Chapter One
Speak softly and carry a big telescope.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
Oxford, 1890
A geographer behaves withquiet dignity at all times. Elodie Tarrant had been informed of this maxim by many professors over the years, and she took great pains to impress it upon her own students. Britain’s surveyors and mapmakers must be known for their decorum so they are not known for their trespassing and shot at. Consequently, Elodie had chosen to cycle to the Oxford train station that morning, rather than run along the streets—walking in a dignified manner being out of the question, considering how late she was.
And this would have been entirely commendable, except for the small but not untrivial matter of her bicycle being a steam-powered velocipede.
Anyone not immediately witness to the spectacle of a helmet-clad woman perched upon a rickety wheeled contraption, with steam clouds billowing around her and a long, unbuttoned tweed coat billowing behind, was alerted to it by the loud rattling, tooting, and random belches of the machine. Atleast her skirt did not billow—but as this was because she had it knotted up around her knees, thus revealing her stocking-clad legs, it rather failed to argue in favor of dignity.
“Faster!” she urged the vehicle, as though doing so might make some difference to its speed. “It will be a disaster if I miss that train!”
She spoke literally. News had arrived yesterday that, following a large storm, magic was afoot in Wales, igniting trees and sending sheep airborne. The Home Office had called upon Professor Tarrant to manage the crisis. Being one of Britain’s foremost specialists in exigent thaumaturgic geographic dynamics (otherwise known as “magical mayhem” to people who valued their vocal cords), Elodie received many such requests, and usually delegated them to graduate students. But with the Michaelmas term still a week away, Elodie rather fancied a few days in the autumnal countryside.
Besides, there existed a small chance that this job would indeed require her advanced expertise. The site—Dôlylleuad, a minor village ten miles east of the Welsh coastline—contained a deposit of subterranean thaumaturgical minerals marked as a level five trove on the Geographic Paranormal Survey map, which recorded all known sources of earth magic, along with the fey lines that connected them in a complex web around the world. Level five indicated minerals powerful enough to send dangerous sorcerous energy down the line to Oxford and its various libraries just waiting to explode, then on to London, where an incursion of wild magic would have cataclysmic results.
Immediately, Elodie had packed a suitcase, postponed her milk delivery, and organized to catch the earliest morning train to Wales. It was the perfect rapid response.
At least, up until the part where she forgot to set her alarm clock.
Arriving at Oxford Station with less than ten minutes to spare, she parked the velocipede and was untying the suitcase from its luggage tray when a young man approached, mustache trembling on his thin brown face as he hugged a clipboard of papers.
“Professor Tarrant?” he peeped.
“Ah, there you are, Motthers.” Elodie turned to him with a brisk nod. He took in her entirely rational ensemble of coat, white shirtwaist, and gray skirt, and then her altogether irrational stockings exposed to general view (one black French lace, the other green, embroidered with flowers), and he winced so deeply his neck disappeared. “Is everything prepared?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I have the emergency response kit, two tickets for the train, and a plentiful supply of sandwiches.”
Elodie waited…
“Ham with cheese,” he clarified.
She grinned. “Well done.” Removing the helmet, she shook out her long, pale blonde hair. It tumbled down in reckless waves—magical hair, literally, having been mousy brown until, at age thirteen, she swam in a moonlit lake she hadabsolutely no ideawas enchanted. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, sweeping wayward strands from her face. “I overslept, then I started wondering during breakfast about how Persephone went for nine days in the underworld before eating the pomegranate seeds, and I quite lost track of time. Do you know?”
“Know what, Professor?” Motthers asked warily.
“How she survived all that time without even drinking water, of course.”
“Um.”
“Never mind. I’ll ask someone from the classics department when I get back.” She hung the helmet on the velocipede’s handlebars and began to gather up her hair, looking around as if clips might appear midair for her convenience. Then she noticed Motthers’s dazed stare. “What?”
“T-ticket, ma’am,” he said, holding it out in a trembling hand. Elodie took it from him, her hair tumbling down again.
“Much obliged.”
But Motthers was not done with trembling. “There’s, um, a small problem.”
“Oh?” Elodie asked, not really listening as she inspected the ticket. It provisioned her with a second class seat from Oxford to Aberystwyth, after which she and Motthers would take a hired carriage to Dôlylleuad. This was altogether a journey of several long, dull hours, but Elodie didn’t mind, feeling that tedium was best described as an opportunity for imagination.
“Just a very small problem,” Motthers persisted. “Which is to say, quite large actually, and—and—problematic.”
“Uh-huh.” Elodie experienced so many problems in her profession that they had to be literal disasters before she started worrying. Motthers, however, was only a master’s degree student, and had not yet been caught in a raging flood, let alone outrun fiery boulders that chased him uphill. He needed several more catastrophes under his belt before he developed perspective. As a result, his voice tried to hide behind his tonsils when next he spoke.
“You recall how the telegram yesterday requested aid from Professor Tarrant?”
