps half-an-hour now,” Tharkay said, meaning how long they might hope for, before discovery: Laurence himself made it likelier a quarter.

“We go in quickly, then,” he said. “Not running, but with purpose: do you know where he is, Janus?”

“Well, sir,” Janus said, shrugging awkwardly inside his coat, and looking a poorer match for it than Tharkay, “the maids will sometimes take a fellow up to the better rooms to see, and I don’t say I haven’t had an invitation or two; but which his room will be, I am sure I can’t say.”

“There will be no difficulty there,” Laurence said. “It will be the door that is guarded.”

He went first, with Woolvey beside him: a quick glance would see their faces and perhaps miss the others behind them; Tharkay had a handkerchief up to his face as if to catch a sneeze, for some more concealment. They went up the back staircase, and at Janus’s whisper turned off the landing into the hallway.

Some eight or nine men stood in the hall talking near one of the doors, of a room facing onto the rear of the house. Undoubtedly there would be more guards within. Laurence did not pause, but kept walking steadily towards them: the men not stiff at their posts but talking and lounging freely, unalarmed: some sitting on the floor in a game of cards, others crouching by to observe, only a few standing. A maid was coming down the hall past them, loaded down with washing, and picking through the knot of them had a moment’s awkward struggle to win past one over-enthusiastic sergeant, who caught at her waist.

“Keep off your hands,” she said coldly, and jerked expertly free with a twist of her hips, while the other officers roared with laughter at their fellow’s expense. She won past them at last, cheeks angry with color and her eyes downcast; Laurence was nearly even with her now, and as they passed one another he seized one of the sheets from her pile and snapped it open over the entire company.

A confused babble of shouting arose at once: they all four rushed the swathed men, toppling the standing men over. The door to the room opened and another man looked out: Tharkay shot him, and kicked the door wide. Granby, warned by the commotion, took the opening at once and came rushing out of the room, with a bruised cheek and a bandaged arm. “Thank God, give me a pistol,” he said, and threw off the sling.

“The window,” Laurence said, and turning at the report of a shot, received Woolvey into his arms. There was a startled look on Woolvey’s face, and a great stain spreading already through his shirt, visible beneath the swallow-wing lapels of his coat. Another shot fired and another, bullets coming wild through the sheet, small fires catching in the linen in their wake. The maid, screaming, had fled down the hall.

“Iskierka!” Granby was shouting: he had dashed into the room across the way and was leaning out the window.

A look was enough to be sure: the light was already gone from Woolvey’s eyes; he was dead weight sliding to the floor. “Laurence,” Tharkay said, and shot the first French officer struggling out of the tangled sheet.

“Damn you,” Laurence said, not very certain if he meant Woolvey, or the man who had shot him, or indeed himself; he, stooping, worked the wedding-ring from Woolvey’s hand, and went after Tharkay into the bedroom. They shut the door and barricaded it with a wardrobe overturned. It would hold only a moment, but they needed no longer: Iskierka’s talons were already seeking at the window, scrabbling and tearing away glass and masonry and brick in great shattering blocks.

IT WAS NOT at all pleasant to wait, and wait, and keep waiting: Temeraire paced, and then went aloft to look in case there should be any sign, and then came back down and paced a little more.

“There is no one coming, is there?” Perscitia asked, a little anxiously, worried in another direction entirely. “No French dragons? Perhaps you should stop going up so much: someone might see you, and,” she added quickly, “if we had to move, or had some fuss, it would make it hard for Laurence to find us again, on his way back.”

Temeraire tried to settle; he could not help but see the sense in this remark, but he shook his head at her offer of a haunch of cow: the smaller dragons had gone out quietly hunting for all of them, but he did not have much appetite.

“It was not very fair of those dragons,” Arkady said, “all coming on at us at once like that. If you ask me, they are all cowards. We should go fly in and get Iskierka out ourselves.” He had recovered his spirits and was eating a sheep, which Lester had gone and fetched for him, with great cheer.

“We are not going to do any such thing,” Temeraire said. “There are four times as many of them as of us, with guns and soldiers, and they will only have us down. Anyway that would not help us get Granby back: they will shoot him,” and maybe Laurence, too, he added silently, anxiously. It was all the more unpleasant to have Arkady making such reckless suggestions, when it was all that Temeraire wished to do himself.

“What are we going to do, then,” Arkady returned, “if they do not come back?”

“If they do not come back,” Temeraire said, and paused, and lamely finished, “then we will think of something,” not liking to imagine the prospect. He had thought Laurence was dead, and it had been just as dreadful in every way as if Laurence really had been dead. It made one unsure of the distinction between the event imagined and real, and therefore, Temeraire felt, any sort of unnecessary speculation perhaps a little bit of a risk. Laurence thought such concerns foolishly superstitious, Temeraire knew, but it seemed to him a danger not worth courting.