“Je ne me sens pas bien,” Sauvignon said, on the morning of the fourth day, waking herself and them with a violent burst of sneezing; she was taken away to join the other sick beasts, leaving them to wait alone for the first herald of disease.

Jane had come to see him daily, with encouraging words as long as he wished to hear them, and brandy for when he could no longer; but she reluctantly said, coming to see him on the unhappy day, “I am damned sorry to speak of this so bluntly, Laurence, but you must forgive me. Would Temeraire have begun to think of breeding yet, do you know?”

“Breeding,” Laurence said bitterly, and looked away; it was natural, of course, that they should wish to preserve the bloodline of the rarest of all breeds, acquired with such difficulty, and now also in the possession of their enemy; yet to him it could be only a desire to replace what should be irreplaceable.

“I know,” she said gently, “but we must expect it to come on him any day now, and mostly they are disinclined once they get sick; and who can blame them.”

Her courage reproached him; she suffered as much herself with no outward show, and he could not yield to his own feelings before her. In any case there was no shading of the truth to be had; he could not lie, and was forced to confess that Temeraire had “grown very fond of a female Imperial, in the retinue of the Emperor, while we were in Peking.”

“Well, I am glad to hear it: I must ask if he would oblige us with a mating, to begin as soon as tonight, now he has been without question exposed,” Jane said. “Felicita is not very poorly, and informed her captain two days ago that she thinks she has another egg in her; she has already given us two, good creature, before she fell sick. She is only a Yellow Reaper, a middle-weight; it is not the sort of cross any breeder of sense would choose to make, but I think any Celestial blood must be better than none, and we have few enough who are in any state to bear.”

“But I have never seen her in my life,” Temeraire said puzzledly, when the question was put to him. “Why should I wish to mate with her?”

“It is akin to an arranged marriage of state, I suppose,” Laurence said, uncertain how to answer; it seemed to him belatedly a coarse sort of proposal, as though Temeraire were a prize stallion to be set on to a mare, neither of their preferences consulted, and not even a prior meeting. “You need do nothing you do not like,” he added abruptly; he would not see this forced on Temeraire, in the least, any more than he should have lent himself to such an enterprise.

“Well, it is not as though I expect I would mind,” Temeraire said, “if she would like it so very much, and I am rather bored only sitting about all day,” he added, with rather less modesty than candor, “only I do not understand at all why she should.”

Jane laughed, when Laurence had brought her this answer, and went out to the clearing and explained, “She would like to have an egg from you, Temeraire.”

“Oh.” Temeraire immediately puffed out his chest deeply in gratification, his ruff coming up, and with a gracious air bowed his head. “Then certainly I will oblige her,” he declared, and as soon as Jane had gone demanded that he be washed and his Chinese talon-sheaths, stored away as impractical for regular use, be brought out and put on him.

“She is so damned happy to be of use, I could weep,” said Felicita’s captain Brodin, a dark-haired Welshman not many years older than Laurence, with a craggy face which looked made for the grim and brooding lines into which it had presently settled. They had left the two dragons outside in Felicita’s clearing to arrange the matter to their own liking, which by the sound they were doing with great enthusiasm, despite the difficulties which ought to have been inherent in managing relations between two dragons of such disparate size. “And I know I have nothing to complain of,” he added bitterly, “she does better than nine-tenths of the Corps, and the surgeons think she will last ten years, at this rate of progress.”

He poured out an ample measure of wine, and left the bottle on the table between them, with a second and third waiting. They did not speak much, but sat drinking together into the night, drooping gradually lower over their cups until the dragons fell quiet, and the shuddering aspen trees went still. Laurence was not quite sleeping, but he could not think of moving or even to lift his head, weighted with a thick smothering stupor like a blanket; all the world and time dulled away.

Brodin stirred him awake in his chair in the small hours of the morning. “We will see you again tonight?” he asked tiredly, as Laurence stood and bent back his shoulders to crack the angry muscles loose.

“Best so, as I understand it,” Laurence said, looking at his hands in vague surprise: they trembled.

He went out to collect Temeraire, whose profoundly smug and indecorous satisfaction might have put him to the blush, were he disposed to be in any way critical of what pleasures Temeraire might enjoy under the present circumstances. “She has already had two, Laurence,” Temeraire said, laying himself back down to sleep in his own clearing, drowsy but jubilant, “and she is quite sure she will have another; she said she could not tell at all that it was the first time I had sired.”

“But is it?” Laurence asked, feeling slow and stupid, “Did not you and Mei…?” Belatedly the nature of the question stopped him.

“That had nothing to do with eggs,” Temeraire said dismissively, “it is quite different,” and coiling his tail neatly around himself went to sleep, leaving Laurence all the more confused, as he could not dream of prying further.

They repeated the visit the following evening. Laurence looked at the bottle and did not take it up again, but with an effort engaged Brodin upon other things: the customs of the Chinese and the Turks, and their sea-journey to China; the campaign in Prussia and the great battle of Jena, which he could re-create in considerable detail, having observed the whole cataclysm from Temeraire’s back.

This was not, perhaps, the best means for relieving anxiety; when he had laid out all that whirling offensive, and the solid massed ranks of the Prussian army, in the form of walnut shells, were swept clean from the table, he and Brodin sat back and looked at one another, and then Brodin stood restlessly up and paced his small cabin. “I would as soon he came across while some of us still can fight, if only I could give more than ninepence for our chances if he did.”

It was a dreadful thing to hope for an invasion, with unspoken the suggestion of a desire to be killed in one: perilously close, Laurence felt uneasily, to mortal sin, an extreme of selfishness even if it did not mean that England would be laid bare after, and he was troubled to find a sympathetic instinct in himself. “We must not speak so. They do not fear their own deaths, and God forbid that we should teach them to do so, or show less courage than they themselves do.”

“Do you think they do not learn fear by the end?” Brodin laughed unpleasantly and short. “Obversaria scarcely knew Lenton, by the end, and he took her out of the shell with his own hands. She could only cry for water, and for rest, and he could give her none. You may think me a heathen dog if you like: I would thank God or Bonaparte or the black Devil himself for giving her a clean death in battle.”

He poured the bottle, and when he was finished Laurence reached for it across the table.

“The breeders prefer two weeks,” Jane said, “but we will be glad for as long as he feels himself up to the task,” so Laurence dragged himself from his bed the next day, his sleep gone all to pieces, taken half in wine at Brodin’s table and half during the early hours of the morning, and crept through his day, supervising the useless harness-work and lessons for Emily and Dyer, until it was time to go again. They repeated the engagement twice more, and then on the fifth day, while he sat lumpen and considering the chessboard dully, Brodin raised his head and said to Laurence abruptly, “Has he not yet begun to cough?”