A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

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 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?

“Why do you find it so easy to be kind to me and so difficult to be kind to yourself?”

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?

sometimes saying things out loud made them hurt that much more.

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.

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.

That belief we cling to as children that death’s something that happens to other people, not to us. And that’s what it’s been like ever since. Like little pieces of me keep chipping away, bit by bit, and each time something goes, that version of me dies. Sometimes it’s big things that do it.

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.”

“A knight is supposed to protect other people, not themself. A knight shouldn’t make themself bigger by stepping all over everyone else.”