“And now they must know that we are here and cannot reach them,” Laurence said, lowering the glass. “They could hardly have avoided seeing us come in, yesterday, with the fuss the French made.”

“It’s that Fleur-de-Nuit who chased us here that is the worst trouble,” Granby said. “Otherwise I should say let us just wait until the dark of the moon and make a dash for it; but you may be sure that fellow will be waiting for us to try just such a thing; he’d have all the rest of them on us before we clear the walls.” Indeed that night they could see the big dark blue dragon as a shadow against the moonlit ocean, sitting up alertly on his haunches in the French covert, his enormous pallid eyes almost unblinking and fixed on the city walls.

“You are a good host,” Marshal Lefèbvre said cheerfully, accepting without demur another tender pigeon upon his plate, and attacking it and the heap of boiled potatoes with gusto and manners perhaps more suited to a guard-sergeant than a Marshal of France: not surprising, as he had begun his military career as such, and life as the son of a miller. “We’ve been eating boiled grass and crows with our biscuit these two weeks.”

He wore his curly hair grey and unpowdered over a round peasant’s face. He had sent emissaries to try and open negotiations, and had accepted sincerely and without hesitation Kalkreuth’s caustic reply: an invitation to dine in the city itself to discuss the matter of surrender. He had ridden up to the gates with no more escort than a handful of cavalrymen. “I’d take more risk for a dinner like this,” he said with a rolling laugh, when one of the Prussian officers commented ungraciously on his courage. “It’s not as though you’d get anything for long by putting me in a dungeon, after all, except to make my poor wife cry; the Emperor has a lot of swords in his basket.”

After he had demolished every dish and mopped up the last of the juices from his plate with bread, he promptly let himself doze off in his chair while the port went around, and woke up only as the coffee was set before them. “Ah, that gives life to a man,” he said, drinking three cups in quick succession. “Now then,” he went on briskly without a pause, “you seem like a sensible fellow and a good soldier; are you going to insist on dragging this all out?”

The mortified Kalkreuth, who had not meant in the least to suggest he would truly entertain a suggestion of surrender, said coolly, “I hope I will maintain my post with honor until I receive orders to the contrary from His Majesty.”

“Well, you won’t,” Lefèbvre said prosaically, “because he’s shut up in Königsberg just like you are here. I’m sure it’s no shame to you. I won’t pretend I’m a Napoleon, but I hope I can take a city with two-to-one odds and all the siege guns I need. I’d just as soon save the men, yours and mine both.”

“I am not Colonel Ingersleben,” Kalkreuth said, referring to the gentleman who had so quickly handed over the fortress of Stettin, “to surrender my garrison without a shot fired; you may find us a tougher nut to digest than you imagine.”

“We’ll let you out with full honors,” Lefèbvre said, refusing to rise to the bait, “and you and your officers can go free, so long as you give parole not to fight against France for twelve months. Your men too, of course, though we’ll take their muskets. That’s the best I can do, but still it’ll be a damned sight nicer than getting shot or taken prisoner.”

“I thank you for your kind offer,” Kalkreuth said, getting up. “My answer is no.”

“Too bad,” Lefèbvre said without dismay, and got up also, putting on the sword he had casually slung over the back of his chair. “I don’t say it’ll stay open forever, but I hope you’ll keep it in mind as we go on.” He paused on turning, seeing Laurence, who had been seated some distance down the table, and added, “Though I’d better say now it doesn’t apply to any British soldiers you have here. Sorry,” he said to Laurence apologetically, “the Emperor has a fixed notion over you English, and anyway we’ve orders about you in particular, if you’re the one with that big China dragon who came sailing over our heads the other day. Ha! You caught us sitting on the pot and no mistake.”

With this final laugh at his own expense, he tramped out whistling to collect his escort and ride back out of the walls, leaving all of them thoroughly depressed by his good cheer; and Laurence to spend the night imagining all the most lurid sorts of orders which Lien might have persuaded Bonaparte to make concerning Temeraire’s fate.

“I hope I need not tell you, Captain, that I have no thoughts of accepting this offer,” Kalkreuth said to him the next morning, having summoned him to breakfast to receive this reassurance.

“Sir,” Laurence said quietly, “I think I have good reason to fear being made a French prisoner, but I hope I would not ask to have the lives of fifteen thousand men spent to save me from such a fate, with God only knows how many ordinary citizens killed also. If they establish their batteries of siege guns, and I do not see how you can prevent it forever, the city must be surrendered or reduced to rubble; then we would be killed or taken in any case.”

“We have a long road to travel before then,” Kalkreuth said. “They will have slow going on their siege works, with the ground frozen, and a cold unhealthy winter sitting outside our gates; you heard what he said about their supplies. They will not make any headway before March, I promise you, and a great deal can happen in so long a time.”

His estimate seemed good at first: seen through Laurence’s glass, the French soldiers picked and spaded the ground in an unenthusiastic manner, making little headway with their old and rust-bitten tools against the hard-packed earth: saturated through, so near to the river, and frozen hard already in the early winter. The wind brought drifts and flurries of snow off the sea, and frost climbed the window-panes and the sides of his morning washbasin each day before dawn. Lefèbvre himself looked to be in no rush: they could see him, on occasion, wandering up and down the shallow beginnings of the trench, trailed by a handful of aides and his lips puckered in a whistle, not dissatisfied.

Others, however, were not so content with the slow progress: Laurence and Temeraire had been in the city scarcely a fortnight before Lien arrived.

She came in the late afternoon, out of the south: rider-less, trailed only by a small escort of two middle-weights and a courier, beating hard away from the leading edge of a winter gale that struck the city and the encampment scarcely half-an-hour after she had landed. She had been sighted by the city lookouts only, and for all the two long days of the storm, with snow obscuring all their sight of the French camp, Laurence entertained some faint hope that a mistake had been made; then he woke heart thundering the next day to a clear sky and the dying echoes of her terrible roar.

He ran outside in nightshirt and dressing gown, despite the cold and the ankle-deep snow not yet swept from the parapet; the sun was pale yellow, and dazzling on the whitened fields and on Lien’s marble-pale hide. She was standing at the edge of the French lines, inspecting the ground closely: as he and the appalled guards watched, she once again drew her breath deep, launched aloft, and directed her roar against the frozen earth.

The snow erupted in blizzard-clouds, dark clods of dirt flying, but the real damage was not to be recognized until later, when the French soldiers came warily back to work with their pickaxes and shovels. Her efforts had loosened the earth many feet down, to below the frost-line, so that their work now moved at a far more rapid pace. In a week the French works outstripped all their prior progress, the labor greatly encouraged by the presence of the white dragon, who often came and paced back and forth along the lines, watchful for any sign of slackening, while the men dug frantically.