Free Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik Page B

away and the acrid smoky stink of harness oil. They had a
    long walk out in the dark, after the last clearing, climbing a steep slope upwards to the crown of a hill,
    prominently placed overlooking all the camp, where Iskierka lay sleeping in a thick spiny coil, steam
    issuing with every breath, and the feral dragons scattered around her.
    She cracked an eye open as they came in and inquired drowsily, “Is it a battle yet?”
    “No, love, back to sleep,” Granby said, and she sighed and shut her eye; but she had drawn the notice
    of the men: they looked up, and then they looked from Laurence to Granby, and then they looked back
    down again, saying nothing.
    “Perhaps I had best not stay,” Laurence said. He knew some of the faces: men from his own crew,
    some of his former officers; he was glad they had found places here.
    “Stuff,” Granby said. “I am not so damned craven, and anyway,” he added, more despondently, when
    he had led Laurence into his own tent, pitched in the comfortable current of heat which Iskierka gave
    steadily off, “I cannot be much farther in the soup than I am already, after yesterday. She’s spoilt, there is
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    no other word for it. Wouldn’t keep in formation, wouldn’t obey signals—took the ferals with her—” He
    shrugged, and taking up his own private bottle from the floor poured them each a glass, which he drank
    with an unaccustomed enthusiasm.
    “It’s not so bad, on patrol,” Granby said, wiping his mouth after. “She doesn’t need any coaxing to look
    out the enemy, and she’ll take directions to make it easier; I hardly notice anymore. But in a fleet
    action—I don’t mean she was useless,” he added, with a defensive note. “Did for a first-rate and three
    frigates, all herself and those fellows, and chased a dozen French beasts. But she hasn’t a shred of
    discipline. Pretended not to hear me, left the right wing of the Corps wide open, and two beasts badly
    hurt for it. I ought to be broken for it, if they could afford to give her up.”
    He was pacing the small confines of the tent, still holding the empty glass, and talking swiftly, almost
    nervously; more to be saying something, filling the air between them, than the particular words. “This is
    the sort of thing that rots the Corps,” he said. “I never thought I would be—a bad officer, someone who
    ruins his dragon, some other kind of fool, kept on because his beast won’t serve otherwise—the Army,
    the Navy, they sneer at us for that, as much for anything else, and there at least they are right to sneer. So
    our admirals have to dance to the Navy’s tune, and meanwhile the youngsters see it, too, and you can’t
    ask them to be better, when they see a fellow let off anything, anything at all—”
    He pulled himself up abruptly, realizing too late that his words were applicable to more of his audience
    than himself, and looked at Laurence miserably.
    “You are not wrong,” Laurence said. He had assumed as much himself, after all, in his Navy days: had
    thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, disregarding law and authority as far as they
    dared, barely kept in check—to be used for their control over the beasts, and not respected.
    “But if we have more liberty than we ought,” Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, “it is
    because they have not enough: the dragons. They have no stake in victory but our happiness; their daily
    bread any nation would give them just to have peace and quiet. We are given license so long as we do
    what we ought not: so long as we use their affections to keep them obedient and quiet, to ends which
    serve them not at all—or which harm.”
    “How else do you make them care?” Granby said. “If we left off, the French would only run right over
    us, and take our eggs themselves.”
    “They care in China,” Laurence said, “and in Africa, and care all the more, that their rational sense is not
    imposed on, and their