“I only hope he will not throw it in the fire,” Granby said, after the boy had trotted away, coin clutched in one fist, not very discreetly. “Or I suppose Mustafa might hurl it in himself.”

“We will not hear anything tonight, regardless,” Laurence said. “We had better sleep while we can. If we get no answer, we will have to think of making a dash for Malta tomorrow. They do not have much of a shore battery here, and I dare say they will answer us very differently if we come back with a first-rate and a couple of frigates behind us.”

“Laurence,” Temeraire called from outside, rousing him from a thick, too-real dream of sailing; Laurence sat up and rubbed his wet face: a change in the wind had carried the fountain-spray onto him during the night.

“Yes,” he answered, and went to wash in the fountain, still half-asleep; he went down into the gardens, nodding civilly to the yawning guards, and Temeraire nudged at him with interest.

“That is a nice smell,” he said, diverted, and Laurence realized he had washed with the perfumed soap.

“I will have to scrub it off later,” he said, dismayed. “Are you hungry?”

“I would not mind something to eat,” Temeraire said, “but I must tell you something: I have been talking to Bezaid and Sherazde, and they say their egg will hatch very soon.”

“Who?” Laurence said, puzzled, then stared at the pair of Kazilik dragons, who blinked their glossy eyes at him in return, with mild interest. “Temeraire,” he said, slowly, “do you mean that we are to have their egg?”

“Yes, and two others, but those have not started to harden,” Temeraire said. “I think,” he added. “They only know a little French, and a little of the dragon-language, but they have been telling me words in Turkish.”

Laurence paid this no attention, too staggered by the news; very nearly since any organized sort of dragon-breeding had begun, Britain had been trying to acquire a line of fire-breathers. A few of the Flamme-de-Gloire had been brought over after Agincourt, but the last had died out scarcely a century later, and since then there had been only failure after failure: France and Spain had naturally denied them, too-close neighbors to wish to yield so great an advantage, and for a long while the Turks had been no more eager to deal with infidels than the British with heathen.

“And we were in negotiations with the Inca, not twelve years ago,” Granby said, his face flushed bright with passionate excitement, “but it all came to nothing, in the end; we offered them a kingdom’s ransom, and they seemed pleased, then overnight they returned us all the silk and tea and guns we had brought them, and ran us out of the place.”

“How much did we offer to them, do you recall?” Laurence asked, and Granby named a sum which made him sit abruptly down. Sherazde, with an air of smugness, informed them in her broken French that her egg had commanded a higher price still, almost impossible to believe.

“Good God; how half such a sum was raised, I am at a loss to imagine,” Laurence said. “They might build half-a-dozen first-rates for the same price, and a pair of dragon transports besides.”

Temeraire was sitting up and very still, his tail wound tight around his body and his ruff bristling. “We are buying the eggs?” he said.

“Why—” Laurence was surprised; he had not before realized Temeraire did not understand the eggs were to be acquired for money. “We are, yes, but you see yourself that your acquaintances do not object to giving over their egg,” he said, glancing anxiously at the Kazilik pair, who indeed seemed unconcerned at being parted from their offspring.

But Temeraire dismissed this with an impatient flick of his tail. “Of course they do not mind that, they know we will take care of the egg,” he said. “But as you have told me yourself, if you buy a thing, then you own it, and may do as you like with it. If I buy a cow I may eat it, and if you buy an estate then we may live upon it, and if you buy me a jewel I may wear it. If eggs are property, then the dragons that hatch out of them are also, and it is no wonder that people treat us as though we are slaves.”

There was very little way to answer this; raised in an abolitionist household, Laurence understood without question that men ought not be bought and sold, and when put on terms of principle he could hardly disagree; however, there was plainly a vast difference in the condition of dragons and the unfortunate wretches who lived in bondage.

“It’s not as though we can make the dragonets do as we want, once they hatch,” Granby offered, a useful inspiration. “You could say that we are only buying the chance to persuade them to go into harness with us.”

But Temeraire said, with a militant gleam, “And if instead when hatched they wished to fly away, and come back here?”

“Oh, well,” Granby said, lamely, and looked awkward; naturally in such a case, the feral dragonet would be taken to the breeding-grounds instead.

“At least consider that in this case, we are taking them away to England, where you will have the opportunity of improving their condition,” Laurence tried as consolation, but Temeraire was not so easily mollified, and curled brooding in the garden to consider the problem.

“Well, he has taken the bit in his teeth and no mistake,” Granby said to Laurence, with a worried querying note in his voice, as they went back inside.

“Yes,” Laurence said dismally. He did have some expectation of winning real improvement in the comforts of the dragons, once back home; he was sure Admiral Lenton and the other senior admirals of the Corps would be quite willing to adopt all such measures which their authority should allow. Laurence had with him plans for a pavilion in the Chinese style, with the heating-stones beneath and the pipe-fed running fountains, which had been so much to Temeraire’s liking; Gong Su might easily train others in the art of dragon cookery, and the Allegiance was carrying home besides the reading frames and sand writing tables, which surely could be adapted to Western usage. Privately Laurence doubted whether most dragons would have any interest; Temeraire was unique not only in his gift for language but his passion for books. But whatsoever interest there was could be satisfied easily and without great cost, and could hardly provoke any objections.

But beyond these measures, which might be undertaken within the discretion and the funds of the Corps, Government was hardly likely to go with a good-will, and the degree of coercion required to force anything more, Laurence could not bear to endorse. A mutiny of dragons would terrify all the country, and surely injure the cause as much as promote it; and fix the Ministry in the prejudice that dragons were not to be depended upon. The effects of such a conflict upon the prosecution of the war were hardly to be overstated, and as distraction alone might prove fatal: there were not enough dragons in England for those available to be worrying more about their pay and their rights in law than about their duty.

He could not help but wonder if another captain, a proper aviator and better-trained, might have kept Temeraire from growing so preoccupied and discontented, and channeled his energies better. He would have liked to ask Granby if such difficulties were at all common, if there were any advice to be had on the matter, but he could not be asking a subordinate for help in managing Temeraire; and in any case, he was not sure advice would be of use any longer. To call it slavery, when a dragon egg was purchased at a cost of half-a-million pounds, and the only change whether it should be hatched in England rather than in the Sublime Porte, was unreasonable as a practical matter, and all the philosophy in the world could not change that.

“If the egg has begun to harden, how long do you expect we have?” he asked Granby instead, putting his hand up to the wind that came in at the archway facing the sea, and calculating in his mind how long it should be to bring a ship from Malta; they could reach the island in three days’ flying, he felt sure, if Temeraire was well-rested and well-fed beforehand.