It was a feeling she realized that she’d had before, though very rarely. Alice had always loved books, and she’d devoured first the contents of her father’s shelves and then whatever she was allowed to borrow from the Carnegie Library. Occasionally, she had come across a passage that made her feel like this, as though a light were shining out of the book and directly into her skull. She’d never been able to explain to anyone else why those particular pieces felt so meaningful to her. Even her father had only laughed when she’d tried to get him to see it, and said that books spoke to everyone in a different way.

It was also a faint echo of the sensation she’d had when she’d open the prison-book. If this was a faint whisper, that had been a full-throated roar, a meaning so strong, it grabbed hold of reality and tied it in knots. Alice looked down at the book in her hands, and couldn’t help the smile spreading across her face. So this is magic.

She hurried back to Mr Wurms, hoping he’d show her what to do with what she’d found, but the goggle-eyed scholar merely set the book on a pile and told her to go back out and find another. After her second trip out and back, Ashes decided he would be better employed napping underneath Mr Wurms’s table than tagging along with her. After her third trip, Alice was seriously thinking about joining him.

The seeker went on and on, apparently tireless. By the afternoon, her feet ached from walking and she was coughing from the omnipresent dust. Of all the ways Alice would have expected to describe her new life as a magician’s apprentice, ‘boring’ wouldn’t have been on the list, but she was beginning to wonder if being a Reader’s apprentice was all it was cracked up to be. She was just wondering if it was getting close to time to head in to dinner when a strange sensation on the back of her neck made her pull up short.

It felt like her first night in the library, just before she’d found the fairy. As though the shelves were moving around her, behind her back, somehow pushing themselves into new configurations while leaving decades of dust undisturbed. Her first impulse was to spin round to catch them at it, but she stifled this and simply stood very still, staring straight ahead. The seeker had halted, pulling itself into a tight little ball as though it was afraid of something.

‘Hello, Alice.’

It was a deep, sibilant purr of a voice, soft and rich. If velvet and silk could talk, they would have had a voice like that. It made Alice think of something dark and hidden, poised to spring.

She shivered, and forced herself to turn round slowly.