with the flash-powder being shot in their faces whenever the fighting detachment could manage: Arkady and some of his ferals, with their small crews, were taking a part.
He sighed and put his head down again, twitching as yet another of the bombs went off.
SILENCE WOKE LAURENCE, a little while before dawn: the bombardment had stopped. He rolled off Temeraire's arm and went to wash his face, breaking the crust of ice in the bowl and scrubbing as best as he could: there was no soap. Smoke still rose from the decoy field, but the sky above was empty and lightening quickly. The French would be on the move by now: an hour, perhaps would see them -
A bell was ringing, distantly, a frantic note in its voice, and others picking up the alarm, coming nearer and nearer, sounding all over the camp, and Temeraire put his head up and said exultantly, "It is time to fight."
He put Laurence aboard into an odd arrangement, with only the few straps of harness which Fellowes and Blythe had managed for him and Allen and Roland to latch on to; there would be no one more going up with them. He had considered whether to dismiss Roland back to whatever post she had abandoned, from concern that it might seem a reflection on Jane, a kind of endorsement she surely would not have chosen to make. But he did not know where she had been serving, and when he had inquired, Roland had put out her chin and only said, "I should prefer to stay, sir," and she shook her head when he asked her if she had been signal-ensign. "Fifth lookout, sir; I shan't be missed."
Of course, Emily had no need to worry about her future, which was quite settled: she would inherit Excidium, on her mother's retirement, a promotion guaranteed; Blythe and Fellowes were ground-crew masters and could always be sure of a place. Allen, however -
"No, sir, well," Allen said, stumbling over his words, "that is, they hadn't given me a place again, sir, aloft; I was with the clerks, so, it doesn't much matter for me."
It was, Laurence privately and sadly felt, a better place for him: Allen was hopelessly clumsy, and more than once had nearly accomplished his own end; but Laurence would not tell any man to stay behind the lines, who wished to be in them.
They now came stumbling from their small cold shelter, little more than a few branches laid down on the earth, next Temeraire's side, to keep them from lying in the wet. Laurence reached a hand down, to help them up, where before many dozens would have been.
"I am coming, too," another voice said, thickly accented; Laurence looked over and saw Demane standing already beside him, having come up the other side. The boy was bristling with arms: two smallswords, two pistols, two knives, all with mismatched hilts, and a sack of small bombs slung over his shoulder, which he strung onto the harness without waiting for permission. "No, you sit there," he told Allen, pointing farther back along Temeraire's shoulder to the lookout's place, and such was the air of decision that Allen meekly obeyed; though he had three years and a foot in height over the younger boy.
"Are you not assigned to Arkady?" Laurence said.
"We are of your crew," the boy said, meaning himself and Sipho, whom Laurence now spied down in the clearing, helping Fellowes and Blythe to arrange their meager supply of tools, waiting in case Temeraire should need to come back in for repairs. "Both of us, together. You said."
"That is quite right," Temeraire said, looking around, "and I am sure Arkady does not need him; he was allowed to fight last night," with a note of some disgruntlement, "and will be sleeping late, and I dare say we will have won by the time he wakes up."
So they were four aboard, where thirty were common and hundreds had been managed, all of them latched to the one thick band: it circled Temeraire's neck, and was joined by securing straps to bands about either of his shoulders, so it would not slide about. When they had all hooked on their carabiners, Temeraire sat up, and now Laurence could see past the trees to where a cloud of French dragons was coming, like bees, back and forth along the road: setting down great numbers of men and guns.
He had seen these maneuvers before, at the Battle of