Chapter Twenty-One
What goes up must come down,
just not necessarily in the same form.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
Immediately upon deboarding the train in Oxford, Gabriel and Elodie turned to the northwest horizon. Travelers bustled around them as they stood together in tense silence, watching for magic.
The sky was blanched and cold, strewn with diaphanous cirrus clouds that drifted across a pale, swollen sun. White-gold light girdled the world, dissolving it gently into a dream.
My God, Gabriel thought in horror. This is it. I’ve started thinking in poetry. I should never have kissed her. Those dear lips have corrupted me so sweetly…
“Oh for goodness sake,” he grumbled. Perhaps he should just surrender his doctorate and write romances instead.
“What is it?” Elodie asked with some alarm. “I can’t see anything troubling.”
“There isn’t anything.” Pivoting on a heel, Gabriel scrutinized the various rooftops of the city. They, at least, were uninspiring. No one would want to write poetry about Oxford, especially not in October. “All seems normal. We’ve managed to outrace the cascade.”
“Maybe it petered out,” Elodie suggested, although she sounded dubious.
“I’m not willing to take that chance.” Consulting his wristwatch, he did some hasty mental calculations. “We have an hour at most. Are you confident in our plan?”
The question was a good excuse to look at her, but the moment he did, his mind proceeded to effuse about her starlight hair and the soft curve of her jaw. He flung his attention at a nearby tree instead. It trembled, despite the lack of breeze, as if his dark-eyed glare frightened it.
“I wouldn’t call myself confident,” Elodie said, “but I hope we…What are you looking at?” She glanced over her shoulder nervously.
“It’s coming,” Gabriel said in a low, grim voice. “The trees know.”
Elodie’s eyes widened as she considered the several trees within view. All had begun shivering, their dry red and gold leaves scratching against the crisp air.
Gabriel caught sight of a young man bearing the hallmarks of an undergraduate student: shabby suit, the pallor of a hangover, hair so glossy with pomade the sunlight was reflecting off it. “You!” he shouted, pointing at the youth.
“What? Me?” The youth clutched himself, eyes bulging with the instinctive terror of a student who might be studying medicine but had nevertheless heard all about Professor Tyrant.
“Do you know the police station on High Street?”
The youth flushed scarlet. “What do you mean? Why should I know it? I didn’t break the office window of Balliol’s dean.”
Gabriel exhaled impatiently. “I don’t care if you did or not. I need you to run to the police station and tell them Professor Tarrant invokes Protocol D.”
“But—but I have a train to catch!”
“Come on, lad,” Elodie said encouragingly. “Think of what Jeremy Bentham would say about your duty of beneficence!”
“Bentham?” Confusion glazed the young man’s terror. “Is he captain of the rowing squad?”
Gabriel glared at him.
“ Eep! Yes, sir. I’ll go right away, sir. Protocol D. Thank you, sir.” And he dashed away as if his life and, more importantly, his enrollment depended on it.
Gabriel turned back to Elodie. “Are you sure we shouldn’t be going to the Geography School to find the professors?”
“On an afternoon during Noughth Week?” Elodie huffed a laugh. “Absolutely not. Far too much risk of having students turn up. They’ll be at the pub, mark my words.”
“Hm.” Gabriel had heard whispers among the faculty about outings to drinking establishments, and he understood that they were whispering so he didn’t hear them and ask to come along. For which he was grateful . And not the kind of grateful that covers up feelings of hurt and unhappiness. Pubs were noisy. Smelly. Fraught with an unrelenting joviality that made reading impossible. Gabriel far preferred a snifter of brandy in one of the quiet lounges of the Minervaeum Club, primarily because no one there was stupid enough to approach him.
On the other hand, did the professors invite Elodie to these pub gatherings? Did they laugh with her, exchange anecdotes with her? If so, there was only one logical conclusion.
He needed to get such gatherings banned.
Or, a wild thought—perhaps he could join in one day. After all, he’d go to the ends of the earth for Elodie; he could spend an hour half an hour in a pub.
Providing, of course, Oxford did not burn to the ground this afternoon.
“Let’s go.” Grasping Elodie’s hand, he began to run.
“Wait,” she said, tugging on him to stop. “I have a better idea.”
As he gave her an inquiring look, she grinned in such a way his blood shook with alarm. When Elodie grinned like that, shenanigans were almost certainly to ensue…
—
Toot!
Elodie pumped the velocipede’s horn, causing students to scatter off the road. Steam clouds billowed up from the shuddering engine, and behind her, arms clinging around her waist, Gabriel groaned as his dignity imploded. Elodie laughed.
“It was the sensible option!” she told him—but considering she had to shout over the clanking and rattling of the contraption, inspiring any passersby who weren’t already staring at them to do so, it must be conceded that “sensible” really had no place in a description of the scene. “It’s faster than running!” she tried instead.
“Only if we survive!” Gabriel shouted in reply.
“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly saf—”
Alas, Elodie could not finish this assurance due to Gabriel clutching her tightly, impeding her breath, as she swerved precipitously to avoid a classics professor who’d been attempting a pedestrian crossing. With roars of “Cruentum stulti!” following them, they sped on through the city, leaving their good reputations far behind.
Minutes later, they arrived at Beaumont Street, wherein was located the Bacon Butty, a public bar favored by Oxford’s science professors (mostly because Oxford’s science students hated it). Upon entering rather unsteadily, Gabriel trying without success to tidy his hair, and Elodie filled with stars at having had her husband’s arms around her for the journey, they found a half-dozen tweedy geographers clustered around a table laden with plates of fish and chips. The men were enjoying a loud (Gabriel winced) and jovial (Gabriel frowned) debate about whether Descartes was influenced by Eratosthenes, while a large portrait of Roger Bacon on the wall behind their table looked on in boredom. All were equipped with beer tankards of a size known as the lager majus , and had evidently emptied them enough that they slurred the phrase “Cartesian equations” into something that sounded quite ribald indeed.
Seeing them, Elodie drew a taut breath like she always did when faced with these men, anticipating insults or lecherous stares. As if he sensed this, Gabriel reached to grasp her hand, squeezing it encouragingly; surprised, she flung him a grateful smile. He smiled back fleetingly, and her internal stars flashed and spun.
“Everyone!” she called out as they approached the table. But it was to no avail: she may as well have been methane in a wetlands.
“Ahem.” Gabriel cleared his throat discreetly. At once the professors fell silent, tankards halted mid-gesture, egos on defensive alert.
“The 5-SEQ is in cascade!” Elodie said, the words tumbling with her haste to speak.
Half a dozen pairs of bushy eyebrows elevated.
“It’s heading right this way!” she elaborated, pointing to the window, which actually faced northeast, but that was not important. Besides, no one even glanced at it. Instead, they exchanged amused looks.
“The situation is dire,” Gabriel added.
“Oh?” Professor Diggley, a specialist in oceanography despite not having left Oxford for the past fifteen years, smirked—or at least his shaggy white mustache tilted in a manner that suggested he was smirking beneath it. “I should say, young man, that there’s a more interesting situation right before us.”
Both Elodie and Gabriel stared at him with impatient confusion. He waggled a finger in their direction. “This, here.”
Elodie noticed that every professor’s attention was now angling toward her lower body. She glanced down and realized she and Gabriel were still holding hands.
Aghast, she went to pull away. But Gabriel gripped her hand more firmly.
“Gentlemen,” he said in such a domineering manner, several of the professors had to remind themselves they’d graduated decades ago. “Professor Tarrant and I are going to establish a defense out past Wytham Village. Should it fail, a secondary defense will be needed.”
“Aren’t you Professor Tarrant?” Professor Coffingham asked Gabriel with a drunken chuckle.
Alas, poor fellow, it took him three weeks to recover from the mental injury caused by Gabriel’s glare.
Elodie, torn between wanting to bristle at Coffingham’s insult and swoon at Gabriel’s response, settled on just wishing she had a tankard of beer too. With luck, the cascade would hit Oxford before this conversation became any more stressful.
“What kind of defense do you recommend?” asked Professor Abness, an elderly gentleman of the Scottish persuasion who tended to get so directly to the point that his lectures lasted only twenty minutes. Elodie smiled at him with gratitude.
“Iron and gold barricades have proven to work against this particular energy signature,” she said.
The professors turned their heads as one to Gabriel. He scowled. “Why are you looking at me? She just gave you the answer.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elodie murmured.
His scowl darkened. “Yes, it does.”
“No, it really doesn’t.” She’d spent years worrying about what these men thought of her, studying all through the night so they had no cause to fail her, marrying Gabriel in the hope it would stop them from looking down their noses at her (or, more specifically, at her bosom). She’d succeeded in her career despite them—and because of herself. Because she was tenacious, and clever, and had great sources of funding. And now here she stood, an expert in disaster management, with the fate of Oxford in her hands, and they were no more than a group of old fools who discounted vital information simply because it came from a woman. She didn’t intend to waste another moment on their stupidity.
“The prime location for a defense is by the observatory,” she told them in a cool, professional tone, bringing from her skirt pocket a sketched map with calculations she and Gabriel had made during the train journey.
Abness hesitated the merest second, then took the map and perused it carefully before nodding. “That does make sense,” he admitted (mainly because he recognized Gabriel’s handwriting on the map, although he had at least enough intelligence not to confess it). “We shall get to work at once.”
This pronouncement seemed to invigorate the other professors. They set down their tankards, smoothed their mustaches, and began to rise. Chairs scraped against the floor, and Elodie squeezed Gabriel’s hand in sympathy as she watched him try not to wince at the noise.
“How long do we have?” Professor Dunning asked.
“Less than an hour,” Gabriel told him.
“Right!” Rubbing his hands together briskly, Abness looked around at his colleagues. “Summon the graduate students! Bring out the spades! And somebody get a box for this food. If we’re saving the world, we’ll be wanting snacks!”
This apparently was enough for Gabriel; he pulled Elodie from the pub without another word, as if rescuing her from certain death via the mingled odors of fried fish and mustache wax. Bright daylight swamped her vision, and when she closed her eyes against it, she saw an afterimage of herself standing in front of her peers, holding Gabriel’s hand.
Oh my God . They couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d outright shouted, We had sex in a cellar! The academia rumor network was going to go wilder than a triggered fey line. Elodie released a shaky breath, and beside her, Gabriel did the same. Their hands tightened in each other’s grip.
Then they turned to assess the northwest sky, because they might be muddled-up nitwits who couldn’t manage a sensible adult relationship, but they were also still professionals.
“Nothing yet,” Elodie said.
“Nevertheless, we need to hurry. It’s at least half an hour’s walk to Wytham.”
“Not on the velocipede,” Elodie observed, and Gabriel muttered something about preferring to literally die in a magical cataclysm than mortify himself riding that infernal machine again. Elodie would have laughed were they not on the verge of said cataclysm. But when she tugged on him, he went with her, and awkwardly mounted the velocipede behind her with the attitude of a knight preparing to sacrifice himself in battle.
Leaving the city, they followed a narrow path winding through fields toward Wytham Village, the velocipede juddering boisterously over packed dirt and pebbles. Cool breezes swept across the fields, scented with a tang of river water and the fresh sweetness of grass. The sunlight shone warm and soft on Elodie’s face. It would have been a lovely afternoon but for the sense of approaching doom that seemed to grip everything in the environment. Elodie heard no birdsong, no farm noises, no laughter of students returning from drunken gambols through the meadows. As they rode through Wytham, she noticed windows being shuttered as if the habitants sensed stormy weather. Even the sky looked like it was trying to escape, clouds swept thin by fast winds at its heights.
Past the village, farmland stretched to the northern edge of the woods some half a mile away. It was an area much studied in various university courses, so here and there among the ryegrass could be seen ranging poles, rain gauges, roped-off quadrats, and a yellow raincoat someone had left behind. Elodie and Gabriel clambered off the velocipede, and as Gabriel adjusted his trousers’ seat he gave Elodie a frown that warned against her making some provoking comment. Elodie considered teasing him nevertheless, but she could see that he was actually quite painfully frazzled by the loss of his dignity, and she did not want to cause him any more hurt. So she turned away again, all professional briskness and wifely care, to assess the horizon instead.
“Smoke,” she reported. “Somewhere near Witney, I’d say. Might be unrelated.”
“Definitely related, considering it’s blue,” Gabriel pointed out as he removed the ER kit from his back. “And the breeze is starting to pick up.” He tossed her a dowsing rod from the kit, then took out a thaumometer for himself. Shouldering the kit once more, he pushed windswept hair back from his forehead as he regarded the view. “Thankfully no one’s here.”
They began to cross the field. Both had spent many hours guiding students to investigate its natural and thaumaturgic features; as a consequence, they strode forth with calm certainty. Beneath Elodie’s confidence, however, anxiety fluttered. Would this mad plan succeed? Or was that death burning its way closer? Her usual steady optimism began to falter in the cold, fraught wind. To distract herself, she said lightly, “Someone might well be here. It’s possible to go unseen if you lie down in the long grass.”
Gabriel glanced at her askance.
“I’ve been stepped on more than once,” she explained.
“Why were you lying in the grass in the first place?” he asked in bewilderment.
She shrugged. “Just feeling the world.”
“Feeling the world,” Gabriel echoed, clearly unable to grasp the concept. “How do you quantify the results of that?”
“I don’t. I just… feel them.”
His face wrestled with confusion. “That sounds like the geographical equivalent of reading free verse.”
Elodie laughed. A friendly quiet came to rest between them, quivering ever so slightly with the possibility of more questions and sweeter discussions (should they not be killed in the next hour by an overwhelming force of magic, that is). Then Gabriel halted abruptly.
“Fey line,” he said, tapping his foot against the ground.
They looked at the unremarkable stretch of grass beneath them. Elodie pointed her dowsing rod at it, and the silver branches quivered.
“Well done,” she remarked. “I suppose you counted your steps.”
“Of course not,” Gabriel said, affronted. “I triangulated the lay of the wood’s shadow at this point in the afternoon with the position of the church tower and the willow that marks the 5-SEQ-107 deposit back there close to the stream. How do you find it?”
“Oh, the same way, for sure,” Elodie said, nodding emphatically.
Gabriel checked the thaumometer. “Two thousand and fifty conjures. Fifty-one…fifty-two…”
“It’s coming,” Elodie said. Goosebumps arose along her arms.
Setting down his kit, Gabriel withdrew from it the leather satchel containing Hereford’s artifacts. Elodie removed her opera coat, dropping it to the ground, and began rolling up her sleeves.
“Here.” Gabriel passed her a trowel. She handed him back the dowsing rod in turn, then knelt to thrust the trowel as deeply as she could into the ground.
“I feel like Merlin,” she said. “Except, you know, with a little spade instead of a sword. And dirt instead of a stone. On second thought, ignore me.”
“Right,” Gabriel said absentmindedly. He was holding the thaumometer over the leather satchel. One eyebrow arched.
“Good reading?” Elodie asked.
“Off the scale.”
Thus encouraged, she began digging with heightened vigor, creating a trench that dissected the surface of the fey line. Once she had it deep enough, she used her hands to brush away dirt and roots. Gabriel crouched to prop the charter, writ, and prayer book upright in the space she had created, establishing an unassuming and unlikely barricade.
“Paper to stop a torrent of supercharged earth magic,” he said with disbelief.
“Enchanted paper,” Elodie reminded him cheerfully.
“This will either work or make the situation immeasurably worse.”
“Well, we having nothing to lose at this point.”
Gabriel frowned, biting his lip. “We should have brought gold artifacts from the Ashmolean.”
“We didn’t have time,” Elodie said. “And I’m sure the other professors will be adding some to the secondary defense.”
In fact, she harbored doubts about whether that defense would prove effective, given that none of the professors were emergency specialists; indeed, their experience of disaster generally involved eight a.m. lectures and the faculty lounge running out of tea.
“Besides,” she said, more in an effort to encourage herself than anything, “using items from Oxford itself might draw the magic into the city, rather than repel it. These papers belong to Hereford, so if Lazaar’s theory about sympathetic attraction is right, they will send the magic back that way, and then momentum should keep it going on to D?lylleuad.”
“Hm,” Gabriel responded, in lieu of pointing out that Elodie gave a lecture last year rebutting Lazaar’s ideas.
She shrugged, for she’d happily be proven wrong under the circumstances, and moreover journey out to Morocco to shake Professor Lazaar’s hand in a formal apology. After all, if the Hereford artifacts failed, their power would be added to the cascade before it sped into Oxford, absorbing the university’s hoards of thaumaturgic items and racing on down the line to London. People now strolling blithely through that grand city…playing with their children…holding hands with their beloved…were going to be obliterated before they even understood themselves to be in peril.
Her stomach lurched, and she looked instinctively to Gabriel. In that same moment, his gaze rose from the Magna Carta to meet hers. They stared at each other, worry and hope and exhaustion mingling in the narrow space between them. Gabriel’s eyes were all the synonyms for darkness Elodie had come up with these past couple of days. She could feel her own shine bright in turn. Smiling, she bounced her eyebrows.
“We’re all set.”
“Hm,” Gabriel answered, his eyebrows hunching.
They stood, moving several yards aside from the barricade. Each hooked gold-charmed iron around their left ear before turning as one to look along the line.
The smoke over Witney had dispersed into a cerulean haze that stained the sky with fear. Wind rattled the world.
“I owe you an apology,” Elodie said suddenly—out of the blue, as it were.
“Oh?” Gabriel responded, not shifting his gaze from the horizon.
“I didn’t mean what I said on our wedding day.”
He was silent for a few nerve-racking seconds, then he asked with apparent nonchalance, “Your vows?”
Oh God, this was why she shouldn’t be left unsupervised with a conversation! At once, Elodie shook her head. “No! No, not at all. When I said I’d got what I wanted from our deal. I only meant to sympathize with you about losing the house.”
“Oh.” Gabriel blinked, his shoulders relaxing. “I did wonder.”
“You did?” Elodie tried not to frown as she turned to look at him, apocalypse momentarily forgotten. “So why didn’t you just ask, instead of walking away?”
“I was afraid,” he admitted with a slight half shrug. “I didn’t want things between us to end, and I’m—I’m not good at personal discussions. I thought I might ruin everything.” He huffed dryly at how that had turned out.
“Well, I thought I had ruined everything,” Elodie said, tapping her chest with a little too much fervor and causing a tiny sharp pain to her heart. “And I was too scared to talk to you about it in case I made matters even worse.”
Gabriel looked at her finally, a dark, wry regret in his eyes. “It seems we both could have used some courage,” he said.
Elodie’s pulse leaped, tossing a sardonic laugh from her throat. “Courage or a basic ability to communicate. We could have solved everything with one conversation .”
“Apparently.”
“Well, damn. What is it that people call us, again?”
“You mean ‘geniuses’?” Gabriel suggested.
“Hm,” she said darkly.
“Hm,” he agreed.
In stunned silence, they turned back to stare along the fey line. The sky beyond Wytham Woods was turning cyanic, the lambent blue speckled with dazzling silver and gold as if laughing at them. Elodie felt much the same way within herself.
“Twinkles,” she said.
“Eruptive thaumaturgic scintillations,” Gabriel corrected her automatically.
“Pretty,” she countered.
He looked at her. “Yes,” he said. And then he smiled.
Elodie stared back at him, enraptured. The smile was real, fond, unafraid. It softened his face and lit his eyes with a warm reflection of his heart, and it sent delight melting like honey and slow kisses all through Elodie. She wanted to reach up and touch it, but her fingers were dirty from having dug the trench, and she knew Gabriel wouldn’t appreciate them on his mouth. She knew him . Every line of his face was familiar to her, every smooth plane that she’d watched strengthen over the years.
You’re mine, she thought. From the corner of her eye she could see leaves explode from the woods’ canopy. Beneath her feet she felt the ground tremble. And part of her mind noted with sensible anxiety that she had seconds until the line cascade slammed into their paper barricade.
But the rest of her was absorbed in the truth that had been her magnetic north for the whole of her adult life. And if this moment were to be the last she ever had, she wanted it filled with that truth.
“I love you,” she said.
Gabriel closed his eyes, opened them again like night giving way to dawn. His smile wavered a little with emotion, then deepened.
And the magic arrived.