Throne of Jade Page 0,63

for punishment, was more wretched with guilt than from his punishment, and spent every spare moment at Blythe's bedside; and the only person at all satisfied with the situation was Yongxing, who seized the opportunity to hold several more long conversations with Temeraire in Chinese: privately, as Temeraire made no effort to include Laurence.

Yongxing looked less pleased, however, at the conclusion of the last of these, when Temeraire hissed, put back his ruff, and then proceeded to all but knock Laurence off his feet in coiling possessively around him. "What has he been saying to you?" Laurence demanded, trying futilely to peer above the great black sides rising around him; he had already reached a state of high irritation at Yongxing's continued interference and was very nearly at the end of his patience.

"He has been telling me about China, and how things are managed there for dragons," Temeraire said, evasively, by which Laurence suspected that Temeraire had liked these described arrangements. "But then he told me I should have a more worthy companion there, and you would be sent away."

By the time he could be persuaded to uncoil himself again, Yongxing had gone, "looking mad as fire," Ferris reported, with glee unbecoming a senior lieutenant.

This scarcely contented Laurence. "I am not going to have Temeraire distressed in this manner," he said to Hammond angrily, trying without success to persuade the diplomat to carry a highly undiplomatic message to the prince.

"You are taking a very short-sighted view of the matter," Hammond said, maddeningly. "If Prince Yongxing can be convinced over the course of this journey that Temeraire will not agree to be parted from you, all the better for us: they will be far more ready to negotiate when finally we arrive in China." He paused and asked, with still more infuriating anxiousness, "You are quite certain, that he will not agree?"

On hearing the account that evening, Granby said, "I say we heave Hammond and Yongxing over the side together some dark night, and good riddance," expressing Laurence's private sentiments more frankly than Laurence himself felt he could. Granby was speaking, with no regard for manners, between bites of a light meal of soup, toasted cheese, potatoes fried in pork fat with onions, an entire roast chicken, and a mince pie: he had finally been released from his sickbed, pallid and much reduced in weight, and Laurence had invited him to supper. "What else was that prince saying to him?"

"I have not the least idea; he has not said three words together in English the last week," Laurence said. "And I do not mean to press Temeraire to tell me; it would be the most officious, prying sort of behavior."

"That none of his friends should ever be flogged there, I expect," Granby said, darkly. "And that he should have a dozen books to read every day, and heaps of jewels. I have heard stories about this sort of thing, but if a fellow ever really tried it, they would drum him out of the Corps quick as lightning; if the dragon did not carve him into joints, first."

Laurence was silent a moment, twisting his wineglass in his fingers. "Temeraire is only listening to it at all because he is unhappy."

"Oh, Hell." Granby sat back heavily. "I am damned sorry I have been sick so long; Ferris is a right'un, but he hasn't been on a transport before, he couldn't know how the sailors get, and how to properly teach the fellows to take no notice," he said glumly. "And I can't give you any advice for cheering him up; I served with Laetificat longest, and she is easy-going even for a Regal Copper: no temper to speak of, and no mood I ever saw could dampen her appetite. Maybe it is not being allowed to fly."

They came into the harbor the next morning: a broad semicircle with a golden beach, dotted with attractive palms under the squat white walls of the overlooking castle. A multitude of rough canoes, many with branches still attached to the trunks from which they had been hollowed, were plying the waters of the harbor, and besides these there could be seen an assortment of brigs and schooners, and at the western end a snow of middling size, with her boats swarming back and forth, crowded with blacks who were being herded along from a tunnel mouth that came out onto the beach itself.

The Allegiance was too large to come into the harbor proper, but she had