what he had never realised was that his magic, recognising that it was not and had never been loved by the man who wielded it, had simply decided not to play along. It did as it was told because it did, after all, have a boot on its neck, but it did not do one bit more. 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.
