The Dragon's Apprentice
James A. Owen
 The novel opens in 1943, seven years after the end of the previous book, The Shadow Dragons. It has been seven years since either of the three Caretakers has been in the Archipelago of Dreams and the Summer Country is embroiled in World War II. The Caretakers return and are faced with an issue: the Keep of Time has finally disintegrated and as a result, time has unravelled. Rose has a strange visitor in the night instructing her to find Samaranth's apprentice, ask the dragon a riddle and save the Archipelago from the Echthroi, the primordial shadows. The Caretakers are trapped in the Archipelago because of the final destruction of the Keep of Time, and when John, Jack and Charles return to the Summer Country in 1943, the Nameless Isles are ripped apart from the Archipelago and Tamerlane House, along with all of its inhabitants, are transported to 1945 and are now attached to Oxford. The Caretakers Emeritis meet a distraught John and Jack and learn that Charles died two weeks earlier. John, Jack, Fred, the Tin Man (Roger Bacon), Laura Glue, Richard Burton, Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle and the mysterious End of Time, a friend of Burton's, travel to Avalon and the Archipelago but discover that it is in ruins and that two thousand years have passed in the Archipelago of Dreams. At Paralon, they meet a little boy named Coal, the last of Arthur's descendents, and the group of animals protecting him. From Aven, the daughter of H.G. Wells, they learn of what has happened over the last two thousand years. As the dark star Rao approaches, they go through a door from the Keep of Time; the same one that was given to Madoc. They find themselves in Dickensian London. With no Caretakers in London at the time, the Caretakers and company are alone in London with a cohort of animals and a six-year-old boy from the future. However, they meet a young man named Edmund McGee after he stole the 'Geographica' from them. He leads them to his master, Benjamin Franklin. By persuading Mordred, or Madoc, to continue his apprenticeship to Samaranth and become a dragon himself, and by using Edmund McGee's prodigious skill in cartography and chronology to navigate their way through time, the Caretakers begin the process of fixing Time.