“It’s tidy and alliterative, calling it a speed spell,” she said, toying with a chocolate bar (she’d already made a start on the snacks Lucie had stuffed the car with). “But it would probably be more correct to call it a spell that bends the rules of space and time. Which is much more of a mouthful.”

“So it won’t make the car go faster?”

“Not quite,” she said. “It’s more like, at intervals, the car will sort of bend the space between one point and the next. Like this.” She dropped the chocolate bar back into the box of snacks and plucked a piece of luminous gold thread out of the air. He glanced over, keeping one eye on the winding road ahead. “Let’s say this thread is the distance between Norfolk and the Midlands. If I stretch it taut and you run your finger along it, it’ll take you a few seconds to get from one end to the other. But if I fold the thread and put the ends together, like this, your finger will get from one end to the other almost instantaneously.”

“So you’ll have to cast the spell more than once?”

“Probably a few times each way,” Mika replied. “It’s easier to bend fifty miles a few times than it is to bend two hundred miles all at once, if that makes sense.” She vanished the gold thread and retrieved her chocolate, smiling. “Tiny bites, not one ginormous gobble.”

“Tell Terracotta that,” said Jamie wryly. “You can laugh now, but have you ever seen her eat a cheeseburger? It’s downright terrifying, like watching a python unhinge its jaw.”

He saw the speed spell in action about ten minutes later, and almost didn’t notice. Mika told him that was because he was inside the spelled car, so to him, it felt like he’d just driven down one quiet country lane and turned into another. Only the satnav built into his car, scrambling to recalculate the route, gave away just how much distance they’d covered.

They paused in a thick, brambly wood for twenty minutes so that Mika could gather a few of the potion ingredients she hadn’t been able to forage at Nowhere House like she’d planned. Jamie offered to help, so Mika pointed out what she needed: chestnuts, sloe berries, rosehips, honeysuckle, winter heather, and any winter-blooming flower.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the car?” she asked, sitting cross-legged on the mossy forest floor to snip stalks of heather. “You’re not cold? Or bored?”

“No.”

“See, I actually believe you,” she said merrily. “Because you’re kind, not nice. You’d never say you weren’t bored to be polite.”

“You’re the only person I know who says the word nice like it’s a bad thing.”