Chapter Seventeen
The sensible geographer always knows the safest path,
even if they don’t take it.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Elodie closed her eyes as Gabriel gently pressed his lips against hers. Even so, light filled her, warm and rich and gleaming with pleasure. Their first kiss yesterday had been a storm of passion, their second a sweet accident. This, though, was more like the fulfillment of what the early days of their marriage had promised, tender and deep, with a divine slowness that suggested Gabriel intended to kiss her at his leisure for the rest of their lives.
Gravity settled beneath her heart. She leaned into Gabriel’s strength, and he held her there with an embrace that was so calm, so certain, they might have been standing safe inside a stone-walled room, not on a cracked road while lingering, glimmering magic encircled them and gold-soaked shadows swayed around their feet. The moment was transcendent. The kiss was like dark coffee, smooth and rich, with a sugary tingle as their tongues met. Elodie could have wept from the beauty of it.
Finally, they eased apart. A little dazedly, Elodie looked around, half expecting the morning to be burst open and brightly lit by love’s enchantment. But the sun had still barely risen above the trees. The village remained quiet. They might have been the only people in the world—which, Elodie reflected, was rather fortunate, since public smooching probably did not count as decent professional behavior.
“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked, looking at their feet to ensure they were indeed free from the quirksand and unharmed.
“I’m fine,” Elodie responded in correct English style. The French half of her, however, reached for him again, and he reached for her, and their lips met with such yearning it was as if it had been years since they last kissed.
“Mehheehhhh!”
Startled, they jerked around. The Queen Mab’s goat, Baby, had appeared in front of them as if from nowhere. He was glaring with the kind of malevolent complacency only a creature with dangerous horns and a fluffy pom-pom hat can manage, all the while chewing noisily on a mess of leaves and flowers.
“For fuck’s sake,” Gabriel muttered, his face blanching in reaction to the slurping noises. In turn, Baby ducked his head and glared as if to say, Mind your language, young man!
Elodie laughed. After all, she’d just been extensively kissed by her husband, and as a bonus had not been permanently clamped to the ground by magical quirksand. All was good with the world, at least for now—and to a disaster specialist, “for now” was the only moment that could be relied upon. Besides, it would take a truly stony heart to disagree that Baby really was very cute, in a rustic kind of way.
“Diabolical creature,” Gabriel muttered, crossing his arms with stern disapproval.
Elodie clicked her tongue chidingly at him. Then she leaned down, hand extended to Baby. “What are you doing out here, you silly thing?” she asked in a coaxing voice.
Baby whipped his glare around to her, and Elodie retreated with a gasp. Gabriel instantly put an arm around her back to steady her, but she didn’t even notice, such was her alarm, for the animal’s eyes burned with a fierce, witchy blue, and the sharp flick of his tail suggested she and Gabriel now faced the double hazard of a goat that was enchanted and at the same time a regular goat—both conditions fraught with danger.
“That’s interesting,” Gabriel said mildly.
“Meehh,” replied the goat. The slobbery tangle in his mouth fell to the ground, where it burst into green flames.
“That definitely is interesting,” Elodie agreed. “Perhaps we might discuss it further…” She pointed both hands to the left. “Over there, yes?”
“Hm,” Gabriel agreed. They began to sidestep.
“Meehh!” Baby protested, rearing up. Fire belched from its mouth in a foul-smelling burst, which was a little more interesting than Elodie would have preferred.
“Hurry!” she urged Gabriel, tugging on his sleeve.
They skirted with breathless care around the goat while it stood on two hooves, screaming at them, then immediately began racing down the road toward the Queen Mab. Seconds later, Baby took up the chase.
Glancing back through the swirl of her hair, Elodie glimpsed the cobalt sparks flashing off the goat’s hooves as they struck the ground, and she felt a rush of sympathy for the poor creature. He must surely be hurting from the thaumaturgic power that coursed through his body. This, however, did not prevent her from urgently considering ways in which they might detain or destroy him—provided of course they managed to survive his murderous intent. For Baby proved terrifyingly fast, and soon was snapping at the air so close behind them that Elodie could hear the clash of his teeth and feel the nasty heat of magic.
Calling on a strength developed over years of outrunning dangers in the field and determined bursars wanting to chastise her for blowing up expensive laboratory equipment yet again , Elodie sprinted hard alongside Gabriel as they gained distance on the creature. Pain shot through her bare feet, making her wince, but she dared not slow.
Coming to the Queen Mab, Gabriel grappled with the latch of its garden gate as Elodie patted his back and urged, “Hurry, hurry,” in a manner that was no doubt tremendously inspiring. Baby was drawing close once more, flames snorting from his nostrils, pom-poms wobbling violently.
“Let me try opening it,” Elodie said tetchily, and in the next moment found herself being picked up and lifted over the gate in one swift, powerful movement. She did not even have time to decide whether this action was romantic or outrageously offensive before it was done, and she was dropping to the ground on the other side. She hastened back to give Gabriel room for a more dignified vault himself, which he achieved only half a second before Baby rammed the gate at full speed.
Crack! A wooden picket split upon impact with the goat’s horns.
“Meeehh!” Baby bleated, a clear declaration of war.
“Poor wee thing,” Elodie crooned. Gabriel threw her a disbelieving look. “What?” she said defensively. “It’s not his fault he was struck by magic.”
Crack! Baby rammed the gate again, sending splinters flying. Elodie and Gabriel edged toward the inn’s door.
“Was he?” Gabriel said. “Hm.” Hands on his hips, head tilted to one side, he regarded the goat thoughtfully. Elodie had seen him make the same pose in front of a particularly gnarly map, and a little tremor of love went from her heart down into her stomach. He was so…so Gabriel .
“Surely a magic strike of such potent effect would have outright killed what is a relatively small animal?” he said.
“Well, he was obviously enchanted somehow,” Elodie argued, “considering his peevish behavior.”
“Elodie, Professor Lipovsky is peevish. Always complaining about chalk dust and how ten o’clock is too early to face students. This is belligerence.”
Proving his point, Baby backed up and, with head lowered and nostrils steaming, began stomping on the ground in preparation for a new assault. Elodie glanced at the front door, estimating how fast she and Gabriel could get to it if the gate were breached. Faster than the goat, she guessed, and looked back just in time to see Baby begin his charge.
Crack! He slammed into the gate.
Thud. He collapsed in a tangle of scrawny limbs and pom-poms.
“Meh,” he bleated pathetically, then went silent.
Elodie gasped, pressing her fisted hands against her mouth. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so.” Gabriel leaned over the gate to make a closer inspection. “Unconscious, still breathing. We need to get some rope to secure him before he awakens.”
“Right.” Elodie pivoted toward the door, but Gabriel caught her arm before she could leave.
“Wait.”
He sounded shakier than the Pacific Rim fault line, and as Elodie turned back to him, he lowered his gaze, pushing a hand through his hair, for which there was only one possible interpretation: I’m about to ask you for a divorce. In preparation, Elodie both bit her lip and smiled, which made her appear more coyly excited than she felt. “Trepidation” would have been a better description. “Terror” would have been best.
Gabriel peered up through his lashes at her. Noting the smile, he shifted his own mouth slightly—just a little curve at one edge, the shyest ghost of emotion.
Elodie swallowed heavily. She had seen that same look on his face once before: the only time he’d smiled during the near decade she’d known him. As he’d stood at the altar, watching while she made a solo procession down the church aisle (since a girl needed at least that much on her wedding day), his expression had been entirely neutral until the moment she’d stepped into a slanting, glittering beam of sunlight.
And then he’d crooked his mouth ever so gently. Anyone who’d not spent years adoring him would have missed it. To Elodie, it blazed. And yet, it hadn’t been a smile of pleasure, or even surprised admiration. It had simply said, Of course .
As if he expected always to see her in sunlight.
Among all Elodie’s memories, that was the loveliest. At the time, she’d felt her heart swoon so completely, it had been a miracle she’d been able to take another step. Even a year later, the recollection still did things to her, delightful, tickly things that had no place in a polite paragraph.
And now here he was, smiling at her again.
“Yes?” she breathed.
He shoved back his hair a second time. (Elodie managed a moment’s envy, despite everything, to note that it resettled impeccably.) “I know we’re in the middle of a disaster,” he said, “and that the ground may explode beneath our feet at any moment, killing us and scores of other people. But I must ask…”
He paused, clearing his throat while Elodie’s nerves flailed around screaming. The smile had gone; he appeared now to be on the verge of implosion.
“Yes?” she repeated cautiously.
Gabriel shook his head. “Never mind.” Turning on a heel, he scowled around the garden. “Where the hell is some rope?”
Elodie sighed with exasperation. “Really,” she said rather stroppily, “people who kiss other people ought to just ask them questions if they want.”
“People who have questions might not know how to ask them,” Gabriel replied, his tone coolly conversational. “People might be unused to personal conversations. Why is there no bloody rope in this garden?”
“I’m going to get dressed,” Elodie grumbled, and made again for the door.
“Wait.”
She stopped. “What, Gabriel?”
He squinted at the sky. “Theoretically, do you think being married to a person precludes one from courting them?”
Elodie’s pulse did such a double take, she was momentarily too dizzy to respond. “Um,” she said eventually, which was not quite the answer she’d rehearsed for years, should such a situation arise. “No, I think it would be acceptable. Theoretically.”
“Acceptable,” he repeated gravely.
“Encouraged.”
“Hm.” He was squinting with such ferocity at a passing cloud that Elodie feared he might do himself an ocular injury. She took pity on him.
“I like flowers.”
That brought him back from the sky, although he still would not quite meet her gaze. “Yes, I read your paper on how the presence of Zantedeschia aethiopica in bog environments serves to inhibit acute thaumaturgic emissions. Most insightful.”
“Thanks. I also like coffee, and poetry, and I especially like moonlit strolls along the Thames.”
“To study the bioluminescent phenomenon of the thaumaturgic carp in the river?”
Elodie grinned. “Yes, absolutely, Gabriel. To study the fish.”
He looked at her without speaking, his expression having grown thoughtful (probably because her nightgown was becoming transparent in the strengthening daylight). “I really should get dressed,” she said. “Will you deal with the goat? That would be most chivalric of you.”
And there it was, pinching his countenance and straightening his spine even further—the tetchiness she knew so well, and that she’d even come to love, recognizing it to be not a meanness in his character but a vulnerability showing where he was rubbed sore by a world too loud, bright, and rough-edged for him. She’d teased him just a little too far.
“Sorry,” she said hastily, and fled before she made a mess of things.
—
In the shadowy quiet of the bedroom, Elodie dressed, paying little attention to what she pulled from the kit (which explains how she came to wear a long plaid skirt; a lacy, blue-dotted shirtwaist; and a green silk opera coat embroidered with peacocks). She secured her hair in a lopsided braid. Then, grabbing maps, a weather station, and a field notebook, she left the room.
And a few seconds later returned to don stockings and shoes.
“It’s not my fault I’m being absent-minded,” she told the empty room defensively. After all, no woman cared about trivialities like clothing when the man of her dreams had…er…talked about glow-in-the-dark fish.
“Oh dear,” she murmured. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to romance me after all. Perhaps he really was just talking theoretically. I may possibly have let my imagination run away with me.”
As usual, replied the room, with a smug silence.
“No, he kissed me,” she argued. She certainly hadn’t imagined that.
Feeling much tousled in spirit, and needing to regain some composure before going downstairs, she crossed to the window and peered out. In the Queen Mab’s little garden below, Gabriel was carrying Baby across the grass while Tegan Parry hovered anxiously, rope in hand. His face twisted in disgust at the general goatishness to which he was being exposed, and yet he held Baby with gentle care. Elodie’s heart melted, and she leaned against the window frame, sighing with such sentimentality that she felt embarrassed for herself. Forget being a geographer; this was undignified behavior for a woman , or at least one with self-respect. Straightening, she assessed the view for geographical hazards, and even succeeded in convincing herself that this had been her original aim.
The thaumaturgical flare had dissipated, in the random flash-then-fade way that characterized this situation, and the most interesting thing she saw was Gabriel’s trousers straining against his derriere as he crouched to set Baby down a mangled bush of the same flowers the goat had been chewing when they encountered him.
“Well, thankfully the world isn’t on the immediate verge of self-destruction,” she mumbled, “even if I am.”
She went down to the taproom. A few tourists were already seated therein, perusing breakfast menus. At the bar, two local gentlemen in work clothes conversed with Mr. Parry, and they fell silent while watching her cross the room, their attitude so suspicious that Elodie rather wished something would explode to divert attention from her.
Taking a table within earshot of the locals, she half listened to them muttering, “Twll dyn pob Sais,” while she drew a map of D?lylleuad. Their tone suggested they weren’t commenting on her exceptional fashion sense. Indeed, by the time Gabriel arrived, wearing a new jumper and with hands scrubbed so clean they glowed, she was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable.
“I think we are outstaying our welcome,” she whispered as he sat beside her. “Mr. Parry and his friends keep giving me grim looks.”
“It’s early morning,” Gabriel said, shifting his chair by increments beneath him until it was aligned perfectly with the table. “Everyone is grim at this hour. What are you drawing?”
“I’m layering different themes into a map of the village, trying to pinpoint the most likely location for a trove of thaumaturgic materials. We’re running out of time to find what is causing this chaos.” She tapped her pencil against her weather station, all the gauges of which were now promising imminent doom.
Donning his spectacles, Gabriel contemplated the weather station somberly. “We should just go ahead and evacuate the village.”
“I tend to agree. But in which direction?”
They frowned at her map. “Hmm,” they murmured in unison.
Just then, Mr. Parry appeared beside the table. “Did I hear you say ‘evacuate’?” he asked in a low, troubled voice. “What do you mean by that?”
Gabriel looked up over the rim of his spectacles. “To withdraw from an area for the purposes of safety. Also to empty the bowels, but that isn’t relevant in this situation.”
Elodie hastily turned a laugh into a cough. Then she smiled at the innkeeper. “Nothing’s been decided yet. Can we please order two cooked breakfasts and coffees?”
“Sure,” Mr. Parry said, but he was frowning as he left.
They worked together on the map, absently eating breakfast as they did so. They shared ideas, debated the scale of various features, and generally behaved in a manner befitting colleagues who may have recently undergone two interesting episodes of nervous overexcitement but who were otherwise not engaged in romance, let alone genuinely married.
It is true, however, that as their hands lay side by side on the tabletop, Gabriel’s smallest finger brushed against Elodie’s with a slowness that cast some suspicion on the idea of it being accidental. But since neither of them reacted in any way beyond a tremor of their breath, this can be dismissed.
And when Elodie bumped her knee against Gabriel’s, one can accept it as a simple consequence of their nearness, understanding that she was too tired after the morning’s exertions to move it away.
Furthermore, when Gabriel took his hand off the table and laid it on that knee…well, actually, there is no banal interpretation of this, but since it happened out of sight, beneath the table, it need not be counted.
Professor Jackson arrived, resplendent in a quilted dressing gown, with the cloud of his hair bundled atop his head and pierced through with a dowsing rod. A bleary-eyed Algernon shuffled behind him. They sat opposite Elodie and Gabriel, and Algernon immediately took first her mug and then Gabriel’s, peering inside for any coffee. Finding some dregs in Gabriel’s, he drank them with an unhygienic desperation that left Gabriel staring, appalled.
“I’ll buy you your own,” Elodie said, raising her hand for service. “I’m sure the Home Office can stand the expense.”
Algernon did not argue. “Professor Jackson lectured me all night about the art of cartography,” he said grittily, rubbing his face.
“Why didn’t you tell him to stop?” Elodie asked.
“He was asleep.”
The professor shrugged and grinned unrepentantly. “A mind as great as mine takes no rest,” he explained, even as Algernon, groaning, bent until his face was on the table.
“Next time they offer me a field assignment,” he muttered into the wood, “I will shoot them. With a crossbow. Using a flaming bolt. The consequences will be more pleasant than this week has been.”
“Have you found the trove yet?” Professor Jackson asked, tapping Elodie’s map. As he did so, a faint blue stain washed through the air, and all three geographers went still. But in the next second it was gone again.
“Not yet,” Elodie answered. “But I think it’s down by the river. Magic may be rising in water vapor and being transported by the prevailing southerly wind through the village, causing the atmospheric disturbances.”
“Oh look!” came a sudden cry of delight from the far side of the room. Everyone glanced over to see a glimmering blue globe spiraling gently up toward the ceiling beams. The Misses Trevallion giggled, reaching in an effort to catch it. One almost succeeded, only to have it pop like a bubble. Shards of light fluttered away, winged dreams of the sky.
Elodie turned back to the map. “Or it may be in the fields outside the village, where a lack of proper drainage has led to—” She paused as the floor trembled, rattling the table and making Algernon sit up with a yelp. “Magic leaking from groundwater and decaying plant matter,” she concluded once things had settled again. “But we searched there and found nothing. It’s so strange. I suggest we split up and go over both locations as soon as possible.”
Gabriel looked inclined to argue, but before he could, Tegan appeared, her face alight with happiness. “Baby’s awake,” she said, “and shows no signs of being enchanted. But he is a bit unsteady on his hooves.”
“Poor little darling,” Elodie answered obligingly. Gabriel muttered under his breath about the beast having slobbered green muck on his best jumper, and Elodie was about to call him a poor little darling, but she stopped herself just in time—then stopped altogether, staring wide-eyed into the mid-distance between Professor Jackson and Algernon.
“What?” Algernon asked nervously, checking over his shoulder.
“Stupid!” she said. Algernon’s face fell, and she winced. “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Algie! I’m the one who’s stupid.” She turned to Gabriel. “The flowers and leaves Baby was chewing were what enchanted him.”
Gabriel considered this, then nodded. “Makes sense. He was breathing fire, which suggests ingestion of magic.”
“They were from the Queen Mab’s garden.”
His eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
“I noticed the bush he’d torn them from. That means…” The words felt too heavy to speak. She swallowed them back, shaking her head. “Professor Jackson,” she said instead, “may I use your dowsing rod?”
The professor pulled the rod from his hair, resulting in a mild explosion of white curls. Taking it, Elodie stood, and all three men watched with close interest (Gabriel), wariness (Algernon), and admiration for her opera coat (Professor Jackson) as she pointed the dowsing rod at the taproom’s floor.
It began to shudder in her grip.