Sera had always been good at fortitude. Fortitude was her friend.

She had fortituded her way through undependable parents, megalomaniac mentors, scheming foxes, the death of a loved one, the resurrection of said loved one, the loss of her magic, and quite a large number of fiascoes big and small since then.

Unfortunately, she and fortitude seemed to have now parted ways because Sera, glaring fearsomely at an empty glass teapot, was at her wits’ end.

Nothing was working.

“You’re trying to use magic to restore magic,” Clemmie pointed out, thumping her tail for emphasis. “It’s a big ask.”

“I’m not asking it to be easy. I’m asking it to be possible!”

“Maybe the handsome icicle did translate the spell wrong,” Clemmie grumbled.

Sera would have paid good money to see Luke’s reaction to that description. “He didn’t. Like it or not, we’re looking for a phoenix feather, a strand of sunset, and a thorny heart. A thorny heart,” she repeated darkly. “Honestly. What the actual fuck.”

“You seem a bit cross, my love,” said Jasmine, poking her head around the doorway. “Has something happened?”

“I’m at my wits’ end,” Sera informed her. “My wits, as it were, have ended.”

Regrettably, as much as Sera would have liked to spend her afternoon swearing at an empty teapot in the hope that the answers (and ingredients) would miraculously present themselves to her, the inn hadn’t suddenly and conveniently started taking care of itself, so she put the teapot carefully on a shelf and embarked on an endless list of things that needed to be done.

Fill up the dishwasher. Harvest a few sprigs of lavender and rosemary from the herb beds.

Add a second heater to the chicken coop.

Check on the bees and collect a full honeycomb from the hive.

Extract honey from the comb. Renew the car and home insurance.

Call the GP to pester them about Jasmine’s next appointment.

Put sloe gin and cheddar on the shopping list. Drive over to Theo’s school because he’d left his English homework at home.

Come back and bake scones. Reply to Malik’s text about next week’s pub quiz.

Recast the heating spells. Sit down and draw pictures with Posy to recover from recasting the heating spells.

On her way to deposit a basket of freshly washed clothes in Theo’s room, she noticed a puddle of water gleaming on the old wood floorboards of the corridor. She dipped a toe into it and her sock came away dry.

Great. A magical memo. The inn’s way of telling her that the water wasn’t real, but it was going to be.

“Roof?” she asked out loud.

The puddle of water, reassured that she’d understood its warning, vanished.

She left the basket on the floor, opened the hatch above her, and ascended into the old attic. Navigating her way around Christmas decorations and childhood toys, she pushed open the dusty skylight and climbed out.

The inn’s roof was an uneven, sloping world of chimneys, sun-stained tiles, and birds’ nests. She found the hole in the roof straightaway, a spot where a piece of timeworn tile had crumbled to nothing, leaving a crack through which the rain would undoubtedly seep in.

Sera closed her eyes and imagined weaving stardust into all the broken places until nothing was broken anymore. She imagined the night sky wheeling behind her eyelids, steadying her, strengthening her, and shining with millions upon millions of stars.

She opened her eyes, but there was no stardust at her fingertips. Her skin was cold and the stars were few. Her loyal, treasured magic had answered, like it always did, but she simply didn’t have enough of it to fix her roof.

At times like this, that magical night sky was so utterly out of Sera’s reach that it felt like she was drowning.

She’d been whole once. Nothing had hurt. There’d been no leaky roofs, no uncertainties about what she’d make of her life, no ghosts of her lost selves.

Once, she had been glorious. Once, she had bent the universe to her will.

She wasn’t that person anymore.

From the peak of the roof, arms wrapped around her knees, Sera looked out over an endless horizon of green hills, knots of woodland, fields dotted with fluffy sheep, winding silver streams, and the tiny storybook shapes of villages and towns nestled in and around the valleys.

The magical night sky was out of reach, but sometimes, for a stolen moment every now and then, the wild green land almost, almost , made up for it.

She let that feeling sit for a moment.

For a moment, the world was quiet and still.

For a moment, it was just Sera and the horizon and the few valiant, twinkling stars of magic that had never left.