‘Zara—’

‘Don’t Zara me. You kept huge secrets, even though I told you all my stuff. I trusted you, Yanny. You were the only person I told about my . . . the separation, when I moved here. And you hid all this! So I am being understanding, I am being a virtual SAINT about it all, but that’s enough. You can’t just command someone else to do something they’re uncomfortable with and expect me to go along with it.’

‘She can do it!’

‘That isn’t the point!’

‘What – she won’t? Fine, then. I’ll just go on my own. Hardly anyone about anyway. Who cares?’

‘I care,’ I say. ‘And I’ll do it, if I can, but I never have before, and I don’t know how, so you’ll have to teach me!’

‘Your words. Your spells. You’ve used them before, in class . . . You use them more than you think. And you tell yourself they’re just words, but they’re not. They’re the language of magic, and they’re powered by the magic in you. That’s what you need to use.’

‘I don’t know the words for glamouring . . .’

‘There aren’t any,’ he says. ‘You just need to feel it. Imagine a barrier between us and the world, see the picture you want everybody else to see, and live in it.’

Zara frowns. ‘What? How’s she supposed to live in it?’

But I get it. I know the feeling he’s talking about. I know about barriers. All the things in our own barrier around our house, they’re just moments of thought, symbols of power. Perhaps I can make my own, without the silver.

‘You’ll have to judge it,’ I say to Zara. ‘Stand clear . . . and let me know if anything changes.’

I stare at Yanny and see him as he is, but also as he makes himself. A little shorter; a little more stout. No wings. Skin and hair, warmer; eyes, less bright; teeth, less sharp. It occurs to me as I’m doing it that I’m diluting the best bits of him, but I push the thought away. It’s distracting.

‘Well?’ I ask Zara, my mind fragmented.

She stares at us.

‘Zara!’

The work I’ve done on Yanny evaporates.

‘Yes!’ she says. ‘Sorry. I was pinching myself. You did it. I mean it was a bit wobbly, and you made him a bit short, but to a casual passer-by . . .’ She shrugs. ‘He’d pass.’

I pull all my thoughts together again, and something Yanny said earlier, about the stitches coming undone, suddenly makes sense. It is like stitching something; a new reality. One piece of deception leads to another, and if you lose yourself halfway, the whole thing sort of collapses. Yanny is uncharacteristically patient while I work; he looks utterly spent.

‘There,’ I whisper. ‘Got it?’

‘You’ve got it,’ Zara says, leaning in and taking hold of Yanny’s hand. ‘Come on. March.’

We wrangle ourselves through the town centre, huddling up tight to each other, avoiding the gaze of anyone we meet. A couple of dogs definitely notice there’s something unusual going on and give us a wide berth, but the people we pass don’t seem to see anything out of place.