Temeraire said, “Laurence, that is Auctoritas and Caelifera, from Dover, I am sure of it, but I do not know that other little dragon at all; I have never seen one of that kind.”

“Oh, Hell, that is a Plein-Vite,” Ferris said, after a single borrowed look through Laurence’s glass. The three dragons were directly over the quarantine-grounds, and the great miserable hulks of other sick beasts were plainly visible for the French dragon to see, even through the mist, in all their bloodstained dirt. And already the two dragons who had attempted to halt her were falling off the pace and drooping earthwards, exhausted, as the tiny French dragon darted and looped and evaded, beating her wings mightily, and flung herself past the borders of the grounds, heading towards the Channel as quick as ever she could go.

“After her, Temeraire,” Laurence said, and they leapt into pursuit, Temeraire’s enormous wings beating once to every five of hers, but eating up the yards with every stroke.

“They haven’t much endurance, they’re close-couriers only, for all they’re fast as bloody lightning; they must have brought her nearly up to the coast by boat, at night, to save her strength for the flight back,” Ferris said, shouting over the knife-cut wind. Laurence only nodded, to save his voice: Bonaparte had likely been hoping to slip so small a messenger-beast through where the larger had not been able to manage.

He raised the speaking-trumpet and bellowed, “Rendezvous,” to no effect. The flare they fired off for emphasis, launched ahead of the little dragon’s nose, was a signal less easily missed or misinterpreted, but there was no slackening in the furious pace. The Plein-Vite had only a small pilot, a young boy scarcely much older than Roland or Dyer, whose pale and frightened face Laurence could plainly see in his glass as the boy looked back to see the vast black-winged pursuit ready to engulf him. He turned back to speak encouragement to his beast, casting off bits of harness and buckle as she flew: the boy even kicked off his shoes, and threw overboard his belt with its sword and pistol, flashing in the sunlight as they turned end-over-end, surely prized treasures; and heartened by her rider’s example, with an effort the little dragon began to speed her strokes and pull away, her advantage in speed and small breadth before the wind telling.

“We must bring her down,” Laurence said grimly, lowering his glass; he had seen what effect the divine wind had on enemy dragons of fighting-weight, and on soldiers under arms: what damage it might wreak, upon so small and helpless a target, he neither liked to think nor wished to witness, but their duty was plain. “Temeraire, you must stop them; we cannot let them slip away.”

“Laurence, she is so very little,” Temeraire objected unhappily, turning his head only just enough to be heard; he was still pressing on after her, with all the will in the world, but she would not be caught.

“We cannot try to board her,” Laurence answered, “she is too small and too quick; it would be a death-sentence to make any man attempt that leap. If she will not surrender, she must be brought down. She is pulling away; it must be now.”

Temeraire shuddered, then with decision drew breath and roared out: but over the French dragon, not directly at her. She gave a startled shrill cry of alarum, backwinging as if she was trying to reverse her course, her pace dropping off to nothing for a moment. With a convulsive gathered lunge, Temeraire was above her and folding his wings, bearing her bodily down towards the earth below: soft pale yellow sand, heaped in rolling dunes, and the little French dragon went tumbling pell-mell as they plowed into the dirt behind her, oceanic waves of dust billowing up in a cloud around them.

They slid across the ground some hundred yards, Laurence blind and trying to shield his mouth from the flying sand, hearing Temeraire hissing in displeasure and the French dragon squalling. Then “Hah!” Temeraire said triumphantly, “je vous ai attrapé il ne faut pas pleurer; oh, I beg your pardon, I am very sorry,” and Laurence wiped the grit from his face and nostrils, coughing violently, and clearing his stinging vision found himself looking almost directly into the alarming fiery orange of a Longwing’s slit-pupiled eye.

Excidium turned his head to sneeze, acid droplets spraying involuntarily with the gesture, smoking briefly as the sand absorbed them. Laurence gazed in horror as the great head swung wearily back and Excidium said, in a harsh and rasping voice, “What have you done? You ought not have come here,” while the sand-cloud settled to show him one among a half-a-dozen Longwings, Lily raising her head out of her shielding wing beside him, all of them huddled close in the sand-pit that was their place of quarantine.

THEY HAD NO companion in their isolated quarantine-meadow but little Sauvignon, the French courier-beast, who had not even the solace of her captain’s presence. He, poor child, had been marched away in irons against her good behavior, while she made piteous cries under the restraint of Temeraire’s reluctant but irresistible hold upon her back, his great claw nearly pinning her to the ground entirely.

She huddled upon herself after he was gone, and was only gradually persuaded by Temeraire to eat a little, and then to talk. “Voici un joli cochon,” Temeraire said, nudging over one of the spit-roasted hogs which Gong Su had prepared for him, lacquered in dark orange sauce. “Votre capitaine's’inquiétera's’il apprend que vous ne mangez pas, vraiment.”

She took a few bites, shortly proceeding to greater enthusiasm once Temeraire had explained to her that the recipe was à la Chinois: her naïve remark that she was eating “comme la Reine Blanche” and a little more conversation confirmed to Laurence that Lung Tien Lien, their bitter enemy, was now securely established in Paris, and deep in Napoleon’s councils. The little courier, full of hero-worship for the other Celestial, was not to be led into exposing any secret plans, if she knew of any, but Laurence needed no revelations to tell him that Lien’s voice was sure to be loud for invasion, if Napoleon required any additional persuasion, and that she would strive to keep his attention firmly fixed upon Britain and no other part of the world.

“She says Napoleon is having the streets widened, so Lien may walk through all the city,” Temeraire said, disgruntled, “and he has already built her a pavilion beside his palace. It does not seem fair that we have such difficulties here, when she has everything her own way.”

Laurence answered only dully; he cared very little anymore for such larger affairs, when he was to watch Temeraire die as Victoriatus had died, reduced to that hideous bloody wreckage; a devastation far more complete than any Lien might have engineered from the deepest wells of malice. “You were with them only a few moments; let us hope,” Jane had said, but no more than that, and in her lack of encouragement Laurence saw Temeraire’s death-warrant signed and sealed. All the sand-pit was surely thick with the contagion; the Longwings had been penned up there for the better part of a year, the effluvia buried in the sand along with their poisonous acid.

He understood, belatedly, why he had seen none of his former colleagues, why Berkley and Harcourt had not answered his letters. Granby came to visit him, once: they could neither of them manage more than half-a-dozen words, painfully stilted; Granby consciously avoiding the subject of his own healthy Iskierka, and Laurence not wishing in the least to speak of Temeraire’s chances, especially not where Temeraire himself might hear, and learn to share his own despair. At present Temeraire had no concern for himself, secure in the confidence of his own strength, a comfort which Laurence had no desire to take from him before the inevitable course of the disease should manage the job.