A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

Meanwhile, across the country, a certain innkeeper was about to discover that when you hold tight to the little magic you find, when years go by and the world loses much of its colour and still you refuse to forget the magic, magic will go out of its way to show you that it remembers you too.

That, Luke could understand. History was how he made sense of the world, after all, and what was history if not a collection of stories to make the incomprehensible comprehensible?

And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying. I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.

“When I was seven or eight, everything was possible. Then I became Albert Grey’s apprentice and I gained this huge, dizzying, limitless world at the Guild, but I also lost something. He took little pieces of me, to keep me small, to keep me smaller than him. Then Jasmine died and I lost something else. My magic. My future. That belief we cling to as children that death’s something that happens to other people, not to us. And that’s what it’s been like ever since. Like little pieces of me keep chipping away, bit by bit, and each time something goes, that version of me dies.

“I was loud and excited and too much of everything as a child, but I learned very quickly that it was much easier and that my parents liked me much better when I wasn’t so me. So I did as I was told, and I was careful about what I said and what I did and how I behaved, and eventually, I didn’t even have to try very hard anymore. I put so much cold, empty space around myself that the Tin Man thing wasn’t exactly unexpected.”

This is the life I wanted. This life of contentment and unexpected excitement, of little everyday joys, where I don’t just get to be myself but also get to be embraced as myself. It’s miraculous.”