They found something of an uproar, overseen by four interested dragons whose heads loomed above the knot of men; Demane at the heart of it, Laurence rather despairingly saw, and an officer of the New South Wales Corps on his knees in the dirt before him with a bloody lip and wild-eyed alarm at Kulingile peering down.

“—outrage,” Rankin was saying in great heat, “—will have his commander here in the morning, demanding an explanation—”

“I don’t care!” Demane said. “And the only one who has been outrageous is him; I know you don’t care a jot, so he is here and will stay here, until Captain Laurence comes back; and if he wants to get up and leave before then, he may try, and I will have Kulingile hold him upside-down over the cliff.”

“But Roland, I am sure if Demane is angry with him, he has done something to deserve it,” Temeraire was saying meanwhile to Emily Roland, with what Laurence could only call misplaced loyalty, “so there is no reason not to wait for Laurence to come back: he will certainly know whatever is the best thing to do. But perhaps you had better not hold that fellow over the cliff,” he added to Kulingile, the first thing of sense in the conversation, “for you might very easily drop him, if he squirmed. If he should try and run away, you can just pin him down instead: only being careful not to squash him.”

“You are all a pack of damned fools,” Roland said, as furious as Laurence had ever heard her, “and if he weren’t a coward, he would run, and none of you should do anything; there ain’t any reason the captain ought hear anything about it.”

Iskierka said, “Well, I would like to hear about it, as I am not asleep anymore; is there some fighting?”

“Oh, lord,” Granby said, under his breath.

“I am here; what the devil is going on?” Laurence said grimly. “Demane, we spoke this afternoon, I thought, on the subject of brawling.”