Please,she begged her heart.Stop feeling.
To which her heart responded by sending up a mist of tears, turning the world silvery and vague, as if it were drowning in unhappiness. But Elodie never cried in front of people (apart from that one time when she was lecturing about Mount Vesuvius’s eruption) (and also when Mr. Durbent explained he was late handing in his essay because his beloved grandmother had died) (and when her students gave her a cake for her birthday) (and at the end of each term). So she blinked furiously, pulled the flowers from her hair, and marched after Gabriel. After all, she trulywasa professional, whatever he might think, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t accidentally whack him in the face with her weather station from a distance.
He was standing before the padlocked double doors of a hut that sheltered the mine shaft, and as Elodie came alongsidehim, he kicked one of them. This had no effect besides rattling the padlock and making Elodie’s nerves leap.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“There’s no damage,” Elodie said.
“Except to my toes,” Gabriel answered sardonically. He shoved a hand through his hair, looking like a man on the verge of doing something wild and furious, such as dog-earing the page of an atlas.
“I meant the site,” Elodie said, cool and businesslike. “There’s no storm damage. The initial report said bad weather triggered the magical events plaguing Dôlylleuad, but where is the evidence? None here—and none along the road to here,” she added with a pointed look. Gabriel returned it silently, his own expression barricaded. “No magical char either, no liquefaction, no buildings turned into trees,” she plowed on. “Considering the degree of thaumaturgic activity reported, I’d expect to see consequences in the primary zone. But there’snothinghere, as you said.”
“Good heavens, you agree with something I said?” Gabriel remarked dryly. “Yet I know that music has a far more pleasing—uh—noise.”
Elodie blinked at him. “What?”
The barricade seemed to develop spikes. And cauldrons of burning tar in his eyes. “What?” he echoed defensively.
She blinked again, astonished. “Did you just try to quote Shakespeare?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabriel snapped, flushing.
Her heart, which had been lifting at the thought of her professional curmudgeon of a husband attempting poetry, now came down with a resounding thud. She half turned awayfrom him, glaring at the dusty weeds and empty buildings. “Not the smallest spark of magic,” she declared.
Gabriel tipped his gaze skyward, squinting fiercely. “Nothing stirring at all.”
Then they looked at each other again, like compasses turning inevitably to magnetic north. Elodie felt misery shadow her eyes. Gabriel blinked as if the light hurt him.
“I know the magic exists, though,” she said, her voice growing as quiet and dry as the landscape around them.
“It does,” he agreed.
They went on looking, not talking, until at last Elodie tugged her gaze away once more. Gabriel frowned at his thaumometer.
“There’s nothing underground either,” he said, “according to this reading.”
“Perhaps the energy disseminated at a velocity that minimized damage here,” Elodie suggested. “It also might have exhausted the lode, which would explain our zero readings. But there is a real sense of this place being…”
“Derelict,” Gabriel said.
“Dead as a dodo,” she said at the same time.
And somehow they were looking at each other again. Elodie expected another comment about her idiomatic language, but instead she saw amusement twitch at the corner of Gabriel’s mouth. Her heart did a double take. Gabriel quickly turned away, his profile severe against the blank sky, leaving her to conclude that she’d witnessed no more than a trick of the light. She did not sigh then, but she did exhale rather heavily.
“I’m going to investigate further,” she said, and left before he could reply.
But an hour’s walking around poking at weeds, taking measurements, ignoring Algernon’s complaints about boredom and Mumbers getting in the way as he composed sonnets about the various broken pieces of mine equipment ultimately brought them back to where they had started: standing side by side, trying hard not to look at each other.
“This site is exhausted,” Gabriel said.
Elodie nodded, which accidentally brought her gaze in line with Gabriel’s sun-gilded profile. “All the evidence does suggest as much.”
“Hm.” Gabriel ran a hand through his hair, which resulted purely by chance in him facing her. “The recent crisis must have been caused by an—”
“Undiscovered thaumaturgic deposit,”they chorused. A thrill twinkled between them. Elodie was unable to repress a grin, although she dug her heels into the ground to keep herself from leaping forward and hugging Gabriel in excitement. He seemed equally excited, his mouth straight and brow unfurrowed.
“My calculations placed the trajectory of yesterday’s energy burst six hundred yards west of here,” he said, squinting in that direction. The land bulged gently, covered with an oak wood whose lush autumnal canopy appeared to smolder in the sunlight. Regarding it intently, Gabriel frowned, and Elodie knew he was seeing not trees but angles and inches. “I propose we move west and see if we can pick up thaumaturgic resonance in that direction.”
