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raising a crowd of pint-sized revolutionaries in a one-room schoolhouse in the mountains of Ecuador. Both my uncles flew bombers in the Second World War, though they’re too modest to speak of it much. And Dymphna who owns the wedding boutique ran a soup kitchen in West Philadelphia (the vats of chicken noodle never ran out) before she took up shopkeeping; and so on and suchlike.
    Other vocations were less humanitarian but just as necessary. Uncle Erskine, for example, was an agent with the Society for the Suppression of Supernatural Phenomena, and in the small hours he would scour the Pine Barrens in search of mutant bats, or the shores of Ocean County looking out for any mermaid skeletons that might have washed up overnight.
    But no matter what they did for a living, we were always fascinated by our uncles. We envied our cousins who had dads they could learn from and look up to—after all, they were at an advantage compared to the rest of us, who hardly knew what we were ’til after our fathers’ departure.
    That’s not to say their parents stayed married any more often than ours did; nine times out of ten they never bothered to marry at all. The Magi of old were Zoroastrian priests who studied the stars, and modern magi aren’t so different: above all, they are wanderers.
    At one hundred seventy-seven years of age, Uncle Heck has traversed six continents as a labor rights advocate and the seventh to show off his macho survival skills. In his retirement he has scaled Mount Everest, rafted the Amazon, and run a ring around the terrestrial South Pole in a dogsled, using magic only when expedient. He has built and inhabited tree houses larger than most Manhattan apartments. You see why the magi make lousy husbands? Not because no woman in her right mind would consent to live at the top of a towering redwood, but because he never pauses long enough for conversation.
    Which is not to say our uncles didn’t find the time to play with us when we were small—indeed, they were our greatest teachers, our mothers being too concerned with telling us all the things we mustn’t do. While our aunties showed us how to interpret our dreams and the dregs at the bottom of our teacups, how to recognize a portent (they’re different for everyone, but I learned early on that blind dogs, lightning in a snowstorm, and as I say, my father’s face, all bode ill for me), and how to view a snow globe at just the right angle for a clear picture of events unfolding thousands of miles away, the magi were teaching us all the fun stuff, a beldame’s stock-in-trade.
    For instance, there are five methods of altering one’s physical appearance: invisibility is first. It requires a tremendous supply of oomph to render oneself invisible, so much so that one usually cannot exercise any other power that would make the whole business worthwhile; and besides which, the novelty wears off soon enough. To make oneself invisible does not make one able to pass through matter like a ghost. All the rules of gravity and the material world still apply. I have always found transfiguration far more advantageous. A set of wings! Now, a set of wings will get you someplace.
    Some beldames (or magi) find they are more at ease in the form of bird or beast and even choose to remain that way most of the time. The transformation takes half a minute or so (depends on the animal), but it feels like you’re teething all over—every bone shifting into new form, sinews stretching and contracting. Growing feathers, now that’s the really odd part: a thousand tiny needles poking you from within. Once transformed, you have all the new advantages, and perils, of your temporary form. Birds fly high but fall fast. It is also unwise to turn oneself into an insect, as one is liable to perish upon a windscreen.
    Yes, there are as many dangers as benefits in making oneself invisible and in the growing of wings or tails; a safer, more subtle option is the glamour. The art of glamoury