“I wish I was back in bed,” Algernon grumbled, flicking a raisin into a mud puddle.
Gabriel never wasted mental energy on regrets, but now found himself wishing quite fervently that he’d snuck out at dawn before anyone else was awake, as he’d originally planned.
And yet…had he done that, he’d have missed the rare experience of waking to comfort. At first, he’d supposed it to be a dream, such as he’d had often enough over the past year; the kind of poignant but beloved dream of cuddling with Elodie in all her violet-scented warmth, making him linger, eyes closed and heart sighing contentedly, before he surrendered at last to the cold morning emptiness of his bed. He’d imagined kissing her sweet face, and perhaps even doing more (e.g., jointly composing a scientific paper that described spatiotemporal pattern analysis of thaumaturgic mineral degradation’s effects on ombrotrophic vegetation in Scottish peat bogs)…
And then he’d woken fully, abruptly, to realize it was no dream at all.
Except that shewasa living kind of dream, this wife of his. Glancing at her now, almost forgetting to frown as he took in the generous curve of her smile, and her heavenly eyes glittering with joy, and even the tangled, dirt-speckled flowers in her alabaster hair, he could only think that she looked too ethereally beautiful for corporeal reality.
Which was a problem, since he was a geographer. Hisentire existence focused on interpreting the world in ordinary, systematic, prosaic terms. The last thing he needed was someone in his life turning what ought to be a straightforward journey into a wonder-filled ramble.
Gabriel concluded that there was only one thing he could do under the circumstances: he marched on, leaving the incorrigible woman behind. (Algernon did not rate an inclusion in this decision, and Gabriel had already forgotten the tourist’s name.) He worriednot even slightlythat Elodie might be upset by this. His elevated pulse rate was due to the physical exercise alone.
Within five brisk, efficient minutes he had reached the abandoned mine site beneath which lay the thaumaturgic reservoir. When Elodie and the others wandered in three minutes later, they discovered him standing among the remnants of broken buildings and rusted equipment in the shadow of a small wooded hill, scowling at the gauges and levels on his handheld thaumometer.
“What is it?” Elodie asked, instantly professional despite the petals drifting from her hair.
“Nothing,” he said.
“It looks like something, judging by your expression,” she insisted.
“It is.Nothing. No thaumaturgical energy signal whatsoever.”
She frowned. “That’s impossible.” Bringing out her own thaumometer from a skirt pocket, she consulted its readings, and her eyebrows rose at least as much as the gauges’ needles ought to have been doing. “Huh. Nothing. Quantity—pressure—velocity—all flat. The well appears to have gone dry.”
“Aren’t we at a mine shaft, not a well?” the tourist asked as he tried to peer over Elodie’s shoulder at the thaumometer. Hewas so close, his breath stirred the fine threads of hair that had slipped down about her face.
Mumbers,Gabriel remembered. The man with pleurisy. Gabriel knew a cure for that:I’ll rip out your lungs if you don’t fucking step away from my wife.
“The shaft contains a subterranean pool of magic-charged water,” Elodie said, slipping adroitly from Mumbers’s shadow. The sunlight embraced her at once like a lover, gilding her body. (Gabriel had never before been jealous of the sun, and he wasn’t now either, of course; he merely noted the phenomenon.) “Most such places lie dormant,” she continued to explain, “unless weather or human activity impinge upon them, or the land collapses, or there’s been activity farther along the fey line, causing a cascade—”
“Fey line?” Mumbers asked, the words rolling on his tongue and igniting wonder in his gaze, as if he was internally composing a poem on the subject. Gabriel found his own eyes narrowing as he watched.
“An imaginary line that runs between deposits of magic beneath the land,” Elodie explained. She sounded enthused, and Gabriel couldn’t really fault her for that. A young person’s interest in learning was like manna for teachers.
“For example,” she continued, “the 5-SEQ—Britain’s fifth southeast quadrant line, which is the line this reservoir sits on—travels southeast across Britain from the Welsh coast and through London before it peters out. It’s quite weighted, by which I mean there are many deposits of significant size along it. That’s rare, and makes it a powerful line. But this particular deposit was only discovered by miners eighty years ago, after they were transformed briefly into mice, and it hasn’t been especially active until now.”
“So, if this is a pool, then magic is in water?” Mumbers ventured. “Or is it an elfin grot, wherein dwells a fair lady with wild wild eyes?”
Elodie laughed, delighted at this odd notion, her own eyes shining bright. Sudden pain snapped through Gabriel, startling him. He realized he was smacking his weather station against his thigh. “May I speak to you for a moment, Dr. Tarrant?” he said in a clipped voice.
“Mm hm,” Elodie answered, but then went right on talking, like a pebble caught in a flow of—of—(Gabriel’s brain twisted, attempting a melodic metaphor)—grotty elfin water. “No, magic exists within certain minerals, under certain conditions,” she told Mumbers patiently. “You’ll have to ask a geologist for a detailed explanation, but I can tell you that some of these minerals are dissolved in water or soil, others embedded in rocks. Early scientists recognized dispersal patterns and connections between deposits, and maps of those were created, hence the fey lines. Because they generally form radiant seams through the earth’s crust, we call them lines, although a few are more like wiggles—”
“Wiggles,”Gabriel muttered disbelievingly.
Elodie glanced at him, all flashing fairy eyes and tilted-up chin; all flowery and kissable, and damn he wished something in the vicinity would explode before he injured his brain permanently, trying to come up with poetic descriptions for the woman. Poetic! As if he’d been educated at a community college!
“A simple vocabulary helps people feel less daunted,” Elodie said in an arch tone.
Gabriel was willing to accept that pedagogical theory, although he didn’t subscribe to it himself. But he knew it wasn’tthe true reason why she spoke so casually. He knewher. She simply, unselfconsciously brought the same ebullience to her lectures that she did to everything else in life. And she was clearly more at ease talking with the rhapsodical Mr. Mumbers than with him.
She was never at ease with him.
The thought was like a punch beneath his heart. Mortified, he turned on a heel and strode purposefully across the mine site. Not running away. Just departing with precipitous intent to be gone.
—
Elodie stared atGabriel’s retreating back, frustrated and hurt. Did he have to make his dislike of her quite so evident? And did she have to care about it so much?
