A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

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.

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 searched his face for the young, quiet apprentice she’d just seen and was somewhat annoyed to discover that Luke in his thirties was even nicer to look at than his younger self. And, considering the exact words she’d used to describe him to Francesca at the time were “gah, he’s so hot,” that was saying something.

Luke’s first laugh was a rusty, startled sound. Then he kept laughing. Sera was furious. She had (mostly) been able to avoid noticing how (very, very) attractive Luke was, but now he was laughing (at her! The nerve!), and as if that weren’t enough, the sun had decided this was the very moment to sally forth from behind the clouds and halo him in gold like he was a fucking archangel or something. It was unacceptable.

“Oh, Luke. Luke, Luke, Luke. Has anyone ever told you that you can be an uptight prig?” “Not in those exact words, no. Has anyone ever told you that you can be a quarrelsome gargoyle?” “I like that one,” Sera said admiringly. “I’ll add it to the list.” Luke did not smile, but it was a close thing.

Professor Walter, frankly, seemed to be both positively terrifying and positively everything Sera wanted to be.

His magic was a library of old books, the rustle of its pages a constant, comforting hum of background noise in his mind. The spines of spellbooks cracked open when he wanted to cast a spell, pages turning until the spell he needed was at his fingertips, and the spell he needed right now was one that would lull an animal to sleep.

“Maybe the handsome icicle did translate the spell wrong,” Clemmie grumbled. Sera would have paid good money to see Luke’s reaction to that description.

“Dad and I thought us being witches would frighten you, but you didn’t care,” Sera returned. “Your foot’s not ugly. It’s never been ugly. It’s held you up all your life, even when it hurt. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s so much strength and beauty in that.”

“That’s the whole point.” He took a step closer. “In a moment of rage, that was the spell you cast. It wasn’t planned. You weren’t careful. It just happened. And yet in spite of that, it didn’t hurt the people who’d made you so angry. Your magic knew exactly who you were. That’s why your spell was a shield, not a sword.”

They didn’t talk about the Immigrants Out! poster they’d once seen at the Red Lion, their favourite local pub until that exact moment, but it wasn’t a coincidence they’d started going to the Red Rose after that. They didn’t talk about the way it messed with their heads to belong to this country, at least on paper, and still know from experience that that white flag with a saint’s red cross on it was something to be afraid of.

Her hand lifted to the opposite shoulder, to the exact spot where the ghost’s shoulder touched Luke’s. She shouldn’t have been able to feel anything, of course, yet she could swear she did. As if that touch, that moment, had crossed the boundaries of time and space, travelled miles of night sky and stardust, and become infinite.

“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.” Luke stared at her, stricken. “You really don’t see, do you?”

“What do you see?” He gave a short, quiet laugh. “I don’t think you understand just how many times over the past few weeks I’ve wished I were more like you.”

“I was loud and excited and too much of everything as a child, but I learned very quickly that it was much easier and that my parents liked me much better when I wasn’t so me. So I did as I was told, and I was careful about what I said and what I did and how I behaved, and eventually, I didn’t even have to try very hard anymore. I put so much cold, empty space around myself that the Tin Man thing wasn’t exactly unexpected.”

“Clemmie, stop,” Sera said. “Enough. This is me, remember? It doesn’t matter what your name is. I’m your family.” Clemmie stared at Sera, still bristling, eyes wide and dark. Then, predictably, she let out an exasperated growl. “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?” “Love does have a way of creeping up on you,” Sera admitted. Clemmie nodded. “Like black mould.” “And it’s just as hard to get rid of. Sorry.”

It was her home, where she knew the story of every dent and scar, where the notches on that doorframe over there told the tale of Jasmine measuring Sera’s height every year until she was thirteen, and the scorch marks on Sera’s bedroom wall spun a fable about a little girl casting her first spell. Here, the handmade curtains on the windows had laughter stitched into the seams, the cracks between the floorboards were filled with old magic and Nivea cream, and the wild, unmanageable garden was the scene of a hundred teatimes and starlit dreams.

There were a few minutes of silence and then, unexpectedly, Luke started laughing. Sera and Matilda stared at him. Practically wheezing, Luke said, “Bibbly-Bogg,” and then Sera, too, was laughing until she could hardly breathe.

“You shouldn’t come with me,” Sera said to Luke. She’d tried saying it before and had been entirely ignored, but she had to try one last time. “If I’m spotted, at least you won’t be involved—” “Let me be very clear,” Luke interrupted her. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.” Against all odds, Sera grinned. “You know, I never thought the stern, sexy academic thing would work on me, but it really does.” Luke stared at her in incredulous silence. She bit her lip to hide her smile. “We’d better get going.”

“Is this what it takes to beguile the stoic, icy historian? A corset?” “It helps.” He smiled back. “That’s not the real answer, though. It’s you. You’re what it takes.”

The short version: Clemmie’s hair worked. The longer version: the glass teapot glowed bright, and there was a lot of squealing, and Theo and Posy got enormous hugs and extra cinnamon buns, and the undead rooster flapped excitedly from one pair of arms to the next, and Nicholas cried actual happy tears, and Matilda threw open the kitchen door and shouted down the garden at the top of her lungs, “FUCKING TAKE THAT, ALBERT GREY!”

You’ve had one foot out the door since the day you got here. It was true. He had. He had been halfway gone already. It’s what you do. Every time he started to let his guard down, every time his mask cracked, he expected to have to go. It was what he’d learned. He, Luke, the real Luke, was not acceptable. Posy, the real Posy, was not acceptable. Sooner or later, they were too much, or not enough, and they had to go. So he’d been expecting it. Waiting for it. He’d gotten ahead of it at the inn, over and over, insisting time and time again that he wasn’t staying long, that they’d leave soon, and he’d thought he’d been protecting them both, but it hadn’t occurred to him that what he’d really been doing each time was hurting the people he’d insisted he was leaving.

Fifteen years adrift and untethered, cast out of the sky, unwanted by the earth, finding a way to survive anyway. Fifteen years of yearning, of dying little deaths, of climbing wobbly-legged out of the ashes and building the most unexpected of lives. Fifteen years in the company of ghosts and great-aunts, foxes and farmers, hobbits and knights and children bursting with light. All of that, and it ended with a glass teapot.

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.