A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

Autumn had only just arrived in the northwest of England, bringing with it an unseasonably merry sky, leaves of toasted gold and burnt orange, and, most distressingly, the corpse in the back garden.

She could feel that where that infinite sky had cradled her magic before, keeping it safe, it was now full of exit wounds that were quietly, relentlessly bleeding stardust.

“Are you talking to yourself again, dear heart?” “Usually,” said Sera. “Such a good habit,” Matilda said approvingly.

The thing a great many witches never understood about magic was its heart. It grew in the bones of witches, just as it had once grown in long-lost creatures like wyverns and six-tusked elephants, but what so many of those witches did not realise was that what it wanted was to be loved. It could be tender in one witch’s hands and violent in another’s, it could be vast or it could be small, it could be a night sky or teeth or lightning, but the one thing that never changed was that what it sought and what it repaid, above all else, was love.

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.

“Stop decapitating the resurrected rooster,” Sera said crossly. “It’s impolite.”

“If you’re worried about her manners, don’t be,” Matilda added merrily. “No one here has any. It’s grand.”

Once, she had been glorious. Once, she had bent the universe to her will. She wasn’t that person anymore.

Sera would happily read a good book on the screen of her phone if that was all she had to hand, but there was something about the ink, paper, and dust of an old book that simply couldn’t be beaten.

Their fairy-tale peculiarities side by side with the quiet, ordinary things they dreamed of. Their unwavering hope for the future hand in hand with the desolation of their pasts.

I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder.

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.