Once, I was famous. My face appeared on T-shirts, badges, commemorative mugs and posters. I made front-page news, appeared on TV and was even a special guest on The Yogi Baird Show. The Daily Clam called me ‘The year’s most influential teenager’ and I was the Mollusc on Sunday’s woman of the year. Two people tried to kill me, I was threatened with jail, had sixteen offers of marriage and was outlawed by King Snodd. All that and more besides, and in less than a week.

My name is Jennifer Strange.

It looked set to become even hotter by the afternoon, just when the job was becoming more fiddly and needed extra concentration. But the fair weather brought at least one advantage: dry air makes magic work better and fly farther. Moisture has a moderating effect on the Mystical Arts. No sorcerer worth their sparkle ever did productive work in the rain—which probably accounts for why getting showers to start was once considered easy, but getting them to stop was nigh-on impossible.

A taxi or minibus would have been a needless extravagance, so the three sorcerers, myself and the beast were packed into my Volkswagen for the short journey from Hereford to King’s Pyon. The well-proportioned ‘Full’ Price was driving, Lady Mawgon was in the passenger seat and I was in the back with Wizard Moobin and the Quarkbeast, who sat panting in between the two of us. We were three-fifths of our way through an uncomfortable silence as we showed our passes to the sentry and drove from the walled city and into the suburbs. The silence was not unusual. Despite the three of them being our most versatile sorcerers, they didn’t really get along.