A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

“I walked into that one, didn’t I?” Matilda said regretfully to Luke, and then, like she’d only just taken proper notice of him, did a comical double take. “Well. Well. Did it hurt? When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?”

this was a thing that had, somehow, become important. 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.

Theirs was a friendship built on the unspoken, shared understanding that you can love the home you’ve made with the whole of your heart and still know the land it’s built on will never claim you.

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. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.

wearing old, holey pyjamas that gave her all the sex appeal of a moose on Benadryl,

“I never expected to love you, you know. Jasmine. Theo. None of you. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate the way it’s snuck up on me. When I sneak up on people, they call me a villain, but I’m supposed to believe it’s acceptable when love does it?”

She didn’t know if she felt ready to face the world again, but maybe no one ever knew if they were ready for something until they tried.