“Gabriel!” she called out, an experiment she suspected would fail. Sure enough, only silence replied.
She considered her surroundings calmly. A muddle occurred when an excess of caustic thaumaturgic material in the environment poisoned a small body of water, sending up a bubble of sorcerous energy. On one hand, this provided exciting evidence that the suspected new trove contained a sulfur element, which Elodie had already half suspected due to the intense but off-and-on nature of the magical storm these past two days. Enchanted sulfur tended to be unstable in that way, for reasons Elodie could have explained had she attended more chemistry lectures as a student.
On the other hand,oops! To not notice the muddle’s membrane was a basic error. If anyone at Oxford saw her now, they’d wonder how she’d ever managed to get her doctorate. The only positive to this situation was that Motthers hadn’t joined the assignment. Her various misadventures would not exactly have offered a good teaching opportunity, unless to demonstrate that he ought to take up a safer course of education, such as ornithology.
MaybeIwas his “other problem,”Elodie thought sourly. Maybe he’d intended to shout out, “Professor, remember that you are an idiot!” And he wouldn’t have been wrong. As her mother liked to point out at regular intervals, Elodie possessed the kind of intelligence that overshot normal thinking and landed frequently in the zone of ridiculousness.
“Gabriel!” she called again, a touch more emphatically this time. The result was the same.
“Drat,” she muttered. Most likely she was the one trapped, because that was par for the course. And also likely was that her sod of a husband, having realized she was in a muddle, hadheaded back to the inn to wait in comfort while she got herself out of it. After all, the majority of people did manage an escape. They turned up back in their villages with wild tales ofpwccaor some other fairy that had led them astray, such was their state of dehydration, hypothermia, or exhaustion. But a few others disappeared forever, swallowed by muddles that were so strong, not even a specialist in thaumaturgic geography noticed them.
“Damn it, Gabriel!” she shouted, angry, worried. There came no reply.
“I suppose he’s going to grumble at me when next we meet,” she said as she began scanning the grass for the stone she’d accidentally stepped on. “It really was the worst day of his life when he married me. Best day of mine, but there’s certainly no need for me to tell—aha!” Finding the stone, she snatched it up. Weighing it thoughtfully, she shifted it to a comfortable angle in her palm. Then, swiveling on her heel, she threw it.
Thwack.
With a hollow sound of impact, the stone vanished abruptly from sight. “Ooh,” Elodie said, enlivened, for the air had rippled as the stone passed through it, allowing her to briefly glimpse the muddle’s perimeter. It had been convex shaped, which meant she was standing on theoutside. She was not the one trapped, after all.
She smirked. Professor Perfect Tarrant had got himself into a muddle. Ha!
“Ahem.”She cleared her throat solemnly, reminding herself that she was an adult, and it did not do to laugh about a colleague being in trouble, let alone one’s own husband. Besides, it really was quite serious trouble. The fey line’s instability might lead to all kinds of atypical consequences, such as themuddle collapsing in upon itself while Gabriel was still trapped inside.
At that thought, Elodie’s pulse shook. Without further ado (or, alas, further reflection) she leaped forward. Magic flowed around her like sheets of cold, opulent satin. The world shone with a pearlescent gloss for one strange and beautiful second.
And there he was. Standing with his feet apart, arms crossed, eyebrows raised as he looked straight at her.
Whew,she thought with relief…even while her heart sighed a wild prayer of thanks…and she stumbled a little as she forced herself to stop, rather than to keep running forward and fling her arms around him.
“No,” he said conversationally, “my wedding wasn’t the worst day of my life. That would be this one.”
Oops.(Again.) He’d heard her. Elodie winced, biting her lip.
“Have you come to rescue me?” he asked in the same politely inquiring tone that inspired his students to greatness (or sent them fleeing Oxford in tears).
Elodie shook back her hair, chin angled high in the manner of a plucky heroine who had absolutely given serious thought to entering a muddle and had in no manner whatsoever panicked. “I have.”
“Thank you,” Gabriel said in that same even tone, which was beginning to make her nerves rattle. “One further question, if I may?”
“Hm?”
“How are you going to do that frominsidethe trap?”
Elodie blinked at him. Forgetoops.This was anoh, darn. There remained to her only one recourse.
Shrugging, she smiled.
—
Gabriel regarded Elodiesteadily in austere silence. He’d spent his whole life studying magic—deconstructing it beneath a microscope—writing papers bristling with footnotes about it—watching its filaments sift through his fingers on a riverbank. In all that time, he’d never seen anything more spellbinding than the sight of his wife leaping through the muddle’s perimeter to rescue him.
“You were foolhardy,” he told her sternly. (She was sublime. She was a dream come true.)
“Of course I was,” she replied, scoffing. “You surely must expect that from me by now.”
Gabriel huffed. But it was perilously close to a laugh, so he hastily frowned as well, just to press home the point that he wasso in love with herdisapproving of what she’d done—not only her heedless jumping into a muddle, but having driven him into it in the first place. For if he’d not been so hot and bothered by her gorgeousness, and by the feel of her bare skin beneath his fingers, he’d have paid better attention to where he was going. Consequently, this was all her fault.
And if only he weren’t a pedant about truthfulness, he could have quite happily believed that, instead of knowing all too well that he’d behaved like a libidinous idiot.
