League of Dragons (19 page)

“I beg you not to repine upon it,” Laurence said. “Temeraire understands well that orders must be obeyed, and will not hold it against you; he knows it was not in your power to deliver us to him.”

“Well, but it
was,
” Souci said, not conciliated, and Granby said nothing reassuring at all. Iskierka did not allow of assurances of her behavior, good, evil, or otherwise.

They were returned by their polite but firm escort to their rooms, and Laurence did not try to speak with Granby, both silent with their own shared and private unhappiness, and shared anger as well. Laurence had in some sense felt they
deserved
to be captured: that it had been the only reasonable outcome of skulking about on the very borders of France. That feeling had spared him real regret, like a gambler at the table who had staked all upon one unlikely throw, knowing all the while it would not come, and even in despair had accepted the natural course of the event. But now the trick dice had been uncovered: indignation burned in his chest, the resentment of having been taken by what felt a low cheat.

He slept well, despite it all. He could have slept for a month. In the morning, he was asked to the admiral's rooms for breakfast, and met with a bow. “Captain Laurence,” Thibaut said, “I hope to gratify you,” and handed to him a letter; Laurence steeled himself to meet with a reply which, however generous, could only stoke his still-hot indignation.

But surprise banked the fire. The letter was addressed to Thibaut and written in the neat hand of a secretary, but the words, abrupt and decisive, were all Napoleon:
Tell me you have shown him every courtesy! Nothing is too good for such a man,
adding the phrase,
il a bien plus de valeur que les perles,
a phrase which Laurence, half-amused despite every will to be otherwise, recognized as the description of the virtuous woman.

Napoleon continued,

We have sent an escort to bring him and his companions to Fontainebleau, and the dragons as well: let them depart at once. Here they will see the egg in its safe repose, and arrangements will be made for their comfort.

NAPOLEON

“I have sent to ask M. Tharkay and Captain Granby to join us for breakfast,” the admiral said, “while the dragons of your escort make their own. You will leave immediately.”

“Y
OU WILL FORGIVE THE
Emperor's absence,” Empress Anahuarque said, in quite fluent English, improved still further beyond what she had acquired at great effort in her own country; she had evidently kept up her studies.

Laurence had last met her in her own court at Cusco, dressed in the Incan style in bright-woven wool and adorned in gold; yet she seemed not a whit out of place here in the sitting room where they had been received, nor the least uncomfortable in a morning gown of white made elaborate by gold embroidery, striking against her dark-brown skin, and her black hair bound up behind a tiara of diamonds: overdressed perhaps for a private visit, yet not inappropriate to an empress. Laurence was surprised to find the crown prince of Prussia in her company: a gangly young man of seventeen, who bowed and spoke to them in very fluent French. Her own child, a handsome and sturdy-looking boy with a cap of dark hair and large dark eyes, was playing upon a blanket in the corner of the room. He was overseen by a trio of nursemaids and a fourth just outside the house: the massive feathered head of an Incan dragon, one of the sleek and venomous Copacati, peered in through the barn-wide glass doors at the end of the chamber.

Laurence offered his congratulations on the child, as a little more awkwardly did Granby: difficult to know how to behave to a woman to whom he had so nearly been forced to pay his addresses—and who had ordered an attack upon them, while they had been guests in her court. She seemed not the least conscious of any awkwardness herself, however, and merely inclined her head accepting those congratulations as her due; then she said, “There will be another in the fall,” with a calm complacency.

Laurence bowed again; there was nothing else to say, although any enemy of Napoleon might feel some regret at his finding so much success in securing his dynasty, and his alliance with the Inca.

“My husband wished to be here to greet you, but matters in Paris demand his attention for a few days more,” Anahuarque continued. “But I greet you in his stead, and I assure you that you will be made comfortable. Although the unhappy state of war between our nations makes you our prisoners, feeling must make you our guests,” a pretty sentiment, though of course meaningless.

She sat with them a quarter of an hour—unusually gracious, particularly as a heap of letters upon the writing-table and a silent and hovering pair of secretaries made plain there were many demands upon her time. It fell to Laurence to carry the conversation on their side; Granby was stifled by embarrassment and by the surroundings, and Tharkay only sat observing with a sardonic expression in his eye. But the Empress was well able to supply her own share, and when Laurence had asked her how she liked her new home, she recounted with charming frankness several amusing stories of the misunderstandings that had plagued her on arrival, and laughed at her ongoing travails in learning to read and write: the Inca had been used to rely instead upon a system of knotted cords to communicate.

The handsome clock against the wall chimed the hour softly, and a footman came in to speak to her in a quiet voice; the Empress rose to her feet, and they rose with her. “Gentlemen, I am afraid I must bid you farewell,” she said, giving them her hand to kiss in dismissal, and they were escorted out past another visitor waiting to be taken in. The gentleman was standing at the other side of the antechamber, studying the large landscape upon the wall; Laurence saw him only briefly and from the back, but some vague sense of familiarity tugged at him, and when they had gone on into the hallway, he almost stumbled a moment in surprise: it had been Talleyrand.

“A remarkable performance,” Tharkay said, when they were at last shown to their own quarters—a magnificent suite more suitable for a visiting dignitary than prisoners of war—and private once more, the guards having withdrawn politely past their doors. The garden outside the windows gave a handsome illusion of liberty, if one did not go close enough to see the additional soldiers standing to attention across the paths, just out of view. “She makes quite the picture of domesticity. You would never think to look at her that she is the absolute ruler of several million people and some five thousand dragons, and a nation larger than Europe.

“Talleyrand is an interesting visitor for her to host. He quarreled with her husband several years ago, after the failure of the invasion of Britain. I wonder where he is getting his money from these days: Austria, perhaps.”

Laurence had of course said nothing of the means by which he had engineered Tharkay's release, nor asked anything about the charge laid against him. He only knew as much as he did by unhappy accident; he could invite no further confidences on a subject where he had intruded without invitation in the first place. But nevertheless he could not help but perceive in Tharkay's remarks a professional assessment, and Laurence could not but recoil at the idea of a man taking funds in exchange for his own country's secrets.

“Spying is not the cleanest business,” Tharkay said, perhaps reading his face.

Laurence shook his head sharply: he felt certain whatever might be distasteful in the work Tharkay did could have nothing to do with this kind of selfish treachery. “There can be no comparison,” he said, and then realized he had betrayed himself unintentionally.

Tharkay nodded a little, but did not speak directly to the subject. “The two are not unrelated, I am afraid,” he said only. “A man rarely will compromise himself without assistance.”

“That does not justify the act upon
his
side,” Laurence said. “No man may be made a traitor without his consent.”

He could speak from experience; he had given his own consent, once. He could not understand the coarseness of spirit which could permit a man to do such a thing for money and not the bleakest imperative of honor.

He paced the room round twice, troubled, and abruptly asked, “Are we not obligated by ordinary humanity to warn her she ought not be in his company? A man who would do treason for money—what would he not do?” Even if Talleyrand was in some sense on their side, Laurence could not help but feel uneasy to have knowledge of his treachery, and yet say nothing as the man was admitted to the private company of the expectant Empress and her small child—the worst fears of Napoleon's enemies realized.

But Tharkay said dryly, “You seem to be under the impression she does not know exactly the sort of man he is. At the very least she cannot suppose him fond of her husband; a man who has been publicly called a shit in front of half the Marshals of France by his emperor is not likely to be easily conciliated. In any case, certainly Fouché knows as well as I do that Talleyrand's expenses outrun his public income.”

“Why would she entertain such a visitor, if he had not persuaded her of his having been reconciled with her husband?”

“He might be safer company, if he were the Emperor's loyal servant,” Tharkay said, “but he would not be half so useful, if she cares to maintain any sort of communication with the other courts of Europe when they have declared war upon France.”

To reconcile this kind of cold scheming with the charming young woman they had only just left was an incongruous task, but Granby said, “Well, I am not forgetting any time soon that she set a hundred beasts on our tail hunting us across the Andes, however meek and mild she chooses to look at present,” which was a useful reminder. “I am sure I wish Napoleon every joy of his wife: better him than me.”

“But not, perhaps, for us,” Tharkay said. “Our present circumstances leave a great deal to be desired. Not that I mean to make you regret your happy escape,” he added, with a faintly amused glint.

“No fear of that,” Granby said. “I don't mean to say I wouldn't rather be back in the Peninsula, where I can do some good, but I would as lief kick my heels in France the rest of the war as be married in Cusco. I don't suppose one dragon can make all that much difference, even Iskierka, when he has a whole horde of them breeding up.” He sighed.

Tharkay was silent; then he said, “And yet Napoleon
does
suppose it.”

“What do you mean?” Laurence said.

“We are not here by accident, after all,” Tharkay said. “Temeraire and Iskierka were deliberately tempted here, as you have divined, by those threats against the egg; but if you will pardon me, we have not considered
how
they were tempted: where you heard these threats.”

“The Prussian dragons had overheard them,” Laurence said, and then slowly, “—you mean that they were deliberately permitted to escape?”

Tharkay inclined his head. “You would have been a good deal more skeptical of threats sent directly to you, and having received those threats, you would not have supposed you could intercept the egg. Not to mention that it does pass credulity that some thirty dragons were able to flee the breeding grounds of France without challenge.”

“But surely credulity is passed much more thoroughly to suppose that Napoleon let half the Prussian aerial corps loose, just to get Temeraire and Iskierka here,” Granby said. “Not that they don't make a good deal of noise, but they are only two beasts: they aren't worth the exchange.”

“With as many dragons as Napoleon has in prospect, the relative value of keeping the Prussian beasts captive must have been diminished,” Tharkay said. “But nevertheless, you are right—if the dragons were judged solely for their fighting-qualities. Which must mean there are other considerations which have prompted the act.”

Lien's unblinking expression, fixed on Temeraire, managed somehow to convey without a word that she was astonished that he should have got himself into such a state, and even disappointed: that her satisfaction in his defeat was somewhat reduced by his looking so ragged, as though it were not much, after all, to have brought him low. Temeraire had not given a thought all this month to his torn-up wings, to his fresh scars; the scales where the fire had burned him worst had grown back hard and dull instead of glossy. None of these had mattered.

But now he could think of them again, for beyond Lien stood a small but elegant little pavilion, and beneath the roof, an enormous basket lined with silk and much padding held the beautiful shining egg, its delicately speckled shell unharmed, even to the small mark which looked so much like an eight. Half a dozen braziers stood around, warming it, and there were screens to shelter it from the wind, which the servants had drawn aside only to let them see.

With the worst anxiety eased, others crowded forward to take its place. Temeraire could not help but realize that he made a very disreputable figure at present; as slovenly as Forthing, with no power of repairing his appearance.

Iskierka felt no consciousness; she was sniffing around the pavilion with immense suspicion. “Are you sure that the egg is warm enough?” she demanded. “Look at all this snow everywhere around; what if it should take a chill? And how has it been brought here, anyway; did you shake it? Did it get wet at all?”

“All proper measures have been taken for its care, of course,” Lien said, with cool disdain.

“I don't see what is
of course
about it when you have been going on and on about
smashing,
and hauling it all over the world,” Iskierka said, rounding on her. “What do you mean by it? How dare you go anywhere near my egg?”

Lien did not—quite—edge away from Iskierka's flaring anger, but she stiffened her back visibly, which Temeraire found a little gratifying. “Surely one must ask why
you
left your egg behind in the care of those who were not capable of its protection,” she answered.

“Oh!” Temeraire said: that was too much. “When you certainly had your friends in China bribe some of the guards, and murder the rest; I hope Crown Prince Mianning puts them all to death just as soon as he is emperor.”

“I will have cause for sorrow enough if China should be brought so low,” Lien said venomously, “as to have an emperor who has lost all the favor of Heaven: his own Celestial companion lost, and willing to pledge his empire to a nation of low opium-merchants to acquire another. But I will not call it the fault of the
egg,
nor have I permitted any harm to come to it, poor mongrel creature though it is sure to be; but that is more cause to pity it than harm it.”