A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

the courage of a lion, the lovability of a puppy, and the common sense of a goldfish.)

“I hate it when you do that,” Clemmie complained. “Do what?” “Work things out,” said Clemmie sulkily.

The thing a great many witches never understood about magic was its heart. It grew in the bones of witches, just as it had once grown in long-lost creatures like wyverns and six-tusked elephants, but what so many of those witches did not realise was that what it wanted was to be loved. 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.

Make a plan. Whatever. I’m giving you that time. So stay. For fuck’s sake.”

Over the next few days, between keeping an eye on Posy, helping her draw pictures of chickens and foxes, learning to navigate his way around the maze of a house, and getting through the boxes of reference materials Verity had sent over, Luke kept himself busy. If he were a different sort of person, perhaps he might have been able to settle into this rhythm. There was a part of him that wanted to, that wanted to believe it was possible for somebody’s life to be nothing but this: the work he loved, his sister tearing around a wild, overgrown garden in bare feet with a smudge of jam on her chin, hot cups of strong tea and scones that crumbled in his mouth, and fairy-tale evenings by the fire with a book. But that, there, was the problem. Fairy-tale. Reality was traffic and steeples and old bookshops in Edinburgh. Reality was tedious meetings with Guild bureaucrats over whether the acquisition of a priceless book was really worth the funding. Reality was the question mark over Posy’s future, and his own, and the cold, secret fear that came late at night and made him wonder if maybe it wasn’t normal, really, to have nobody in your life you could say all of that to. This place, this inn, which was every bit as batty as its ridiculous name promised, was not reality as Luke knew it. This was a place of fables and stories and peculiar magic, and such a place, he was certain, had no place in the real world. So Luke did not settle. He waited, calmly, icily, resigned, for the fairy ta...