“Have you ever been forced to choose between the Library and your honour?” Kai demanded.
“Kai,” Irene said, “the Library is my honour. And if you seal yourself to it, then it’ll be yours too.” She could feel herself smiling grimly. “But you’ve already told me that you don’t have any living family, haven’t you? So it’s not a choice you’ll ever have to make.”
Kai didn’t even flinch at that; he simply glared at her. “You’re confusing the issue. There ought to be a way of finding our book that doesn’t involve allying ourselves with an honourless, family-betraying creature like this. Irene, please. Walk out now and tell him no. We don’t need this kind of help.”
Irene tried to think of a way to make him understand. Perhaps she was being too abstract in an attempt to make him comprehend this specific case—but, damn it all, he was going to have to face tough moral choices himself some day. If he really wanted to be a Librarian. If he survived.
“Leaving aside the question of his personal honour,” she said, “we’re not in a good situation. Dominic Aubrey’s dead. There’s an enemy in the city, quite possibly Alberich, and maybe others too. We’re cut off from a direct retreat, and though I may be able to open a way back—”
“May?” Kai broke in. “What do you mean, may?”
Irene raised her bandaged hand. “I mean that I may be chaos contaminated. I need to find out. It should get better in a few days, but at the moment I may not be able to open a way to the Library. It would keep me out in the same way that it’d keep out anything chaos tainted. So we don’t have a convenient escape route.”
“Oh,” Kai said. He bit his lip.
She was actually far less certain than she was willing to admit about how long it might take for her to access the Library again. It wasn’t something that had happened to her before. She knew the theory, but this was her first case of actual contamination. Thinking about it made her feel ill. She wanted peace and quiet and a chance to actually look at her hand, plus a small library where she could run some tests.
Unfortunately, what she had here and now was a nervous and highly principled subordinate to reassure. It wasn’t a leader’s place to cast herself trembling on a junior’s shoulder and confess uncertainty. It wasn’t even a leader’s place to suggest that they might be in an indefensible position and should be grateful for any allies that they could get. It was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions.
A leader’s job was a crock of shit.
This was becoming one of Irene’s least favourite missions ever. And that included the one with the evil dwarves under Belgium (what was it about Belgium?) and the one requiring a cartload of carved amber plaques to be shipped across Russia. Or even the one with the cat burglar.
“Would it help if we could find out more about his family?” she offered. “If we find out that they’re not as bad as he’s painting, we can re-evaluate how much we trust him.”
Kai shook his head decisively. “That makes no difference. We should reject his offer of help.”
“That,” Irene said quietly, “is not an option.”
They looked at each other for a moment. Kai’s lips were drawn together, his eyes darkly furious as he stood there, glaring down at her. In that moment, there was something almost inhuman about him, something fiercer—more elemental, perhaps. For the first time, she thought he might actually disobey her.
In the end, he was the first to drop his eyes. “As you command,” he said. But I don’t approve of it was unspoken and unnecessary.
Irene had met other Librarians who tried to manage their subordinates using shallow gender tactics. Bradamant, for one. She hadn’t liked it. She wasn’t going to try to sugar-coat this for Kai by softening now or by fluttering her eyelashes at him. “Did you bring our stuff along when you got me out of the British Library?” she asked.
“I did,” Kai answered stiffly. “Both your document case and the jar with the . . . the skin.”
“I’m impressed,” Irene said. “It must have been difficult to handle both them and me.”
Kai shrugged, but she had the feeling that he was pleased. “I found a larger suitcase in the room, and I managed to get the jar and your document case in it. Do we tell Vale about those?”
“No,” Irene said quickly. “That he doesn’t need to know. Did anything else happen while you were getting me out of there? People following us, attacks, whatever?”
“Nothing worth mentioning,” Kai said smugly. “I wrapped your face in your veil and propped you against my shoulder and got my arm round your waist, and sort of steered you, and I kept on telling you how you shouldn’t have had so much gin last night. Nobody looked at us twice.”
“Very prompt thinking,” Irene said drily. “Well done. Good job. And good selection of a place to hole up.”
“If I’d known then what I know now . . . ,” Kai muttered, but not quite as sullenly as before.
“You did the best you could on the information you had,” Irene said. She started peeling off the bandage again.
“Are you sure it’s safe to do that?” Kai asked. “You don’t want it to get infected.”
“I just want to see how bad it is . . .” A chunk of bandage fell back to reveal a layer of ointment-soaked dressing. Bits
