“Well, we are not going to do any better, not unless we hire an army of men and hounds; and where to get them, you may tell me and much obliged,” Warren said, holding the bottle in one hand as he drained his glass in the other, so he might refill the tumbler straight away. “Nemachaen is a clever little beast,” meaning the dog, who had acquired this grandiose name after the lion, courtesy of some of the younger ensigns presently being subjected to a haphazard education in the classics, “but there is only so much blasted forest we can hack through in a day, to find one mushroom or two at a time when we need scores of the things.”

“We must have more hunters,” Laurence said, but they were rather in danger of losing those they had; the agreed-on week having passed, Demane gave signs of wishing for himself and Sipho to be returned to their home village with their reward. Laurence with many unpleasant pangs of conscience had refused to immediately understand his signs, and instead had taken him to see the pen near the castle, where the cow had been set aside: a large, handsome milch cow, placid, with her six-months’ calf browsing the grass beside her; the boy ducked through the fence slats and slipped in to touch her soft brown side with cautious, almost wary delight. He looked at the calf, and back at Laurence, a question in his face; Laurence nodded to say they would give him the other, too. Demane came out, protests silenced by this species of bribery, and Laurence went away feeling that he had behaved himself like a desperate scrub; he hoped very much the boys did not have family to be made anxious for them, although he had rather gained the impression they were orphaned, and at the very least neglected.

“Too slow,” Dorset said, very decidedly despite his stammer. “Too slow, by half. All the searching in the world—we will only help to stamp it out. It has been the target of systematic eradication; we cannot hope to find much nearby. Who knows how long, how many years, the herdsmen have been digging it up. We must go away, farther away, where it may yet grow in quantity—”

“Perfect speculation,” Keynes snapped, “on which to recommend the pursuit of wild chances. How much distance will satisfy you? I dare say all the continent has been used for herding, at some time or another. To risk the formation, dragons scarcely risen from their sickbeds, and go deep into feral territory, on such a hope? The height of folly—”

The argument rose, grew warm, surged across the table; Dorset’s stammer grew more violent so he was scarcely comprehensible, and Gaiters and Waley, Maximus’s and Lily’s surgeons, were ranged with Keynes against him; until at last Catherine had silenced all of them, standing up to make her demand with her hands planted on the cloth.

“I do not quarrel with your concern,” she added, more quietly, “but we did not come here to find a cure only for ourselves. You have heard the latest dispatches; nine more dead since March, and by now more gone, when we could not spare any of them in the least.” She looked at Keynes steadily. “Is there any hope?”

He was silent, displeased, and only with a surly lowering look allowed there to be some chance of a better harvest, farther away; she nodded and said, “Then we will endure the risk, and be glad that our own dragons are well enough to do so.”

There was no question, yet, of sending Maximus, who had only lately begun to try at flying again: with a deal of flapping and kicking up dust, often ending only in an exhausted collapse; he could not quite manage the launching spring, which was necessary to get him aloft, although once in the air could remain for some time. Keynes shook his head and felt at his paunchy sides.

“The weight is coming back unevenly. You are doing your exercises?” he demanded; Maximus protested that he was. “Well, if we cannot get you in the air, we must find you room to walk,” Keynes said, and so Maximus had been set to making a circuit of the town, back and forth several times daily: the only stretch of cleared ground large enough for him, as he could not go far up the mountain-slopes without pulling them down in small avalanches.

No-one was very happy with this solution: ridiculous to have a dragon the size of a frigate ambling about like a lap-dog on an airing, and Maximus complained of the hard ground, and the pebbles which introduced themselves into his talons. “I do not notice them at first,” he said unhappily, while Berkley’s runners struggled with hoof-picks and knives and tongs to pry them out from under the hard, callused hide around the base of the claws, “not until they are quite far down, and then I cannot easily say how very unpleasant it becomes.”

“Why do you not swim, instead?” Temeraire said. “The water is very pleasant here, and perhaps you might catch a whale,” which suggestion brightened Maximus remarkably, and infuriated the fishermen, particularly the owners of the larger boats; they came in a body to protest.

“I am damned sorry to put you out,” Berkley said to them. “You may come with me, and tell him yourselves you do not like it.”

Maximus continued his outings, in peace, and might be seen daily paddling about the harbor. Sadly the whales and dolphins and seals, too clever by half, stayed well-clear of him, much to his disappointment: he did not much like tunny or sharks, the latter of which occasionally beat themselves against his limbs in confused fits perhaps provoked by some traces of blood or flesh from his latest repast: on one occasion he brought back one of these to show, a monster some nineteen feet in length, weighing close on two tons, with its angry snoutish face full of teeth. He had lifted the shark straight out of the water whole, and when he laid it down on the parade grounds before them, it abruptly went into a paroxysm of thrashing: knocking over Dyer, two ensigns, and one of the Marines, snapping and gnashing furiously at the air, before Dulcia managed to pin it to the ground with her foretalons.

Messoria and Immortalis, both older beasts, were perfectly happy to lie in the parade grounds and sleep in the sun, after their short daily flights for exercise; but Lily, having stopped coughing, shortly displayed that same restless energy which had overcome Dulcia, and began to insist on activity. But if she were to go flying anywhere, she must go far abroad, where a stray lingering sneeze or cough would not spray anyone below; Keynes, quite ignoring the covert gestures, the attempts at signaling, of nearly every senior officer, examined her and declared that she was perfectly fit to fly, “had better fly, I should say; this agitation is unnatural, and must be worked off.”

“But perhaps,” Laurence said, voicing the reluctance which the captains all privately shared, and they as a body began to suggest flights out over the ocean, along the scenic and settled coastline and back; gentle exercise.

“I hope,” Catherine said, going pink clear up to her forehead in a wave of color, “I hope that no-one is going to fuss; I would dislike fuss extremely,” and insisted on joining the hunting party, with Dulcia and Chenery, who likewise declared himself perfectly well, although Dulcia would only agree if he was bundled aboard in a heavy cloak, with a warming brick at his feet.

“After all, it cannot hurt to have more of us: we can make several parties and cover more ground; we do not need the dog so badly if the notion is we are looking for larger patches of the stuff,” Chenery said. “Just as well to have more of the dragons in hailing-distance, if any of us should run into a larger band of ferals, and your natives can keep us out of trouble with the animals.”

Laurence applied to Erasmus and his wife for their persuasive assistance, and pressed the cowrie necklace on Demane to open the conversation, as a preliminary bit of bribery. He objected vehemently nonetheless, his voice rising in high complaint, and Mrs. Erasmus said, “He does not like to go so far, Captain: he says that country belongs to the dragons, who will come and eat us.”