Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik Page A

fore shoulders.
    “Oh, but it is working!” Lily cried, on the far side of the ship, and then with alarm, “Look out—” as the ship came up and off the rocks with almost startling ease, and began to slide down the levers towards them.
    Laurence had made one of the party which had taken the
Tonnant
, at the Nile, after the Longwing formation above had made its pass. He remembered the great pitted smoking holes, which had gone through the decks, and the screams of the wretched seaman who had incautiously put his bare foot upon one small spatter, not the size of a shilling. One of his mess-mates had chopped his foot off at once, there upon the deck, and so saved the fellow’s life; although the wound had mortified and killed him three days later.
    He recognized, therefore, the characteristic spattering of the Longwing acid upon the tree-stumps which they showed him, andthe earth surrounding them, and although the stolen trees had provoked such hostility in his captors, Laurence could not help but rejoice that at last he could begin to understand; he could make sense of the intelligence these signs offered him. There was a Longwing near-by, and it had come and taken away three prime pieces of timber.
    “Taken for masts, most likely,” Laurence said, drawing a picture of a sailing ship in the wet sand to translate the word for them. Three masts on such a scale: a dragon transport for sure, which in any event should have been required to carry a Longwing and its usual formation; and
that
, surely, explained Laurence’s own presence. The
Reliant
must have been traveling in company with the larger ship, to serve her as a more agile defender: no-one could call transports easy to handle, for all the massive weight of iron they could bring to bear.
    The coat—the green coat—must have come off some aviator’s back. Perhaps it had been thrown up on the shore beside him by the same storm that had wrecked the ship’s masts, and in the first early moments of cold and delirium Laurence had put it on. He wondered now if the sword, too, had come from another man’s hand; but he put that doubt aside. If it had, he could more easily restore it himself than could the Japanese—if he were permitted to go home.
    And home was now a real possibility. There was a British ship here, in these very waters. She was not sunk; she was injured, but afloat, and her crew hoped to repair her. The
Allegiance
? Laurence wondered. Or perhaps the
Dominion
; although that ship was ordinarily on the run to Halifax. He still did not know what they had been doing with a transport so near Japan, but those questions were as nothing to the sheer inexpressible relief of knowing himself not, as he had begun to feel, wholly adrift, unmoored from any connection to his own life.
    Laurence looked up from the sand, and addressed Matsudaira again. “Sir, I will say on behalf of my country-men that I am surethey intended no offense. They came ashore meaning only to take some necessary material for their ship’s repair, from what they must have supposed to be a stand of unused timber.”
    “And where is this ship, now?” Matsudaira said.
    His expression betrayed nothing but the same mild interest he had displayed throughout all the conversation, but the question came very quick. Laurence paused. He had just been thinking he might ask for a map of the coastline, or for a local fisherman to question. A transport had a draught near fifty feet: she could not anchor in shallow waters, and would not risk coming very near the coast. Some haphazard anchorage sheltered from the worst of the ocean by shoals was the most likely; near in straight line flight from this bay. He thought he might be able to guess a likely place, and even direct a boat thence, given some sense of the nearby waters.
    He looked at the great serpentine creature looming overhead: the gleam of intelligence in its eye was plain, despite its monstrous size, and it was following their conversation with a