‘Ah, yes. Your great-grandmother had a version of that. In time, you’ll learn to read the message they’re giving you. And obviously your power is concentrated in your fingers, which goes some way to explaining what happened to the tree up at the rock.’ She takes hold of the fingers of my left hand and I feel an unpleasant jolt, kind of how I imagine a reverse electric shock would feel, and a faint nausea. I pull my hand away.

‘What did you just do?’

She waves her hand around. ‘Oh, it’s just a thing that sometimes happens when two powerful magicians touch.’ She pats my leg. ‘A little charge, that’s all.’

CHAPTER 14

Every morning, when I wake in the store tent, I expect Dad to announce that he’s sending Sylvie away. But he doesn’t.

At first, I hope he’s changed his mind, that he’s letting her stay. Then Kit tells me that there’s been an argument among the circus folk between those who want Sylvie to stay, and those who want her to go. The ones who want her – and her magic act – have won.

Her act is pretty simple, and she’s just using little magic, as far as I can tell. But she’s very razzledazzle, with a lot of wand waving and fancy hand gestures which the audiences seem to love. She’s brilliant at taking a watch from someone’s wrist and slipping it into their pocket without them knowing, then – a few minutes later – having them discover it there.

One evening, Vince comes to stand beside me as I watch through a hole in the curtains and says, ‘She’s a top-notch pickpocket, in case you didn’t know.’

‘You mean she steals things from people?’

He nods and passes me some pistachios.

After breakfast each day, when Sylvie is supposed to be helping me with my schoolwork, she and I slip away to a hidden spot by the river. A few times, I try to ask about the times she’s been to parallel universes, and the danger she supposedly put Mum in, but she cuts me off and tells me I need to focus on learning magic.

One day, she teaches me a simple moving spell. ‘You must say Swyn first. That’s the word for spell.’

‘Swyn. Symud y ffon honno,’ I repeat after her, pointing at a bent twig on the ground and imagining it lifting into the air.

I feel a rushing sensation up through the soles of my feet until every cell in my body is tingling. There’s a buzzing on my skin that feels like those tiny bubbles that burst on the surface of a fizzy drink.