Cameron was interrupted from staring at yet another page of Treasury figures that he couldn't make work by Osborne, calling up from the courtyard: "Cameron, there's a dragon here for you!"
And there was. Dragons had suddenly become a not unfamiliar sight around London with dozens of dragons, harnessed and unharnessed, helping out with the rebuilding since Shoeburyness. This one was a medium-sized yellow one, thankfully properly harnessed, though the only crew with it appeared to be its captain, a slender, boyishly handsome man in uniform green whom Cameron vaguely recognized.
He stopped a safe distance from the dragon and said, "Captain Clark, is it?"
"Clegg, actually," said the captain. He stepped away from the dragon to greet Cameron, and Cameron noticed he was carrying some kind of large bundle on his back. "And this is Vincentius. We come bearing you a gift from the Duke of Wellingon, and Lord Roland, Admiral of the Air, to honour you for your services to his Majesty's Crown."
"Services to the Crown?" Cameron asked, letting a bit more incredulity than he'd meant to into his voice. Yes, he'd done what he could, but with Alexander dead, that had ended up being mostly desperately trying to keep the family finances, and by extension the Crown's, out of Boney's greedy hands.
"He means you're rich," said a drawling voice above him. Cameron looked up, and up, and up, at the yellow dragon, who had somehow moved closer without his noticing.
"It talks," Cameron said stupidly. Of course he'd known that these days everyone was claiming the dragons were as intelligent as humans, but he'd never really believed it; stood to reason.
"When I have something to say," answered the dragon, in that rumbling voice.
Cameron pulled away from the dragon's gaze, which had somehow managed to be both withering and paternal, and instead his eyes lit on the contents of Clegg's bundle, which he had unwrapped. "That's a dragon's egg," he said.
"This is a smart one we've got here," said the dragon.
"Be nice, Vince," Clegg said absently. "And yes, it's a dragon's egg. Which is now yours. Congratulations."
"But I don't want a dragon's egg," Cameron said helplessly.
"You can arrange to deliver it back to Lord Roland, then," Clegg answered cheerfully. "Our orders were just to bring it here."
"Since when are they giving out dragon eggs to low-level ministers anyway?"
"Well, that's an interesting story," Clegg said. "The thing is, the Aerial Corps, now that the epidemic is over, has suddenly realized that they have more eggs than they have captains, crews, or supplies for. And the Treasury--" Clegg nodded solicitously at Cameron there, "is as usual refusing to provide them the necessary funding, especially now that the dragons want proper housing and pay. But they're also refusing to let us release unharnessed dragons for civilian work. So Captain Harcourt suggested that perhaps if the Government had closer contact with the beasts themselves, they would be more understanding of what was necessary. And then Lord Wellington said that was the last thing he needed, the damned dragons spreading their Whiggish subversion directly in Parliament, and then Admiral Roland said - what was it exactly, Vince? Your memory is better."
Vincentius answered, "'If you want Tory Dragons, then give the damned eggs to the damn Tories; at any rate they're the only ones who can afford to feed the damned beasts anymore.'"
Clegg spread his hands. "Thank you, Vince. So here we are."
"You're giving dragon eggs to all the Tory ministers? Whether they want them or not?"
"No, unfortunately Lord Grenville insisted on parity, so they've been split up among the parties. Only to people who can independently afford upkeep, though."
"And if I try to give it back?"
"I wouldn't bother, honestly," Clegg answered. "If you're truly unsuited to partner a dragon, it'll refuse the harness, and you can offer its services back to the Corps. You'll still be responsible for paying any upkeep beyond its salary, though," Clegg said, grinning. "Most of the eggs we're giving out are haphazard crosses, who would most likely be no use to the Corps anyway, so it's no great loss if they refuse harness. Yours is by Vincentius out of Teresina - Yellow Reaper and Pascal's Blue. By previous experience, it'll be quite small and no good in battle, but rather clever with strategy and mathematics. Perhaps it can help you figure out how to fix the Treasury."
"Or at least do your arithmetic for you," Vincentius said, reaching one massive claw out to touch the egg. Cameron barely stopped himself from jumping back. Vincentius added thoughtfully, "Clegg tells me it's not the end of the world if one of my eggs hatches out a Tory, but I think he was making a joke."
"Vince!" said Clegg, laughing, "I didn't want you to repeat that!" He reached up to the dragon's side and rummaged in one of the bags, pulling out a small tangle of leather. "Here's a harness, just in case. Caring for it until hatching is fairly simple - keep it warm, talk to it - they can hear what goes on around them, so the more you expose it to that before hatching, the better you'll get on afterward - and send a message to the covert when it starts to hatch."
Cameron took the harness for lack of anything better to do with his hands. "When will it hatch?" he asked.
"Whenever it wants to," Clegg said, and flashed him another grin as he swung back up onto Vincentius's back. "Good luck, Cameron! I'll be seeing you!"
The egg was turquoise blue with swirls of brighter green, about the size of a small human child. Cameron touched it - gently, and almost involuntarily - before he slung the harness over his shoulder, gathered the egg and its wrappings up in his arms and shouted back into the building. "Gideon!"
Osborne poked his head around the corner where he'd hidden as soon as he could get away from the dragon - the errant coward. "What?"
"I have a dragon's egg."
"Oh," he said. "Yes, you do. What do you want me to do about that?"
"Make a warm place to put it, to start with," said Cameron. "Honestly. It's just a dragon, it's not as if it's going to bite your head off."
Gideon glanced at him, hesitating, before Cameron added, meaningfully, "I might, though," and he scurried off.
Some discreet, and occasionally not-so-discreet, asking around by Osborne soon established that Clegg's information was in essence correct: something of the number of fifteen mid-to-high ranking members of the government and the opposition had received dragon eggs on the same day as Cameron, more-or-less evenly distributed between parties, but with at least as much care to monetary solvency as to political power. It was tacitly acknowledged that this was the new Duke of Wellington's way of reviving the old tradition of royal gifts that were as much a noose as an honor, intended to ensure loyalty by limiting free action, and to relieve the pressure on the Crown's purse strings by shifting it to the wealthy among private citizens.
"But," Osborne noted with a rather mean smile, "Nobody has tried to give theirs back."
Cameron had no particular desire to do so; certainly there were far more odious ways Wellington might have chosen to throw his new weight around. The egg itself was quite handsome, in the cushioned basket that had been established for it beside the stove in his office in the temporary Treasury headquarters. And it took very little care, after all; talking to it was no chore. In fact he quite rapidly established it as a habit, which occasionally disconcerted visitors when they discovered him reading Treasury numbers aloud to an apparently empty office.
It even surprised Captain Clegg, when he and Vincentius appeared a week after their first visit to check on the egg.
"You keep it in your office?" Clegg asked, eyebrows raised, after he'd been shown up the stairs.
Cameron folded his hands over his desk. "You told me to talk to it. It seemed sensible."
"And, I suppose, it lets you more easily inculcate it with Tory ideals."
"I rather thought that was the idea. Have you objections?"
"Oh, no, I'm absolutely delighted. Just unexpected. All of the others have tucked theirs away in an outbuilding or a hidden corner of the kitchen."
Cameron snorted. "If I did that, I'd never see the thing, much less talk to it. I count it good fortune if I eat supper at home more than one day a week."
"As I said," answered Clegg, "I am delighted to see it here."
Cameron gaze at him curiously. "You know, I almost believe you are. Why? I'll lay any odds you don't count yourself a Tory supporter."
Clegg laughed, free and merry. "Not by half. But we figure that every parliamentarian who learns to count a dragon as a political ally is one step closer to Vincentius winning a seat."
"Vincentius wants to run for Parliament?"
Clegg smirked. "Give me one good reason why he shouldn't. And don't say 'because he wouldn't fit,' the Commons Chamber has needed enlarging for decades."
"You honestly believe you have any chance whatsoever of seeing a dragon in Parliament?"
Clegg shrugged. "Maybe not in my lifetime, but in Vincentius's? And regardless of the chances of success, I think it's a goal worth fighting for. At any rate, Vincentius would make a damn good MP. Better than most of your colleagues."
Cameron ran a hand through his hair. "I can't actually argue with that."
All the same, after Clegg had left, Cameron told the egg, very firmly, "You, at least, are never going to run for Parliament, understand?"
He found himself strangely warmed by Clegg's approval, however. Having the egg in the office with him was not only something resembling good company, it was, on occasion, politically useful. Many of the men Cameron was forced to deal with remained uneasy around dragons, and he'd taken to arranging meetings in the same room as the egg when it was convenient for his opponents to be disconcerted and eager to leave quickly. He got the impression that he was, perhaps, gaining a reputation for being, at best, slightly eccentric, but it seemed a fair trade-off. He could do things like watch the Rt. Honorable Mr. Brown of Kirkcaldy Burghs suddenly break off from his argument about the absolute necessity of using scarce treasury funds to pay for minor harbor improvements to shout, "And why is that egg still staring at me? What possible use is a dragon to you? It's not as if you're going to be off fighting the French!" And Cameron could look at him, and smile, and say, "Perhaps I'll borrow an idea from the old stories, and set him to guard the Treasury, so that he can bite the heads off of sticky-fingered people who try to come in and spend money they don't have." And then he could watch Brown glance over at the egg, attempt to hide a shudder, and leave.
He did eventually come to the conclusion that he might be getting a bit too invested. When even Osborne - who had been teaching himself finance quite despite himself, and had even got in the habit, through long exposure, of getting into policy arguments with Vincentius whenever Clegg stopped by the office - pointed out to Cameron that using the dragon's egg as an excuse to stay late every evening simply because he did not want to go back to his cold, empty townhouse, with half the furnishings stripped out during the occupation and no time to replace them, was a bit unhealthy, and he needed to get out more - Cameron conceded to public opinion.
The first London Season, post-occupation, had recently begun; as thin and threadbare as it was, the gaiety was genuine, and it was no difficulty for Cameron to procure himself an invitation to a suitably exclusive ball at short notice.
It was easy enough to fall back into the patterns of socializing; greeting old friends and political allies, spending exactly the politic amount at the gaming tables, drinking no more than necessary and dancing with pretty girls. It wasn't until he found himself partnered with the lovely and eminently eligible Miss Sheffield, daughter of the Viscountess Astor, and with whom he had a long-standing, if often postponed, understanding, that he noticed things had changed.
She noticed first: she poked him. "La, David. As grand as it is to see you about again, why do I suspect you aren't all here?"
He realized, suddenly, that he wasn't; twirling a lovely and pliant young lady in his arms, half his mind had been back in the warmth of his office, with the firelight glinting off of the blues and greens of the egg, and Captain Clegg with his long green-clad legs stretched toward the stove as he expounded on the changes ongoing in the Aerial Corps and their ramifications for wider British society, while Gideon and Vincentius shouted abuse at each other by way of the second-story window next door.
He shook his head. "I'm so sorry, Miss Sheffield. It's simply that my egg may hatch any day--" that was true enough, according to Clegg, the dragon broke the egg when it wanted to, and there was no predicting when; he'd heard reports that several of the fifteen were hatched already-- "and I'm a bit preoccupied."
"Oh!" said Miss Sheffield. "That's right, you are one of the people who was given a dragon egg. That's so terribly romantic, isn't it? I've never seen a dragon's egg before, do you think it would be possible--?"
Which is how he ended up bringing Miss Sheffield, and her younger sister Emily (for propriety's sake, of course) to the temporary Treasury headquarters late one evening. Emily sat on her hands and declared that she had no need to see the egg herself, so he took Samantha's hand and led her alone up the narrow stairway of the temporary Treasury headquarters by candle-light, feeling absurdly like a schoolboy again.
"Oh," Miss Sheffield said, raising her hands to her mouth, "Oh, David, it's beautiful," and he felt a sudden rush of something that might even be love toward her, because she understood.
"I know," he told her.
She dropped the hand she had been holding and crossed the room, kneeling in front of it in a great crush of silk skirts. "Might I touch it, David?" she asked.
"Yes, of course," he said, and she reached out to caress it gently.
"I think it moved," she said, voice full of wonder. "I wonder if it knows I'm here."
"Oh, it knows you're here," David said. "It can hear and understand everything that goes on around it."
"And you keep it locked in this stuffy Treasury office, with no proper feminine influence?" she asked, mock-disapproving. "No wonder it hasn't bothered to hatch yet!" She rapped sharply on the egg with the knuckles of one hand. "Hurry up and get born, egg! I promise you that there are far more interesting things in the world than arguments over Funds allocation!"
"Miss Sheffield!" said Cameron.
She came up and placed a hand on his chest, teasingly. "I adore you, David, you know that I do, but you aren't always exactly a ball of sparkling fun."
He was tempted to show her just how much fun he could be if he tried, but Emily downstairs, and the egg listening here, stopped him just in time. Instead he settled for "Stop trying to corrupt my egg, Miss Sheffield!" and led her carefully back out of the office.
He knew Miss Sheffield had an amazing ability to simply get her own way with things, effortlessly, but he still was not at all prepared, the very next morning, when the egg began to rock violently in its basket.
The egg was hatching.
Events had been set in motion, smooth and well-organized, as soon as Cameron shouted to Osborne that it was happening, now, today: most of a cow was fetched from the stockyards, the egg was carried (very carefully, and still rocking frantically) from Cameron's office to the courtyard, and a runner was sent to alert the London covert.
Cameron noticed none of it; he barely noticed the warm rush of air as Vincentius backwinged to land in the courtyard behind him, or the comforting weight of Clegg's hand on his shoulder as the captain silently moved to stand beside him. He was watching the egg, the first small crack that grew very slowly and then spiderwebbed until half the shell was covered in a crackling of small fractures; another, larger crack starting on the opposite side of shell after a frantic series of rocks until a small triangle of shell fell away. He thought, for a second, that would be the beginning, that the dragon would now burst out, but instead it was still and silent for an unbearably long time.
Cameron could barely resist the desire to run forward, and peel the rest of the shell away with his hands; but Clegg felt him tensing and said, "No, Cameron, you must wait; let the dragon be born in its own time," and almost as he said that, there was another sudden burst of motion from the egg which ended in it toppling quite violently over with a smacking sound; the hairline cracks deepened and almost too quickly to watch the shell fell apart into myriad fragments, leaving the dragon sitting rather startled in the open air.
That first sight of his dragon would stay with Cameron forever: it was small-only the size of a large dog- and rather cobby in the body, but that, Cameron thought, would surely change with age; a lovely deep sea-blue all over, patterned with dapples and swirls of peacock green, and relieved by a large ruffled crest behind its head that was a shockingly bright yellow, and, damp and crumpled from the egg, was draped awkwardly over the dragon's eyes and face.
It swayed, looking rather lost and confused, and quite without thought Cameron stepped forward and folded the crest gently back and out of the way.
"Oh!" said the dragon, sounding entirely surprised, "That is why I could not see! I found the utter yellowness of the world rather troubling."
"Yes," replied Cameron, suppressing a laugh as he knelt down to be on eye-level with the dragon. "But I think that once you have been in the open air for some time your crest will dry, and you will have no more trouble with it."
The dragon looked at him and blinked. "Do you think so?"
"I am quite certain of it," Cameron said firmly, and then he cast his mind back to the instructions Clegg had carefully pressed in to him over the past weeks: first give the dragon your name, and then when it asks, offer it a name for himself. Cameron had chosen Prosperitas; perhaps not the most exciting name, but properly traditional, and he thought it a good wish for the new England. "I am very glad to know you," he told the dragon. "I am Davi--"
"Yes, yes," said the dragon, "yes yes yes, you are Cameron, and my name is Boris, and you shall harness me, and then I shall be fed." It blinked again.
Cameron stared back. Boris?
"Are you going to harness me soon?" the dragon asked plaintively. "Only I am very very hungry, you see."
"Yes, of course," said Cameron. "Boris. Here is the harness, it will not take very long, and then there is a cow for you, right here."
It did not take very long - Cameron suspected the Corps of supplying him with a simplified harness, as clearly civilians could not be trusted with the complexities of a standard one - and then he led the dragon to the meat, and watched it set to eagerly on its first meal.
When he was satisfied that it was not going anywhere, he gave one last pat to its shoulder above the harness, and then stalked over to where Clegg was waiting with Vincentius.
"Why," he said, "Why, Clegg, is my dragon named Boris?"
Clegg shrugged widely, grinning. "I don't know why you would imagine it's my fault. What did you do to him when he was in the egg?"
"Nothing!" said Cameron, and then lowered his voice. "Clearly you have given me a defective dragon."
Vincentius peered at him curiously. "Boris is not defective," he said and then glanced over to where Boris, getting a bit too enthusiastic over the meat, had somehow managed to tumble down the side of the carcass and roll right into a minor Treasury functionary, who was staring at him in bewilderment while he mumbled something and shook bits of cow off of his wings. "Well," Vincentius clarified, "He is not defective because of his name, at any rate. All Turkish dragons choose their own names; it is perfectly ordinary."
They both stared at Vincentius.
"Vince," said Clegg, "Boris isn't Turkish."
"Yes he is," said the dragon. "His father was that captured Alaman who was kept at Calais for a few months, you remember. We did not think it was fair that he wasn't to be permitted to make any eggs, simply because his captain would not give parole - he was just as likely to be taken ill and die as any of us, after all, and I have made many eggs already. And Teresina was amenable. For once. We told them to put my name on the pedigree as I am about the same color and size, and we thought it might prevent difficulties from the officers."
Clegg stared at him. "And why did you think this was an acceptable thing to do? Sneaking an enemy into the breeding-grounds, and then lying about it?"
Vincentius folded himself down on his forelegs. "It was Lembit who came up with the idea, actually, but I thought it was a good one, and Legalitas agreed."
Clegg threw his hands in the air and exploded, "Lembit is an utterly unharnessable half-feral Estonian Warbler who thinks we're all going to be killed by rocks falling from the sky. Do you usually do things just because Lembit things you should?"
"Only," said Vincentius, "When I think they are right."
"Does your formation regularly falsify documents in order to smuggle foreign dragons in among our British ones?" asked Cameron, loading his voice with as much censure as he could manage.
"Oh, well," Clegg said, "You'll be meeting them soon, you're scheduled to basic flight training with us, you'll learn what we dragon people have to deal with. Congratulations," he added. "I do believe you're the first Tory MP to successfully manage a harnessing."
Cameron followed his gaze over to where Boris, having apparently attempted to drag a bit of cow closer to where Cameron and Clegg were talking, had somehow managed to get himself completely tangled in one of his own wings, so that he could not quite move at all without risking a tear in it. Cameron sighed, and went over to unwind him.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry," Boris said, looking up at him with big doe eyes once his face was uncovered again, "I seem to have wound up in a terrible muddle, sorry."
"That's all right," said David, smiling a bit helplessly at him. "It was fixable."
"Yes, it was, wasn't it?" said Boris. He spread his wings and gave a little hop, almost but not quite managing a bit of flight, and then he folded them again and cocked his head at Cameron. "I fear I'll just get into another one shortly, though."
"Don't worry about it, Boris," said Cameron, leaning on one of his dragon's shoulders to hoist himself to his feet: "I think we'll manage."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes. Yes, I think I do."