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Sera was lucky fairy tales weren’t real, because a wolf could huff and puff and absolutely blow the whole thing down.
And because Sera was Sera, she couldn’t help pointing out the obvious. “So was it before or after you had the twins that you noticed how much of a fuckwit your father is?”
Bradford Bertram-Mogg
Mogg was by far the most ancient and very nearly the most intolerable, an anachronistic and malevolent old man who looked like he had one foot in the grave already. Luke, for one, couldn’t wait for the rest of him to catch up.
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.
“It’s silly, but it was the thing I needed at exactly the moment I needed it. When I put it on, it felt like I was saying fuck you, I can still fly.”
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.
Well, Luke had just been to all nine circles of hell and lived to tell the tale, so there was that.
It seemed at first glance like ridiculous theatre, unnecessary and a bit silly, but at the heart of it, weren’t they just a handful of people trying to be good to one another?
She could tell he’d been crying, which made her want to simultaneously cuddle him and cast a spell that would make whoever had done this to him step on Lego at least twice a day for the rest of their lives.
Your magic knew exactly who you were. That’s why your spell was a shield, not a sword.”
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.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s not enough fruit and far too many biscuits. But you’re wrong. This is the perfect biscuit-to-peach ratio.”
“but it always seems to me that she doesn’t care about what other people think of her. She hasn’t yet let the way other people have treated her change her. She’s so completely, extraordinarily sure of who she is and just lets herself be that person.
“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.”
You always expect to leave, so you’re always waiting for it.
You’ve had one foot out the door since the day you got here.
Maybe there would come a day when he’d outstay his welcome. Maybe there would come a time when he wouldn’t be wanted anymore. Maybe that day would never come. Luke would never know if he didn’t stay.
The old inn went quiet and still. Sera closed her eyes. And found entire galaxies of stars waiting for her.
“Look, the point is, this thing you’ve got going here, where the same ten families seem to make their way into the Cabinet every single time? It needs to stop. It shouldn’t matter who our families are. It shouldn’t matter what our names are, or what our skin colours are, or who our grandmothers were. By making those things so important for so long, you’ve let generations of witches down.
