Chapter Sixteen
What we see of a tree is its own underneath.
Dirt is its sky, and light its dreaming.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Two miles and twelve hours later, they finally arrived back at D?lylleuad.
Exhausted and aching, they trudged into the Queen Mab’s lobby, where they found Algernon and Professor Jackson wrestling for possession of Algernon’s suitcase while Tegan looked on in amusement. As Gabriel shut the door with an eloquent thud, both men froze, astonished, the suitcase dropping to the ground between them.
“Leaving again, Algie?” Elodie asked, her voice dry with weariness.
“We thought you were dead!” Professor Jackson exclaimed.
“Algie?!” Algernon blustered at the same time.
“To be fair,” Elodie said, “I feel a little dead.”
“You do seem like you’ve been through the mill,” Tegan remarked, managing to balance neatly on the fine line between politeness and oh my God is that cow dung in your hair?
“Not so much the mill as the tornadic storm,” Elodie told her grimly.
“The exploding tree,” Gabriel added.
“The mud bombs and a magic-crazed bull.”
“And don’t forget the volcano.”
“Good God!” Professor Jackson exclaimed, whipping off his lensless spectacles to stare at them with amazed horror. “A volcano outside D?lylleuad?”
“A foot-high volcano,” Elodie clarified. “But considering we didn’t notice and almost stepped on it…”
“How could you not notice a volcano?” Tegan asked bewilderedly.
“Our attention was otherwise occupied.”
Indeed, after hours of navigating what had turned abruptly from a placid morning to a maelstrom of fiery, deadly magic, they had been so busy arguing over whether the fey line was already in cascade or merely being zany…and if Gabriel would allow this as a topic for discussion…and furthermore whether Elodie was able to point to “zany” in a science dictionary…that they’d barely noticed anything else around them. Elodie would have received a highly educative practicum on the effects of magma had not Gabriel, annoyed by the sudden odor of hydrogen sulfide, seen the volcano in the nick of time.
He’d grabbed her by the waist, lifted her over his shoulder for some reason Elodie could not fathom, and after she finally convinced him to put her down two minutes later (not that she’d insisted with especial force), they discovered that the volcano had burned itself out and so had their ability to form any conversation whatsoever, whether an argument or otherwise. The remainder of their walk had been undertaken in profound silence.
Frankly, Elodie no longer cared about the state of the fey line or any danger it presented to D?lylleuad. Besides, despite the surrounding countryside having been bedeviled by ricocheting magic, the village itself proved peaceful, and now her sole preoccupation was to have a bath. A nice long, quiet bath in cold water. Icy water. Water so arctic she would emerge entirely dispassionate about over-shoulder carries, and embraces, and kisses that Gabriel had been quite right to call “nervous overexcitement” after all, considering their ongoing effect on her. Even a day’s hard slog through magical chaos had not dislodged them from her consciousness.
“The degree of spillage suggests increasing thaumaturgic pressure, but all our readings have been too cluttered to pinpoint a source,” Gabriel told Professor Jackson, who murmured worriedly. “It’s somewhere nearby; that much is obvious from the intense activity. But damned if we can find it. Has there been any magical activity here? Any injuries?”
“None,” Professor Jackson assured him. “Obviously the trove isn’t inside D?lylleuad itself.”
“Did you telegraph the Home Office?”
“I was on my way to do so when I caught Jennings here about to escape.”
Gabriel did not bother pointing out that he’d tasked Jackson with sending that telegraph a day and a half ago. “We need to call for reinforcements,” he said. “It’s imperative we locate the source of this disruption before things worsen. We also need to alert nearby villages and towns to the risk.”
“And I want to hold a public meeting here in D?lylleuad,” Elodie added, “to discourage tourist activity before someone gets turned into—oh, wait, that already happened, didn’t it?” She turned to Tegan with belated concern. “Are the Americans back to form?”
A brassy peal of laughter from the taproom answered her even as Tegan said, “Yes.” Gabriel winced at the noise, pressing fingertips against his forehead as if pained. Elodie nodded, but did not have enough energy for a smile.
“I’m going to have a bath,” she declared, “and eat dinner in my bedroom.”
“As am I,” Gabriel said. Then his eyelashes flickered and Elodie’s pulse did the same, recollecting the fact of their shared room and its sole bed. “Mr. Jennings,” he said briskly, “since you are leaving, I’ll take your bedroom.”
“He can’t leave,” Professor Jackson argued. “We need every scientist we can get.”
“But I’m not a scientist!” Algernon wailed. “I’m an accountant.”
“You’re also a man without a bedroom now,” Gabriel told him, and marched off upstairs, leaving the others to stare at each other in stunned silence.
“Look on the bright side,” Elodie said. “You two gentlemen can share a room. You’re bound to become great chums.”
“I’ve never had a chum,” both men said, the professor wistfully, Algernon with a grumble that suggested friendship was too costly to allow.
“Well, there you go, then,” Elodie said. “It’s perfect.” And she fled before the conversation entered dangerous territory—that is, the swampland of why her husband didn’t want to spend the night with her.
A long, perfumed bath eased her bodily aches, dinner cured at least some of her empty feeling, and an evening of poring over topographical maps of D?lylleuad’s surrounds while sitting on the bedroom floor kept her from knocking on Gabriel’s door and demanding what he’d meant when he’d said she had “vivacity.” Finally, she forced herself to retire so she would be well rested for the next day.
But the bed that had previously been too small now seemed lamentably overlarge, and the room’s quiet served only to make her thoughts as loud and disturbing as thunder. Assisted by two glasses of wine, Elodie managed to enjoy “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,” but woke feeling suffocated, as if not only the sleeve but the entire cardigan of care were currently wrapped around her like a straightjacket.
She writhed irritably, then sat up all at once, blowing crumpled strands of hair away from her face.
“Confound it,” she said to the wan light that softened the room. What exactly she confounded was unclear, even to her; essentially, a general atmosphere of confoundment surrounded her heart, the professional situation, and pretty much every choice she’d made for nine years that had ultimately led her to this room, at this time, with her husband sleeping on the other side of the wall.
Flinging back the quilt, she rose and paced to the window, automatically drawn to check on the village’s status. Dawn was unfurling across its slate rooftops and red-gold trees, giving them a cold, delicate luminescence that capped the lingering shade of night. The eastern horizon blushed like a woman who had just woken to the kisses of an adoring spouse, and the steam fog drifting over the river might have suggested bridal veils or tumbled white sheets had Elodie not found herself become half-sick of metaphors.
Most importantly, she saw no disasters farther than her own reflection in the shadowy windowpane. With her white cotton nightgown and loose, unbrushed hair, she looked spectral, lost, and unmourned.
Or, more prosaically, a little hungover from last night’s wine.
Deciding that “prosaic” should be the order of the day, since “romantic” had got her nowhere thus far, she left the peaceful view of the slumbering village and visited the bathroom. Upon returning, she was about to dress when a soft flicker caught her eye through the window. She paused, watching cautiously.
Windblown leaves floated past outside, and the world gave a sigh that seemed to echo what she felt in her own heart. Reaching automatically for her weather station, Elodie felt a slight flicker of concern. The general readings were normal, but the thaumometer’s needle trembled in a strange way. It was surely nothing…and yet, before she knew what she was doing, she found herself walking downstairs, barefoot and still in her nightgown, hair streaming down. By the time she reached the front door, that flicker of concern had become a hard knocking in her heart. It was probably too much imagination. Or perhaps it was some tiny clue—an unexpected breeze, a trembling needle—that alerted her expertise. Whatever the case, something definitely felt odd…shivery… rhyfedd .
Opening the door, she looked out at the dusky morning. The unlit houses of the village seemed to be part of the land, little stone hillocks with their right angles blurred by shadows. The faint breeze was a poem Keats might have written. And the inn’s narrow, bright garden smelled like a geographer’s heaven, loam-rich and with a slight fetid odor of rot. Elodie found herself being lured outside. Through the white picket gate, onto the street, she wandered toward the dawn.
Mist swirled around her, strangely warm, like steam from a bath. Mist and yet a breeze, she thought worriedly. The street’s cobblestones felt warm too beneath her feet. The oddness of it slowed her, making her strides heavy. She stopped in a wide patch of oak shadow, and pressing her hands to her heart, she closed her eyes as she drank in the quietness.
There’s nothing wrong, she told herself. The possibility of a line cascade had her nerves humming, that was all. She ought to go back to the inn and ask Gabriel to kiss her again look at her maps again, instead of wandering around out here getting cold.
Only it wasn’t cold, was it?
“Cold enough to want a good, strong coffee,” Elodie grumbled aloud. She turned back.
And could not move.
Startled, she looked down and realized that what she stood in was not oak shadow. It was quirksand.
Like quicksand but much, much worse.
Its thick, implacable magic clung to her legs, making every step an agony. She had probably less than five minutes to get free or else be clamped to the ground forever.
“Oh, drat,” she muttered.
—
Gabriel had barely slept through the night, acutely conscious of his wife lying on the other side of the bedroom wall while every muscle within him ached to hold her close again. At dawn he gave up and rose, aggravated, restless, and desirous of a good, brisk walk to enliven himself.
Which was the truth, as far as it went. There did exist an even truer truth, however: that he desired a far more interesting manner of exercise, if only it weren’t made impossible by the bedroom wall (and more to the point, his wife’s dislike of him).
But this was swiftly and decisively repressed by his brain, which avowed that, henceforth, good sense would rule. Two days in Elodie’s company had rendered him an emotional mess, and Gabriel could not abide mess. It made his blood itchy. Consequently, the time had come to reinstitute self-discipline, self-respect (and a rather desperate self-entertainment, which had probably contributed to his lack of sleep).
He dressed in a shirt, field trousers, and a brown jumper made of the softest wool, and was in the process of buckling his boots when a sudden argent brilliance swamped the window, scattering dapples of light through the dim room. Gabriel reacted instantly, not even pausing to make the bed before he rushed out. Finding Elodie’s room empty, he ran downstairs and out into the dawn.
Almost at once he saw strands of moon-bright magic forming overhead, binding the village within their compass. Only almost at once, however, because the very first and most imperative thing he noticed was Elodie standing farther along the road, hair and nightgown billowing around her as she gazed up at the sky. She was a wild goddess. She was an angel come to rescue him from a slow, cold fate of loneliness.
She was a bloody nuisance who was going to get herself killed! Furious, Gabriel took off at a run toward her.
Thaumaturgic energy wove above him like the Lady of Shalott’s web. Little breezes dusked and shivered. I’m being enchanted, Gabriel thought, reaching for the iron hook around his ear only to remember that, in his haste, he’d left it on the bedside table. He began seeing images of Elodie lying in a boat that drifted downriver while he lay beside her, kissing her closed eyes and soft mouth and the gentle swell of her—
“The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle,” he chanted, trying to barricade his mind. Simultaneously assessing the situation, he found nothing to measure, only endless twining magical threads making a ring that surrounded D?lylleuad. A closed system, pointing nowhere.
It’s here, he realized suddenly, his blood chilling. The thaumaturgic deposit we’re looking for is right here in the village.
Just then, Elodie glanced at him, her eyes alight. Gabriel could tell she’d reached the same conclusion he had, and excitement shot between them. He wanted to lift her up and spin her around with that excitement—which must be the most ridiculous, most undignified idea he’d had in years. It certainly showed the degree of disaster that had befallen him. Never mind explosive earth magic; he was completely ensorcelled by his half-wild and exasperatingly beautiful wife.
But as he jogged close to her, Elodie held out her hand with the palm raised in a warding gesture. “Stop!” she shouted.
Her attitude was grave, professional, and Gabriel immediately tried to obey. But momentum kept him going, even as his legs grew oddly heavy, causing him to stumble…
Then he did stop—so fast, and with such a wrench, that he tipped into her arms. Elodie lurched from the force of his weight. Catching her, Gabriel pulled them both into balance, then released her with a murmur of apology. He tried to step back but could not move his legs.
“It’s quirksand,” Elodie told him, well and truly after the nick of time.
“Damn,” he said.
“Bit of a sticky wicket,” Elodie agreed. (Gabriel wondered if she’d been thinking up that joke the whole time he ran toward her.) “I’m awfully sorry for the bother.”
And then the blasted woman went and smiled at him again.
—
Really, the situation was not funny. It was extremely serious. But Elodie felt herself on the verge of helpless, anxious laughter as Gabriel bristled automatically. “I am not bothered,” he declared.
“No, no, of course not,” she said, nodding fervently. Gabriel scowled, not at all taken in by her supposed agreement, then turned his irritation on the magic underfoot.
“Well?” Elodie prompted.
He looked back at her, his face tighter than the grip of the magic around their legs. “Don’t panic,” he said, much in the same way he might tell a student not to panic about losing all their lecture notes: as if the path forward had not just turned significantly arduous.
“Don’t panic?” Only the constrictive magic prevented Elodie from stropping off making a dignified exit. Did he think her one of his juniors?! Or was he quite simply the most arrogant sod to ever have arroganted?! “Do you see me panicking?” she demanded, setting her hands on her hips.
Gabriel did not reply, only shifted his attention to her left eye, beside which a muscle was twitching.
“Fine, so my spirit is slightly ruffled,” she conceded. “But you feel the same way, I know it.” She pointed a finger at him; he raised one eyebrow. “You’re just as ruffled! After all, there’s only one way to escape quirksand.”
“Hm,” he said.
“Waltzing.”
“Hm,” he said again.
“Walt. Zing.” The dance of romance. The dance they’d have performed at their wedding, had it been genuine. “I did warn you to stop.”
“I would have entered anyway,” he said. “You rescued me from the muddle, now I have the honor of rescuing you.”
As far as charming statements went, this would have been really quite nice indeed, had he not made it in such an offhand tone. Perhaps he did not realize the extent of the situation. “Waltzing,” she reiterated. “Together.”
Gabriel did not reply, exuding such dispassionate calm he might well have been standing in front of a blackboard, about to teach seventy hungover undergraduates how to map the relative gradients of thaumaturgic intensity within the vector of a fey line by employing isothaums. And yet, when Elodie advanced her left hand, he appeared to forget the mechanics of breathing.
“You do know how to waltz?” she asked.
“Every emergency geographer learns how,” he answered stiffly.
“Because I can lead if—”
He silenced her with an affronted look. Taking her hand in his, he gripped it firmly while placing his other against her upper back. A delightful frisson went through Elodie, no doubt due to the surrounding magic. Trying to ignore it, she placed her right hand on Gabriel’s shoulder.
“We can do this,” she said through gritted teeth. “Slow, steady movements.”
Crrrack! The ground nearby split open under the magic’s pressure. Vicious spikes of thaumaturgic energy shot out, searing through the shadows, leaving hot black scars.
Crrrack! Again, closer.
“Actually,” Elodie amended, “perhaps quite fast movements, what do you think?”
Gabriel did not reply. He moved his left foot forward, and Elodie moved hers back, wincing against the burning pain of the effort. It was like trying to get through setting concrete or a boring lecture on a hot afternoon. They dragged themselves out of one step and to the side, then turned to repeat the procedure. One, two three…one, two three…
Elodie exhaled a tremulous breath. She was dancing with her husband, and her heart showed no signs of breaking. (Her ankles, however, were a different matter.) Indeed, the beat of her pulse was so strong, sending such a swirl of emotion through her—happiness, and giddiness, and embarrassment over being dressed in her nightie—that she began to see stars.
Silver and blue stars, glinting in the pink glaze of early sunlight.
Blinking, she became aware that their dance was loosening the thaumaturgic bonds of the quirksand and scattering fragments of them into the air—a hundred bright, tiny stars of magic.
“Beautiful,” she said sighingly.
“Yes,” Gabriel said. His voice was so gruff, Elodie almost chided him for having no sense of wonder in his soul. Then she realized that he was not looking at the enchantment of the stars. He was looking at her.
She blushed the color of the sky.
Crrrack! A fissure opened mere inches from their feet. Scorching thaumaturgic electricity hissed from within the broken ground, transforming tiny insects into jewels.
Gabriel said nothing more, just continued to lead them in aching, gliding steps toward safety. Each turn of the waltz was easier than the last until it felt to Elodie like they moved in a seamless dream. And perhaps the magic had shifted, for they could not seem to look away from each other. Gabriel’s eyes were as dark as the ink they’d used to sign their marriage certificate. Each time he blinked, Elodie’s pulse stuttered. She forgot the quirksand, forgot D?lylleuad. Nothing existed for her at all but the breathless quiet between her and her husband as they moved through the chaos of the world.
“Miss Hughes is better at forecasting probabilities,” he’d said once, when they were students and their professor had been allotting responsibilities for a group task. His voice had been impassive, and he’d glanced so briefly across the classroom at her that he might actually have just been blinking, but nevertheless Elodie had treasured the compliment.
“Leave that last tea bag for Miss Hughes to use, Fotheringay,” he’d commanded a fellow lecturer in the faculty lounge, thrilling Elodie so greatly, she’d been quite unable to drink the tea she made from that bag (possibly also because she’d had four cups already that morning).
“I will,” he’d said at the altar, marrying her.
Elodie carried the memories of a dozen such perfect moments with her always, private little joys that sheltered her on maudlin days. None though came anywhere near the perfection of this moment, waltzing with Gabriel in silence.
A warm gust of magic curled around her ankle, inciting her to glance down…
“Oh,” she said softly.
The quirksand had completely shattered. The fractured street lay quiet beneath their feet, magic swirling in slow, opalescent waves among the remnants of stars.
“Don’t panic,” Gabriel said.
“I’m not,” Elodie assured him.
“I was talking to myself.”
Elodie was bemused. “The spell is broken. We’re safe. Why would you panic now?”
“Because I’m going to kiss you.”
“Oh.” Panic immediately swept through her too.
“It is no doubt a consequence of the magic, sensitizing my nerves,” he said. “Or possibly the radiant effervescence of your spirit, which has fascinated me for so long now that my resistance to it has weakened.” He frowned with intense botheration, as if she were a table that wobbled on side and he a chair that wobbled on the other, and he’d run out of little bits of folded paper to make them properly straight. “I’m compelled, Elodie. I’m driven. My every thought circles back to you. My every breath wants to kiss you. I know you despise me, and I will never speak these words again, so don’t be afraid. But I l-l—” He winced. “Like your hair. And the way you draw topographical maps. And, well, you. ”
“Oh.” Elodie would have thought herself dreaming were it not for a fresh breeze gusting up beneath her nightgown, acquainting her intimately with reality’s existence. “Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Oh,” she said again. “But why would you think I despise you?”
He frowned in confusion. “You run away or hide every time you see me.”
She wriggled a little in his hold, embarrassed. “That’s because I l-like you but I know you hate me.”
His eyes widened. “You like me?”
She shrugged, and nodded, and stared at an exceedingly fascinating piece of air over his shoulder. But Gabriel took her jaw between his fingers and gently guided it so that she was facing him again.
“I have never hated you, Ellie.”
To which massively life-changing information there was only one response: “Gosh.”
“Indeed,” he answered wryly. “Hence the panic.”
“But goodness, there’s no need for it,” Elodie told him. “We kissed rather comprehensively yesterday in the farmhouse.”
“Nervous overexcitement.”
“And under the tree,” she added.
“An accident.”
“And on our wedding day,” she said with just a little exasperation. “Indeed, we did a great deal more than kissing for those two days…”
“This is different.”
“I understand.” In fact, she understood nothing, but now was not the time for contemplation. “Would it help if I kissed you first?”
“Probably not. I just have to get it over with.”
She strove not to roll her eyes. “Heavens, what a romantic line. I shall have to record it in my diary.”
Gabriel frowned, seeming more confused than cross. “We’re dancing among magical stars as the sun rises over a quaint country village. Isn’t that romantic enough for you?”
“Considering that I’m starting to get goosebumps in unmentionable places,” Elodie answered dryly, “I’m going to require a very thorough kiss to make things ‘romantic enough.’?” Which wasn’t true; she thought her heart would never recover from the gorgeous romanticism of this morning (the risk of dying in quirksand notwithstanding).
Gabriel gave her one of his thrillingly intense looks. “I’m good at thorough,” he said—and proved it.