A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

Like his lonely and her lonely fit perfectly into the empty spaces at the other’s side, saying nothing, asking nothing, just keeping each other company.

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?

Theirs was a friendship that did not talk about the things that cut deepest, but it understood that those things were there, and respected them, and gave them space.

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.

“My name is Sera Swan,” she said. “My magic is a galaxy. I belong in the sky, but I stopped being able to fly. And maybe that would have been okay if I could have become a creature of the earth instead, but this world, down here, it doesn’t want me. The posters in the pub remind me of that. The Guild reminds me of that. It feels like I’m drowning. Which is a funny thing for a swan to say, but it’s true. The earth doesn’t want me and the water could drown me, so I don’t belong anywhere anymore, and the ghosts remind me of that more than anything else. I talk about them like they’re not me because they’re not, because they left me behind, one after another, and each time, they’ve left me smaller and heavier, and heavy…” Her voice cracked. “Heavy things can’t fly.”

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.”