Perscitia

Character Profile

Name:	Perscitia
Date of Birth:
Breed:	crossbreed between Malachite Reaper and Pascal's Blue
Captain:	None, rejected by her captain
National Loyalty:	Britain
Appearance:	Body and wings bright blue, streaked with shades of pale green; spines along her back
Special Abilities:	extreme intelligence
Status:	Breeding

Biography

Perscitia was a middle-weight experimental cross between a Pascal's Blue and a Malachite Reaper. She was harnessed at birth and her captain taught her mathematics when she was young.

Perscitia grew to become slower and larger than the breeders had hoped. She was also an individual thinker with a nervous disposition, making her unreliable in formations and fearful of combat. Ultimately, she was sent away to the breeding grounds. She thought her captain did not want her because she would not fight, and certainly the Aerial Corps had little use for such a dragon, regardless of whatever her captain's personal feelings might have been.

Temeraire met her as another occupant of the Pen Y Fan Breeding Grounds. Perscitia discussed mathematics with him, even proposing some theories he had not thought of before. When he led the Pen Y Fan dragons against the French, she went with them. Initially, she assumed she would not get any prize moutney because she refused to enter combat, but Temeraire suggested she could earn her share by figuring out how to work a cannon that was among their booty.

After this, Perscitia became their strategist. At one battle, she sent in the unharnessed British heavyweights as the first wave of attack, with their backs painted with mock harness lines and "crewed" with loosely attached straw figures; this decoyed the French aviators into futile boarding attempts that left them under-manned and demoralized for the second wave of harnessed dragons. She worked out the logistics of dragon-assisted transport for troops and materiel. At the Battle of Shoeburyness, she rigged alcohol-soaked tangles of netting for Iskierka to light as they fell onto the French troops. By the end of the campaign, she was respected by her peers despite her technical noncombatant status, and even Wellesley seemed to appreciate her talents.

Following the campaign, Perscitia set about building pavilions. Dissatisfied with the tardiness and poor quality of the cows rationed to them by the government, she urged the other unharnessed dragons to carry commercial goods to London and other towns, earning more money to buy their own food. This lucrative business drew complaints from carters (their direct competition, as the dragons were much faster than carts drawn by horses or oxen) and the general public (unaccustomed to seeing dragons overhead or nearby). The government complained about heavy-weight dragons running all over the countryside; the dragons of the London covert were urged to prevent the unharnessed dragons from landing there with their goods, but saw no reason to enforce the ban after Perscitia gave them an explanation (and some non-governmental cows).

Name

In Latin, her name is probably based on the feminine adjective perscita ("very clever") or a faulty feminization of the comparative neuter perscitius ("even more clever"; the proper feminine comparative would be perscitior), rather than the phrase per Scitiam ("from Scythia").