“I’m sorry sir, with all we can do it’ll be rising noon before we can get him under leather again,” Fellowes came to say apologetically, having made a first survey of the damage and set the harness-men to work. “It’s the way he twists about, I expect: widens the tears.”

“Do what you can,” Laurence said briefly; no need to press them: every man was working to his limits, and there were as many as could be asked for, volunteers from the ground crews they had rescued. In the meantime, he coaxed Temeraire to sleep and conserve his energy.

Temeraire was not unwilling, and laid himself out around the still-warm ashes of the cooking fires. “Laurence,” he said after a moment, softly, “Laurence, have we lost?”

“Only a battle, my dear; not the war,” Laurence said, though honesty compelled him to add, “but a damnably important battle, yes; I suppose he has taken half the army prisoner, and scattered the rest.” He leaned against Temeraire’s foreleg, feeling very low; he had so far staved off with activity any serious contemplation of their circumstances.

“We must not yield to despair,” he said, as much for himself as for Temeraire. “There is yet hope, and if there were none at all, still sitting on our hands bewailing our fate would do no good.”

Temeraire sighed deeply. “What will happen to Eroica? They will not hurt him?”

“No, never,” Laurence answered. “He will be sent along to some breeding-grounds, I am sure; he may even be released, if they settle upon terms. Until then they will only keep Dyhern under lock and key; what the poor devil must feel.” He could well imagine all the horrors of the Prussian captain’s situation; to be not only himself prevented from doing any good for his country, but the instrument of his inexpressibly valuable dragon’s imprisonment. Temeraire evidently shared some very similar train of thought, with respect to Eroica; he curled his foreleg in to draw Laurence nearer, and nudged him a little anxiously for petting; this reassurance only let him drop off at last.

The harness-men managed the repairs quicker than promised, and before eleven o’clock were beginning the laborious process of getting aboard all the enormous weight of straps and buckles and rings, with much assistance from Temeraire himself: he was the only one who could possibly have raised up the massive shoulder-strap, some three feet wide and full of chain-mesh within, which anchored the whole.

They were in the midst of their labors when several of the dragons looked up together, at some sound which only they could hear; in another minute they could all see a little courier coming in towards them, his flight oddly unsteady. He dropped into the center of the field and sank down off his legs at once, deep bloody gashes along his sides, crying urgently and twisting his head around to see his captain: a boy some fifteen years of age if so many, drooping in his straps, whose legs had been slashed badly by the same strokes which marked his dragon.

They cut off the bloody harness and got the boy down; Keynes had put an iron bar in the hot ashes the moment both came down, and now clapped the searing surface to the open and oozing wounds, producing a terrible roasting smell. “No arteries or veins cut; he’ll do,” was his brusque remark after he had inspected his handiwork, and he set to giving the same treatment to the dragon.

The boy revived with a little brandy splashed into his mouth and smelling-salts under his nose; and he got out his message in German, gasping long stuttering breaths between the words to keep from breaking into sobs.

“Laurence, we were to go to Halle, were we not?” Temeraire said, listening. “He says the French have taken the town; they attacked this morning.”

“We cannot hold Berlin,” Hohenlohe said.

The King did not protest; he only nodded. “How long until the French reach the city?” the Queen asked; she was very pale, but composed, with her hands lying in her lap folded over lightly. “The children are there.”

“There is no time to waste,” Hohenlohe said; enough of an answer. He paused and said, his voice almost breaking, “Majesty—I beg you will forgive—”

The Queen sprang up and took his shoulders in her hands, kissing him on the cheek. “We will prevail against him,” she said fiercely. “Have courage; we will see you in the east.”

Regaining some measure of self-control, Hohenlohe rambled on a little longer, plans, intentions: he would rally more of the stragglers, send the artillery trains west, organize the middle-weights into formations; they would fall back to the fortress of Stettin, they would defend the line of the Oder. He did not sound as though he believed any of it.

Laurence stood uncomfortably in the corner of the room, as far away as he could manage. “Will you take their Majesties?” Hohenlohe had asked, heavily, when Laurence had first told him the news.

“Surely you will need us here, sir,” Laurence had said. “A fast courier—” but Hohenlohe had shaken his head.

“After what happened to this one, bringing the news? No; we cannot take such a risk. Their patrols will be out in force all around us.”

The King now raised the same objection and was answered the same way. “You cannot be taken,” Hohenlohe said. “It would be the end, Sire, he could dictate whatever terms he desired; or God forbid, if you should be killed, and the crown prince still in Berlin when they come there—”

“O God! My children in that monster’s power,” the Queen said. “We cannot stand here talking; let us go at once.” She went to the door and called her maid, waiting outside, to go and fetch a coat.

“Will you be all right?” the King asked her quietly.

“What, am I a child, to be afraid?” she said scornfully. “I have been flying on couriers; it cannot be very different,” but a courier twice the size of a horse was not to be compared with a heavy-weight bigger than the whole barn. “Is that your dragon, on the hill over there?” she asked Laurence, as they came into view of the covert; Laurence saw no hill, and then realized she was pointing at the middling-sized Berghexe sleeping on Temeraire’s back.

Before Laurence could correct her, Temeraire himself lifted up his head and looked in their direction. “Oh,” she said, a little faintly.

Laurence, who remembered when Temeraire had been small enough to fit into a hammock aboard the Reliant, still in some part did not think of him being quite so large as he really was. “He is perfectly gentle,” he said, in an awkward attempt at reassurance; also a brazen lie, since Temeraire had just enthusiastically spent the previous day in the most violent pursuits imaginable; but it seemed the thing to say.

All the dragon-crews sprang up startled to their feet as the royal couple entered the makeshift covert, and remained at stiff and awkward attention; aviators were not used to being so graced, as the little couriers who ordinarily bore important passengers went to their lodgings to carry them to and fro. Neither monarch looked very easy, particularly when all the dragons, catching their crews’ excitement, began craning their heads to peer at them; but with true grace the King took the Queen’s arm in his and went around to speak to the captains and give each a few words of approval.

Laurence seized the moment and beckoned hurriedly to Granby and Fellowes. “Can we get a tent put up for them aboard?” he asked urgently.

“I don’t know we can, sir; we left all behind what we could spare, running from the battlefield, and that lummox Bell had out the tents to make room for his kit, as though we couldn’t work him up a tanning-barrel anywhere we went,” Fellowes said, rubbing at the back of his neck nervously. “But we’ll manage something, if you can give me a turn of the glass; maybe some of these other fellows can lend us a bit of scrap.”

The tent was indeed managed out of two pieces of spare leather sewn together; personal harnesses were cobbled together; a half-respectable cold supper was hastily assembled and packed into a basket with even a bottle of wine, though how this should be opened mid-flight without disaster, Laurence had not the least idea. “If you are ready, Your Majesty,” he said tentatively, and offered the Queen his arm when she nodded. “Temeraire, will you put us up? Very carefully, if you please.”