Chapter Fourteen
Weeds are plants that belong where they grow,
it’s just that we don’t want them there.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
“Well this is a fine muddle!” Elodie declared as she turned in a slow circle to confirm that Gabriel had indeed vanished completely from sight.
It is worth noting that her tone was not annoyed but excited, for a muddle was a rare thaumaturgic event— vanishingly rare, as it were , she couldn’t help but think with a chuckle—and this an exceedingly fine example of one indeed.
Setting her hands on her lips, Elodie blew a wayward strand of hair away from her face as she tried to discern whether it was she or Gabriel who had inadvertently walked into a puddle of magic. Either way, there could be no denying this was her fault. As soon as she’d noted the haze of sunlight, she ought to have appreciated that such a thing was unlikely on a cold autumn afternoon and that instead it was a muddle’s perimeter. And she’d almost certainly have done so if only Gabriel hadn’t infuriated her so much.
Which, come to think of it, made this situation his fault.
“Gabriel!” she called out, an experiment she suspected would fail. Sure enough, only silence replied.
She considered her surroundings calmly. A muddle occurred when an excess of caustic thaumaturgic material in the environment poisoned a small body of water, sending up a bubble of sorcerous energy. On one hand, this provided exciting evidence that the suspected new trove contained a sulfur element, which Elodie had already half suspected due to the intense but off-and-on nature of the magical storm these past two days. Enchanted sulfur tended to be unstable in that way, for reasons Elodie could have explained had she attended more chemistry lectures as a student.
On the other hand, oops ! To not notice the muddle’s membrane was a basic error. If anyone at Oxford saw her now, they’d wonder how she’d ever managed to get her doctorate. The only positive to this situation was that Motthers hadn’t joined the assignment. Her various misadventures would not exactly have offered a good teaching opportunity, unless to demonstrate that he ought to take up a safer course of education, such as ornithology.
Maybe I was his “other problem,” Elodie thought sourly. Maybe he’d intended to shout out, “Professor, remember that you are an idiot!” And he wouldn’t have been wrong. As her mother liked to point out at regular intervals, Elodie possessed the kind of intelligence that overshot normal thinking and landed frequently in the zone of ridiculousness.
“Gabriel!” she called again, a touch more emphatically this time. The result was the same.
“Drat,” she muttered. Most likely she was the one trapped, because that was par for the course. And also likely was that her sod of a husband, having realized she was in a muddle, had headed back to the inn to wait in comfort while she got herself out of it. After all, the majority of people did manage an escape. They turned up back in their villages with wild tales of pwcca or some other fairy that had led them astray, such was their state of dehydration, hypothermia, or exhaustion. But a few others disappeared forever, swallowed by muddles that were so strong, not even a specialist in thaumaturgic geography noticed them.
“Damn it, Gabriel!” she shouted, angry, worried. There came no reply.
“I suppose he’s going to grumble at me when next we meet,” she said as she began scanning the grass for the stone she’d accidentally stepped on. “It really was the worst day of his life when he married me. Best day of mine, but there’s certainly no need for me to tell—aha!” Finding the stone, she snatched it up. Weighing it thoughtfully, she shifted it to a comfortable angle in her palm. Then, swiveling on her heel, she threw it.
Thwack.
With a hollow sound of impact, the stone vanished abruptly from sight. “Ooh,” Elodie said, enlivened, for the air had rippled as the stone passed through it, allowing her to briefly glimpse the muddle’s perimeter. It had been convex shaped, which meant she was standing on the outside . She was not the one trapped, after all.
She smirked. Professor Perfect Tarrant had got himself into a muddle. Ha!
“Ahem.” She cleared her throat solemnly, reminding herself that she was an adult, and it did not do to laugh about a colleague being in trouble, let alone one’s own husband. Besides, it really was quite serious trouble. The fey line’s instability might lead to all kinds of atypical consequences, such as the muddle collapsing in upon itself while Gabriel was still trapped inside.
At that thought, Elodie’s pulse shook. Without further ado (or, alas, further reflection) she leaped forward. Magic flowed around her like sheets of cold, opulent satin. The world shone with a pearlescent gloss for one strange and beautiful second.
And there he was. Standing with his feet apart, arms crossed, eyebrows raised as he looked straight at her.
Whew, she thought with relief…even while her heart sighed a wild prayer of thanks…and she stumbled a little as she forced herself to stop, rather than to keep running forward and fling her arms around him.
“No,” he said conversationally, “my wedding wasn’t the worst day of my life. That would be this one.”
Oops. (Again.) He’d heard her. Elodie winced, biting her lip.
“Have you come to rescue me?” he asked in the same politely inquiring tone that inspired his students to greatness (or sent them fleeing Oxford in tears).
Elodie shook back her hair, chin angled high in the manner of a plucky heroine who had absolutely given serious thought to entering a muddle and had in no manner whatsoever panicked. “I have.”
“Thank you,” Gabriel said in that same even tone, which was beginning to make her nerves rattle. “One further question, if I may?”
“Hm?”
“How are you going to do that from inside the trap?”
Elodie blinked at him. Forget oops. This was an oh, darn . There remained to her only one recourse.
Shrugging, she smiled.
—
Gabriel regarded Elodie steadily in austere silence. He’d spent his whole life studying magic—deconstructing it beneath a microscope—writing papers bristling with footnotes about it—watching its filaments sift through his fingers on a riverbank. In all that time, he’d never seen anything more spellbinding than the sight of his wife leaping through the muddle’s perimeter to rescue him.
“You were foolhardy,” he told her sternly. (She was sublime. She was a dream come true.)
“Of course I was,” she replied, scoffing. “You surely must expect that from me by now.”
Gabriel huffed. But it was perilously close to a laugh, so he hastily frowned as well, just to press home the point that he was so in love with her disapproving of what she’d done—not only her heedless jumping into a muddle, but having driven him into it in the first place. For if he’d not been so hot and bothered by her gorgeousness, and by the feel of her bare skin beneath his fingers, he’d have paid better attention to where he was going. Consequently, this was all her fault.
And if only he weren’t a pedant about truthfulness, he could have quite happily believed that, instead of knowing all too well that he’d behaved like a libidinous idiot.
“Do you have a plan to effect an escape for us both?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied at once in a tone that said, Obviously , but with a shadow in her eyes that said, Um… She turned, looking around thoughtfully. Then all of a sudden, “Aha!” she declared, her attention fixed on the tiny pond of water that Gabriel had already determined was the source of the muddle (a conclusion reached by the scientific method of accidentally stepping in it).
“No,” he said automatically.
Elodie stared at him in indignant surprise. “I haven’t suggested anything.”
“But you will.” He shook his head in anticipatory disapproval. “You’ll come up with some mad idea that will almost kill us but ultimately prove a brilliant success.”
She grinned so brightly the entire muddle seemed to light up—or perhaps it was just his brain, which organ Gabriel was beginning to accept as a lost cause. “You called me brilliant,” she said.
“No,” he disagreed, his crossed arms tightening. “Yes. But I also called you mad.”
It was hopeless. She looked like she might at any moment take flight. Gabriel considered kissing her, to make her forget what he’d said, but concluded regretfully that this would only make matters worse.
“I do have a brilliant idea, as it happens,” she told him as she began to unfasten her skirt.
“What are you doing?” Gabriel demanded warily.
“I’m going to use my skirt to soak up the puddle.”
“Bloody hell.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s incredibly risky. Besides, you can’t walk around in your drawers again. It’s too cold.”
She hesitated, considering this. “Fair point,” she said, and Gabriel breathed with relief as she refastened the skirt. Never mind the temperature—he feared for his dignity if she exposed her underwear like that again. After all, just touching her bare foot had resulted in him bumbling headlong into a thaumaturgic muddle.
Then the blasted woman reached up under the skirt and pulled down her drawers, and only three decades’ habit of imperturbability saved Gabriel from hysterics. He did, however, somehow manage to raise his eyebrows and frown at the same time.
“What are you doing? We should just wait; the muddle will eventually dissipate.”
“No, I’m sick of waiting,” she said, and flicked her gaze away from him, eyes darkening. “I can’t bear it.”
“You’ve only been in this muddle for two minutes.”
She muttered something under her breath and began to roll up the drawers in a wild, rather violent movement that caused Gabriel’s eyes to widen in alarm. “I believe we’re dealing with thaumaturgically charged sulfur,” she said, her voice all sharp edges and snapping consonants. “That means instability. The magic could collapse in on us.”
“All the more reason to act with care and precision,” Gabriel argued. “There will be a seam in the perimeter, we just have to find it.”
“That’ll take too long,” she countered, and strode toward the little flooded hollow.
“Don’t—”
She shoved her drawers into the water.
Boom! (Again.)
—
Elodie watched with smug satisfaction as the muddle shuddered violently and began dissolving around them. Its lustrous shell became a gentle rain of argent magic that looked like a thousand tiny, sugary kisses she wanted to lift her face to. Before she could (not that she would have, she wasn’t entirely stupid…although maybe she could just catch a speck on her fingertip, the tiniest of morsels to taste…), Gabriel grabbed her wrist and pulled her to safety. They ran, hunched against the perilous shower, their hair sparking, their boots stamping on flashes of blue fire among the grass.
“So bloody foolhardy,” Gabriel was complaining as they came to a stop beyond the danger zone. He took her by the shoulders, turning her to face him, his eyes a furious dark storm.
“Actually, I believe your earlier word, ‘brilliant,’ is most appropriate here,” Elodie argued, but he ignored this. Grumbling curses, he began to brush thaumaturgic flakes from her hair and arms. A sweet prickling danced over her skin, either from his touch or the deadly magic that was beginning to burn through her shirtwaist. She swept Gabriel’s hair in turn, then pulled his coat off him and ran her fingers down the tight sleeves of his henley and over his chest. Granted, these areas were unaffected by magic, thanks to the shelter of the coat, but as a professional she felt it important to be meticulous.
“I was right about the sulfur,” she said as they worked.
“You were,” Gabriel agreed, his fingers sweeping the column of her throat, startling the breath within. “Which is one of a dozen reasons why you shouldn’t have exploded the muddle.”
Elodie bristled, and not because he was now brushing specks of magic from her bosom. “It got us out, didn’t it?”
“Hm.”
“Just say I was brilliant, you know you’re thinking it.”
“I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking anymore.”
The urgent brushing slowed, his hands stroking the tumbled length of her hair, her fingertips gently grazing his cheekbone. No trace of the magic remained, yet they continued to touch each other, in the name of being…um… thorough , of course…and cautious , yes!…and goodness the stubble developing along his jaw made her fingers twinkle.
“You shouldn’t have risked yourself for me like that,” Gabriel said. It would have been a whisper had it not sounded rough, like pebbles shaken by a cold wind.
“Of course I should have,” Elodie replied. “Close your eyes.”
He gave her a fiercely suspicious look, she returned it with an exasperated one of her own, and he finally obeyed. With great gentleness, she brushed her thumb over the abundant, thick lashes of first one and then the other eye. It would have been a tragedy if magic burned that lavish darkness; she absolutely had to ensure it was safe.
“There,” she breathed, withdrawing her touch reluctantly. Gabriel opened his eyes again, the lashes swooping like a nightbird dreaming of the sun. He gazed at her for so long, she felt the muddle of her heart dissolve. They drifted close, lips parting, breath stilled in delicious anticipation…
And Gabriel jerked away. Elodie stared blankly as he stepped back, his usual frown gathering once more as he gazed out at the fields.
“Where are we?”
I wish I knew, she thought in wild, aching frustration. Then she turned to consider a more literal answer.
To her surprise, they stood on calm green land that swelled gently into low hills around them, dipped into shadows lined with beech and fir trees, and rang out in its secret places with the melodic commotion of roosting birds. Evening had begun to settle, soothing the air with tranquil duskiness. Plump clouds were thickening, darkening. To the northwest, an aura of brightness blanched part of the vast crimson sunset, and from this Elodie oriented herself, assuming it to be the city lights of Aberystwyth. Otherwise there were no signs of nearby civilization, and certainly none of D?lylleuad.
“The energy from the muddle’s bursting must have propelled it across considerable distance while we were still inside,” she said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“You needn’t sound so excited,” Gabriel grouched as he shook his coat to remove flakes of magic.
“But it’s a fascinating scientific discovery!”
“Which you only made because we were not killed by it.”
“Yes, yes.” She waved this point away.
“We’re going to have a long walk back to D?lylleuad. In the dark. With magic erupting everywhere.”
Elodie grimaced at the thought. Then shook her head and smiled. “No, it’s worth it. I’ll get an article in The Journal of Thaumaturgic Sciences with this.”
“Hm.” Gabriel put on his coat, then took a map from an inner pocket. He frowned at it while Elodie gazed at the deepening southeastern horizon, seeing all the way to Oxford and some six months into the future, when the head of the geography department shook her hand and called her “as good as a man” for her work on thaumaturgic simulacrum theory.
It was an unlikely dream, and she gave a little melancholy sigh, although she could not quite bury it in a graveyard of hopes—for it was dreaming that had got her through the loneliness of childhood, when so often she felt like just another piece of luggage her parents had to take on the road…and through the loneliness of university, surrounded by men who wanted to see her fail…and she would not even think about the loneliness of her marriage. Holding on to hope, she smiled at Gabriel. He looked beautiful, all shadowy and blushed in the last breath of day, and made luminous by her secret wishes.
Sensing her attention, he looked up from his map, and his eyes darkened. The blush flared.
“Ahem.” Clearing his throat, he turned toward the southeast as she had done, but with a far more somber expression, as if all his own dreams were nightmares. “From what I can tell,” he said, “we’re almost two miles northwest of D?lylleuad. I’d rather not risk traveling in the dark. Besides, those clouds look like they’re going to rain. Therefore, I suggest that, unless we come across a farmhouse or mining operation within the next few minutes, we find somewhere to make camp until the morning.”
Elodie agreed, and they set off walking. “Ankle?” Gabriel asked brusquely.
“Still fine,” Elodie assured him. “It’s not sprained.”
“Hm.”
Silence descended. Gabriel read his map, and Elodie tried not to squirm as the rough fabric of her skirt rubbed against her bare skin. Then, with an abrupt swing of mood, she sighed aloud.
“What?” Gabriel asked disinterestedly, not looking up from his map.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Oh?”
“It might have been a mad idea to collapse the muddle in the way I did, causing it to displace us such a distance.”
He glanced at her then, a tint of amusement in his eyes. “Are you tired of walking already?”
“No. But we’re without food and water, and goodness only knows what trouble Professor Jackson will be getting into back at the village.”
Gabriel did not reply as he rolled up his map, securing it with an elastic band. Elodie assumed he’d abandoned the conversation. But then he said, “To be fair, considering the intense energy output upon its dissolution, I suspect any escape attempt would have met the same result.”
Elodie blinked, astonished. Then her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Stop being reasonable.”
He slipped the map back into its special long pocket inside his coat. “Stop criticizing yourself.”
“You said my actions were foolhardy and could have got us killed.”
“Well, upon reconsidering the evidence, and with a new set of calculations that suggested—”
“Get to the point, please.”
He frowned at her. “I was wrong.”
Elodie’s jaw dropped, which inspired Gabriel to frown even more severely. “Being wrong is necessary for me sometimes,” he said, “in order to illuminate my general record of being right.”
She closed her mouth with a clash of teeth and strode forth away from him, trying to ignore that he kept pace easily. But she managed only half a minute in angry silence before she burst out, “You are so—the most—cottage.”
Gabriel gave her a strange look. “I’m a cottage?”
“No, there!” She pointed to a small building visible among a small cluster of trees in the near distance. No light shone at its window nor smoke arose from its squat chimney, which quite frankly Elodie found encouraging, considering her earlier experience with locals. “Come on!” she said, and began to run.
She felt Gabriel shake his head disapprovingly at her. But when she glanced back, she saw him following her, his pace calm and steady. He made a grim, brooding figure in the deepening shadows, like some manifestation of old Welsh myths, and Elodie’s imagination immediately transformed her into a springtime maiden, bedecked with wildflowers, stalked by the terrifying but darkly romantic winter king…
“Be careful,” Gabriel said blandly.
Be careful? That was the best he could do as a creature of haunted midnight? Elodie scoffed.
And ran straight into a bush.
—
For as long as she could remember, Elodie had been excessively fond of a cottage. Perhaps this was due to a childhood spent living in tents and caravans, or perhaps it was from too much time spent in those tents reading romances. She liked to daydream about finding Mr. Darcy not at his grand manor but in a cozy, single-bedroom house at which she was forced to seek shelter due to stormy weather. He would be stony and brooding, but she rather liked that, and she would be dignified, witty, calm like Elizabeth Bennet, instead of the Marianne Dashwood she knew herself truly to be.
Alas, if only she’d read Jane Austen’s works as scrupulously as she did maps, she’d have been forewarned about the dubious wisdom of loving a cottage.
The little house beside the trees was comfortable in the way a heap of used rags would be comfortable. That it proved unoccupied was no surprise, for the grime and the dank smell would certainly have driven away any reasonable tenant. Enough daylight remained for Elodie and Gabriel to see very quickly that dust covered the few shabby pieces of furniture in its living room, old ashes filled the hearth, and an entire civilization of spiders had built cobweb empires at each ceiling corner. Elodie, chewing her lip, tried to summon some positive comment; Gabriel, however, did not spend even three seconds inside before making for the exit.
He was met there by a sudden torrential downpour. Consequently, there was only one thing to do: cheerfully make the best of it! (Elodie) / suffer (Gabriel).
Inspecting the house more thoroughly, they found some canned food in the kitchen, firewood stacked beside the hearth, and a bedroom containing only one bed.
Now this is more like it, Elodie thought. Granted, the notion of sleeping alongside Gabriel after an afternoon of kissing, embracing, and shoe-putting-on was a little nerve-racking, but she was prepared to be brave. The bed had an old iron frame, a blanket hopefully made from brown wool and not some other color that had become brown with grime, and just enough width for two occupants, provided they snuggle.
“You may take the bed,” Gabriel said. “I’ll sleep in the chair by the hearth.”
Elodie’s racked nerves twanged with irritation. “How gracious of you,” she said in a wry tone, for it was obvious he wasn’t being magnanimous but feared the state of the mattress. She , however, was not a pedant. She did not wobble at the mere sight of dust. “I’m looking forward to a comfortable sleep,” she remarked gaily.
“I suppose that’s the benefit of having an imagination,” Gabriel replied, albeit as if it was a bad thing.
They also found a few tallow candles, and Gabriel supplied matches from a pocket of his coat, thus providing them with light. Whether this was fortunate or not can be debated, for it allowed them to see more clearly what they were doing, but also to see more clearly the place they were doing it in. They got the fireplace cleaned out and lit—then very shortly thereafter discovered a possum had colonized the chimney. Only after dousing the flames and ensuring the possum was not going to come out to wreak revenge did they know peace.
By this point, Gabriel’s jaw was clenching so hard a dentist would have wept to see it. But Elodie kept her spirits up by dint of sheer obstinance. After all, she wouldn’t be Elodie Tarrant if she admitted how ghastly the situation was. The deeper Gabriel scowled, the brighter she smiled. The less he said, the more she filled his silence with cheerful observations that involved words like “quaint,” “pastoral,” and (when even her imagination began running out of positives) “quirky.” This resolution did waver slightly upon her visiting the outhouse, but a nearby tree served her needs just as well, and it was refreshing to get wet and cold in the rain.
“And will it be a jolly jape if you come down with pneumonia?” Gabriel countered.
Dinner managed to be almost charming, partly due to the candlelight, but mostly because they were both too tired to argue and too hungry to care that they were eating corned beef and peaches from tins. Elodie attempted some fun conversation.
“If the new thaumaturgic trove does contain magically charged sulfur, it may have originated from pyrite. We should get a map of the regional mining operations.”
“I have one, back at the inn,” Gabriel said.
“Of course you do,” Elodie murmured, then felt a clenching of her stomach that wasn’t entirely due to the corned beef. “I meant that as a compliment,” she added hastily. “You’re always so prepared, I’m quite envious of it. I really ought to work harder to follow your excellent example, because the most—”
“It’s fine,” Gabriel interrupted. “I know what you meant; I wasn’t offended.”
“Oh.” She stared at her tinned beef ruefully. “Good.”
A peaceful quiet followed, with the rain outside making soft—
“Are you sure you’re not offended?” Elodie blurted out. “Because it came out all wrong, I really did mean it in a positive way.”
Gabriel gave her a calm, steady look. “I know.”
“I’m always putting my foot in my mouth. Which, by the by, is what this corned beef tastes like.”
“Hm,” Gabriel agreed. In fact he did not seem to mind the beef so much, but was clearly struggling with everything else, from the table’s weathered surface to the crookedness of his chair to the very air he breathed, which was rather pungent with tallow smoke.
“We should have just camped in the woods,” he grumbled.
“Nonsense!” Elodie said with a touch too much good cheer, even for her. She winced privately, then resolved to keep her chin up. After all, the world was what one made of it. “Yes, the house is a little rustic, to be sure, but it’s not so bad as you’re making it out to be. Really, you ought to try relaxing your scruples.”
“If I did, the spiders would come down and eat them,” Gabriel muttered.
Elodie stared at him. “Was that a joke?”
Glowering, he stabbed the corned beef with his fork. “What do you think? Have you ever known me to joke?”
This casual acknowledgment that she knew him well made Elodie’s blood tingle. As they returned to silently eating, she began to weave a romantic tale in her imagination of her and Gabriel as a genuinely married couple sitting together at their dining table, a little weary after working all day, a little grouchy, and wholly comfortable being so with each other. She sighed.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
“Nothing.”
“Do you have enough food? I can open another can of corned beef for you.”
“No, thanks.” She smiled at him; he frowned in return, of course. She didn’t mind that, not truly; it was just who he was. Self-defended, suspecting trouble from the world all the time. And what it most made her feel, beneath her protestations of annoyance, was hope that one day she might win a path through those defenses, to his heart.
Suddenly he reached across the table and turned her peach can to a new angle that presumably satisfied him better. Elodie gave him a surprised look; he gazed back unblinking. Something capricious in her heart flared in response to such inexplicable fastidiousness. She took hold of the peach can to move it in one haphazard direction or another—and stopped, seeing the ragged metal at the edge that he’d turned to be farthest from her.
She flushed. “Thank you.”
“Hm,” Gabriel said, and stabbed the corned beef again.
The silence returned, newly awkward as Elodie was forced to acknowledge to herself that some of Gabriel’s defenses probably existed because of her. He’d done her a kindness, ensuring she wasn’t hurt by ragged metal, and she’d automatically assumed he was just being finickity. Really, no wonder the man hated her. She wasn’t so fond of herself in this moment.
“I’m sorry,” she said—then lost courage for explaining why, since no doubt her words would come out all wrong, and she’d make things even more difficult than they already were. “I know this shelter is not ideal,” she said instead. “But we’re really quite lucky to have found it. We must try to cheer up. A bit of dust won’t hurt us. We can— aaaggghhhh !”
Her scream pierced the candlelight.