him with his claws. “He is not any bigger than I am,” he said. “And he is not a Longwing, so he does not spit poison, and there are no fire-breathing dragons in Britain; I do not see why he is any better than I am.”
“He is not one jot better, not at all,” Laurence said, stroking the tensed foreleg. “Precedence is merely a matter of formality, and you are perfectly within your rights to eat with the others. Pray do not be quarrelsome, however; they have fled the Continent, to be away from Bonaparte.”
“Oh?” Temeraire’s ruff smoothed out gradually against his neck, and he looked at the strange dragon with more interest. “But they are speaking French; if they are French, why are they afraid of Bonaparte?”
“They are royalists, loyal to the Bourbon kings,” Laurence said. “I dare say they left after the Jacobins put the King to death; it was very dreadful in France for a while, I am afraid, and though Bonaparte is at least not chopping people’s heads off anymore, he is scarcely much better in their eyes; I assure you they despise him worse than we do.”
“Well, I am sorry if I was rude,” Temeraire murmured, and straightened up to address Praecursoris. “Veuillez m’excuser, si je vous ai dérangé,” he said, to Laurence’s astonishment.
Praecursoris turned around. “Mais non, pas du tout,” he answered mildly, and inclined his head. “Permettez que je vous présente Choiseul, mon capitaine,” he added.
“Et voici Laurence, le mien,” Temeraire said. “Laurence, pray bow,” he added, in an undertone, when Laurence only stood staring.
Laurence at once made his leg; he of course could not interrupt the formal exchange, but he was bursting with curiosity, and as soon as they were winging their way down to the lake for Temeraire’s bath, he demanded, “But how on earth do you come to speak French?”
Temeraire turned his head about. “What do you mean? Is it very unusual to speak French? It was not at all difficult.”
“Well, it is prodigious strange; so far as I know you have never heard a word of it: certainly not from me, for I am lucky if I can say my bonjours without embarrassing myself,” Laurence said.
“I am not surprised that he can speak French,” Celeritas said, when Laurence asked him later that afternoon, at the training grounds, “but only that you should not have heard him do so before; do you mean to say Temeraire did not speak French when he first cracked the shell? He spoke English directly?”
“Why, yes,” Laurence said. “I confess we were surprised, but only to hear him speak at all so soon. Is it unusual?”
“That he spoke, no; we learn language through the shell,” Celeritas said. “And as he was aboard a French vessel in the months before his hatching, I am not surprised at all that he should know that tongue. I am far more surprised that he was able to speak English after only a week aboard. Fluently?”
“From the first moment,” Laurence said, pleased at this fresh evidence of Temeraire’s unique gifts. “You have been forever surprising me, my dear,” he added, patting Temeraire’s neck, making him preen with satisfaction.
But Temeraire continued somewhat more prickly, particularly where Praecursoris was concerned: no open animosity, nor any particular hostility, but he was clearly anxious to show himself an equal to the older dragon, particularly once Celeritas began to include the Chanson-de-Guerre in their maneuvers.
Praecursoris was not, Laurence was secretly glad to see, as fluid or graceful in the air as Temeraire; but his experience and that of his captain counted for a great deal, and they knew and had mastered many of the formation maneuvers already. Temeraire grew very intent on his work; Laurence sometimes came out from dinner and found his dragon flying alone over the lake, practicing the maneuvers he had once found so boring, and on more than one occasion he even asked to sacrifice part of their reading time to additional work. He would have worked himself to exhaustion daily if Laurence had not restrained him.
At last Laurence went to Celeritas to ask his advice, hoping to learn some way of easing Temeraire’s intensity, or perhaps persuading Celeritas to separate the two dragons. But the training master listened to his objections and said calmly, “Captain Laurence, you are thinking of your dragon’s happiness. That is as it should be, but I must think first of his training, and the needs of the Corps. Do you argue he is not progressing