The girl did not seem too encouraged by this. “Can’t you help me herd the tourists back home?” she asked.
“No, we have important work to do,” Gabriel said. “This chaos is being triggered by something. We need to find the source before it sends the whole fey line into cascade.”
“ ‘Cascade’ sounds pleasant?” Tegan ventured.
Gabriel frowned. “A line cascade means thousands of people being transformed into cows or worse. Not. Pleasant.”
“Come on, Professor Tarrant,” Elodie said, tugging on his arm before he terrified the girl even further. “Let’s go find our magic.”
Chapter Thirteen
A map is a translation of what we see,
evidence of what we consider valuable,
and a handy place mat if we need one.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
“You’re looking inthe wrong place.”
Gabriel forced himself not to sigh. Again. “On the contrary, I am following the fey line exactly.” He held up his thaumaturgic compass as proof.
Elodie dismissed this with a wave of her dowsing rod. “ ‘Exactly’ doesn’t count in geography.”
“What? Of course it does!”
“You have to feel the ambience.”
Gabriel regarded her with stiff irritation. They’d been out here for five hours now, feeling the ambience, measuring the ambience, and traipsing through so many mud puddles in the goddamned ambience that his boots were completely ruined. He’d have called it a wild-goose chase (to be more precise, he’d have called ita profitless errand, except Elodie’s devil-may-care attitude toward language seemed to be invading his brain), but damned if he knew what else to do at this point other than wander around frowning at things.
It didn’t help that, despite him being as fit as any fieldgeographer needed to be, the day’s escapades had left him bone-tired. Only thanks to the energy provided by Tegan Parry’s sandwiches (and a good ration of stubbornness) had he not given up an hour ago, retiring to the inn and its bathing facilities.
Elodie, on the other hand, was possessed of an enthusiasm that seemed indefatigable. She’d thrown herself into the work, quite literally in the case of a weed-filled ditch she’d sworn had been twinkling suspiciously. Her skirt hem was filthy, torn flower petals littered her hair, and there existed beneath her fingernails enough dirt to harbor a dozen germ colonies. She was, in short, a perambulating biological weapon—and simultaneously the most beautiful creature Gabriel had ever seen. The lowering sun infused her hair with glory and flashed against the silver of her dowsing rod, making it seem like she’d stepped out of a fairy tale. Gabriel’s irritation grew so stiff he had to think with some urgency of cold tea to bring himself under control once again.
“Are you paying attention?” Elodie demanded, tapping the dowsing rod against her thigh impatiently. Her lovely, curvaceous thigh that felt like silk beneath a man’s palm. Not even the passage of a year could erase his memory of caressing it, and of gently hooking it over his own thigh…
“Uh-huh,” he managed to answer.
“Then what did I just say?”
Something about kissing?his brain suggested. Something about laying her down in the soft white clover and using his lips to map every delectable contour of her body? That seemed unlikely. She had displayed no inclination to further their earlier intimacy. Indeed, her lower lip was ragged from where she’d been biting it, her gaze kept flicking to him then away,and she carried with her an uncharacteristic quiet tension—all of which informed Gabriel plainly about her dislike of him. At one point their hands accidentally brushed together as they navigated a narrow space between two trees, and Elodie’s breath had shuddered audibly, her face shining red. Dislike. There could be no stronger proof of it.
Thankfully, he disliked her too. He only thought about kissing her because even such an excellent mind as his fell prey now and again to the baser qualities of manhood. As soon as they returned to Oxford, he could once more take up the austere mental discipline that was his comfort and stay.
“I was too occupied with examining the ambience to hear every word you said,” he answered with a fine show of disdain.
Elodie flung out her arms, and he stepped back with mild alarm. But her face was doing that lighting-up thing it did whenever she was about to say something whimsical or heartfelt (or probably both), and Gabriel prepared himself for an onslaught of colloquialism.
“The magic is everywhere,” she said, turning from side to side to indicate the fields and copses surrounding them.
Whimsical, indeed. “More poetry,” Gabriel muttered.
“Tsk.”Elodie shook her head, as if he were a first-year student who’d failed to comprehend the simple fact that heterogeneous colluvium incorporating disaggregated thaumaturgized paleosols is a telestic hazard resulting from downslope creep. “I’m talking science. So far today we’ve encountered thaumaturgic manifestations, waterspouts, ignes fatui, and there was that exploding puddle a mile back. But it doesn’t all align to the fey line, and the dispersion patterns don’t immediately suggest a point of origin. This is all just ricocheting spillage.”
She gestured indiscriminately, but there was no real needfor greater precision. She was right; everywhere Gabriel looked, he saw magic. The horizon, a darkening blue behind the swollen shadows of hills, was strung with fey lights. Rainbows floated between trees. His wife brushed a luminous strand of hair away from her cheek. Three quarters of a mile west, where Dôlylleuad nestled beside the slow curve of the river, plumes of chimney smoke became dandelion fluff that drifted like a thousand wishes.
Without the gauges of his weather station, it was impossible for Gabriel to judge the environment in any quantifiable way unless he resorted to adjectives that he was unprepared to entertain. But he did suppose it might be called “magical” without risking accusations of lyricism. Before he could say so, however, Elodie jabbed her dowsing rod at him, as if she were in a lecture theater and he her student.
