Dulcia was finally persuaded not to go flying off, with the temptation of a couple of lambs dressed hastily by Gong Su with some of the peppery local seed-pods which Temeraire liked; no one suggested she should not be allowed to eat, this time, and she devoured them so readily as to spray bits of meat around the feeding grounds, though ordinarily a rather delicate eater.

Temeraire watched her enviously; not only was he not allowed more than a taste of the posset itself, which he so enjoyed, but his belly was still inclined to be delicate after his excessive adventuring; so that Keynes had placed him on a strict and uninteresting diet of plain-roasted meat which his palate now disdained. “Well, at least we have found the cure, then, surely?”

Dulcia, having finished her repast, fell down asleep and began at once snoring loudly, with a thin wheezing whine on the exhale: nevertheless an improvement, as she had only lately been perfectly unable to breathe save through her mouth. Keynes came over and sat down heavily on the log beside Laurence, mopping his sweating red face with a kerchief, and said disgruntled, “Enough, enough of this casting ourselves into alt; have none of you learnt your lesson? The lungs are by no means clear.”

A heavy bank of clouds blew in during the night, so they all woke to a steady dripping grey rain and clammy wet ground, the air still unpleasantly hot and clinging damply to the skin like sweat. Dulcia was worse again, drooping and tired after her previous day’s cavorting, and the dragons were all of them more inclined to sneeze than ever; even Temeraire sighed and shivered, trying to get more of the rain off his hide and out of the hollows of bone and muscle where it collected. “I do miss China,” he said, picking unhappily at his wet dinner; Gong Su had been unable to sear the antelope carcass properly.

“It must be something else; we will find it, Laurence,” Catherine said, giving him his coffee-cup at the breakfast table inside the castle. Laurence accepted it mechanically and sat down among the rest of them; they ate silently, only the clatter of forks and plates; no one even offered around the salt-cellar, or asked for it. Chenery, ordinarily their life and gaiety, had bruised hollows under his eyes as if he had been beaten about the face, and Berkley had not come in to breakfast at all.

Keynes came in stamping his feet clear of mud, his coat sodden with rain and traces of whitish mucus, and said heavily, “Very well: we must have more of the thing.” They looked at him, made uncomprehending by his tone, and he glared back ferociously before he admitted with reluctance, “Maximus can breathe again,” and sent them all running for the door.

Keynes disliked greatly giving them even this much hope, and resisted all their demands for more; but they could stand by Maximus’s head and hear for themselves the slow wheeze of air through his nostrils, and the same for Dulcia also. The two of them yet coughed and coughed and coughed, but the aviators all agreed amongst themselves that the tenor of the sound was entirely altered: a salutary and productive cough, and not the wet terrible lung-rattle which did not end; or so they contrived to persuade one another.

Dorset still made his daily implacable notations, however, and the surgeons continued with the other experiments: a sort of custard made out of green bananas and cocoanut meat was offered to Lily, who tasted one swallow and refused any more point-blank. Messoria was persuaded to lie curled on one side and a battery of candles were melted onto her skin, lit and cupped, to attempt and heat the lungs, with no apparent effect except to leave great streaks of wax upon her hide. A tiny white-haired Khoi matron appeared at their gates dragging behind her a laundry tub nearly her own size, packed to the brim with a preparation made of monkey livers; with only her broken bits of pidgin Dutch she managed to convey the impression she had brought them a sovereign remedy for any illness whatsoever. When tried on Immortalis, he ate one unenthusiastic bite and left the rest; but they had still to pay, as the remainder was quickly raided by Dulcia, who cleaned out the tub and looked for more.

Her appetite increased by leaps and bounds as the sensation of taste returned, and she coughed less daily; by the end of the fifth day almost not at all, except for an occasional hacking. Maximus coughed a while longer, but in the middle of the night towards the end of the week, they were all woken by a terrible squealing, distant shrieks of terror and fire; in a panic they burst out from the tents to discover Maximus attempting guiltily to sneak unnoticed back into the parade grounds, with as much success as was to be expected in this endeavor, and carrying in his already-bloodied jaws a spare ox. This he hurriedly swallowed down almost entire, on finding himself observed, and then pretended not to know what they were talking about, insisting he had only got up to stretch his legs and settle himself more comfortably. The track of his dragging tail, followed through dust spotted liberally with blood, led them to a nearby stable now half-collapsed, the paddock circled by the wreckage of a fence, and the owners apoplectic with rage and terror at the loss of their valuable team of oxen.

“It is just that the wind turned, and they smelled so very good,” Maximus confessed finally, when confronted with the evidence, “and it has been so long since I have had a nice fresh cow, with no cooking or spices.”

“Why you ridiculous lummox, as though we would not feed you whatever you liked,” Berkley said, without any heat whatsoever, petting him extravagantly. “You will have two of them tomorrow.”

“And let us have no more damned excuses out of you for not eating, during the day, when you will go wandering about at night like a rampaging lion to stuff your belly,” Keynes added more peevishly, scruffy with his night’s growth of beard and disgruntled; he had for once sought his bed at a reasonable hour, after having sat up nearly every night the week observing the dragons. “Why you did not think to tell anyone, I can scarcely understand.”

“I did not like to wake Berkley: he has not been eating properly,” Maximus said earnestly, at which accusation Berkley, who had indeed shed another two stone of weight since their arrival, nearly spluttered himself into a fit.

Afterwards they fed Maximus on the ordinary British diet of fresh-slaughtered cattle, occasionally sprinkled with a little salt, and he began to eat through the local herds—and their own purses—at a truly remarkable rate, until Temeraire was recruited to hunt for him northward of the Cape among the vast herds of wild buffalo; although these were not as tasty in Maximus’s mournful opinion.

By then even Keynes had ceased to affect displeasure, and they were wholly engaged on a fresh, a desperate, search, for more of the wretched fungus. The local children had given up the hunt as too unlikely of return: despite every promise which Laurence and his fellow captains could make of their open and waiting purses, none seemed inclined to hazard their time on the pursuit.

“We can do it ourselves, I suppose,” Catherine said doubtfully, and in the morning Laurence and Chenery took a party of men out to seek hunting grounds less picked-over, Dorset along to confirm the identity of the mushroom; the other captains would not willingly leave their sick dragons, and Berkley was plainly not up to a long traipse through wilderness, although he offered to go.

“No need, old fellow,” Chenery said cheerfully, very cheerfully: since Dulcia’s recovery he was little short of getting on a table to sing for joy, given the least encouragement. “We will manage all right, and you had better stay here and eat with your dragon; he is right, you need fattening up again.”