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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.

Sera, being part of everyone, knew this, but did that matter? No, it did not. She was wholly, absolutely, one hundred percent going to let the feeling run away with her entirely.

The thunderstorm was gone by morning and a gentle flurry of snow settled over Batty Hole again.

Sera, possessed by a heady combination of joyous, manic energy and terror that the restoration spell hadn’t worked after all (not to mention a very nice post-orgasmic high), hurtled up to the roof of the inn.

Mist rolled over the white hills, drifting through the spikes and brambles of the dark green forests and curling like smoke against the windows of the inn.

Soft flakes of snow landed on her bare cheeks as she clambered onto the old tiles and looked across the slopes and chimneys and nests of the shabby, patched-up roof that had sheltered them so valiantly for years.

She saw all the cracks and splinters and holes.

She saw the broken chimney and the missing tiles and the empty birds’ nests.

She knew exactly what needed to be done.

She pictured the spell in the dark behind her closed, star-filled eyelids, excited and afraid, remembering only too well the day up on the roof just a few weeks ago when she’d tried and failed to cast this very spell.

This time, she called and her magic answered. Instantly. Effortlessly. It sang .

“Hello again,” she whispered with a tearful laugh, like she’d found an old friend she’d thought she’d lost.

It was laughably, absurdly, outrageously easy.

It took seconds. The broken chimney flew up from the ground below, re-forming itself in the exact spot where it was supposed to be, stronger and sturdier than it had been before.

The empty birds’ nests blew away into twigs and feathers on the wind, the cracks in the tiles sealed over, the holes and rifts where the rain came in were mended, and all the rusted joists and bowed beams and old wood were made new once more.

“Haaaa!” Sera laughed giddily, shouting into the winter day. “I’ll fix the boiler, and mend all the window frames, and straighten out the creaky steps, and enchant the fires so they never run out, and—”

“And when exactly ,” Clemmie interrupted, poking her head out of the loft hatch, fur bristling in annoyance, “do you plan to fit in the breaking of my curse?”

“Now, if you like,” Sera said sunnily. “I mean, it’s been fifteen years since I last cast a big spell, Clemmie, and I thought you’d prefer it if I first got some practice in with spells that don’t actually affect a living person, but maybe I’m wrong?

Maybe you’d like to be turned into a frog?

Lose all your hair? Meet an untimely end?

Because those, after all, are all things that could happen if I make a mistake! ”

“That’s a good point,” Clemmie acknowledged grudgingly. “As you were, then.”

So off Sera went to fix all the things that needed to be fixed, and patch up all the things that didn’t yet need fixing but probably would if she didn’t get ahead of it, and shine up a whole lot of other things (even if some of those other things were chairs, and people were sitting in them, and didn’t necessarily enjoy having the cushion beneath their bottom magically fluffed up while they were simply trying to drink a cup of tea).

She was a whirlwind, cannoning from one part of the house to the next.

She magicked new parts into her car, gave herself heated seats, and then turned it a bright, joyful lollipop red.

She made the dishwasher twice as efficient.

She did everybody’s laundry with a snap of her fingers.

She took the faded, peeling wallpaper and restored it so that it looked new.

She conjured up a chocolate fountain for Theo and Posy, then conjured up an outdoor shower so that they didn’t track melted chocolate into the house.

She added new panelling to the hallways, decided she didn’t like it, and put in a different kind instead.

She enchanted Jasmine’s room to make it twice its previous size so that Matilda could move in without having to leave her many, many belongings upstairs.

She repainted all the rooms (“A tangerine kitchen is a step too far, my love,” Jasmine said, looking slightly shell-shocked, and Sera, admitting that it was a bit much, agreed to simply give all the rooms a new coat of their old paint. For now).

“Should we expect any other big changes in the immediate future?” Luke asked her wryly, scrutinising her like he was expecting her to crash any day now. “A blacksmith’s forge in the woodshed? A biscuit bakery just for the crows? Witch wine brewing in the loft?”

“No, but I like all those ideas.”

And, well, she ended up exactly where you’d expect, which is to say that by the end of the week, Sera was wilting on the sofa with two ibuprofen and the sort of headache that made her feel like there was a herd of elephants stampeding across her skull.

“Fine,” she said, blinking up from a pile of pillows at Luke and Jasmine, neither of whom was above saying they’d told her so. “I should have taken it a bit slower. But look! Look how pretty everything is!”

“Prettier than you are right now, certainly,” Matilda offered. “You’ve got the bug-eyed, jittery look of a meerkat that’s eaten an entire bag of sugar.”

“That’s because that’s more or less exactly what she is,” Luke said severely, his voice much sterner than the hand stroking her hair. “Only it’s not sugar, it’s magic, and it’s not a bag, it’s a fucking truck . You need time to adjust to it.”

He was right, which made her scowl.

“Hey.” He kissed the top of her head. “You have time. You have all the time in the world. Your magic’s not going anywhere.”

So she slowed down and let herself simply enjoy the wheeling, golden galaxies of stars behind her eyes and the fierce, beating heart in the places she’d been empty.

It was like sitting quietly and contentedly in the company of a dear friend.

It had been a long, twisty road, but she and her magic had never given up on each other.

Before long, she was more settled and the headaches were gone and she felt ready, at last, to tackle something big.

The day of Clemmie’s cursebreaking dawned cold, white, and distinctly blizzardy, which might have been enough to put her off such an arduous undertaking if it didn’t seem unfair to make Clemmie wait any longer.

Clemmie reinforced this point. “Don’t you dare back out on me now,” she said, watching Sera with an intensity that might have unnerved someone made of feebler stuff.

“How about you go away and let me pee without an audience?” Sera said irritably.

Sera went downstairs to eat her weight in Jasmine’s blueberry and chocolate pancakes.

By the time she came back, having left everybody else downstairs so that they wouldn’t have an audience, Clemmie had scratched nervous grooves in the floorboards.

Sera, who took pride in being able to contain multitudes, was easily able to be annoyed and sympathetic at the same time.

She got to work on the curse. Undoing a spell that literally bound a person was tricky. It was spellcasting in reverse, an unmaking instead of a making, so the first thing she needed to do was see the original spell Clemmie had cast all those years ago.

She wiggled a finger, revealing the spell, and winced.

Clemmie was surrounded by hundreds of gleaming magical knots, the threads of her curse looping this way, tangling that way, leaving her thoroughly (and, frankly, impressively) bound.

The easiest thing to do would be to simply cut through the spell, breaking a curse by breaking the threads, but no witch would dare take the easy way out like that.

You’d have no idea what such a violent breaking would do to the person who’d been bound.

Sera was going to have to untangle the curse. Unpick the spell, knot by knot, until Clemmie was unbound.

“Get comfy,” Sera said, bracing herself for a long day. “We’re going to be here a while.”

The whole thing probably looked absurd to anyone who didn’t know what they were really seeing: the fox perched tensely in an armchair, trying to move as little as possible, grumbling under her breath, and the woman sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed a few feet away, brow furrowed in concentration, hands weaving in the air, picking at invisible knot after invisible knot.

It was tedious, intricate work, but it was enormously satisfying to watch each dreamlike thread of the spell dissolve as she unknotted it and pulled it away from the others.

As the curse loosened, Clemmie shifted nervously like she could feel something changing, and Sera had to warn her more than once to stay put.

It took her most of the morning, but then Sera was finally down to the last knot. She undid it and the spell extinguished into nothing.

There was a blinding flash of light. Sera shielded her eyes with her hand automatically, turning her face away until she could be sure the light had faded.

“Sera?” Clemmie’s voice sounded almost the same. Sera lowered her hand.

The fox was gone. In its place stood a naked white woman in her fifties. She had lines at the corners of her hazel eyes, a freckled nose, rounded limbs, long waves of black hair with grey roots, and a face that was downright cherubic.

Not a flea in sight either.

Sera picked up a blanket and placed it gently around Clemmie’s round shoulders. Slightly startled, she noticed that Clemmie was taller than her now.

“Clemmie? Are you okay?”

Clemmie blinked at the question. She looked down at her own hands, holding the blanket around herself, and promptly burst into tears.