Chapter Twenty-Two
You’re already where you want to go.
Getting there is part of being there.
Blazing Trails , W.H. Jackson
The land above the fey line buckled and groaned as if an enormous subterranean snake were moving through the field. Grass and dirt exploded, sparking with thaumaturgic energy. The wind began to scream.
Elodie and Gabriel tensed, not even daring to breathe, while their clothes and hair swirled in the leaf-strewn wind and the ground shook beneath their feet. Two and a half miles behind them, Oxford stood in a calm that made Elodie’s heart ache. The power racing toward the little paper barricade was enormous. It would bring the beautiful old city absolutely to ruins.
The plan’s going the fail, Elodie thought with a sudden rush of horror. She needed to think of a better solution in the next three seconds.
But there wasn’t even that much time. The cascade slammed into the barricade.
With a hollow roar, the air shuddered. Translucent flames of raw magical energy whipped at the documents; earth cracked, fissures ripping through the grass.
Elodie tried to inhale a calm, professional breath, but it shook wild and hot down her throat. “The barricade’s not going to hold!” she warned Gabriel, shouting through windblown strands of her hair.
“It will!” he shouted in reply, even as the thaumometer in his hand began to smoke. Cursing, he tossed it away, and they both flinched as it burst apart midair, scraps of metal becoming black dragonflies with wings of flame. The cascade howled in response. Enormous weeds began shooting up from the cracked earth, their jagged leaves snapping at the dragonflies and long stems slashing the air.
“It’s not going to hold!” Gabriel conceded.
Elodie looked around desperately as if something nearby might help. But grass and wooden marker poles offered no hope, and while the yellow raincoat might have some application, Elodie could not immediately think of what. The prayer book was rising out of the trench, its pages flapping. The King’s Writ was aflame.
Elodie wedged a knuckle between her teeth and began to gnaw at it. But magical luminescence flared against her wedding ring and she winced, snatching the hand away…then lifted it again to stare at it wide-eyed. Or, more specifically, at the ring of thaumaturgic gold.
“No,” Gabriel said instantly, guessing her thoughts.
“Yes,” Elodie argued, tugging at the ring. “Or, at least, maybe. It’s worth a try! After all, it stopped the thaumaturgic bomb outside D?lylleuad.”
“Ignis fatuus is nothing compared to this!” he shouted. Black hair streaked his brow like anger; the wind tore his voice apart. “It’s too much risk, Elodie!”
“I don’t need to get close. I can just toss it into the trench.” She waved her hand in demonstration.
And the magic caught it. Elodie was yanked off her feet so fast, the world seemed to blur around her. She cried out with shock, arms flailing as if she might be able to grab handfuls of air and stop herself. But the thaumaturgic force was inescapable. Mercilessly it dragged her toward the cascade.
“Ellie!”
She barely heard Gabriel’s alarmed shout as blood and enchanted wind thundered in her ears. He grabbed her legs, wrapping his arms around them and digging his heels into the ground so as to anchor her. But magic buffeted them both, howling, wrenching, and even Gabriel’s arrogant, determined strength failed. He stumbled, cursing vehemently. And then he too was being pulled into the danger zone.
“Let go!” Elodie yelled.
“No!” With the power of desperation, he managed a step backward, and then another, hauling them into retreat. You’re mine, he’d said, and Elodie was beginning to believe that he actually meant it. And she thought that maybe, incredibly, he would be able to defy the force of an entire fey line in cascade.
But the ground ripped open beneath his feet, emitting gusts of pure, feral magic that shoved him off-balance, and immediately he was sucked into the air. Using what Elodie could only suppose was the might of stubbornness, he managed to keep hold of her, and together they were dragged toward the raging magic that crashed and crashed against the shuddering barricade.
Now Elodie was angry. No stupid, zappy rock was going to take her Gabriel! Grasping the wedding ring, she tried to pull it free. But since the moment Gabriel had placed the band on her finger, she’d never removed it, and now it would not budge past her knuckle. She tugged and twisted it desperately, thinking that her finger might break in the effort. That was the least of her problems, of course; indeed, if she could deliberately break the finger, and so get the ring off, she would do so without hesitation. But with no way of achieving that, she resorted to placing it in her mouth and sucking. After all, as she’d said to Gabriel, dignity was not a priority in a disaster.
The tactic worked: with its path thus lubricated, the ring at last came free. Elodie held it out like an offering, and the magic grabbed it away.
As if a thread snapped, she and Gabriel dropped to the ground only one yard’s distance from where the cascade rioted against the barricade.
BOOM.
A shock wave smashed into them. Elodie clung to the shuddering earth and Gabriel clung to her, and if she feared that he was going to restrict the blood flow to her feet, this seemed an inopportune moment to complain. The world screamed in agony. Then abruptly—
Silence.
Elodie held still for a moment, just in case the magic turned around and said, Fooled you! before exploding over her. But the stark, blank silence eased into a gentle quiet, and finally she knew she was safe. Her breath staggered out of her lungs and collapsed dramatically with exhaustion and relief.
Gabriel dragged himself up next to her. “Are you all right?” he asked, brushing the hair away from her face. Elodie turned on her side, smiling weakly at him.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But only in the British sense. Every fiber of me hurts.”
“Poor girl,” he murmured, still stroking her hair.
“And you?”
“Fine,” he said. And when she looked dubious—“I’m not caught in the center of a cascading fey line; anything else is absolutely fine.”
“Good point. Is it done?”
They both tilted their heads to see…nothing. A field of grass bathed in late afternoon sunlight. A somnolent woodland thick with shadows against the tranquil western horizon. From somewhere nearby, small birds of the meadow recommencing a cheerful melody.
“I knew it would work!” Elodie said triumphantly. Gabriel scoffed, and she smacked his arm without looking. “Gentlemen don’t point out ladies’ little exaggerations.”
“Ladies don’t call bald-faced lies ‘exaggerations,’?” he answered, but humor tinged his voice, making Elodie think for a brief, mad moment that she had been more affected by the magic than she appreciated and was now experiencing auditory hallucinations.
They waited for half a minute to be sure no further eruptions were likely to occur, then went back to more important matters: each propping their head up on a hand, they gazed at the other, watching mesmerized as emotions burgeoned in their eyes.
“Say it again,” Gabriel commanded, his words a dark, hoarse whisper.
“I knew it would work,” Elodie repeated.
“No, the other thing.”
He stroked gentle fingers across her cheek, which was very nice but also distracted her from clear thinking. “What other thing?”
“You know.”
Oh. That thing. She grinned. “I love you.”
He lowered his eyelashes, blushing sweetly, but she hadn’t finished. “I’ve loved you from the very start, Gabriel Tarrant. The first time I saw you, I wanted you so much I tripped over my own feet and made a mess of everything.”
He contemplated her for a long, thoughtful moment, then suddenly rose to his feet. Elodie did not have enough time to feel bereft before he was reaching down and taking hold of her hands, pulling her up in one strong, easy motion. She swayed, hair tumbling around her, heart not sure which way was up. Still holding her hands, Gabriel stepped closer, as if he thought she might suddenly make a run for it. And, Elodie had to admit, as her pulse thundered and her eyes grew wide, he wasn’t entirely wrong. So much of her life had been about escaping, in dreams and books and out of windows, that she didn’t quite know how to stay.
But Gabriel just stood there as if he’d found his place, marked a claim, and never intended to leave. “You didn’t make a mess,” he told her, stern and austere, the way he always was in his first lecture of the year, so his students knew they could trust what he taught them. “Well, you did, but it was like a fresh breeze. You brought me wild joy in a life that had always been about safety, and excellent school marks, and mapping my every step exactly. Ellie, my sunshine, I loved you that first day when you tripped right into my heart, and I’ve loved you every moment since.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s always been you for me. No one else, ever. You’re in every dawn I watch rising over cities and fields. You’re in everything I do and dream. You are the heart of the world for me.”
Delight cascaded through Elodie, spilling over as a jittery laugh from her throat. “Oh my, Professor Tarrant. You can indeed talk in poetry.”
“I must have hit my head when we fell,” he grumbled.
She grinned. “You’re mine , Gabriel. I love you with all my soul.”
Which wasn’t a declaration anywhere near as gorgeous as his had been, but she could not seem to summon better words. They had all turned to love, love, love .
So instead she just stared at her husband with the fierce adoration she felt for him, utterly, indescribably beloved man that he was. And as if she’d willed it into being, a smile blossomed, gentle and ravishing, from his solemn expression. He lowered his head, and she raised hers, and they kissed, there in the ruins of the magical explosion.
“Elodie Tarrant, you are so beautiful,” Gabriel whispered against her lips. It sounded like he was commenting on a map that bore a clear visual hierarchy: passionate, intense, leaving her breathless. “That fact is far more real than some poem.”
“Gosh,” she sighed as dreamily as any Miss Trevallion. Hearing herself, she rolled her eyes with exasperation, then glanced around at the grass surrounding them. “I could have sworn I left my intelligence around here somewhere.”
But her levity faded as she saw the long black scars in the land. “Bloody hell, we’re lucky to be alive.”
“Hm,” Gabriel agreed.
They shifted apart, although only by inches, and turned to assess the fey line. It lay quiet, with only a length of charred and broken earth to show that it had been violently active minutes before. The woods were unstirred. And northwest, where low sunlight blanched the horizon, there existed no sign of smoke or magic.
And yet, Elodie thought of the energy that was now rebounding up the line. Would it squelch vulnerabilities as it went, or cause even more turbulence?
“We need to get to a telegraph station,” Gabriel said a second before she was about to suggest the same thing. “If things don’t go as we expect, D?lylleuad’s going to require more help than Professor Jackson can give it.”
“And if they do go as expected, the village will require help being rid of him before he causes new mayhem,” Elodie added, making Gabriel snort with amusement. “We should also check our own lot haven’t burned down the observatory in their effort to build a defense.”
She turned toward where the velocipede stood at the edge of the field, but Gabriel caught her wrist. When she gave him an inquiring look, he frowned.
“There’s something I need to do before anything else,” he said.
“Oh yes, I forgot about the Hereford artifacts.” Elodie bit her lip guiltily as she looked at the paper strewn about the grass.
“More important than that.”
“Confirm the stability of the terminal point?”
“No.”
“Clean up the litter that your broken thaumometer—”
“Ellie.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, then apparently managed to restore his briefly lost patience, for he smiled at her. “Just stay there, all right?”
Elodie nodded, thinking that she could certainly get used to those sweet, shy, heart-melting smiles of his. She watched him cross to the barricade and crouch down to inspect its tumult of dirt and charred grass. The ravaged prayer book lay open some distance away, the King’s Writ in its charred leather sleeve nearby. The scroll of the Magna Carta was half-buried inside the shattered trench. Gabriel pulled it free, checked that the casing was still intact, then tossed it aside with all the heedlessness of a geographic scientist for whom history meant tree rings and river sediments. Then he stood, brushing dirt from something small in his cupped hand.
Her wedding ring . A breath of riotous emotion spilled from Elodie, and Gabriel looked over, his expression daring her to flee.
Instantly Elodie responded by lifting her chin and staring at him with magnificent hauteur. His mouth twitched, and she could have sworn she saw a hint of swagger as he walked back to her. It made her grin. By gods, she loved him, egotism and all.
An arm’s length away, he stopped as if meeting some hard boundary, and he held out the ring before him. It was completely unharmed by having blocked an ultrapowerful cascade of devastatingly lethal magic; indeed, its thaumaturgic gold seemed to dazzle even more gloriously. Elodie had never before seen a piece of jewelry look quite so smug.
“To think,” she mused, “one ring saved the world.”
“Well, Oxford,” Gabriel amended.
“And London,” she added.
He shrugged as if the fate of the great city was neither here nor there in his conscience. “So…” he said.
“So,” Elodie agreed.
“You’re going to want me to kneel.” He made it sound like she required him to dance naked through the university grounds, singing of his love for her.
“I made no such suggestion,” she said.
“It’s proper.”
Now Elodie was the one to shrug. “Just be yourself, Gabriel.”
“Hm.” He seemed dubious as to the wisdom of this. “You’ll be able to fix me over time, I’m sure.”
She shook her head earnestly. “You don’t need fixing.”
“I agree.”
Elodie had to quickly bite her tongue to keep from calling him an arrogant sod considering he was, after all, in the middle of attempting a romantic scene. That would be undignified of her at the least, and at the most it would make a terrible mess of…
“Arrogant sod,” she said, nudging his foot with hers.
He just looked at her complacently. Then he took a deep breath, and Elodie held her own. This was it. The impossible dream, actually coming true.
But he paused, and Elodie watched as his jaw clenched. She sensed that he was waging a silent, internal battle against the spikiness that protected him from what everyone assumed was general botheration but she had come to understand was a painful sensitivity. He really needed to exist in a microhabitat, this darling grouchy man of hers, and the fact that he went about in the greater world teaching people, addressing conferences, and riding velocipedes when needed, despite the constant assaults on his tender spirit, made him heroic in her eyes.
“Don’t kneel,” she urged with a burst of feeling. “I don’t want a grand gesture. I want you .”
He looked through his eyelashes at her in that devastating way he had, all midnight and secrets. “Here,” he said abruptly, holding the ring out. “Will you be my wife?”
There was no need to ponder it. “Yes,” she answered with a radiant smile. Gabriel took her hand with exquisite gentleness and slid the ring back on where it belonged. Then, while Elodie’s heart pulled her intellect into an exuberant waltz, he lifted the hand and kissed it.
Oh my, she thought, going warm and sparkling. Who needed grand gestures when a man did things like that?
“I hope you don’t have many possessions,” he grumbled, fastidiously turning the ring as if there were some exact place on the plain gold band that should face outward. “My lodgings are not expansive.”
“We should live at my place,” she answered, practically singing the words, so joyful did she feel. “It’s quite sizable, and I have only one neighbor, a venerable old lady who is so silent you’d never know she—”
Suddenly Gabriel pulled her into his arms and kissed her with all the fervor of a man who had waited years for this moment: love, and quiet accommodation! A soft breeze swirled around them as if in benediction. Sheets of ancient illuminated paper drifted on it, and as one brushed Elodie’s leg, she broke away from the kiss to watch anxiously as it tumbled away across the grass. “Oh dear, Amelia is going to be so cross.”
“Please don’t talk about my sister while I’m kissing you,” Gabriel said, and possessed her mouth again with determination. Such a tyrant, Elodie thought, and let herself sink into the delight of it.
“Oh my God, I’m going to be sick!”
The sudden exclamation made them look around irritably. Some twenty feet away a young man was sitting up the long grass, wine bottle in one hand and hair fallen over half his face. Elodie recognized him as a student from her Dynamic Geography course (subtitled When Things Go Boom). He swayed, his throat lurching with nausea, then jolted as he realized two university professors were standing nearby, watching him. His face went white as he sobered instantaneously.
“Dr. Tarrant!” he said, voice shaking like a triggered fey line. “What are you doing here?”
“Canoodling with my husband,” Elodie answered at the same moment Gabriel growled, “Saving Oxford, young man.” Each shot a look of exasperation at the other, but their eyes gleamed.
“See, I told you so,” Elodie said, grinning. “If you lie in the long grass, no one notices you.”
“?‘Feeling the world,’?” Gabriel muttered with disapproval.
She shrugged. “Hiding from students.”
At that, unexpectedly, Gabriel laughed.
And the whole world sighed dreamily at the sound of it.