LAURENCE HAD PUT down his ground crew deep in the countryside on the far bank of the Saale, tucked into a well-hidden forested defile, not easily seen from above; they were standing all together, the strongest of the hands in front with axes and sabers and pistols held ready, and Keynes and the runners to the back, the eggs tucked safely in their swaddling and harness near a small screened-off fire.

“We heard the guns going near since you left us, sir,” Fellowes said, anxiously, even as he and his men began looking over Temeraire’s harness for damage.

“Yes,” Laurence said, “they overran our position; we are falling back on Jena.” He felt as though he were speaking from a great distance; an immense weariness had hold of him, which could not be allowed to show. “A ration of rum for all the flight crew; see to it if you please, Mr. Roland, Mr. Dyer,” he said, letting himself down; Emily and Dyer carried the spirit bottles around, with a glass, and the men each drank their tot. Laurence took his own last, with gratitude; the hot liquor was at least an immediate presence.

He went back to speak with Keynes over the eggs. “No harm at all,” the surgeon said. “They could keep like this a month without difficulties.”

“Have you any better sense of when we may expect the hatching?” Laurence asked.

“Nothing whatsoever has changed,” Keynes said, in his peevish way. “We still have anywhere from three weeks to five, or I should have said.”

“Very good,” Laurence said, and sent him to look over Temeraire, in case there should be any sign of injury to his muscles, a result of overextending himself, which in the heat of battle or the present sorrow he might not have noticed.

“It was mostly that they took us by surprise,” Temeraire said miserably, as Keynes clambered over him, “and those wretched formations; oh, Laurence, I ought to have said more, and made them listen.”

“There was scarcely any hope of your doing so under the circumstances,” Laurence said. “Do not reproach yourself; think rather how the formation movements might most easily be amended, without causing them great confusion. I hope we may persuade them to heed your advice, now, and if so, we will have repaired a grave fault in tactics, at no more cost than the loss of one skirmish; as painful a lesson as it has been, we will then count ourselves fortunate it was no worse.”

They arrived at Jena in the small hours of the morning; the army was drawing up close around the town, withdrawing in upon itself. The French had captured a badly needed supply-train at Gera, and the depots in the town were near-empty. There was only a single small sheep for Temeraire to eat; Gong Su stretched it by stewing, with the addition of some aromatics which he had gathered, and Temeraire made a better meal than the men, who had to make do with a sort of hastily cooked porridge, and hard-baked bread.

There was an ugly murmuring all through the camp, as Laurence walked by the fires: Saxon stragglers coming in from the battlefield were murmuring that they had borne the brunt of the attack, sacrificed to try and hold the French; and worse yet, there had been another defeat: General Tauentzein, retreating from Hof in the face of the French advance, had backed out of Marshal Soult’s arms and straight into Marshal Bernadotte’s, from frying-pan to fire, and had lost four hundred men before at last escaping. Enough to disquiet any man, much less those who had been counting on an easy, assured victory; there was little sign of that early supreme confidence anymore.

He found Dyhern and the other Prussian aviators having claimed a small ramshackle cottage, hastily deserted by its peasant tenants when the dragons descended upon their fields, for their meager comfort. “I am not proposing any wholesale alteration,” Laurence said urgently, laying out his diagrams, sketched to Temeraire’s orders, “only what changes can easily be accommodated; whatever risks are entailed in so desperate a change in the final hour can scarcely be measured against the certainty of disaster, if nothing be done.”

“You are kind enough not to say, I told you so,” Dyhern said, “but I hear it nonetheless. Very well; we will let a dragon be our instructor, and see what can be done; at least we will not be sitting in covert licking our wounds, like dogs after a beating.”

He and his fellow captains had been sitting gloomily around the mostly bare table, drinking in silence; now he rallied himself and them both with an immense effort, and by sheer force of personality put fresh heart into them, chiding them for getting into the dumps, and very nearly dragged them bodily outside and back to their dragons. The activity perked up their heads and spirits, Temeraire not least of all; he sat up bright-eyed as they all assembled and gladly threw himself into the exercise, showing them the new flying-patterns which he had devised.

To these Laurence and Granby had contributed little but simplified much; elaborate maneuvers which Temeraire could perform without a thought were simply beyond the physical agility of most Western dragon breeds. Even considerably slowed down, the new patterns gave the Prussians, so long inculcated with their formal drills, some difficulty at first, but the precision which informed their regular practice slowly began to tell, and after a dozen passes or so they were tired but triumphant. Some of the other dragons with the army had crept up to observe, and shortly after their officers came too; when Dyhern and his formation dropped down at last for a rest, they were quickly mobbed with questions, and shortly a couple of other formations were in the air trying their own hand.

Their practice was interrupted that afternoon, however, by a fresh change of plans: the army was concentrating anew about Weimar, with intentions of falling back to protect their lines of communications with Berlin, and once again the dragons would lead the way. An angry grumbling met this news; before now all the marching hither and yon, the changing orders, had been taken in good spirits, viewed as the inevitable shifting course of a war. But to fall back again now pell-mell, as if a couple of small French victories were enough to chase them home, was infuriating to all; and the confusion of orders took on the more unsettling cast of a lack of decision among the commanders.

In this hostile mood, the further news reached them that the ill-fated Prince Louis had taken his position across the Saale in answer to unclear orders by Hohenlohe, which had indeed implied an advance in progress, though this same advance had not been properly authorized by Brunswick or the King; the whole army had never stirred southward in the end, Hohenlohe evidently thinking better of his plans.

“He sent fresh orders to fall back,” Dyhern said, bitterly, having heard the news from one of Prince Louis’s aides-de-camp, who had just struggled back to camp, on foot, his poor horse having foundered crossing the Saale. “But we were already engaged by then, and our prince had not an hour left of life; so has Prussia thrown away one of her finest soldiers.”

They could not be said to be mutinous, but they were very angry all, and worse than that discouraged; the sense of achievement built over the afternoon worn away. They went silently to their several clearings to oversee the work of packing.

The sound of the courier-dragon leaving the covert had begun to be a hateful noise, signifying yet another of the endless futile conferences was under way. Laurence woke to that flurry of wings in the still-black hours of the morning, and rolled out of his tent in bare feet and shirtsleeves to scrub his face at the water-barrel: no frost yet, but more than cold enough to wake a man properly. Temeraire lay sleeping still, breath coming in warm puffs from his nostrils; Salyer looked up alertly when Laurence glanced into the cramped half-sized tent where he and the snoring Allen had kept the night’s watch over the eggs: the warmest place in camp, the fabric doubled over and the brazier coals glowing.