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quarreled with.
    But she was so jealous of her discoveries that she flew into a temper when Temeraire could inform her
    that any of them had been made before, and she was resentful of the hierarchy of the breeding grounds,
    which as she saw it denied her the just deserts of her brilliance. Because of her middling size, she had to
    make do with an inconvenient poky clearing down in the moorlands, of which she complained
    endlessly—no prospect and little more than an overhang to shelter from the rain.
    “So why do you not take a better?” Temeraire said, exasperated. “There are several very nice, directly
    over there, in the cliff face; you would be much more comfortable there, I am sure.”
    “One does not like to be quarrelsome,” Perscitia said, evasive and entirely false: she liked very well to
    be quarrelsome, and Temeraire did not understand what that had to do with taking an empty cave, either;
    but at least it diverted the subject.
    The only event of note was that it rained for a week without stopping, with a steady driving wind behind
    it which came in to all the cave-mouths and permeated the ground, and made everyone perfectly
    miserable; Temeraire was very glad of his antechamber, where he could shake off the water and dry
    before retreating to the comfort of his larger chamber. Several of the smallest dragons, courier-weights
    living in the hollows by the river, were flooded out of their homes entirely; sorry for their muddy and
    bedraggled state, Temeraire invited them to stop in his cavern, while the rain continued, so long as they
    first washed off the mud. They were loud with appreciation for his arrangements, gratifyingly, and a few
    days later, while he was brooding anxious and solitary once again over Laurence, a shadow crossed over
    the mouth of his cave.
    It was the big Regal Copper, Requiescat; he ducked in through the antechamber and came into
    Temeraire’s main chamber, uninvited, and gazed around the room with a pleased air, nodding, and said,
    “It is just as nice as they said.”
    “Thank you,” Temeraire said, thawed a little by the compliment, although he did not much want
    company, just then; and then he remembered he must be polite. “Will you sit down? I am sorry I cannot
    offer you tea.”
    “Tea?” Requiescat said, but absently, not expecting an answer; he was poking his nose into the corners
    of the cave, even putting his tongue out to smell them, Temeraire saw indignantly, as if he were at home;
    Temeraire’s ruff began to try to bristle.
    “I beg your pardon,” he said, stiffly, “I am afraid you have found me unprepared for guests,” which he
    thought was a clever way of hinting that Requiescat might go away again, any time he chose.
    But the Regal Copper did not take the hint; or at any rate he did not choose to go, but instead settled
    himself comfortably along the back of the cave and said, “Well, old fellow, I am afraid we will have to
    swap.”
    “Swap?” Temeraire said, puzzled, until he divined that Requiescat meant caves. “I do not want your
    cave,” adding hastily, “not that it is not very nice, I am sure; but I have just got this one arranged to suit
    me.”
    “This one is much bigger now,” Requiescat explained, or by his tone thought he was explaining, “and it is
    much nicer in the wet; mine,” he added regretfully, “has been full of puddles, all this week; wet clear
    through to the back.”
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    “Then I can hardly see why I would change,” Temeraire said, still more baffled, and then he sat up,
    outraged and astonished, and let his ruff spread fully as it had so wanted to do. “Why, you are a damned
    scrub,” he said. “How dare you come here, and behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge? I
    never saw anything so sly in my life; it is the sort of thing Lien would do, I suppose,” he added, cuttingly,
    “and you may get out at once; if you want my cave you may try and take it; I will meet you anytime you
    like: