The circus tent was much bigger and noisier than Millie had anticipated, and so noisily teeming with people that she was put unpleasantly in mind of the processions through the dusty streets she had undergone in her days as the Living Asheth. The colours felt too bright. She began to wish she had offered or even insisted on staying behind with Christopher as Mordecai shepherded them to seats in the very front row of the ring.

Music played as they waited for the show to start, and clowns on terrifically high stilts strolled amongst the audience, juggling. One came and pulled a banana from behind a delighted Bernard's ear, and then peeled it only to make disappear into a puff of sparkling smoke. None of this particularly impressed Millie, although she could see that these things were, if done without actual magic, objectively impressive to most people: but the pleasure and mirth of the others was infectious and by the time the music changed and the show began, she was perfectly disposed to enjoy it.

And enjoy it she did. In the carriage on the way home the children hotly debated which had been the Best and Most Astonishing bit of the circus. Even Flavian and Mordecai were moved to put their oars in, in support of the dancing elephants and the glamorous ladies on horseback respectively. Millie laughed until her sides ached at the fooling of the clowns (and learned something about the nature of humour when, trying to describe it later to Christopher, she found it was impossible to convey at all why any of it had been remotely funny); she applauded breathlessly the daring of the fire and sword swallowers (Jason surprised himself by being suddenly squeamish and had to look away); she was in paroxysms of delight to eat candy floss for the first time during the interval. But to her mind nothing was comparable to the trapeze artists whose performance was the finale of the whole show. They consisted of a family of 3 women and 2 men, all with jet black hair and skin tight shimmering sky blue costumes. All five of them leapt through the air with a confidence and grace suggestive of birds of prey, but the smallest, barely discernible as a woman from her too-lithe body, was in a different class altogether. She leapt further and did more somersaults between trapezes than the others; but it wasn't only that. There were undulations within the path she took through the air which clashed with the laws of physics as Millie knew them (which is to say, academically not at all - but like anyone, enough instinctively to know when she saw something that defied them). Millie clapped the trapeze family until her hands were red and stinging.

As the children filed out of the circus tent, a final surprise was disclosed to them. Flavian told them that it had been arranged that they and a small group of other well-dressed children were to be taken to meet the circus animals. The excitement in Flavian's voice as he led the way to the holding pen where he animals were waiting led Mordecai to remark, with his usual good-natured teasing manner, that the children had been brought along only to justify Flavian's own Christmas treat. Millie said she would prefer to stay behind. She wasn't ashamed to say that the lions made her nervous and privately the other animals made her a bit sad now that she came to think of them as creatures living in captivity and forced to perform a role that they couldn't choose and which could have no meaning for them. Mordecai, who had more insight into what her life before coming to the Castle had been than the others, nodded briskly when she proposed to wait for the others near the entrance and smoothed things over when Bernard tried to persuade her to come along by speculating that they might be allowed to shake hands with the seals, leading Bernard and Jason to debate whether seals had flippers or fins.

Millie wandered out into the night, which was lighted by flaming torches in sticks lining the way from the field where the tent had been erected to the road. To escape the throng of people pressing out of the tent and down the muddy path, Millie walked around to the back of the tent. She was glad of the frosty night air after the closeness of the tent.

She set off with a disregard for her personal safety and for the sort of interest that a lone young girl in an obviously expensive coat and muffler might arise which was born partly of her naivety about the world she now lived in and partly from the knowledge that the strength of her magical abilities were almost certainly greater than that of all the other non-Castle folk in the vicinity combined. She wandered idly around for a while, ending up by a make-shift stable block. The horses in it were not the sleek, well fed white ones who had galloped around the ring with Mordecai's elegant ladies performing acrobatics upon them, but dull, worried looking nags who Millie realised must be employed to pull the many circus caravans around her, forming a messy camp, from place to place.

She patted the long nose of the spare brown horse nearest to her and conjured a carrot to give her. Just then, the rickety wooden door of a nearby caravan opened, a forlorn and scraggly looking child half-fell out of it and a harsh voice shouted "and don't come back until ye've got some, ye can sleep in the stable for all I care". The door slammed shut.

Millie stared at the child. It was too dark for her to make out any sky blue under the rough brown cloak the child had on, and there was nothing in its shoulder length dirty ginger hair or its bearing to suggest a connection with the trapeze artist Millie had so admired. But Millie's own powerful and sensitive magic thrilled to the silent fizzing of the child's magic and she recognised at once that this was the same person, somehow, as the glittering figure she had perceived as a grown woman.

The child disappeared behind the back of the stable block, and Millie ran to follow her, wanting to tell her how marvellous she had been and wondering whether she could ask for an autograph.

It was dark behind the stable block because, away from the torches erected to guide the audience members home, the only light was from sporadic fires in metal containers around which small bunches of circus folk were warming themselves, talking and laughing and in some cases frying delicious smelling sausages.

Millie faltered in her step as she followed the trapeze girl further around the block and the impact from the smell of the stables hit her in full. Millie hadn't spent much time around horses and no time around them in such number. So she was still standing in the shadows, unobserved, when the trapeze girl went over to a momentarily unattended fire by the side of the stables and stood by it briefly, as if trying to decide which part of her was most in need of warming.

"Yer mum thrown you out again, has she?" The voice seemed to come from nowhere and was followed by the appearance of tall figure in a coat so dark that Millie could only make out of him a white blob at his face and a shadowy bulk. The voice did not, then, seem unpleasant.

"She's not my mum", the trapeze girl's accent was a mixture of many regional dialects and Millie at first struggled to understand every word. The girl started moving away from the fire, with a shuffling sort of gate that was worlds away from the avian grace she'd displayed in the big top.

"Hey", the man's -boy's? Perhaps somewhere in between - voice came. "You can stop by our fire awhile if you like".

The girl came shuffling back, her head at an angle suggesting pride but everything else suggesting utter dejection. She said nothing. Millie didn't now know what she could say to the girl. She felt ridiculous for having thought of an autograph. Her one thought was to get away without drawing any attention to herself. Normally it would be the work of a second to magic herself away but she felt sure that anyone with magic as strong as the trapeze girl seemed to have would be able to sense it at once and maybe follow her.

"What you done, then?" the voice asked, conversationally.

"Not one thing." The girl's voice was completely expressionless. "She wants me to go after some spirits. She'll let me back into my bed if I can get some for her, not else". For Millie, spirits meant ghosts. It seemed a baffling errand.

The fire crackled on. "I've room enough in mine for two, if one's as small as you". The voice was more friendly all of a sudden, but much less pleasant. The bulky shadow moved closer to the trapeze girl.

"No, you're all right" the girl said in the same expressionless voice. "I've got other places".

"What other places?" The voice seemed to have decided not to bother with friendliness after all. "D'you think nobody knows that you sleep in the stables? Can smell it on you for miles" he jeered.

"You'd best get away from me then, hadn't you". Millie couldn't believe the girl's voice was still so expressionless when she must be terrified. The stranger was standing behind her now so that her shadow had been swallowed up by his. The white blobs of his hands at the end of his dark sleeves were round her waist.

Millie could take no more and in a panic she conjured an apparition of a tiger running past the stable block, whizzing by the fire mere inches away from the faces of the two standing by it, and around the corner of the stable towards the circus tent. He swore and started running after it, shouting and banging on doors as he went.