strange creatures, and there is no understanding them; some of them even take a liking to sea-officers.” He slapped Temeraire’s side, and left as abruptly as he had come; without a word of parting, but in apparently better humor, and leaving Laurence hardly less perplexed than before.
The flight to Nottinghamshire took several hours, and afforded him more leisure than he liked to consider what awaited him in Scotland. He did not like to imagine what Bowden and Powys and Portland all expected him to disapprove so heartily, and he still less liked to try to imagine what he should do if he found the situation unbearable.
He had only once had a truly unhappy experience in his naval service: as a freshly made lieutenant of seventeen he had been assigned to the Shorewise, under Captain Barstowe, an older man and a relic of an older Navy, where officers had not been required to be gentlemen as well. Barstowe was the illegitimate son of a merchant of only moderate wealth and a woman of only moderate character; he had gone to sea as a boy in his father’s ships and been pressed into the Navy as a foremast hand. He had displayed great courage in battle and a keen head for mathematics, which had won him promotion first to master’s-mate, then to lieutenant, and even by a stroke of luck to post-rank, but he had never lost any of the coarseness of his background.
What was worse, Barstowe had been conscious of his own lack of social graces, and resentful of those who, in his mind, made him feel that lack. It was not an unmerited resentment: there were many officers who looked askance and murmured at him; but he had seen in Laurence’s easy and pleasing manners a deliberate insult, and he had been merciless in punishing Laurence for them. Barstowe’s death of pneumonia three months into the voyage had possibly saved Laurence’s own life, and at the least had freed him from an endless daze of standing double or triple watches, a diet of ship’s biscuit and water, and the perils of leading a gun-crew composed of the worst and most unhandy men aboard.
Laurence still had an instinctive horror when he thought of the experience; he was not in the least prepared to be ruled over by another such man, and in Bowden’s ominous words about the Corps taking anyone a hatchling would accept, he read a hint that his trainer or perhaps his fellow trainees would be of such a stamp. And while Laurence was not a boy of seventeen anymore, nor in so powerless a position, he now had Temeraire to consider, and their shared duty.
His hands tightened on the reins involuntarily, and Temeraire looked around. “Are you well, Laurence?” he asked. “You have been so quiet.”
“Forgive me, I have only been woolgathering,” Laurence said, patting Temeraire’s neck. “It is nothing. Are you tiring at all? Should you like to stop and rest awhile?”
“No, I am not tired, but you are not telling the truth: I can hear you are unhappy,” Temeraire said anxiously. “Is it not good that we are going to begin training? Or are you missing your ship?”
“I find I am become transparent before you,” Laurence said ruefully. “I am not missing my ship at all, no, but I will admit I am a little concerned about our training. Powys and Bowden were very odd about the whole thing, and I am not sure what sort of reception we will meet in Scotland, or how we shall like it.”
“If we do not care for it, surely we can just go away again?” Temeraire said.
“It is not so easy; we are not at liberty, you know,” Laurence said. “I am a King’s officer, and you are a King’s dragon; we cannot do as we please.”
“I have never met the King; I am not his property, like a sheep,” Temeraire said. “If I belong to anyone, it is you, and you to me. I am not going to stay in Scotland if you are unhappy there.”
“Oh dear,” Laurence said; this was not the first time Temeraire had showed a distressing tendency to independent thought, and it seemed to only be increasing as he grew older and started to spend more of his time awake. Laurence was not himself particularly interested in political philosophy, and he found it sadly puzzling to have to work out explanations for what to him seemed natural and obvious. “It is not ownership, exactly;