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Temeraire flew out of the noisome smoke above Glasgow and into the cold, sweet sky above the valley of the Clyde, and Laurence, upon his shoulder, sighed in relief. The very air changed colour, losing its yellowish-grey tint; only the glaring grey clouds remained, promising snow. Temeraire echoed him a moment later, his breath pluming out like a ribbon behind him; he stretched out his long neck, and tilted into a gentle spiralling loop, flicking his wings as if to shake the city’s coal-smut off his hide. Laurence held tight to the harness, and enjoyed the sharp sting of wind upon his cheeks as they sped towards the hills beyond.
The day had been hectic and frustrating, full of small matters of business best gotten out of the way before the new year, but it was past. There were even a few hours of daylight left, and Laurence intended to enjoy them. As the valley gave way to rolling moorland, he thought that perhaps he would have a hot bath before supper - and perhaps he would speak with Tharkay of the day while he did. He wouldn’t have to wait long. With his eyes closed, by the smell of the air, he could have said how close they were to home.
“Oh no,” said Temeraire, dipping his head. “Is that one of Mr Jeffray’s sheep, do you think?”
Laurence’s pleasant reverie burst like a soap bubble.
He leaned over Temeraire’s shoulder to see. There were patches of snow on the ground below, heaped here and there in the shade of shrubs and trees, and at first he could not see anything significant - and then Temeraire’s shadow rippled over the hill, and what Laurence had taken for some snow-covered furze broke north at a trot. If he squinted, he could see the paint mark on its haunches that signified its owner, who was one of Tharkay's tenants.
“Ah,” he said, trying not to let disappointment colour his voice, and banished the hopes he had harboured of spending his afternoon in Tharkay’s private company. “Well spotted. I shall let Tharkay know - we shall have to see if we can catch it before dark.”
“Perhaps I could just pick it off the ground and save some bother?” Temeraire sounded hopeful. “Sheep do run about somewhat, but they are easy to trick, because they are very stupid.”
Laurence did not think Temeraire had had to catch a sheep in many years, and then only for supper; they had tended to be penned already, and moreover were not expected to be presented back to the shepherd whole and healthy. “I think it is better to coordinate our efforts with its owner, my dear,” Laurence said diplomatically. “There are many cliffs about this place, and a panicking animal might break its leg. Mr Jeffray has clever dogs - they can herd it home.”
Temeraire grumbled, “Not clever enough to stop it from wandering in the first place,” but he beat his wings for height and arrowed away towards the manor.
Indeed, the sound of barking dogs greeted them when Temeraire landed on the court before the house. Mr Jeffray was by the front door, wrangling his two excited collies as they attempted to break free and bound towards Temeraire. Standing in the doorway, watching this commotion with some delight, was Tharkay. Laurence slid to the ground and strode over to join him there, gladdened by the sight of him.
“Sir William!” Mr Jeffray said - then, “No! Down, you beasts!” as the collies made as if to bound towards Laurence instead. Laurence paid them no mind, and leaned over them and shook Mr Jeffray’s hand. The shepherd was a man of forty or so, as windburnt as an aviator, and so flustered that he almost thrust his hat into Laurence’s hand, forgetting that he was clutching it. He went red and passed it to his other hand. “I do beg your pardon, sir.”
“Not at all,” Laurence reassured. “You are missing a sheep, Mr Jeffray?”
“I do not suppose you saw it on your return, Will?” Tharkay said.
“We did, in fact!” Temeraire put in, as he hooked a claw into the harness-buckle at his neck to loosen it. “It is only a few miles behind the house.”
“That is excellent news,” Tharkay said. “There, Mr Jeffray, you see? I think there is a good chance of us finding it before dark.”
Mr Jeffray made a polite attempt to demur, but Tharkay insisted, and Laurence supported him. “Certainly we will assist you,” he said. “We shall cover more ground as two parties, and time is of the essence.”
Mr Jeffray, outvoted, acquiesced.
It was not the first time that one of Mr Jeffray’s sheep had gone astray on Tharkay’s estate, which went some way to explaining his mortified expression. Indeed, in the three years that Laurence had lived in Tharkay’s manor, sheep, cows, and even the occasional horse had wandered onto the grounds from the surrounding crofts. This was not uncommon on working estates - Laurence remembered some similar incidents at his own father’s house - but here, with the landscape so craggy and wild, and a dragon on site whose mere presence could panic an animal, the operation of retrieving a wayward beast was more delicate than merely shooing it away from the rose bushes.
(In point of fact, the rose bushes on Tharkay’s estate were concentrated around Temeraire’s pavilion, in an elaborate garden that framed gravel paths wide enough to admit any size of dragon, and indeed often hosted many dragons at once for matters of political discussion. The pavilion was finished now, its fine stone edifice fashioned in a style that complimented the great house, albeit with the addition of a grand skylight and a golden cupola. The roses, however, were still somewhat stubby, and had only truly bloomed this summer past. Temeraire did not seem discouraged, understanding that it might take many more years to be what he wished it to be. “It will never equal my mother’s lotus ponds,” he had sighed. “But I hope, should she ever visit, that it will please her nonetheless.”)
It took them only a few minutes to prepare - Laurence was already dressed to travel, and so he helped Temeraire out of his harness while Tharkay put on his coat and boots, and the housekeeper fetched them lanterns. It was not advisable to be out on the moor in the dark, and especially not near the cliffs, without a lamp. They left Temeraire in charge of the house, still a little put out by his inability to help with the search, but mollified by the prospect of a hot bowl of tea.
An easy distance from the air felt a great deal further on foot. It took almost an hour for Laurence to lead Tharkay, Mr Jeffray, and Mr Jeffray’s dogs to the place where Temeraire had spotted the sheep, and by that time, naturally, the sheep was gone, and fresh snow had begun to fall. Mr Jeffray’s collies sniffed the ground with great enthusiasm, but did not seem to pull in any definite direction. Whatever tracks the sheep had left were quickly being covered, and he supposed its scent must be too.
“You said it was travelling north?” Tharkay said, and at Laurence’s nod he said, “Very well, then it may be best to divide our forces. Mr Jeffray, will you go northeast and try the wood? Sir William and I will go to the cliffs in the northwest. Whistle if you find your sheep, and we shall do the same. Good luck to you.”
With a handshake, Mr Jeffray departed, his collies running ahead. Tharkay turned to Laurence then, and said, with only a little chagrin, “You are very good. I imagine this is not what you planned to do after a day traipsing all over the city.”
“On the contrary,” Laurence said, his voice low, “I am at home and in your company, and so I am precisely where I wish to be.” And he had the pleasure of seeing Tharkay temporarily lost for words, which Laurence only ever seemed to achieve by sincerity.
“Well,” Tharkay said at length, a small smile playing about his mouth. “This way, then.” And they set off together across the moor.
They took to the ridges, to afford them views in every direction. From the height, Laurence could see the house and pavilion to the east, the rooftop glowing in the afternoon light, and the woods to the west - the small figures of Mr Jeffray and his dogs were just visible through the falling snow, trudging towards the treeline. To the south was the village and lowlands beyond, and higher ground to northward, which dropped away abruptly into crags, and it was in this direction that they headed. This was a section of the estate that Laurence had only ever flown over, it being a more strenuous trek than the rest of Tharkay’s lands, but Tharkay, naturally, strode towards it with perfect confidence. No Scottish hill could equal the mountains he had crossed to come here, and moreover Laurence was quite sure Tharkay knew every rill and rabbit hole of his old home.
In the few years they had lived here together, it had been Laurence’s great pleasure to observe Tharkay’s handling of the estate. It had been halfway to ruin when he took it from his cousins, the house neglected and ransacked for most of its valuable items, and the grounds overgrown and unproductive. Further, the tenants had not been allowed to use the lands for over a decade, and their rents had been raised exorbitantly in the meantime. They had not liked their previous masters, and had been slow to trust this new one.
However, there were men in the village who still remembered the old laird’s half-foreign son, and Tharkay had wasted no time in reintroducing himself to them. He employed local men to help mend the house and grounds, and allowed the tenant farmers use his lands in common again. They were once more given leave to pollard the trees to make fences and feed their stock, to graze their sheep upon the hillside and their pigs in the wood, all practices which Tharkay’s cousins had banned.
Tharkay would have it that this was all to his own ends, as the grounds were vast and this kept them very well, with little effort or expense on his own part. But if he wished to play the high-handed lord, he would have had to take to his duties with less obvious enthusiasm and kindness. Instead, he threw himself at the challenges of land management with the same sharp-eyed boldness that he had ever applied to the exigencies of war, and with a great deal more joy. There was little call for spycraft or travel in his new life, and yet he did not seem bored. There was almost every day some local matter that required his attention, from lost sheep to new buildings, and he seemed happy to pour his fortune into works that benefited his tenants. And so, he was well-respected in the village, despite having brought the local populace into more contact with dragons than they might ever have expected. On quieter days, he often worked upon converting the travel charts in his notebooks into beautiful maps of the silk roads that he had so frequently travelled in years past - something his father had done too, the half-finished atlases left in the library to gather dust after the old man’s death.
Tharkay had been working to regain his father’s house for longer than Laurence had known him, and now that he had it he seemed utterly content. Laurence was sometimes puzzled by it - the heretofore unknown depths of domestication in this most adventurous man - but he was grateful to see it, and to be allowed to share his home and his life.
The snow was easing now, which improved their visibility somewhat, but the sun was going down and they could move only slowly, for the ground up here was thick with heather and gorse. “Ah!” Tharkay said, and stooped to pluck something off a shrub. He held up a tuft of wool - fresh enough that it could only be from their quarry.
“Perhaps we should whistle for Mr Jeffray now,” Laurence said. “There isn’t much daylight left.”
“You may be right. I hope it hasn’t gone much farther,” Tharkay said, squinting northeast. “We’ll come to the cliffs soon.”
Laurence turned west towards the woods, and with his fingers in his mouth let out a sharp whistle - one he hoped would carry far enough to alert the shepherd, or at least his keen-eared dogs. Then he followed Tharkay with some care across the steep slope.
There was a break in the clouds near the horizon, and abruptly the snowy landscape was flooded with the last light of the day. Glaring and honey-coloured, it transformed the grey hillside into something breathtaking, the visible cliffs painted a hundred shades of purple and gold, the patches of snow flaring like fire. For a moment Laurence stopped and stared, and Tharkay did too. The view was simply too beautiful to ignore.
High in the sky circled a bird, and Laurence shaded his eyes to see it better. He realised it was further away than he had realised, and much larger, and he heard Tharkay laugh, a rare sound of delight.
“Is that--?” Laurence said.
“A golden eagle? Yes,” replied Tharkay, the smile audible in his voice. “They make their nests here sometimes. I have been waiting to see one.”
It looked just like the one Tharkay had had when Laurence met him, so many years ago, and half the world away. “Have they always been here?” Laurence said, a little stupidly. It was only that he had never seen a golden eagle in Britain, only buzzards and kestrels. He was not, however, the keen falconer that Tharkay was - perhaps he had merely been unobservant.
“Oh yes, always,” Tharkay said. The dazzling burst of light began to fade; the sun was slipping over the horizon. He began to walk again, the smile lingering about his handsome face. “Though I did not know it when I first came here.”
Laurence sensed a tale there, and attempted to conceal his eagerness to hear it. Tharkay rarely ventured stories of his youth, and never when pressed. But Laurence followed him across the edge of the cliff, staying close to his side, and at length, Tharkay spoke again.
“My grandfather tamed eagles,” he confided. “I was very small when he began to take me hunting with him,” and he held a hand out over the ground, “So high, scarcely taller than the birds. But I wanted to help him, and he taught me how to feed them, and tie their jesses, and the whistles to command them. When I was a little older, he helped me catch a fledgling of my own to train. But then my mother died, and my father called me here, and I had to leave for a foreign country that I knew nothing about. This place was so strange to me then. Nothing was familiar. And I missed my grandfather.”
He looked away then, out over the cliff and to the distant valley. The eagle folded its wings and dropped like a stone, plummeting out of sight, vanishing into the dusk.
Tharkay murmured, “My father was a kind man, and a perceptive one. He wanted to know me - I was, after all, his only child. And one day, he brought me up here. It was autumn, then, and I admit I followed him rather resentfully. But when we came to this spot, he showed me what he had found. It was an eagle’s nest - enormous, and close enough that we could observe the fledglings in it, who were only just learning to fly. It astonished me. I hadn’t known they existed outside of Nepal.” In a drier tone, he added, “I have since found that they are perfectly common, and can be found on any mountain across the width of the world. Still, it was the first time I thought I could be at home here.”
He set about lighting his lantern, then, for the light was failing fast. Laurence held it steady for him, blocking the wind with his body, and said, “Perhaps you will find a fledgling to train next year?”
“Perhaps I shall,” Tharkay said, and took his lantern back. His dark eyes held a lovely glitter in the lamplight, and Laurence leaned forward to kiss him.
This was, quite naturally, the moment that they heard a miserable bleating from over the hill.
“Of course,” Tharkay murmured against Laurence’s mouth, and pulled away, smiling.
Laurence, exasperated, held his lantern up and crested the next rise, and there was Mr Jeffray’s sheep, stuck fast in a snow-covered gorse bush. When it saw them, it began to struggle, shaking clumps of snow loose, and Laurence saw that its thick wool had become tangled in the thorns. He sighed and stuck his fingers in his mouth, letting fly with another whistle just as loud as he could make it, and this time he heard an answering whistle, and the distant barking of the collies, coming closer.
“Come now, you silly creature,” he said, and he and Tharkay set about pulling it free - efforts which were hampered severely by the sheep itself, which seemed to want to find new, previously unexplored parts of the gorse bush in which to bury itself, bleating all the while. At last they got it free, and by the time they had by turns chivvied and hauled it to safer ground, the dogs came running up, and Mr Jeffray came panting behind them, holding his lantern aloft.
“Oh, you found it! God bless you,” he said, and they told him to think nothing of it, and watched with great relief as he and his dogs took charge of herding the creature expertly downhill.
“I think that was a fine afternoon’s work,” Tharkay said lightly, as they followed Mr Jeffray at a distance. “We won’t even be late for supper.”
Laurence, though damp with snow, pricked with gorse, and smelling faintly of sheep, could not help but concur. He would have to pick thorns out of his gloves and flying-coat, but before that, he would have that hot bath. As the rocky hillside gave way to steadier ground, he slipped his arm into Tharkay’s, and together they walked in a little pool of lamplight towards the friendly glow of home.
END