OH,” TEMERAIRE SAID, in a very strange tone, and he pitched forward and vomited tremendously all over the open ground before him, heaving up an acrid stinking mess in which the traces of banana leaves, goat horns, cocoanut shells, and long green ropes of braided seaweed might be distinguished among the generalized yellowish mulch, scattered through with unrecognizable scraps of cracked bones and shreds of hide.

“Keynes!” Laurence bellowed, having leapt out of the way just in time, and to the two hapless medicine-men who had offered the latest remedy, savagely said, “Get you gone, and take that worthless draught with you.”

“No, let us have it, if you please, and the receipt,” Keynes said, approaching a little gingerly, and bending to sniff at the pot which they had presented. “A purgative may be of some use on future occasions, if this is not simply a case of excess; were you feeling ill before?” Keynes demanded of Temeraire, who only moaned a little and closed his eyes; he was lying limp and wretched, having crept a little way off from the former contents of his stomach, which steamed unpleasantly even in the overheated late-summer air. Laurence covered his mouth and nostrils with a handkerchief and beckoned to the deeply reluctant groundsmen to bring the midden-shovels, and bury the refuse at once.

“I wonder if it is not the effects of the protea,” Dorset said absently, poking through the pot with a stick and fishing out the remnants of the spiny blossom. “I do not believe we have seen it used as an ingredient before: the Cape vegetation has quite a unique construction, among the plant kingdom. I must send the children for some specimens.”

“As glad as we must be to have delivered you a curiosity, it is certainly nothing which he ever ate before; perhaps you might consider how we are to proceed, instead, without making him ill again,” Laurence snapped, and went to Temeraire’s side before he could make a further display of his ill-temper and frustration. He laid a hand on the slowly heaving muzzle, and Temeraire twitched his ruff in an attempt at bravery.

“Roland, go you and Dyer and fetch some sea-water, from beneath the dock,” Laurence said, and taking a cloth used the cool water to wipe down Temeraire’s muzzle and his jaws.

They had been in Capetown now two days, experimenting lavishly: Temeraire perfectly willing to sniff or swallow anything which anyone should give him, if only it might by some chance be a cure, and exercise his memory; so far without any notable success, and Laurence was prepared to consider this latest episode a notable failure, whatever the surgeons might say. He did not know how to refuse them; but it seemed to him they were trying a great deal of local quackery, without any real grounds for hope, and making a reckless trial of Temeraire’s health.

“I already feel a good deal better,” Temeraire said, but his eyes were closing in exhaustion as he said it, and he did not want to eat anything the next day; but said wistfully, “I would be glad of some tea, if it would not be much trouble,” so Gong Su made a great kettle of it, using a week’s supply, and then to his disgust they put in an entire brick of sugar. Temeraire drank it with great pleasure when it had cooled, and afterwards stoutly declared himself perfectly recovered; but he still looked rather dismally when Emily and Dyer came huffing back from the markets, hung all over with the day’s new acquisitions in net-bags and parcels, and stinking from ten-yards’ distance.

“Well, let us see,” Keynes said, and went poking through the materials with Gong Su: a great many local vegetables, including a long pendulous fruit like an oversized yam, which Gong Su dubiously picked up and thumped against the ground: not even the skin so much as split, until he at last took it into the castle, to the smith, and had it smashed open upon the forge.

“That is from a sausage-tree,” Emily said. “Maybe it is not quite ripe, though; and also we did find some of the hua jiao today, from a Malay stall-keeper,” she added, showing Laurence a small basket of the red peppery seeds, for which Temeraire had acquired a great liking.

“Not the mushroom?” Laurence asked: this being a hideously pungent specimen they all recalled vividly from their first visit, which in its cooking had rendered the entire castle nearly uninhabitable from its noxious fumes. Laurence had his share of the seaman’s instinctive faith in unpleasant medicine, and secretly the best part of his own hopes lay on the thing. But it was surely a wild growth, uncultivated: no person in their senses would ever deliberately eat the thing, and so far it was not to be found, for any price.

“We found a boy who had a little English and told him that we would pay gold for it, if they would bring some,” Dyer piped up; a group of native children had brought them the first example mostly as a curiosity.

“Perhaps the seed husks in combination with another of the native fruits,” Dorset suggested, examining the hua jiao and stirring them with a finger. “They might have been used on any number of dishes.”

Keynes snorted, and, dusting his hands as he straightened from the survey, he shook his head at Gong Su. “No, let his innards have another day’s rest, and leave off all this unwholesome stuff. I am increasingly of the opinion that the climate alone must cook it out of them, if there is to be any benefit to this enterprise at all.”

He prodded the ground with the stick he had been using to turn over the vegetables: dry and hard several inches down, with only the stubborn frizz of short yellow grass to hold it together, the roots long and thin and spidery. A few days into March, they were deep in the local summer, and the steady hot weather made the hard-packed bare ground a baking stone, which fairly shimmered with heat during the peak of the day.

Temeraire cracked an eye from his restorative drowse. “It is pleasant, but it is not so much warmer than the courtyard at Loch Laggan,” he said doubtfully, and in any case the suggestion was not a very satisfying one, as this cure could not be tried until the other dragons arrived.

And for the moment they were alone, although the Allegiance was expected now daily. As soon as the ship had come in flying distance of the Cape, Laurence had packed the surgeons and the barest handful of men and supplies aboard Temeraire’s back, and taken them on ahead, that they might begin this desperate business of attempting to find the cure.

It had not been merely an excuse: their orders unequivocally stated without the loss of a moment, and Maximus’s ragged, gurgling cough was a constant spur to their sides. But in all honesty, neither had Laurence been sorry in the least to go. The quarrel had not been made up, at all.

Laurence had made attempts: once, three weeks into the journey, he paused, belowdecks, as they passed one another by chance, and removed his hat; but Riley only just touched his own brim and shouldered by, a quick surge of red color mounting in his cheeks. This had stiffened Laurence another week, long enough to make him refuse an offer of a share in one of the ship’s milch goats, when the one which he had provided himself ran dry and was sacrificed instead to the dragons.

Then regret won out again, and he said to Catherine, “Perhaps we ought to invite the captain and the ship’s officers to dinner?” on deck and perfectly audible to anyone who might be curious, so when the invitation was sent it could not be mistaken as anything but a peace offering. But though Riley came, and his officers, he was utterly withdrawn all the meal, scarcely answering except when Catherine spoke to him and never lifting his head from his plate. His officers, of course, would not speak without he or another captain addressing them, so it was a strange and silent affair with even the younger aviators stifled by the uneasy sense that their manners did not suit the formality of the occasion.