A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

All of which was to say that Sera knew the Guild hadn’t given her a second thought until she’d proven herself too gifted to ignore, so as far as she was concerned, Jasmine, who had loved her without question since the day they had met, came first.

Albert, it seemed, had forgotten that his history might be a legacy of power, but hers was a legacy of resistance. Not to get too dramatic about it, but Sera’s ancestors had not defied tyrants and broken free of empires for her to now give this man a single inch.

“Consequences?” Sera laughed without any real humour. “I expected consequences, Francesca. I risked those consequences because I couldn’t stand the thought of losing my only real family. What I didn’t expect was for you to look me in the eye, swear to keep my secret, and immediately turn around and throw me under the fucking bus!”

Sera stared at her. “To be clear, you’re saying an unknown individual decided for equally unknown reasons to help a child and a talking fox get into the restricted archives of the Guild’s library?”

“The Guild has never been perfect, but Albert Grey has all but ruined it. The sooner we can throw him and that entire spineless Cabinet in the bin, the better.”

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.

Visiting her past wasn’t exactly a pleasant stroll down memory lane. It was a lane of teeth, crooked and sharp, and the pleasant stroll was more of a panicked scramble to find what she needed without slicing herself open on the sharpest edges.

“After the resurrection spell,” she said, “when Albert exiled me, he gave me this big speech about how he was still the powerful descendant of an old and distinguished magical family, whereas I was nothing but a swan who had clipped her own wings.”

“Fifteen years ago, Albert Grey put me in the unpleasant position of having to choose between my work and a young girl’s future,” Verity snapped. “I’m not saying I made the wrong choice, exactly, but, er, it hasn’t sat well with me.”

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how things worked here, no line between guest and family, no logic to who did what and when and why.

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? It was the first thing about the inn that made sense to him. It would probably be the last thing too.

“Years of small things and big things just added up, and one day, it was like I couldn’t really feel anything except the big, dark space where everything I was missing was supposed to be. I couldn’t deal with it on my own, so eventually, I asked for help.”

And yet, for some reason, it felt like that was exactly where they were supposed to be. Like 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.

Their fairy-tale peculiarities side by side with the quiet, ordinary things they dreamed of. Their unwavering hope for the future hand in hand with the desolation of their pasts.

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.

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.

From the very moment she’d cast the spell over the inn, she must have been keeping it alive, giving it that little bit of stardust to keep it going, but she’d had so much of it then that she’d never noticed. Who notices a few stars scattering into the aether when there are millions more? Then, the first time she had noticed, she’d resurrected Jasmine, and there was just a smattering of stars left in her night sky, so she’d finally seen the few that were going away.

“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, and I think there are very few things in the world that matter more to you than the home you and Jasmine made for each other, so no, you were never going to let the spell die out.”

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.

In a way, it was everything she’d wanted all those years ago, the fantasy she’d clung to when she’d first lost her power: the Guild acknowledging her worth, revoking her exile, more or less begging her to come back. A child’s fantasy, undoubtedly, but she wasn’t above feeling a certain satisfaction at hearing the words we’re the ones who need you.

“She’s taking away his magic,” Luke said quietly. “All of it. And it’s going to cost her all of hers.”

Every choice she had made since she’d cast the resurrection spell had been about bringing magic back into her life. 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?

There was something. A single flicker of light. A twinkle. A solitary star. She would never be able to cast another spell, but that single, lonely star was still there because, if you know where to look for it, there is always a little magic in the heart of a person who loves it. So that star would stay for Sera, always, flickering in the dark, letting her know she had not been abandoned.

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.