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.”

You have a heart of stone, Sera Swan, she told herself sternly. You are not going to feel sorry for the fox curled up on top of your kitchen cabinets.

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 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.”

I was the Tin Man.” “The Tin—” “No heart,” Luke explained. Sera’s temper blazed. “They didn’t. Oh, the audacity.” “It’s fine,” Luke said again. “It’s not. But you do know the joke’s on them? Because the whole point of the book is the Tin Woodman thinks he doesn’t have a heart, but the whole time he’s actually the one with the most heart.”

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

She looked up at him, breath catching in her throat, wondering why this moment felt like something much, much bigger than it ought to.

A long, still, suspended moment. She captured it in pieces, saving each one. Her heart, beating out of her chest, exposed. Moonlight. Music from inside the pub. His hand, rising, the whisper of a thumb against her cheek, there and gone so quickly she would have thought she’d imagined it if it weren’t for...

It wasn’t a coincidence that Posy, who used to retreat into herself and put her headphones on for hours a day, almost never did anymore.

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.

Their fairy-tale peculiarities side by side with the quiet, ordinary things they dreamed of. Their unwavering hope for the future hand in hand with the desolation of their pasts.

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 compassi...

“You made yourself into what you needed to be to survive, Luke. There’s nothing wrong with that.” “I don’t want Posy to have to survive.”

“No, of course not,” Sera agreed, emphatically. “Like you said, though, she isn’t just surviving. She’s happy. She’s herself.”

“That’s my point. You fight. You fight everything. Everything you just told me, about the night sky and the lost magic and the drowning, is a story you tell because you think it’s about how small you’ve become, but what I heard was a story about how you’re anything but small. You fight. You were fighting today, out there, for Posy, when you told us you were the gargoyle of this castle and you had to look out for us. That’s why I stood my ground.”

The light had spread under her skin, warm and a little tingly, shooting up her arm, shining so brightly you should see it through her clothes, flooding outward into every limb, every hair, every cell, until her body couldn’t contain all the light anymore and the three men had backed away in shock, shielding their eyes. For one extraordinary moment, Sera was the sun.

She looked at him, her eyes tracing the lines of his profile, the angle of his jaw, the sharp, icy blue of his eyes, and she felt such a fierce, painful yearning that it took her breath away.

It shouldn’t matter what our names are, or what our skin colours are, or who our grandmothers were.

“You don’t get to play these games anymore, Albert. You don’t get to scare me like you used to. Empires always fall, one way or another, and yours is finally done.”

You’re still here, they said, those echoes of all the Seras that ever were. You went up in flames, but you’re still here. You’ll go up in flames again, but that’s okay, you know what to do now. You’ve done it already.

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.