“Mustn’t I?” she said, gazing up at him damp and bewildered.

“Oh, Christ,” Laurence said, under his breath. “No,” he told her firmly, “it is not suitable; you are beginning to be a young lady.”

“Oh,” she said dismissively, “Mother has told me all about that, but I have not started bleeding yet, and anyway I would not like to go to bed with any of them,” and a thoroughly routed Laurence feebly fell back on giving her some make-work, and fled to Temeraire’s side.

The pigs were coming to a turn, and meanwhile Gong Su had been stewing the intestines and offal and hocks, judiciously adding from the various ingredients which the ferals had begun offering him, the fruit of their own collections, not all entirely legitimate: some greens and native roots, but also a bushel of turnips in a torn sack, and another bag of grain, which evidently they had snatched and found inedible.

Temeraire was engaged in a conversation of rapidly increasing fluency with the red-patch leader. “His name is Arkady,” Temeraire said to Laurence, who bowed to the dragon. “He says he is very sorry they should have troubled us,” he added.

Arkady inclined his head graciously and made a pretty speech of welcome, not looking particularly repentant; Laurence doubted not that they would set on the next travelers with as good a will. “Temeraire, do express to him the dangers of this sort of behavior,” he said. “They will all end by being shot, likely enough, if they continue to waylay men: the populace will grow exasperated and lay out a bounty on their heads.”

“He says it is only a toll,” Temeraire said doubtfully, after some further discussion, “and that no one minds paying it, though of course they ought to have waived it for me.” Arkady here added something more in a slightly injured tone, which puzzled Temeraire into scratching at his forehead. “Although the last one like me did not object, and gave them a pair of very nice cows, if they should lead her and her servants through the passes.”

“Like you?” Laurence said, blankly; there were only eight dragons in the world like Temeraire, all of them five thousand miles away in Peking; and even in so broad a quality as color he was very nearly unique, being a solid glossy black save for the pearlescent markings at the very edges of his wings, while most dragons were patterned in many colors like the ferals themselves.

Temeraire made further inquiry. “He says she was just like me, except white all over, and her eyes were red,” he said, his ruff coming straight back up, and his nostrils flaring redly; Arkady edged away, looking alarmed.

“How many men were with her?” Laurence demanded. “Who were they; did he see which way she left, after the mountains?” Questions, anxieties at once came tumbling over one another: the description left no doubt as to the identity of the dragon. It could only be Lien, the Celestial whose color had been leached away by some strange mischance of birth, and surely in her heart their bitter enemy: in her startling choice to leave China he could read nothing but the worst intentions.

“There were some other dragons traveling with them, to carry the men,” Temeraire said, and Arkady called over the little blue-and-white dragon, whose name was Gherni: being in some measure familiar with the Turkish dialect of these parts, as well as the draconic speech, she had served as interpreter with the pack-dragons and could tell them a little more.

The news was as bad as could be imagined: Lien was traveling with a Frenchman, by the description surely Ambassador De Guignes, and from what Gherni said, she had already mastered the language, from her ability to converse with De Guignes. She was certainly on her way to France, and there could be only one motive for her to have made such a journey.

“She won’t let them put her to any real use,” Granby offered as consolation, in their hasty discussion. “They cannot just throw her into the front lines, without a crew or captain, and she’ll never let them put a harness on her after all the fuss they made about our putting one on Temeraire.”

“At the very least they can breed her,” Laurence said, grimly, “but I do not think for a moment that Bonaparte will not find some way to turn her to good account. You saw what Temeraire did, on our way to Madeira: a frigate of forty-eight guns, sunk in a single pass, and I do not know the same trick would not do for a first-rate.” The Navy’s wooden walls were yet Britain’s surest defense, and the still-more-vulnerable merchantmen carried the trade which was her lifeblood; the threat Lien represented alone might well alter the balance of power across the Channel.

“I am not afraid of Lien,” Temeraire said, still in a bristling mood. “And I am not in the least sorry Yongxing is dead, either: he had no business trying to kill you, and she had none letting him try, if she did not like it served back again.”

Laurence shook his head; such considerations would surely hold no water with Lien. Her strange ghostly coloration had rendered her outcast among the Chinese, and all her world had been bound up in Yongxing, even more than most dragons with their companions; she would certainly not forgive. He had not imagined, proud and disdainful of the West as she was, that she would ever go into such an exile: if revenge and hatred had moved her so far, they would suffice for more.

“ANY DELAY NOW is disaster,” Laurence said, and Tharkay sketched out the last stretch of their journey upon the smooth floor of the cavern, using pale rocks for chalk; a course which would avoid the great cities, past golden Samarkand and ancient Baghdad, between Isfahan and Tehran, and take them on a meandering road through wilderness and skirting the edges of the great deserts.

“We will have to spend more time hunting,” Tharkay warned, but that was small cost by comparison: Laurence wanted to risk neither challenge nor hospitality from the Persian satraps, which would consume far more time in either case. There was something a little unpleasant and skulking about creeping through the countryside of a foreign nation, without permission, and it would be at the very least embarrassing if they were caught, but he was willing to trust their caution and Temeraire’s speed to guard against the last.

Laurence had meant to stay another day, to let the men worst injured by the avalanche make some recovery on the ground, but there could be no question of that now with Lien on her way to France, where she might wreak merry havoc at the Channel, or upon the Mediterranean Fleet. The Navy and the merchant marine would be wholly unsuspecting and vulnerable; her appearance would not be a warning, for her white coloration would not be found in any of the dragon-books which ships carried, to warn their captains of fire-breathers and the like. She was many years older than Temeraire, and though she had never been trained in battle, she lacked nothing in agility and grace and likely was more practiced in the use of the divine wind; it made him shudder to think of so deadly a weapon placed in Bonaparte’s hands, and aimed nearly at the heart of Britain.

“We will leave in the morning,” he said, and stood up from the floor to find a disgruntled audience of dragons; the ferals had gathered around in curiosity while Tharkay made his diagrams, and, having demanded some explanation from Temeraire, they were now indignant to find their own mountain range little more than a scattering of hatch-marks dividing the vast expanse of China from Persia and the Ottoman Empire.

“I am just telling them that we have been all the way from England to China,” Temeraire informed Laurence, smugly, “and round Africa, too; they have none of them ever been very much outside the mountains.”

Temeraire made some further remarks to them, in a tone of no little condescension. He had indeed some experience to brag of, having been fêted lavishly at the imperial court of China after a journey halfway around the world, not to mention several notable actions to his credit; besides these adventures, his jeweled breastplate and talon-sheaths had already drawn envy from the unadorned ferals, and Laurence even discovered himself the subject of a gallery of appraising slit-pupiled stares after Temeraire had finished telling them he knew not what.