how she would learn the news, or what her fate would be, widowed and alone with a small child in the occupied city.
"He was a brave fellow, sir," Janus ventured: the old sailor had climbed over to Temeraire, who was lighter-burdened than Iskierka, for the trip. "Bad luck we had, there."
Laurence only nodded. He could not go back; his duty lay ahead.
They caught up Wellesley's corps that afternoon, and paced them the rest of the long way to camp outside Coventry, with a bitter wind blowing south: a taste of the weather they would have in Scotland. The men came marching dully along the road, falling out of step into quicker shuffling as they came at last to the cold comfort waiting for them: ground frozen solid as stone, covered with drifting flurries of snow. At least the waggons rolled easily, wheels clattering: the muddy road had frozen into uneven ridges.
"I don't see why we must be staying up here," Requiescat said, gliding into another slow circle. "There is a nice clearing here below us: we could see just as well from there if anyone attacked, which they won't, as we would have seen them sometime the last hundred miles."
"We mayn't land until the infantry are settled," Temeraire said, but then turned his head back and murmured, "Laurence, why mayn't we?"
"They have less comfort marching than do we aloft," Laurence said tiredly, "and will sleep in worse: the least we can do in solidarity is protect them until they have established the guard-posts, and lit their fires. If you went to your leisure while they yet struggled, it would only arouse envy and discontent."
Temeraire said, "Well, I can hover, but it is not very easy for the others to stay up: we had much better go down there and help them. We could pull up trees for them, for firewood - "
Laurence opened his mouth to say it would throw the men into a panic; but looking down at those slow and weary ranks, he did not think they had the energy to run, even if they had been half-dead with fear. "The smaller dragons, perhaps, might begin."
Temeraire turned and spoke to the ferals, and Gherni led down a handful of them, smallest, to go and pull out the old dead trees from the forest, shaking needles and dirt and squirrels out of the logs as they lifted them up, and carried them by twos and threes to the camp. The men mechanically breaking up the ground for ditches did not at first even notice the activity at their backs, and then only flinched when the first logs were put down: they stared up at the dragons with their shovels and pickaxes clutched in their hands. Lester, who had just landed, stared back at them curiously, and then poked his head over to look at the ground and asked them something in his own tongue.
"He wants to know why they are digging," Temeraire said, and, "No, no - " he called, and then went down himself, a descent which did send the men stumbling haplessly away, to stop Lester from picking one of them up: evidently with the plan of shaking him for answers, as if this would enable the man to speak the dragon-tongue.
"It is for a midden, stop being so foolish," he informed Lester, and then turning his head back to Laurence added, "and I suppose we may help them with this also: I can do what Lien did at Danzig."
She had used the divine wind there as the French dug their siege-trenches, to break up the frozen ground and make it easier for the men to dig. But it took several attempts, and the ruin of some fifty trees brought down by excess, for Temeraire to manage the same effect. "It is not," he panted, having taken a moment to breathe, "quite so easy as it looks. It seems to me it ought to be easier to roar just a little, than all-out; but it is not. I do not understand why. Not," he added hastily, "that I cannot do it perfectly well: if Lien can do it, so can I."
"Since you are having trouble, I will help, too," Iskierka announced, landing beside them, and before anyone could stop her, she had put her head down and blasted flame out onto the ice-packed ground.
A great cloud of hissing steam arose in the center of her strike, but for the most part the flames licked and billowed away