At the stroke of midnight, the very beginning of the Solstice day, Mika set two different potions bubbling in her cauldrons to make the most of how much stronger each infusion would be on this extra magical day. (One of the potions was the fabled fairy wine, a treat that had by this point reached the proportions of a hallowed myth akin to Excalibur. She did not, of course, tell the girls that the fairy wine was just a sweet, syrupy lavender and stardust tea with added Solstice pizzazz.)

She went to bed, then woke up early to bottle her completed potions and set two new ones going. By the time she got downstairs, she found that despite the early hour, everyone was already awake, the promise of presents being too great to keep the girls in bed a moment past dawn.

But the atmosphere was perilously fraught. Mika walked into what looked like Terracotta and Jamie in a towering row, and it was only when Rosetta edged closer to her and whispered in her ear that she found out what she’d missed: Altamira had, happily, found the jigsaw puzzle she’d been missing for weeks. Terracotta hadn’t taken it after all. Unhappily, this discovery had come a smidge too late because Altamira had already placed a basket of rotting fish in Terracotta’s bedroom.

To Mika, this sounded like a lot of silliness and tomfoolery, the kind that could be expected from children of the girls’ age, but it seemed that Terracotta had then taken it a step too far. Infuriated by the injustice of being accused of something she hadn’t done, and by the persistent smell of rotting fish in her bedroom even after the fish had been disposed of, she had dumped a colour-shifting potion on Altamira’s head, turning the latter’s brown hair a lurid, ghastly shade of green.

Which was how Jamie and Terracotta had come to be arguing in the middle of the festively decorated front room.

“You get a lot of leeway, Terracotta, but I draw the line at you hurting someone else on purpose!”

“Pfuee,” said Terracotta scornfully. “It’s just her hair.”

“That is not a word, and that is not the point!” Jamie snapped. “Don’t ever do anything like that again! Are we understood?”

“No, we’re not,” said Terracotta, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’m not promising anything.”

Jamie, obviously, seemed to feel that such impertinence deserved some kind of clever and quelling retort, but before he could come up with one, he was distracted by the fact that Altamira had wrapped her arms around his waist and was bawling into his jumper.