Broken Homes

their purplish bark and hairy buds. I was also pleased to note that what I thought earlier were silver birches were really silver birches. Nightingale would have been proud of me.
    I chose the dismantled children’s playground, making sure I stood with my back to the cherry trees so I could keep an eye on the tower and avoid accidentally shredding the blossom.
    When I first started my apprenticeship, practice was a slog. And, while my appreciation and skill have improved, running through your formae again and again as you strive to perfect them is never going to be a laugh a minute.
    And you don’t even get to do cool martial art stances while you do them. Although me and Dr Walid have speculated that the formae somehow represented the interaction between our electrochemically powered nervous system and the magical – field? Subspace dimensional manifold? Banana flavoured milkshake? – that creates observable effects in the material world. If that was the case, then surely it might be possible to generate the same effect through gesture, stance and movement. Certainly it seemed natural to enhance a spell-casting with gestures. Even Nightingale had his quirks – the little flick of his hand for impello , the admonitory finger wag for aer and the opening hand movement that accompanied the first spell I ever learnt – lux.
    What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata , a physical expression of formae . Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost in the tops of bamboo trees.
    Toby lay on his back in the grass while I worked my way through lux, aer and aqua , but stirred when I started adding my second-order effects with impello, iactus, palma and my personal favourite scindere . Then he jumped up and started chasing my little globes of water around the playground. He seemed to particularly enjoy the way they burst when he bit them.
    Just as I’d expected she would, Sky appeared and chased after Toby and the water globes. I added a couple of low level werelights to follow them both – for fun and because it was good practice. When I paused for breath Sky rushed over and grabbed my hand.
    ‘Follow me,’ she said.
    ‘Where?’ I asked.
    She put her hands on her hips and pushed out her lip. ‘Just follow, okay?’
    ‘Okay,’ I said and when she skipped off I followed. When we reached the edge of the playground she did a sharp turn and followed its perimeter. Once we’d completed a circuit and returned to where we’d started, she turned and gave me a cross look.
    ‘You’ve got to do the dance,’ she said.
    It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.
    The sun dropped into the dark slot between the blocks and the garden was filled with a dusty orange light. Sky danced around the dismantled playground and me and Toby followed. He yapped at my heels as I tried to match her turns and stretches and suddenly I was feeling it – feeling that now familiar change in the phase state of existence, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.
    And then she jumped and spun sideways, lifted whirling into the air like a leaf on the wind. Or like Zhang Ziyi in a flying rig. She touched down a few metres further away and, spinning, danced on. I caught up and matched her step for step, move for move and when she jumped again I followed.
    And for a second I felt the wind lifting me and experienced a surge of joy at my escape from the constant pull of the earth, my freedom.
    And then the ground smacked me in the gob.
    I lay face down for a while, soil and grass mixing with blood in my mouth. Two metres away Sky had collapsed in a heap and was laughing hysterically, drumming her heels on the grass and pausing only to draw breath and point.
    I spat the grass out of my mouth and sat up. I’d bitten my lip, not badly but just enough to draw blood.
    ‘It’s not that funny,’ I said but obviously Sky thought it was. Toby did a lap of honour around the playground, yapping occasionally.
    The shadow of the blocks had stretched across the gardens, except for the strip of sunlight we were sitting in. I looked up and saw that the dirty brown concrete had been shaded russet by