In stunned silence, they turned back to stare along the fey line. The sky beyond Wytham Woods was turning cyanic, the lambent blue speckled with dazzling silver and gold as if laughing at them. Elodie felt much the same way within herself.
“Twinkles,” she said.
“Eruptive thaumaturgic scintillations,” Gabriel corrected her automatically.
“Pretty,” she countered.
He looked at her. “Yes,” he said. And then he smiled.
Elodie stared back at him, enraptured. The smile was real, fond, unafraid. It softened his face and lit his eyes with a warm reflection of his heart, and it sent delight melting like honey and slow kisses all through Elodie. She wanted to reach up and touch it, but her fingers were dirty from having dug the trench, and she knew Gabriel wouldn’t appreciate them on his mouth. She knewhim. Every line of his face was familiar to her, every smooth plane that she’d watched strengthen over the years.
You’re mine,she thought. From the corner of her eye she could see leaves explode from the woods’ canopy. Beneath her feet she felt the ground tremble. And part of her mind noted with sensible anxiety that she had seconds until the line cascade slammed into their paper barricade.
But the rest of her was absorbed in the truth that had been her magnetic north for the whole of her adult life. And if thismoment were to be the last she ever had, she wanted it filled with that truth.
“I love you,” she said.
Gabriel closed his eyes, opened them again like night giving way to dawn. His smile wavered a little with emotion, then deepened.
And the magic arrived.
Chapter Twenty-Two
You’re already where you want to go.
Getting there is part of being there.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
The land abovethe fey line buckled and groaned as if an enormous subterranean snake were moving through the field. Grass and dirt exploded, sparking with thaumaturgic energy. The wind began to scream.
Elodie and Gabriel tensed, not even daring to breathe, while their clothes and hair swirled in the leaf-strewn wind and the ground shook beneath their feet. Two and a half miles behind them, Oxford stood in a calm that made Elodie’s heart ache. The power racing toward the little paper barricade was enormous. It would bring the beautiful old city absolutely to ruins.
The plan’s going the fail,Elodie thought with a sudden rush of horror. She needed to think of a better solution in the next three seconds.
But there wasn’t even that much time. The cascade slammed into the barricade.
With a hollow roar, the air shuddered. Translucent flamesof raw magical energy whipped at the documents; earth cracked, fissures ripping through the grass.
Elodie tried to inhale a calm, professional breath, but it shook wild and hot down her throat. “The barricade’s not going to hold!” she warned Gabriel, shouting through windblown strands of her hair.
“It will!” he shouted in reply, even as the thaumometer in his hand began to smoke. Cursing, he tossed it away, and they both flinched as it burst apart midair, scraps of metal becoming black dragonflies with wings of flame. The cascade howled in response. Enormous weeds began shooting up from the cracked earth, their jagged leaves snapping at the dragonflies and long stems slashing the air.
“It’s not going to hold!” Gabriel conceded.
Elodie looked around desperately as if something nearby might help. But grass and wooden marker poles offered no hope, and while the yellow raincoat might have some application, Elodie could not immediately think of what. The prayer book was rising out of the trench, its pages flapping. The King’s Writ was aflame.
Elodie wedged a knuckle between her teeth and began to gnaw at it. But magical luminescence flared against her wedding ring and she winced, snatching the hand away…then lifted it again to stare at it wide-eyed. Or, more specifically, at the ring of thaumaturgic gold.
“No,” Gabriel said instantly, guessing her thoughts.
“Yes,” Elodie argued, tugging at the ring. “Or, at least, maybe. It’s worth a try! After all, it stopped the thaumaturgic bomb outside Dôlylleuad.”
“Ignis fatuus is nothing compared to this!” he shouted.Black hair streaked his brow like anger; the wind tore his voice apart. “It’s too much risk, Elodie!”
“I don’t need to get close. I can just toss it into the trench.” She waved her hand in demonstration.
And the magic caught it. Elodie was yanked off her feet so fast, the world seemed to blur around her. She cried out with shock, arms flailing as if she might be able to grab handfuls of air and stop herself. But the thaumaturgic force was inescapable. Mercilessly it dragged her toward the cascade.
