Chapter Thirteen
A map is a translation of what we see,
evidence of what we consider valuable,
and a handy place mat if we need one.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
“You’re looking in the wrong place.”
Gabriel forced himself not to sigh. Again. “On the contrary, I am following the fey line exactly.” He held up his thaumaturgic compass as proof.
Elodie dismissed this with a wave of her dowsing rod. “?‘Exactly’ doesn’t count in geography.”
“What? Of course it does!”
“You have to feel the ambience.”
Gabriel regarded her with stiff irritation. They’d been out here for five hours now, feeling the ambience, measuring the ambience, and traipsing through so many mud puddles in the goddamned ambience that his boots were completely ruined. He’d have called it a wild-goose chase (to be more precise, he’d have called it a profitless errand , except Elodie’s devil-may-care attitude toward language seemed to be invading his brain), but damned if he knew what else to do at this point other than wander around frowning at things.
It didn’t help that, despite him being as fit as any field geographer needed to be, the day’s escapades had left him bone-tired. Only thanks to the energy provided by Tegan Parry’s sandwiches (and a good ration of stubbornness) had he not given up an hour ago, retiring to the inn and its bathing facilities.
Elodie, on the other hand, was possessed of an enthusiasm that seemed indefatigable. She’d thrown herself into the work, quite literally in the case of a weed-filled ditch she’d sworn had been twinkling suspiciously. Her skirt hem was filthy, torn flower petals littered her hair, and there existed beneath her fingernails enough dirt to harbor a dozen germ colonies. She was, in short, a perambulating biological weapon—and simultaneously the most beautiful creature Gabriel had ever seen. The lowering sun infused her hair with glory and flashed against the silver of her dowsing rod, making it seem like she’d stepped out of a fairy tale. Gabriel’s irritation grew so stiff he had to think with some urgency of cold tea to bring himself under control once again.
“Are you paying attention?” Elodie demanded, tapping the dowsing rod against her thigh impatiently. Her lovely, curvaceous thigh that felt like silk beneath a man’s palm. Not even the passage of a year could erase his memory of caressing it, and of gently hooking it over his own thigh…
“Uh-huh,” he managed to answer.
“Then what did I just say?”
Something about kissing? his brain suggested. Something about laying her down in the soft white clover and using his lips to map every delectable contour of her body? That seemed unlikely. She had displayed no inclination to further their earlier intimacy. Indeed, her lower lip was ragged from where she’d been biting it, her gaze kept flicking to him then away, and she carried with her an uncharacteristic quiet tension—all of which informed Gabriel plainly about her dislike of him. At one point their hands accidentally brushed together as they navigated a narrow space between two trees, and Elodie’s breath had shuddered audibly, her face shining red. Dislike. There could be no stronger proof of it.
Thankfully, he disliked her too. He only thought about kissing her because even such an excellent mind as his fell prey now and again to the baser qualities of manhood. As soon as they returned to Oxford, he could once more take up the austere mental discipline that was his comfort and stay.
“I was too occupied with examining the ambience to hear every word you said,” he answered with a fine show of disdain.
Elodie flung out her arms, and he stepped back with mild alarm. But her face was doing that lighting-up thing it did whenever she was about to say something whimsical or heartfelt (or probably both), and Gabriel prepared himself for an onslaught of colloquialism.
“The magic is everywhere,” she said, turning from side to side to indicate the fields and copses surrounding them.
Whimsical, indeed. “More poetry,” Gabriel muttered.
“Tsk.” Elodie shook her head, as if he were a first-year student who’d failed to comprehend the simple fact that heterogeneous colluvium incorporating disaggregated thaumaturgized paleosols is a telestic hazard resulting from downslope creep. “I’m talking science. So far today we’ve encountered thaumaturgic manifestations, waterspouts, ignes fatui, and there was that exploding puddle a mile back. But it doesn’t all align to the fey line, and the dispersion patterns don’t immediately suggest a point of origin. This is all just ricocheting spillage.”
She gestured indiscriminately, but there was no real need for greater precision. She was right; everywhere Gabriel looked, he saw magic. The horizon, a darkening blue behind the swollen shadows of hills, was strung with fey lights. Rainbows floated between trees. His wife brushed a luminous strand of hair away from her cheek. Three quarters of a mile west, where D?lylleuad nestled beside the slow curve of the river, plumes of chimney smoke became dandelion fluff that drifted like a thousand wishes.
Without the gauges of his weather station, it was impossible for Gabriel to judge the environment in any quantifiable way unless he resorted to adjectives that he was unprepared to entertain. But he did suppose it might be called “magical” without risking accusations of lyricism. Before he could say so, however, Elodie jabbed her dowsing rod at him, as if she were in a lecture theater and he her student.
“The fact we’ve failed to locate the originating source is very worrisome, considering how much magic is afoot. I really expected to arrive at D?lylleuad and be met by a single trove venting thaumaturgic energy, rather than all this mess. The only thing I can conclude is that pressure is building in the unmapped deposit, wherever it is. The leakage through geographical vulnerabilities, such as the village graveyard and these sodden fields, is strong enough to cause all this intense spillage. I worry it could explode at any moment.”
“I agree,” Gabriel said. “The source lode must be immense.” He paused, his thoughts sparking with theories and concerns. “It might even contain platinum.”
“Or it may have absorbed the energy of the original trove beneath the mine site,” Elodie said, “which would explain why that was completely drained.”
Considering this, Gabriel shrugged his mouth then nodded. “That’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
“Vampire minerals!” She grinned, and Gabriel had all he could do not to grin in response. It sent alarm bells through him, for he was not a grinning man. He was a man who considered amusement a precursor to anarchy, and the fact that he’d been close to it all day suggested an imminent and catastrophic failure of dignity. Why, the last time he’d smiled had been—
Abruptly the thought was slammed into silence by a vanguard of self-restraint. His countenance hardened, and his heart followed suit. Safe again, Gabriel exhaled quietly in relief.
Alas, however, his breath trembled just a little, sigh-like, and emotions took this encouragement to rush in again…
Elodie, unaware of his internal struggle, continued to smile and shine and generally light up the world with her presence. “Mark my words,” she said, “we’re dealing with something even stronger than level five. When it does erupt, it could trigger the fey line into cascade.”
“Hm,” he said.
She huffed a little. “Might you perhaps expatiate further than one syllable?”
“I’m thinking.” And it was true. He thought about her luxuriant beauty. He thought about the softness of her lips, and about how glorious it had been to taste the magic on them. He thought as well about what a bloody fool he’d been to do so. A disaster zone was not an appropriate place to reacquaint oneself with the charms of one’s wife. He should be focusing instead on the far more deadly charms of ensorcelled meadows and potentially explosive rocks.
It was just that every time he tried to do so, all he saw was Elodie standing in the sunlight, with her wild fair hair and stormy eyes flashing with magic.
Gabriel was at a loss to understand what was happening to him. Many, many times he’d escaped life-threatening thaumaturgic squalls in the company of associates and felt no subsequent desire to kiss them (perhaps because the majority possessed greasy mustaches and an odor of pipe smoke). But he’d been physically unable to stop himself from kissing Elodie, despite how wet and filthy they’d both been. Had he studied biology, he’d have been able to reason through this situation in cool, scientific terms. As it was, the only explanation he could generate was idiocy .
“We should return to D?lylleuad to consult a topographical map,” Elodie said, clearly having given up on waiting for his reply. It was sensible advice, and in fact what he himself would have suggested were he in better control of his brain right now. Back at the Queen Mab, they could not only chart the morning’s experiences and run theoreticals, but also change out of their filthy clothes. Gabriel envisioned it: a crisp map, a shining protractor, and Elodie undressing, cotton and candlelight drifting over her bare skin, revealing curves that both softened and hardened a man, making him want to… To listen to the woman now as she spoke , he interrupted himself sternly. She was talking about potentially evacuating D?lylleuad. Her voice was like velvet soaked in honey. He might lick it from her tongue…
Ahem, he interrupted himself again, and adjusted the iron and gold hook around his ear, since obviously magic was messing with his mind.
“And I want to telegraph the Home Office,” Elodie continued. “I doubt Professor Jackson remembered to do so, and we really are going to need a bigger team here.”
She sighed at the thought. Gabriel couldn’t discern why, and he wondered whether he’d done something to cause it.
“I agree,” he ventured, since that seemed the safest response.
Elodie nodded. Then she wrapped her arms around herself, gazing over his shoulder at the magical light show ( the profusion of aeriform thaumaturgic materialization, thank you very much, his intelligence corrected him indignantly). It washed her over with rainbows and gleaming blue-green shadows, and Gabriel would have sworn she was more lovely than any enchanted sky could ever be. If only he might kiss her even one more time in his life…
Then again, he was no doubt confusing a desire for dinner with desire for his wife, and a good serving of steak and potatoes would soon cure him of this undignified romantic nonsense.
“Let’s get going,” he said gruffly, rubbing a thumb knuckle against his forehead. He needed to get back on track, walk a straight line, and perform other cartographical metaphors that would stabilize his thinking.
They began trekking toward the distant village. “Do you think the tourists will have transformed back by now?” Elodie asked.
“Impossible to say,” Gabriel answered disinterestedly.
“Perhaps they’ll take it as a lesson. Too many people treat the environment as property…a resource…entertainment, rather than a community to which we all belong. I don’t wish to criticize the villagers—”
“I’m entirely comfortable criticizing them,” Gabriel interposed. “They’re money hungry.”
“Or just hungry,” she suggested.
“The mice in this field were hungry too, no doubt, until the moment thaumaturgic energy smashed through them.”
Elodie winced. “True. And without those mice to scatter seeds, make tunnels that aerate the soil, and so on, the environment that people want to give them crops and orchards wouldn’t be so healthy. It’s all a magic web with colors gay.”
“Poetry,” Gabriel muttered, managing to fit an entire critique of the genre into three syllables.
“It’s that too,” she answered, then grinned at him. Why did she insist on doing that so often? Was she deliberately trying to set him off-balance? If he kissed her, would she stop? He should try!
No, he bloody well should not. He should frown at her so she understood he was a tyrant and not to be smiled at like a man adored.
She looked at the frown and her grin widened. Widened . “I’m surprised you recognized a Tennyson reference,” she said.
“Yes, well, I’ve heard excerpts from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ recited in moony tones by a certain geographer for years now, during faculty meanings and in library corners where people are supposed to be silent. It’s inevitable I would recognize its mumbo jumbo.”
“Mumbo jumbo!” she sputtered. The grin vanished, thank goodness. If he kissed her, would she bring it back? If he told her that he’d bought a volume of Tennyson’s collected works just so he could read that poem late at night and let it bore him to sleep, would she stop hating him? “You can’t call great poetry mumbo jumbo ,” she said.
“You call undulating fey lines wiggles ,” he retorted.
“That is a perfectly reasonable synonym.”
“And ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is a perfectly ridiculous rhyme.”
“Rhyme!” Now she closed her mouth so firmly, a muscle in her jaw leaped.
They trudged on, side by side, shadows weaving together, furious silence between them. A few minutes later, however, Elodie asked with a timbre that managed to be both huffy and conciliatory, “Did you know that field mice sing to each other?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
They glanced at each other. Elodie smiled tentatively. Gabriel gave her a clipped nod in lieu of the highfalutin poetry his wrecked and aching brain was urging him to express instead. And for one beautiful moment, magic flittered between them.
Literally…
“Ooh, look!” Elodie said, reaching for the star-colored thread of thaumaturgy.
Boom!
—
The horizon really was beautiful, Elodie thought as she gazed at it. Blush-colored and soft and far, far away. If only she were in it. Or back at the Queen Mab. Or even better, in her own Oxford home, hiding under the bed. Anywhere, dear God, except sitting here in the damp grass, watching Gabriel examine her bare foot. All that kept her from dying on the spot from mortification was that she’d got a professional pedicure before coming on this assignment. (It hadn’t take much intuition to prepare just in case she got tossed hither and yon by magical explosions and thus injured her ankle, considering how often that befell her.)
Gabriel looked like a knight errant on one knee before her, sober-faced, illuminated with late golden light; but the impression was spoiled by the way he tsk-tsk ed. Elodie was sure Lancelot had never clicked his tongue at Guinevere. Then again, Guinevere no doubt never had to surreptitiously pull a leaf from her hair while a handsome man tended to her injury.
“You need someone going around behind you at all times with a safety manual and first aid kit,” Gabriel grumbled as he carefully moved the foot to ensure she’d not broken her ankle.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Elodie retorted at once, even though it absolutely had been.
“So it was a pure accident that you tried to catch magic with your bare hand— again, may I add —causing it to explode and knocking us both to the ground?” He gave her a severe look, but something glinted in it that made Elodie’s stomach glint in response.
“Er, parts of that may have been my fault, and other parts accidental.” She smiled, and he shook his head a little, and some ten seconds later they both blinked hard and looked away.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a plaintive breath. It hurt to look at him and to not. It hurt to breathe the air he’d walked through, but hurt worse when he was absent. It hurt so beautifully, she could not bear it, and if only…
Wait. He was probably talking about her ankle.
“It aches a little,” she confessed. “But I’m sure I can walk on it.”
“Hm.” Clearly, Gabriel doubted her, but nevertheless took her stocking and slipped it back onto her foot.
“I can do that myself” is what Elodie should have said, and indeed would have said, had it been any other man. Instead, she sat in a sweet-glazed silence, watching him unfurl the stocking up her leg. Thank goodness it was sturdy green wool rather than black lace, or she’d have died from internal combustion right then, and Professor Coffingham would get her office, which he’d always coveted.
Once the stocking was in place, Gabriel moved on to replacing the boot. This was safer; no one could take anything erotic from a man placing a dirty old boot on a woman’s green-stockinged foot. He pushed it over her heel and proceeded to button it.
His fingers were strong yet nimble as they grasped a small, round button and slipped it through the corresponding hole. A little sensation of completion followed, and Elodie found her muscles tightening as he worked. She realized belatedly that her skirt was rucked up, exposing the lace hem of her drawers, but she could not seem to make herself move to remedy the situation. Then Gabriel began to slide his thumb across each button after fastening it, and all hope of doing anything beyond staring at his hands was lost. She watched, mesmerized, her nerves quivering delightfully.
“I can do it,” she managed to say, although she made no real attempt to intervene.
“Hush,” Gabriel replied.
By the fifth button, she’d become so taut, and yet so trembly, she felt like she might implode. By the seventh, when Gabriel inserted two fingers between boot and her bare leg to hold the boot’s flap steady, she had forsaken breathing altogether. After he had all nine buttons secured at last, he withdrew those fingers, stroking them against her calf as he did so. The tension in Elodie abruptly snapped, setting her nervous system into cascade like a fey line. She closed her eyes, the breath shaking out of her.
“All right?” Gabriel asked.
“All right,” Elodie managed to reply. Decidedly quivering, and knowing her face was flushed, she dared to look at him. His face was lowered, hands blotching red as they gripped his knee.
“We should get on,” she said. “It will be evening soon.”
Gabriel cleared his throat. “I just—in just a moment,” he answered, his voice rough.
Elodie regarded him as she would any thorny problem: enchanted rosebush, explosive cactus, arrogant sod of a husband. But his eyes were hidden beneath his lashes, and his shoulders hunched as if he strove to control something wild inside himself. Elodie, being the intelligent and insightful scientist that she was, concluded he was upset by the dirt he’d got on his fingers from her muddy boot. Taking a handkerchief from her skirt pocket, she lifted one of the hands off his knee and began to clean it.
Gabriel jolted as if she’d attacked him with pumice instead of delicate lace and lawn. “You needn’t do that,” he said, although he did not pull away from her grip.
“Pish tosh,” she replied amiably. “Sit still.”
The injunction was unnecessary: he was so stiff, even his breath did not seem to stir. Elodie, conversely, now felt like she was turning to hot pudding. Perhaps this had been the “other problem” Motthers had tried to warn her about: the risk that she’d end up sitting alone with her husband in the middle of the enchanted Welsh countryside, caressing his hand minutes after having come apart merely from him putting her boot on her foot. Had she known it would happen, she’d almost certainly have…well, undertaken the assignment just the same, but at least first polished her fingernails.
She’d always considered her hands ugly although capable, the fingers too blunt, the nails too often broken during fieldwork to justify pampering them. Whereas her feet needed care after continually wading through bogs and rivers, her hands were hardy.
But now, as she touched Gabriel’s own strong, olive-skinned hands, her fingers seemed delicate, feminine, in a way they never had before. And Elodie was surprised to discover that tending to him made her feel as quivery as when he’d buttoned up her boot, but with an even deeper level of satisfaction. Not only her body was aroused, but her heart.
Suddenly Gabriel made a strange, broken sound and yanked his hand from her, simultaneously rising and whirling away. Elodie stared up at him gobsmacked.
“Where the bloody hell is the village?” he demanded, shoving a hand through his hair.
Elodie dared not reply at once, or else she risked suggesting a location that was neither physically possible nor dignified. Blast the man and the way he made her spin between love and anger so exhaustingly. Dragging calm from the corners of her brain, she took a deep breath, then pushed herself clumsily to her feet.
“It’s there,” she said in a clipped tone, pointing east-southeast despite the fact that Gabriel had his back to her and couldn’t see the gesture. D?lylleuad crouched in tree shadows by the riverbank, almost a mile away. It had the quality of a fairy-tale illustration: pretty, quaint, a little blurred through a diaphanous haze of fading sunlight. The sky beyond it was purpling with a promise of night.
“I need wine,” Gabriel muttered as he turned, still facing away from her, and began to stomp toward the village. Then he stopped abruptly and glanced over his shoulder. “The ankle.”
By which, Elodie supposed, he meant, How is it?
“Fine,” she said acidly, and took a step.
Pain shot through her foot.
Which is to say, her other foot. Looking down, she discovered she’d trodden on a jagged stone. With a hissed curse she looked up again—
And Gabriel was gone.