A mewling noise comes from inside the van. Kit sighs and goes inside.

I shake out my hands. My fingertips are sizzling like crazy. Sizzle is not the technical term, of course, but it’s the best way I know to describe how the tips of my fingers tingle sometimes. This is my special power, apparently. But because I am not an actual magician yet – thanks to Mum – I just get spurts of sizzle now and again, and have no idea what it’s trying to tell me. What if tonight the sizzle is warning me that my circus family really is about to fall apart?

My heart feels squashed and tight at the thought of me and Mum and Dad out in the world on our own.

I point a tingling finger at Kit’s balled-up serviette where it lies on the ground, and say, ‘Swyn, symuda hwnna.’ It’s a spell I’ve heard Mum use a million times. But the serviette doesn’t move. Not even a centimetre.

A chorus of barks comes from behind Diego and Zanni’s van and three of her poodles gallop across the grass towards me. I have always attracted animals. Mostly it’s great, but sometimes it is a bit awkward, like the time a conga line of twenty dogs and cats followed me along the main street of a town up north.

Louie is my favourite of Zanni’s dogs, and the star of her act. Every night, he rides a barrel around the ring and leaps through hoops and barks on command. I stroke his soft, curly head and look over to the always-comforting Millimba fig trees, silhouetted against the night sky. Uncle Vince says they’re at least a hundred-and-fifty years old. Whoever planted them must have known that they’d never get to see them fully grown, so they planted them for the future, for their kids, and their kids’ kids. I like that.

When those trees were tiny seedlings, Eunice would have been around. Eunice is my great-great-great-great-grandmother and a legend in my family; at just nineteen, she snuck onto a ship, sailed from England to Australia, and came up with the idea of using big magic to entertain people in a circus. Before that, back in Wales and England, big magic was used only for healing people and for ceremonies. Apparently Eunice reckoned that laughter and joy are as healing as any medicine. If I could, I’d ask Eunice if there really is a law that no-one should be taught magic until they are sixteen.