They came to an abrupt halt. Gabriel frowned at Algernon. “Talk fast.”
“The townsfolk are in a tizzy,” the young man gabbled. “The Rheidol river’s turned bloodred in places!”
“No doubt from erosion of the Old Red Sandstone common in this area,” Gabriel said.
“And, a strange fog sent a whole crowd of peddlers running back to town! They swore fairies were calling to them.”
“Cattle lowing. The sound would be distorted by the fog.”
“Oh.” Algernon seemed rather crestfallen, as if fairies were somehow more interesting than acoustic attenuation and dispersion in relation to water molecules.
Elodie set down her suitcase so as to brush the hair away from her face. “There’s really no need for superstitious panic in town,” she said. “Magic does exist, of course—”
“Sensible, scientific magic,” Gabriel interjected. “Not fairies.”
“—but the 5-SEQ fey line is some four miles from Aberystwyth. For any overflow to reach across such a distance, the energy intensity would have to be unprecedented. You’d see consequences, such as fires, between here and the line.” She angled to point southward and blinked at the sight of a large smoke plume rising beyond the edge of town. “Er, well,moreof such things.”
“What does any of this have to do with getting us to Dôlylleuad?” Gabriel asked, glancing pointedly at his wristwatch.
“No one will take you there,” Algernon explained. “Even though the fog has cleared, they say they won’t risk the…um, lowing cattle. Professor Jackson had to go out on a bicycle.”
Elodie stiffened. “Did you say Jackson? As inWoodrowJackson, formerly a professor of Oxford?”
“Yes. He teaches at Aberystwyth University now, so the Home Office sent him out as an advance scout.”
Elodie and Gabriel exchanged a glance darker than the cave from which they and their fellow students had barelyescaped after Professor Jackson took them to see singing stalactites that turned out to be razor-sharpspinningstalactites.
Clearlythiswas Motthers’s “other problem.” If Jackson was currently on-site, they could not get there fast enough.
The breeze whipped through her hair yet again, and she swiped irritably at the strands tangling across her face. Suddenly, Gabriel’s hand appeared before her, an elastic band between its thumb and forefinger. “Good heavens,” she remarked in surprise. “You just happen to have one of those on you?”
“Of course,” he said, looking straight ahead, expressionless. “I’m a geographer.”
“And I’m perfectly capable of—”
“Take the elastic band, Ellie.”
She almost gasped. No one had called her Ellie in years. All at once she was back in Oxford’s quaint little coffeehouse Jabbercoffee, laughing with other students and trying not to look at the handsome, bespectacled boy who sat, usually with his nose in a book, at the edge of the group. Their peers and teachers always treated them as a matching pair—the prodigies—but nothing could be less true. Gabriel was a remarkable scholar, Elodie a wild card. Gabriel had an instant answer for any mathematics question; Elodie could say “My, what a big rock” in seven languages. And whereas Gabriel wore smart tweed jackets and was never seen around town without a tie, Elodie had once got halfway to class before realizing she’d been so occupied with daydreaming about flame trees, lakes of jewel-colored water, and the ethereal landscapes of Tennyson’s poetry that she’d forgotten to change out of her nightgown.
Even so, there had grown over the years a bond of memory and collegiality between them, a kind of belonging togetherthat not even her wedding ring made her feel. Her stomach swooped.
Taking the elastic band, employing assiduous care that their gloved fingers did not graze each other, she murmured thanks. Gabriel did not reply, except to flex his hand against his thigh, which was certainly eloquent enough. Elodie considered employing the elastic band as a tiny slingshot directed at his face, but decided she really did need it.
“Listen,” she told Algernon as she tied back her hair. “There is an obvious solution to this predicament.”
“Walk?” Algernon guessed.
“No.”
“Then…what…?”
—
“Oh my God,”Algernon wailed for the thirteenth time in an hour. “A hot air balloon!” He clasped the edge of the wicker basket as if his life depended on it rather than on the harness and two safety belts he’d insisted upon wearing.
Elodie looked at him wearily. She’d tried to point out that it was amotorizedhot air balloon that operated on both kerosene and flaming hot gas, but for some reason this failed to ameliorate his concern. “We’re almost there,” she assured him, raising her voice above the whir of the motor blades.
“How do you know?” Algernon demanded.
