Lady Salisbury pulls a tissue from her cardigan pocket and wipes her eyes. “Yes.”

“He’s giving them magic?” Simon asks, and I know he’s thinking of those days when he pushed his magic into me—it shouldn’t have been possible. Or perhaps he’s thinking of the Mage’s last moments, when the man tried to drain Simon’s magic into himself. Would it have worked?

“Not exactly,” she says. “Smith-Richards claims to be healing their magic. Helping them realize their true potential.”

“And your son believed this?” I ask.

“He didn’t at first,” she says, “or he acted like he didn’t. But Smith-Richards’s name kept coming up. Jamie started to get very agitated talking about the other Greatest Mage contenders. He’d say they were swindlers, obvious frauds—that only Smith Smith-Richards was saying anything interesting…”

She wipes her eyes again. “Jamie started going out more,” she says, “in the evenings. Before all this, he’d spend every night upstairs, on his computer. I tried to tell myself that it was a good thing, him getting out a bit, meeting new people—but it made my blood run cold …

“Finally,” she says, “I confronted him. Oh, we had such a row!” She smiles ruefully at us, blinking away tears. “Me asking him if he was getting too involved in all this Chosen One hullabaloo, and him telling me he’s an adult who can do what he likes. Me saying I was worried, and him saying…”

Lady Salisbury looks down at her teacup again and slowly shakes her head. “Well. He said I didn’t want him to be a success. That I liked him being a failure because it kept him here with me.

“‘Mum,’ he said, ‘what if Smith can fix my magic?’

“‘Your magic isn’t broken!’ I told him, and I meant it! Jamie isn’t broken.” She looks at Simon and me, like she’s pleading for someone to believe her. “It’s always been more nuanced than that. Magic didn’t come easily to him, and then he wasn’t trained, and then he built up all of these behavioural ways to cope with it … Maybe he just didn’t have much access to magic in the first place! Call it genetics or call it circumstance. It happens. Sometimes it’s a trickle, and sometimes it’s a stream.”

“Sometimes it’s a spark,” I say, “and sometimes it’s a fire.”

“Exactly!” she says fiercely. Then her gaze falls to her lap. “Well, he didn’t want to hear that. He stormed up to his room. A few days later, he left for one of his meetings and didn’t come back.”

“No note?” I ask.