A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

Albert, it seemed, had forgotten that his history might be a legacy of power, but hers was a legacy of resistance.

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?

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

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?

This was a place stitched together by resistance, by acts of defiance by people who could not or would not go gently down the path the world had decided was inevitable, but Luke had never resisted.

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.

“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.

“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.