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“I don’t want to speak for Posy, or make assumptions about what she’s thinking,” Luke said, running his fingers over the old, worn grooves in the wood of the table, “but it always seems to me that she doesn’t care about what other people think of her.

She hasn’t yet let the way other people have treated her change her.

She’s so completely, extraordinarily sure of who she is and just lets herself be that person.

I mean, is it annoying when she wakes up between the hours of three and five in the morning and wants to tell me the name of every single animal in that farm app she loves so much?

Yes, yes, it is. Do I sometimes find myself just a little unenthusiastic about pretending to be a dragon and chasing her up the stairs for the five hundredth time in a row? Yes, yes, I do.”

Sera smiled in spite of everything. “But?”

“But I’ll take it,” said Luke. “I’ll take it because it means she’s still her . It means she’s not disappearing inside herself, she’s not putting miles of empty, frozen space between the real Posy and other people, she’s not going quiet .”

The penny dropped. “Like you did?”

He shrugged. “I was loud and excited and too much of everything as a child, but I learned very quickly that it was much easier and that my parents liked me much better when I wasn’t so me .

So I did as I was told, and I was careful about what I said and what I did and how I behaved, and eventually, I didn’t even have to try very hard anymore.

I put so much cold, empty space around myself that the Tin Man thing wasn’t exactly unexpected. ”

Sera scowled. “I thought we’d agreed the other apprentices were colossal fuckwits who had no idea what they were talking about and who probably ought to have actually read The Wizard of Oz before trying to be clever.

” She shook her head. “You made yourself into what you needed to be to survive, Luke. There’s nothing wrong with that. ”

“I don’t want Posy to have to survive.”

“No, of course not,” Sera agreed, emphatically. “Like you said, though, she isn’t just surviving. She’s happy. She’s herself.”

Luke laughed without much humour. “No thanks to me. I spent nine years of her life doing the same thing I did for almost twenty years before that. Giving in instead of fighting. Retreating instead of standing my ground. Resigning myself to the inevitable instead of resisting.”

Sera was incredulous. “Is that what you think? Luke, hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe the reason Posy hasn’t yet changed is you? You didn’t have anybody when you were her age, but she’s always had you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe you’re the reason she’s still herself?”

He shook his head. She had a sudden, peculiar, upside-down sort of feeling and she wanted to laugh because if he, who could see right through her , had not seen this about himself, how much had she, who could see him as clearly as if he were glass, not seen about herself?

“ You’re the one who took her to the Guild because you wanted something better for her,” she said. “ You’re the one who brought her here because the Guild wasn’t right for her. You’re the one who’s still here even after your mother’s visit today.”

Luke’s jaw tightened. “That went about how I expected it to go.”

“Meaning?”

“I think her exact words were a place like this is going to make Posy even wilder and unrulier . I said that was fine by me.”

“Posy is not unruly,” Sera said crossly.

“I know that.”

“I know you know that. That’s my point. What happened after that?”

“We argued. I won.”

“Is that so?” said Sera. “You won? In other words, you stood your ground?”

“I did that because of you ,” Luke growled, standing abruptly.

He looked down at her, furious, and she couldn’t help thinking he looked like he wanted to either shake some sense into her or kiss the sense right out of her.

“That’s my point. You fight. You fight everything.

Everything you just told me, about the night sky and the lost magic and the drowning, is a story you tell because you think it’s about how small you’ve become, but what I heard was a story about how you’re anything but small.

You fight. You were fighting today , out there, for Posy, when you told us you were the gargoyle of this castle and you had to look out for us. That’s why I stood my ground.”

She would turn those words over and over later, like they were the most unexpected of treasures shining in the dark, memorising them, taking them apart, learning them from every angle, wearing them smooth with the pads of her thumbs.

She would hold the words close, feeling her way around the unfamiliar edges of them, and later, much later, she would think that she didn’t totally agree with him, and that he was giving her too much credit, but , and this was the important part, she would notice she didn’t feel quite so small anymore.

But that would come later, and was future Sera’s epiphany to have, because right then, at that very moment, present Sera was a little tipsy, and it was very important that she stand up too, and stomp around the table, and flatten one palm against his chest, right over his hammering heart.

And smile, and say, “That doesn’t feel like tin to me.”

His eyes widened, ink darkening the icy blue with a hunger that matched hers. He reached for her hand, like he wasn’t even thinking about it, like it was a reflex that came as naturally as breathing, and held it in place on his chest.

And anything could have happened next, anything at all, but what did happen was the back door opened, and Nicholas stumbled in after what must have been a rowdy night out, whispered a drunken “Shhhh!” as if they were the ones clattering about in historically inaccurate armour, and tottered out of the room again.

Sera was tempted to be annoyed, but then it occurred to her that she was emotionally overwrought, not especially sober, and was wearing old, holey pyjamas that gave her all the sex appeal of a moose on Benadryl, so maybe Nicholas’s interruption was for the best after all.