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.

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.

Because they did see, at long last. Each other, yes, but also, by that act of looking, they saw their own selves too. He, the Tin Man who recognised his own heart at last, and she, not a shadow or a ghost of what she once was but alchemy, a phoenix who had gone up in flames again and again and yet, each time, had outlasted the fire.