Irene rubbed her forehead in exasperation. ‘But you were staying with him …’

‘He encouraged me to sample local literature and art,’ Kai said, losing a little of his anger. ‘The fact that I became involved with local criminals was entirely beside the point.’

Irene mentally raised the draconic capacity for hypocrisy by several thousand points and took a deep breath. ‘We are wandering from the point. Kai, you will be attending that family gathering. It would be rude not to, and they might suspect I was teaching you bad manners and relocate you.’ She saw his face twitch. He hadn’t thought of that.

Kai sighed. ‘You talk like my elder.’

‘I probably am,’ Irene said. She’d lived more than twenty-five years outside the Library, in alternate worlds where she aged normally. But at least a dozen more had been spent inside the Library at various intervals, and people didn’t age within its walls. ‘Even if you’re a dragon.’

‘But how do you suppose they found me here?’ Kai asked, returning to the point in question like a cat with a favourite toy.

‘At a wild guess, my supervisor Coppelia had word passed to your people, so that they wouldn’t worry about you.’ Irene rose to her feet and began looking for her coat. She wasn’t wild about Kai’s family possibly turning up on her doorstep, but she could understand the political necessity of being able to account for where he was. ‘You won’t have any problems getting to your uncle when you visit, will you?’

Kai twitched a shoulder in a deliberately casual way. ‘Irene, I am a dragon. I don’t require the Library to travel between worlds. I can do so quite easily myself.’

She had to concede him that bit of smugness. It was quite justified. Librarians needed props and protocols; she couldn’t simply stroll from one world to another, as Kai could. ‘Can all dragons do that?’ she asked, trying not to sound jealous.

‘All royal ones,’ Kai said. ‘Lesser dragons can make smaller journeys - it doesn’t really translate into physical terms,’ he added hastily, when she raised a hand to ask what he meant by ‘smaller journeys’. ‘Or they can follow in a royal dragon’s wake, if he is leading the way.’

‘I see.’ She found her coat and started to button it. ‘Now we should be moving. It’s nearly ten o’clock.’

‘Irene …’ Kai hesitated. ‘You don’t want to get rid of me, do you?’

She simply gaped at him for a second. ‘What?’

‘You’re sending me off to my family. You’re treating me like any other apprentice. You don’t seem to care that they might order me to leave. You don’t …’ He looked at her, his face full of yearning and uncertainty. ‘If you want me to go, then I will go, but …’

It wasn’t some sort of emotional blackmail. It was sincere and it was honest, and it made her heart clench in her chest. She sighed, and walked around the desk - nowhere near as graceful as he was, nothing like as elegant, just a mortal human - to take his hands. They were thin and hot in her grasp, his long fingers curling around hers. ‘Kai, don’t you understand that I am saying all this because I don’t want to lose you? You are my friend. You are the person who I trust to watch my back, to fight werewolves for me. To dangle me out of zeppelins. To stand by with a hammer when I’m staking vampires. I don’t know what might make your family take you away. I don’t want to give them an excuse.’

‘Do you mean that?’ He rose to his feet and looked down into her face, his hands tight on hers. ‘Do you promise that you mean that?’

It would be so easy just to say yes and let go of common sense, to slide her hands up to his shoulders and hold him against her. She had been spending months now trying to avoid this sort of thought, this sort of situation. ‘I give you my word that I don’t want to lose you,’ she said. ‘You’re my apprentice. You’re my ally. You’re my friend. Can’t you believe me?’

Yes. And stop asking for more, before I do something I might regret.

‘I want to.’ His voice was rough. ‘It’s just that - Irene, I’m afraid.’

‘The mugging? If you don’t feel safe—’

‘Not that!’ He very nearly sneered at the idea, and it cooled a little of the heat between them, like a sudden touch of fresh air. ‘Not of danger. Not for myself. It’s … everything.’ His eloquence and his grace of speech had deserted him. ‘You. Vale. The Library. Everything. I’ve never disobeyed my honoured father before, never challenged the authority of my elders. What am I to do if they tell me to leave you?’

Irene would have liked to give him some sort of reassurance, but she didn’t have any easy answers. She didn’t even have any complicated ones. She could only return the clasp of his hands. ‘We’ll find a solution,’ she said firmly. ‘There has to be a way. Even if I have to steal examples of poetry from a hundred worlds, to convince them that you’re on a valid postgraduate study course. There will be a way.’

She wasn’t going to lose him.

There was a cracking noise from the next room, like pebbles on glass. At the same moment Irene felt a strike against the wards that she’d placed on their lodgings, a thunderclap in her metaphysical hearing. It wasn’t significant enough to bring the wards down, but it was a firm, carefully placed blow, not an ignorant blaze of power. And it was definitely tainted with chaos. Someone was knocking, and they wanted in.