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I think you pushed yourself so hard that you didn’t just deplete the stars. I think you fractured the sky. It can’t hold all the stars you used to have. Those constellations you see are all you’ve got left.”
“If I wanted your advice, I’d ask for it! I am in the twilight of my life! I have earned the right to grow my vegetables, hunt for mushrooms, eat eight meals a day, and sing rousing drinking songs without interruption!”
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.
In hindsight, given the way things had gone over the last few weeks, such a suspiciously smooth journey ought to have been a dead giveaway that everything was about to go tits up.
She could tell he’d been crying, which made her want to simultaneously cuddle him and cast a spell that would make whoever had done this to him step on Lego at least twice a day for the rest of their lives.
“Your foot’s not ugly. It’s never been ugly. It’s held you up all your life, even when it hurt. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s so much strength and beauty in that.”
“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.”
“I’m making you my problem, dearest. You and I are more alike than you think, you know. Nobody ever looked out for me either. This is the first place I’ve ever felt sheltered. This is the first place I’ve ever had space to be exactly what I am. It could be that for you, too, but I suspect you’re determined not to let it. I, however,” she went on, “am much harder to keep at a distance, so I will stick my nose in, and I will interfere, and I will look out for you.”
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.
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.
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.”
Everyone knows that when something good happens, something you’ve dreamed of for a long, long time, you’re filled with this wonderful, dizzying, joyful conviction that there’s nothing in the world beyond your reach. Everyone also knows that as lovely as that feeling is, it’s best not to let it run away with you entirely, because next thing you know, you’ve tried to do too much and you’re wilting on your sofa with two ibuprofen and the sort of headache that makes you feel like there’s a herd of elephants stampeding across your skull.
“The fact that I am quite wildly in love with her does not preclude me from recognising she can be wrong.”
The dying wasn’t what mattered. Unfurling your scorched feathers from the ashes and getting up again. Growing. Staying. That was the part that really mattered. So Sera slept. Woke. Unfurled. And got up again.
