“It damned well is, if you are her commanding officer,” Wellesley said. “Do not let me hear you blame one of your subordinates again.”

“Oh,” said Temeraire, quelled, and looked a little ashamed.

“Now,” Wellesley said, “if you have finished with this back-talking: since you have spent half the day flying hither and yon, I mean to profit by it, at least. Where is Davout bivouacked, and how many soldiers does he have on the road in reach of us?”

“But I told Hollin to tell you,” Temeraire said. “They have all gone back to London.”

“There were thirty thousand men behind us yesterday morning,” Wellesley said. “I don’t care if Bonaparte is chasing them with whips from morning to night and using dragons for supply, they cannot all have got back to the city in a day: you must at least have seen some sign, pickets or fires—”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “there was no sign that any of us saw, either the beasts which flew off earlier, or when we pursued them; we saw Davout’s regiments making camp around London, and Murat was in the city also.”

“And I have already told you all,” Temeraire said, “they can go fifty miles in a day, we have seen them do it, so—”

“It is one thing to move a brigade or two by dragon-back,” Wellesley said impatiently, “another to move an army: you cannot put much more than two hundred men even on the largest beasts.”

“That is not how they do it,” Perscitia put in, unexpectedly. The other dragons had all been listening in to the conversation and the lecture with gossipy interest, though hanging back a little; now she put her head forward to interject. “They do not just take a hundred men and fly with them straight, all day. They take a hundred men and carry them as far as they can in an hour, and put them down, and those men start marching from there. And then the dragons go back and get the next hundred men, who you see have been marching all this time, so they are not all the way off, and the dragons take them forward for—”

“Wait, they fly back?” Requiescat said, and with much irritation Perscitia had to interrupt to claw a picture into the dirt, showing how the companies would each in turn be carried leap-frog over those in front of them, each receiving two hours of the dragons’ time.

“And so on, until they have carried everyone a little way, and given them all a rest,” Perscitia said, “and so the men can walk thirty miles instead of twenty, and the dragons fly everyone twenty miles on top of that, so the whole company has moved fifty miles, together.”

She finished triumphantly, and Requiescat said, “Well, it seems like a lot of bother to me, just for an extra twenty miles; even I can make that in an hour or two,” and she huffed in indignation.

Wellesley had a better appreciation of her explanation, however, and studied the diagram with a fierce, hawk-like intent. “So this is what Roland has been going on about, then?” He looked at Laurence and said sharply, “And can your beasts manage the same?”

“If the men would go aboard,” Laurence answered him.

“They will go aboard if I have to shoot them,” Wellesley said.

For all his harsh words, however, the next morning he took the Coldstream Guards apart, and addressed them personally; the seven Yellow Reapers and three Grey Coppers were lined up some distance behind him, facing away so their jaws and teeth could not be seen. They had been rigged out with rope and sackcloth, and his aides were all busily climbing over the dragons—to no purpose but the dramatic, as the rigging had already been thoroughly tried by the dragons themselves tugging on it.

“Men,” Wellesley said, “this is a damned sorry state of affairs we are in. That Corsican upstart sleeping in the King’s bed, and his bully-boys stealing cattle and wrecking the harvest: it is more than any red-blooded Englishman can bear, and we are not going to bear it, either, for much longer.”

“That’s right,” a couple of men called back; a “hear, hear” and scattered mutterings of agreement.

“Every one of you knows they cannot outfight you, and we have learned they are not outwalking you, either: it is all one of Boney’s tricks. Those damned lazy Frenchmen are being carted around half the day on dragon-back, that is how they have been getting the jump on us,” Wellesley said, jerking his head back towards the dragons. “It is time we put a stop to it, and your colonel has solicited the honor for your regiment to go first.

“It is no treat to go aloft, so I rely on you all to make an example for the rest of the corps to follow. When your sergeants give the word, you are to go aboard the dragons, one to a company, one column to a side, filling the rigging from front to back. The first company which is aboard in good order will have the honor of carrying the flag when we give Boney his well-deserved drubbing, and an extra ration of rum in camp to-night.

“And I hope there is no man here more faint of heart than a Frenchman,” he added, “but if there is anyone here who is too craven to go aloft for an hour, he may say so now, and be excused.” He nodded to the colonel of the regiment, and himself turned and walked over to the dragons, to make a show of speaking with Rowley. No-one spoke, and the men filed in perfect order—with something even of a hurry—aboard the beasts; the rest of the army had been roused up to see it happen, and the dragons lifting off with the soldiers all aboard: with only a little prodding from the sergeants, the men aboard all jeered cheerfully at the regiments marching below as the dragons sailed away.

The first few days were a confusion of trying to match the supply to the men, at the end of the day, and more than one set of rations went astray; they did not manage to go more than ten miles beyond the usual distance, and the brigades on the road became a wretched muddle, with some regiments on each others’ heels, and others separated by miles. The dragons were also not very pleased. “One of them poked at me with a bayonet,” Chalcedony complained, indignantly, “and when I turned around and told him to stop, he shrieked: he is lucky I did not toss him off.”

But a semblance of order was gradually imposed on the proceedings, and in the end, the march which ought to have taken a long slow month was completed in two weeks: the advantage of air transport told all the more as they came through the mountains, where the dragons carried the men over the worst stretches, anywhere snow and ice had made the road impassable. Winter was now upon them in earnest, and they flew deeper into it as they went north; until the Cairngorm range reared up startlingly close, one clear morning, and the frozen black waters of Loch Laggan, with the citadel looking down upon it from the heights.

“Oh, at last,” Temeraire said, with relief, looking down at the courtyard with its heated stones dark and bare of snow.

But Laurence was looking at something else: there was a dragon already in the courtyard, a Papillon Noir gorgeously ornamented with iridescent stripes of blue and green, curled comfortably upon the stones with a flag of parley and a tricolor upon its shoulders.