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“How tiresome. I expected Jasmine to have more sense and better manners than to die in the garden. On a warm day like this, she’ll get icky very quickly. We’ll have to work fast.”
“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.”
Albert, it seemed, had forgotten that his history might be a legacy of power, but hers was a legacy of resistance.
“Resurrecting him was an accident! I agreed to a lot of things when I cast that spell, but a lifetime with a zombie chicken was definitely not one of them!”
“Look at the way he’s trying to nibble your sleeve. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
It sounded madder than a box of frogs, and yet it was, somehow, the reality of Sera’s life.
Sera had never planned to run the inn. It creaked, it leaked, and worst of all, it had people in it.
Roo-Roo scuttled out of the kitchen to go bother the actual, living chickens by the coop, and for a few moments, there was peace in the house.
“Bok!” Apparently, Roo-Roo had lost interest in annoying the chickens.
“So was it before or after you had the twins that you noticed how much of a fuckwit your father is?”
“I hate to break it to you, Clemmie, but your advanced years have no meaning when you failed so utterly in your quest to become the Wicked Witch of the Northeast that you trapped yourself in a form that attracts fleas.”
“Not the fleas, Sera! You promised you would never tease me about the fleas!”
“Did you not hear the part where I lack opposable thumbs?”
“Of course it’s you,” said the stranger, and far be it from Sera to quibble at a time like this, but she couldn’t help noticing he didn’t sound especially pleased. “Hello, Sera.”
“You take yours black, don’t you?” “As my heart,”
By the way, if you saw a fox in the library on your way out last night, you didn’t.”
“The thing is, um, well, sometimes what you think is you being calm can sometimes, er, come across as, er…” “Arctic,” said Verity succinctly. “Antarctic, even.”
“Well, fuck you too,”
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.
“This spell I cast? I cast it to keep us safe. It’s never been wrong about anybody, not once. Believe me, I’ve had my doubts about Clemmie, yet here she remains.”
“Also, I hope you have an umbrella. It rains apple blossom tea in this room every Sunday.”
“Yes, yes, I’m an intolerable grump. A belligerent harpy. A cantankerous shrew. Well, too bad. If you wanted someone warm and welcoming and snuggly, you should really have had this conversation with Jasmine instead.”
“Sera, your rooster has spent the last hour following me around,”
tolerated that with saintly patience. Then he tried to demand a cuddle from me, so I decapitated him. You’ll have to reassemble him. He’s over there, running around like a headless chicken. Actually,”
“Well, you made me promise not to eat the other chickens anymore, so this seems like a happy compromise.”
“I can’t begin to express how uninterested I am in mentioning anything to anyone,”
“Oh, Luke. Luke, Luke, Luke. Has anyone ever told you that you can be an uptight prig?”
Has anyone ever told you that you can be a quarrelsome gargoyle?”
“I think we all deserve our favourite dinner when we’ve had a bit of a low day.”
Can I get back to work now, or do you need something else first? A kidney, maybe? My firstborn?” “I mean, if you’re offering…” He sighed.
“She’ll be a little cross that the garden has been completely destroyed, and who could possibly blame her, but it’s not like she’s a terrifying dragon who’ll gobble everybody up.”
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?
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.
“Well, see,” Nicholas hedged, turning pink, “I tickled her chin one time and she told me to do something I simply couldn’t bear to repeat.”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a grouchy old codger trapped in the body of a young woman?”
“Me? When everyone knows I’m about as nurturing as a dustpan?”
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.”
you could only get out of a snow globe by shattering the glass, and shattered glass always hurt.
None of you. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate the way it’s snuck up on me. When I sneak up on people, they call me a villain, but I’m supposed to believe it’s acceptable when love does it?” “Love does have a way of creeping up on you,” Sera admitted. Clemmie nodded. “Like black mould.” “And it’s just as hard to get rid of. Sorry.”
“I’m so white I’m practically translucent, but sure, she’s my grandmother.”
“You’ve built a beautiful world, Sera Swan.”
“Does it make you happy?” “Yeah.” “And is it doing anyone any harm?” “No?” “Then who the fuck cares what anyone else thinks?”
“You’ve got the bug-eyed, jittery look of a meerkat that’s eaten an entire bag of sugar.”
“I have no doubt that you have a sensible course of action in mind, my love, but consider for a moment that you might find yourself even more ready if you were to put a pair of shoes on.”
“Could you fetch Nicholas, please? And maybe ask him to bring his sword?”
“I keep checking the sky for flying pigs, but no luck yet.”
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.
