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Автор Наоми Новик

League of Dragons is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Novik, Naomi, author.

Title: League of dragons / Naomi Novik.

Description: New York : Del Rey, [2016] | Series: Temeraire ; 9

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008015 (print) | LCCN 2016013985 (ebook) | ISBN 9780345522924 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780345522948 (ebook)

| GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Fantasy fiction.

ebook ISBN 9780345522948

Cover design: David G. Stevenson

Cover illustration: © Craig Howell/Cheeba Productions

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part III

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part IV

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Dedication

By Naomi Novik

About the Author

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THE CHEVALIER WAS NOT dead when they found her, but the scavengers had already begun to pick at her body. A cloud of raucous crows lifted when Temeraire’s shadow fell over the clearing, and a stoat slunk away into the underbrush, coat white, muzzle red. As he dismounted, Laurence saw its small hard shining eyes peering patiently out from beneath the bramble. The French dragon’s immense sides were sunken in between her ribs so deeply that each hollow looked like the span of a rope bridge. They swelled out and in with every shallow breath, the movement of her lungs made visible. She did not move her head, but her eye opened a very little. It rolled to look on them, and closed again without any sign of comprehension.

A dead man sat in the snow beside her, leaning against her chest and staring blindly forward, in the ragged remnants of what had once been the proud red uniform of the Old Guard. He wore epaulets and the front of his coat was pockmarked with many punctures where medals had once hung, likely sold to whichever Russian peasants would sell him a pig or a chicken for gold and silver. Flotsam from Napoleon’s disintegrating Grande Armée: the dragon had most likely been driven by hunger to go too far afield, searching for food, and having spent her final strength could not then catch up the remaining body of her corps. She had come down a day ago: the churned ground beneath her was frozen into solid peaks, and her captain’s boots were drifted over with the snow which had fallen yesterday morning.