A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

“Magic’s like anything else. It gets depleted when you use it, and then time, rest, and a nice cup of tea top it up again.”

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.

“Whatever you’re thinking, forget about it. I don’t think I can possibly overstate just how uninterested I am in getting involved in whatever goings-on are going on.”

The flashing lights and obnoxiously loud music in arcades were his idea of sensory hell, and that was before you got into the finer, nightmarish detail of the relentless clatter of coins dropping into machines filled with hideous toys and key chains that hardly anybody ever actually won,

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?

Sera had always been good at fortitude. Fortitude was her friend. She had fortituded her way through undependable parents, megalomaniac mentors, scheming foxes, the death of a loved one, the resurrection of said loved one, the loss of her magic, and quite a large number of fiascoes big and small since then.

“I’m not asking it to be easy. I’m asking it to be possible!”

Your magic knew exactly who you were. That’s why your spell was a shield, not a sword.”

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 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.

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.

“You made yourself into what you needed to be to survive, Luke. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Sera, I was under the impression that you and I were sensible adults who had our priorities straight. You want your magic back. I want to not be a fox. Where, pray, does sexual tension fit in?”

“You were pretty adamant that you weren’t going to get involved.” He gave her a faint answering smile. “And here I am anyway.”

Don’t we want to get out of the snow globes we’ve trapped ourselves in?”

Sera found herself thinking about snow globes again, and it struck her that no matter how much she missed her magic, no matter how deeply she ached for it, this inn, with all its creaks and groans and inconveniences, was no snow globe. 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.

thought I’d left holes in the sky,” she heard herself say. “Exit wounds that kept bleeding stardust.

“You cast the spell that made the inn what it is. You cast the spell that brought Jasmine back to life. Those things are you. You’ve always given your magic away when it matters most,

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

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.”

“Well,” said Clemmie, a little too smug for someone who hadn’t actually done anything, “I always knew I’d end up saving the day.”

“I will love you with or without your magic, Sera. You will always be enough for me just as you are.”

That first snowfall was always dreamlike and storybook perfect: the sky gone silver day or night, the fluffy layer of sparkling white covering the hills and valleys, the frost dusting the trees and chimneys and roof tiles, the crystalline flakes clinging to the glass of the windows.

“You’ve built a beautiful world, Sera Swan.”

“I’m not going to just walk away. I wouldn’t do that to Posy and Theo. I wouldn’t do that to any of us. We’ll visit. You’ll visit.” “We will,” Sera agreed. “For a little while, anyway. And it might work for the kids and for Jasmine and for Matilda, but I don’t think either of us wants that to be the way we do this. If we were together, would you want to drive over three hours just to spend a day with me every now and then?” “No,” Luke admitted. “No, if we were together, I don’t think I’d be able to stand not seeing you all the time, but I’d try to stand it. It couldn’t be worse than not being with you at all.”

It had been the sort of day that Sera couldn’t wait to see the back of.

“Because a knight is supposed to be kind and brave and loyal.” He stared at her earnestly. “A knight is supposed to protect other people, not themself. A knight shouldn’t make themself bigger by stepping all over everyone else.”

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.

Everyone also knows that as lovely as that feeling is, it’s best not to let it run away with you entirely, because next thing you know, you’ve tried to do too much and you’re wilting on your sofa with two ibuprofen and the sort of headache that makes you feel like there’s a herd of elephants stampeding across your skull.

She had looked for magic for fifteen years, had blamed every bad thing that had happened to her on the loss of magic, and now here she stood, having found the thing she’d fought so long and hard for, and she was trading it away. Or was she? Magic for family. Magic for home. Wasn’t she really just trading one kind of magic for another?

Bittersweet, but not bitter.