A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

“Marvellous work,” Clemmie said to Sera. “I was just thinking this morning that what we really needed in our lives was not a new fireplace or a nice car but, in fact, a resurrected fucking rooster.”

“Well. Well. Did it hurt? When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?”

“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.”

“It’s silly, but it was the thing I needed at exactly the moment I needed it. When I put it on, it felt like I was saying fuck you, I can still fly.”

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 would happily read a good book on the screen of her phone if that was all she had to hand, but there was something about the ink, paper, and dust of an old book that simply couldn’t be beaten.

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

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.

“My name is Sera Swan,” she said. “My magic is a galaxy. I belong in the sky, but I stopped being able to fly. And maybe that would have been okay if I could have become a creature of the earth instead, but this world, down here, it doesn’t want me. The posters in the pub remind me of that. The Guild reminds me of that. It feels like I’m drowning. Which is a funny thing for a swan to say, but it’s true. The earth doesn’t want me and the water could drown me, so I don’t belong anywhere anymore, and the ghosts remind me of that more than anything else. I talk about them like they’re not me because they’re not, because they left me behind, one after another, and each time, they’ve left me smaller and heavier, and heavy…” Her voice cracked. “Heavy things can’t fly.”

Sera was tempted to be annoyed, but then it occurred to her that she was emotionally overwrought, not especially sober, and was wearing old, holey pyjamas that gave her all the sex appeal of a moose on Benadryl, so maybe Nicholas’s interruption was for the best after all.

“Isn’t that the whole point? Finally? Don’t we want to get out of the snow globes we’ve trapped ourselves in?” Yes, Sera wanted to say, but she couldn’t help thinking that you could only get out of a snow globe by shattering the glass, and shattered glass always hurt.

Then Luke took her hand, and she held tight, and the jigsaw of their fingers fitting together felt like a lifeline pulling her out of the water.

There was an expression on Jasmine’s face that Sera had never seen before, an enormousness of feeling that seemed to come all the way from the inside, as if the darkest shadows of her past had finally been chased out by the light.

“He’s not into women his friends are more than a little territorial about.” She laughed. “Territorial?” “My lizard brain’s taken over,” Luke said apologetically. “It’s looking at you right now and thinking mine. I’m sure it’ll calm the fuck down sooner or later.”