“Be careful!” Algernon called out weakly from where he was propping himself up, white-faced, on the ground.
Elodie gave him a radiant smile. Disaster burned behind her, disaster raged ahead, but all she knew was delight. Gabriel had laughed (possibly) (probably not) (but she was going to pretend it really had happened). “Don’t worry about us,” she told Algernon gaily. “This is our job. We’ll be perfectly safe.”
“You’d better be!” the young accountant answered. “It will cost a bloody fortune to transport your bodies back to Oxford!”
“Let’s go,” Gabriel said. Then, without further word, he broke into a run.
“See you later!” Elodie said, waving to the others. And while they stared open-mouthed, she sprinted away from them, following Gabriel right off the edge of the hill into a silver-veined sky.
Chapter Eleven
A thaumaturgic geographer needs to be skilled
in mathematics, analytics, and running like hell.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
When Elodie wasa child, she considered geography the most boring subject ever known to humankind. Traipsing endlessly around the countryside with her parents, dependent on the kindness of their various assistants to compensate for a lack of other children’s company, she’d sought entertainment in the splendors of nature, spending hours lying in the long grass dreaming as tiny winged insects flittered like sparks of wonder above her…rummaging through forest shadows…gathering wildflowers that she wove into crowns and necklaces more beautiful than jewels. But whenever the adults in her life looked up from their work and belatedly remembered her, they turned the grass-scented dreams into lessons on soil characteristics, tore the flowers apart to explain their components, and reduced nature’s magic to a series of numbers, charts, and long, somber conversations at dinner parties while she struggled to stay awake. For the first ten years of her life, geography equaled tedium.
And then they taught her how to fly.
—
The gleaming rayof thaumaturgic power streaming out from the monolith on the hilltop to the field below sang beneath Elodie’s feet as she raced along it, high above the meadows, angling steadily toward the ground. It was the sound of energy and wind and joy. It was exultant magic chiming with her every step. She had learned as a girl how to assess the intensity of these kinds of thaumaturgic beams, to calculate their density, and to make a sensible judgment as to whether they were safe enough, despite their bright translucence, to support her weight. The math went on inside her brain, effortlessly rapid, even as she ran right off the edge of the hill. But her spirit, empty of all good sense, just soared.
Air whooshed against her and she flung out her arms, palms facing forward to scoop the cool sweep of it, hair flying behind her, skirt billowing. The land blurred like a dream of green and gold. She closed her eyes, and life hollowed out to pure freedom, flashing with light through her inner darkness. Her heart seemed to expand as if it would become a new sun for the ensorcelled sky. Any moment, she might misstep and tumble to her death, but Elodie couldn’t find it in herself to fear. More than magic, she felt like she was running on sheer passion.
Only some four or five seconds later—barely any time at all, if you think about it, and therefore notcompletelyreckless—she opened her eyes once more and saw Gabriel standing already on the ground, facing her with his arms crossed and exasperated frown in its usual place. Elodie could just imagine the safety regulations that were ticking over in his brain. Shegrinned, waving to him. And although he was too far away to hear, she just knew he responded with a tetchy “hm.”
The beam began to angle more steeply, wavering as its energy diminished. The field beneath looked old, rusty with fallen leaves, and extremely solid. Gravity cleared its throat officiously, and Elodie’s brain began calling out urgent instructions to be careful, sensible, and to slow her descent.
Woo-hoo!her spirit replied, urging her to go even faster. To outrun gravity. To defy the laws of physics with absolute impudence and hope they didn’t notice. After all, she was still alive after years of such behavior, and you couldn’t get a more logical argument that that.
(Elodie had read a little philosophy, here and there, but the laws of thought were to her what New Year’s resolutions were to other people:affirmed in all their wisdom and value!then instantly forgotten.)
Gabriel stood awaiting her with an expression so intense, Elodie suspected her every step was being assessed toward a final grade.Notliterallyfinal, I hope,her brain muttered. She laughed.
And the path dissolved.
—
As an expertscientist, Gabriel held one thing as certain: there was always something new to learn. New techniques, new theories…and new levels of utter, breathtaking terror. As he watched Elodie run along the disintegrating ray of magicwith her eyes closed, Gabriel experienced an entire bachelor’s degree course in fear.
By which he meant “fear about the time-consumingaccident report he’d have to make should she fall,” that is, nothing more.
His body burned with an overwhelming instinct to run back up along the magic and catch her, hold her safe in his embrace (and lecture her stridently on the importance of prudence), but that was impossible. He could not reach her. He could only watch, arms crossed tightly against the pain of his thundering heartbeat, brain roaring its helplessness.
At last,secondseons later, she opened her eyes, thank God. Then the confounded woman grinned, and actually waved, as if she hadn’t just done something so reckless, so heedless, sobloody stupidthat every cell in Gabriel’s body, and every atom in the world around him, felt like it was going to shatter from the sheer force of the danger. And if it did, that would be fine. He couldn’t exist if she fell from that magic and died. He couldn’t bear to even begin imagining a world without her.
The breath staggered loudly in his throat—it sounded likehm, brusque and sharp, even while the hysterical shouting in his brain began to calm. Elodie was drawing closer to the ground now, closer to safety.
Then, all at once, between one step and another, the thaumaturgic beam disintegrated beneath her, three feet off the ground. Gabriel’s heart stopped. But Elodie went on moving with her own irrepressible womanly magic, tipping over in an effortless cartwheel. Flowers shed from her moon-colored hair. Lace flashed like a provocative wink from beneath her skirt. She landed upright, her boots making a thud on the earth that was echoed by his heart jolting back into rhythm.
“Well, that was fun,” she said, smiling with such joyful exhilaration Gabriel knew she was still running on sunlight inside her mind. It almost unbalanced him, sending him to hisknees before her, but he held himself rigid with a frown. His pulse, however, was a fluttering wreck.
“You are—”
“Incorrigible,” she interrupted blithely. “Irresponsible.”
