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It ought to have been a wholly happy ending, but that, alas, was not in the cards. Scarcely two days had passed before Sera, still reeling from the toll Jasmine’s death and subsequent resurrection had taken on her, made a most troubling discovery.

“Clemmie,” Sera whispered, so Jasmine wouldn’t hear. “Clemmie, the stars are almost all gone.”

Clemmie was across the room, suspiciously eyeing the rooster Sera had inadvertently resurrected, but her fox ears pricked up at this and she padded over to where Sera was on the sofa hugging a cushion to her chest. “What do you mean, the stars are almost all gone?”

“The ones inside me.” Sera swallowed hard, trying not to panic. No matter what, the one thing she’d always been able to count on was the stars. “The ones I used to see every time I closed my eyes. There used to be whole galaxies there, but I only see a few constellations now.”

Clemmie stared at Sera in consternation. “Bollocks, bollocks, and more bollocks! I was so sure this wouldn’t happen!”

That was not the response Sera had hoped for. “You were sure what wouldn’t happen?”

“You pushed yourself too far,” Clemmie said in a tone that suggested she was the one most inconvenienced by this development. “Magic’s like anything else. It gets depleted when you use it, and then time, rest, and a nice cup of tea top it up again.”

“Does that mean I just have to wait a little longer?” Sera asked hopefully. “Because the resurrection spell was so big?”

“I certainly bloody hope so,” Clemmie replied.

“I’m not optimistic, though. You should have stopped when it started to hurt.

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. ”

Sera’s fingernails dug into the soft fabric of the cushion.

She wanted to reject everything Clemmie was saying, but she could feel that there was truth in it.

She could feel a heaviness in her limbs that had never been there before.

She could feel that where that infinite sky had cradled her magic before, keeping it safe, it was now full of exit wounds that were quietly, relentlessly bleeding stardust.

“Maybe I just need more time,” she said desperately. “My magic will come back. It has to.”

“It had better,” Clemmie muttered. “Without it, I’ll be stuck like this forever.”

Sera blinked, momentarily distracted. “You were hoping I’d break the curse that turned you into a fox? That’s why you came to the inn? Why didn’t you ask me before?”

“I was getting to it!” Clemmie said indignantly. “You’ve only known me a few weeks. If I’d pushed too soon, you might have said no! Believe me, I wish I had just come out with it and asked!”

“My magic,” Sera repeated, furious, “will come back.”

Pretending to be struck down with the flu, Sera put off returning to the Guild estate, hoping her magic just needed a few more days. Hoping the galaxies would return to their skies.

It wasn’t to be. The vast dark spaces behind her eyelids remained unchanged, interrupted only by a handful of stubborn, surviving stars.

Everyday spells that had come as easily to her as breathing, like the vanishing of the pain in Jasmine’s clubfoot or the transformation of gooey batter into delicious cake in four seconds flat, were now impossible. Her magic did not come back.

Panic gave way to dismay, and dismay to heartbreak. Shutting herself in her room, Sera sobbed long and hard. The magic she’d loved so dearly, and taken so thoroughly for granted, had left her. She didn’t know who she was without it.

If there was one thing the last five years with the Guild had taught her, it was that her power was everything.

From the moment she’d arrived at their towering, gargoyle-bedecked castle in Northumberland, her instructors, Albert Grey among them, had given her test after test to find out just how much power she possessed.

Surrounded by glittering workshops and endless libraries and magic everywhere she looked, she’d mended broken bones.

Alchemised scrap metal into gold. Enchanted bolts of silk so not even a bullet could pierce it.

“You’re the future of magic, Sera Swan,” old, doddery Chancellor Bennet would say, oblivious to the way Albert’s eyes would harden. “Don’t you think so, Albert? Why, she’s the next you!”

Sera’s future, everyone had agreed, would be extraordinary.

And now that future was gone.

Days passed, muddling together in a tempest of grief, until, inevitably, fear found its way in too. Sera felt nowhere near ready to face a future without magic, but she had no choice. There was only so long she could delay returning to the Guild.

“I have to go back,” she said to Clemmie.

“Of course you do. If there’s some way for you to get your magic back, you’re not going to find it here. You need the Guild’s library.”

“And this?” Sera gestured at her almost magicless self. “How am I supposed to explain this?”

“Lie to their faces, of course,” Clemmie said at once. “Tell them you woke up one morning and your magic was just gone. They absolutely must not find out you cast an extremely forbidden resurrection spell, not least because they’ll realise I was the one who taught it to you.”

Before Sera could ask her why they’d come to such a conclusion and, moreover, exactly why Clemmie was afraid of attracting the Guild’s attention, Jasmine popped her head around the door of the kitchen. “My love, could you show Mrs. Cooper and her little girl to their room?”

Sera obliged. Jasmine’s clubfoot caused her a lot of pain if she navigated the inn’s many stairs too often, so when she’d first reopened the inn, she’d hired a taciturn woman from the village to come in for an hour each morning to keep the four guest rooms in order.

Bryony’s ability to make sinks gleam and bed linen crisp was nothing short of enviable, but she took great pains to avoid everyone except Jasmine and was, therefore, not the best person to ask to make a guest feel welcome.

“I’m really glad you had a room,” Mrs. Cooper said to Sera in a soft, tired voice as they made their way up the stairs of the guest wing. “I’d been driving so long I didn’t think I could stay awake another minute, and then I turned down the lane and there you were. It was like magic.”

“Magic isn’t real, Mummy,” her young daughter said with a giggle, and Sera smiled for the first time in days.

The inn was more magical than any of its guests knew.

The actual house was almost two hundred years old and had been in the possession of a feckless viscount before an enthusiastic innkeeper had acquired it and named it Batty Hole for reasons that would forever escape Sera.

It had changed hands a few times since then, becoming a boardinghouse for unwed mothers, a hospital during the First World War, and an inn once again, before ending up an unwelcome and run-down part of someone’s inheritance.

Enter Sera’s parents. Enchanted by the name, the history, and the leaky, crumbly mess before them, they’d bought it. Restoring it to its former glory, they’d decided, would be their next great adventure.

Between Sera’s father’s magic and Sera’s mother’s money, they’d turned the old house into something approaching liveable. They’d also refused to change the name, which was why Sera’s postal address all her life had been the intolerably precious Sera Swan, Batty Hole Inn, Briercliffe, Lancashire .

As was their way, her parents had soon grown bored of the house, and of parenting too.

So, when Sera was two, they had invited Jasmine, her father’s favourite aunt, to move all the way from the south of India to this lovely but secluded pocket of northwest England.

Jasmine’s bags had scarcely been unpacked before Sera’s parents were gone, destined to visit only a few times a year for the rest of her childhood.

In hindsight, it was the best possible thing they could have done for everyone. They got their adventures, Jasmine got Sera, and Sera got Jasmine.

Sensibly realising that the money Sera’s parents sent back for their upkeep covered little more than the mortgage, and possessed of a deeply welcoming nature, Jasmine had decided the best course of action was to resurrect the old inn.

Sera, brimming with too much magic to contain, had eagerly helped her with clever bits of spellwork.

Then, shortly after Sera’s tenth birthday, they’d had a trying few months.

They’d had an epidemic of difficult guests, the sort of people who turned up expecting pillowcases of mulberry silk and threw a fit upon discovering that a bed-and-breakfast didn’t actually involve being served breakfast in bed.

When a particularly shouty twosome had driven Jasmine to tears, Sera, vibrating with fury, had cast a spell.

What that spell was, she couldn’t say. That was what was so extraordinary about it. It was heartfelt, it was huge, and it was inexplicable.

The difficult guests had stopped coming.

The guests who did come were usually sweet in temperament, often buffeted by tempestuous weather or circumstances, and always relieved.

The inn, it seemed, had become a port in a storm.

Whether they were the exhausted parent who needed just one night away from it all, Mrs. Cooper with the bruised cheek she’d been trying to hide since she’d arrived, or the boy who’d left home for the first time and had had his wallet stolen outside Preston, they all came for something that the inn could give them.

The best way Sera could describe her spell was this: if you didn’t need the inn, you’d drive on. (And if you were a dick, you’d definitely drive on.)