A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

“Marvellous work,” Clemmie said to Sera. “I was just thinking this morning that what we really needed in our lives was not a new fireplace or a nice car but, in fact, a resurrected fucking rooster.”

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.

She went next door to her own bedroom, where she looked for useful things to do, none of which, somehow, involved putting away the pile of clean clothes that had been sitting in a basket beside her old armchair for over a week.

She saw the memory through his eyes. 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.

“His real name is Greg. Sera knows him in the biblical sense.” “Theo!” “What? That’s what Clemmie told me.”

Some people simply weren’t winter people. Sera, on the other hand, was the most winter person to ever winter. No matter how tedious it was to keep the firewood topped up and keep casting the heat spells, no matter how annoying the inconsistent hot water and temperamental boiler, this was her time. Give her a white, starlit winter’s night (and the pipe dream of a completed to-do list) and she’d happily hibernate until springtime.

You’re still here, they said, those echoes of all the Seras that ever were. You went up in flames, but you’re still here. You’ll go up in flames again, but that’s okay, you know what to do now. You’ve done it already. The dying wasn’t what mattered. Unfurling your scorched feathers from the ashes and getting up again. Growing. Staying. That was the part that really mattered. So Sera slept. Woke. Unfurled. And got up again.

I told him I could have kissed him.” “Yeah, kissing Howard is very, very out of the question, love.” “He’s not into women?” “He’s not into women his friends are more than a little territorial about.” She laughed. “Territorial?” “My lizard brain’s taken over,” Luke said apologetically. “It’s looking at you right now and thinking mine. I’m sure it’ll calm the fuck down sooner or later.”