‘She told you that, I assume?’ Isaac snorted. ‘You should know how much that’s worth.’

‘And what about me?’ Alice said.

‘What about you?’ He stared at her, and a strange expression came over his face. ‘Ending promised you the Dragon, didn’t she? You thought I was there to help you get it.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s played us both for fools. I imagine she was following Geryon’s orders the whole time.’

‘I don’t . . .’ Alice hesitated. ‘I don’t believe that.’

Isaac sighed, and sat down heavily on the bench beside the table. His hand bumped the tabletop, and she saw him wince.

‘What happened to your hands?’ Alice said, in spite of herself.

‘Just a couple of cuts from the glass,’ Isaac said, frowning at his bandages. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘You should have told me,’ she said, trying to hold on to her anger. ‘We could have worked something out.’

‘Alice . . . if you’re going to be a Reader’s apprentice, you need to understand what that means.’

‘What, that I have to be awful? That I should lie and cheat and steal like you?’

‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Isaac looked up at her. ‘Did you have any brothers and sisters, when you were growing up?’

‘What?’ Alice paused, taken aback. ‘No. It was just me and my father. My mother died when I was very young.’

‘I had a brother. I don’t think he was really my brother, actually, but he was as good as one. We grew up together in my master’s fortress. He was a Reader too, about three years older than I was. His name was Evander.’ Isaac paused. ‘We used to do everything together. It was all they could do to pry us apart for lessons.’

Alice heard the significant past tense. ‘What happened to him?’

‘When I was six, and he was nine, my master came to some kind of deal with one of the other old Readers. I have no idea what it was about, but this other Reader must have needed an apprentice, and my master felt like he had one to spare. He told us that Evander was going to live somewhere else from now on, and that was that. I cried and cried, but he just left me in my room until I got over it.’

‘That’s horrible,’ Alice said. ‘They just . . . traded him? Like he was a box of chocolates?’

‘That’s how they think. We’re all just stuff to them. I even understand how they feel, a little. When you’ve lived a thousand years, can you take the feelings of a six-year-old seriously? It would be like you and me trying to understand an ant.’

‘Did you ever see him again?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Isaac said. ‘That’s the point, really. The next time I saw him, he tried to kill me.’

‘What?’