Speak softly and carry a big telescope.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson.
Oxford, 1890
A geographer behaves with quiet dignity at all times. Elodie Tarrant had been informed of this maxim repeatedly by professors over the years, and she took great pains to impress it upon her own students. England’s surveyors and mapmakers must be known for their decorum so they are not known for their trespassing and shot at. Consequently, Elodie had chosen to cycle to the Oxford train station that morning, rather than run along the streets—walking in a dignified manner being out of the question, considering how late she was.
And this would have been entirely commendable, except for the small but not untrivial matter of her bicycle being a steam-powered velocipede.
Anyone not immediately witness to the spectacle of a helmet-clad woman perched upon a rickety wheeled contraption, with steam clouds billowing around her and a long, unbuttoned tweed coat billowing behind, was alerted to it by the loud rattling, tooting, and random belches of the machine. At least her skirt did not billow—but this was because she had it knotted up around her knees, thus revealing her stocking-clad legs, and so rather failed to argue in favor of dignity.
“Faster!” she urged the vehicle as though this might make some difference to its speed. “It will be a disaster if I miss that train!”
She spoke literally. News had arrived yesterday that, following a large storm, magic was afoot in Wales, igniting trees and sending sheep airborne. The Home Office had called upon Professor Tarrant to manage the crisis. Being one of England’s foremost specialists in exigent thaumaturgic geographic dynamics (otherwise known as “magical mayhem” to people who valued their vocal chords), Elodie received many such requests, and usually delegated them to graduate students. But with the Michaelmas term still a week away, Elodie rather fancied a few days of strolling through the autumnal countryside.
Besides, there existed a small chance that this job would require her advanced expertise. The site—Dôlylleaud, a minor village ten miles east of the Welsh coastline—was marked as a level 5 node on the Geographic Paranormal Survey (GPS) map, which recorded all known sources of earth magic along with the fey lines that connected them in a complex web around the world. Level 5 indicated a source powerful enough to send thaumaturgic energy down the line to Oxford and its various libraries, just waiting to explode, then on to London, where an incursion of wild magic would have cataclysmic results.
Immediately, Elodie had packed a suitcase, postponed her milk delivery, and organized to catch the earliest morning train to Wales. It was the perfect rapid response.
At least, up until the part where she forgot to set her alarm clock.
Arriving at Oxford station with less than ten minutes to spare, she parked the velocipede and was untying the suitcase from its luggage tray when a young man approached, mustache trembling on his thin, dark face as he hugged a clipboard of papers against his chest.
“Professor Tarrant?” he peeped.
“Ah, there you are, Motthers.” Elodie turned to him with a brisk nod. He took in her entirely rational ensemble of coat, white shirtwaist, and gray skirt, and then her altogether irrational stockings exposed to general view (one black French lace, the other green, embroidered with flowers), and he winced so deeply his neck disappeared. “Is everything prepared?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I have the Emergency Response kit, two tickets for the train, and a plentiful supply of sandwiches.”
Elodie waited…
“Ham with cheese,” he clarified.
She grinned. “Well done.” Removing the helmet, she shook out her long, pale blond hair. It tumbled down in reckless waves—magical hair, literally, having been mousy brown until, at age thirteen, she swam in a moonlit lake she had absolutely no idea was enchanted. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, sweeping the wayward strands from her face. “I overslept, then I started wondering during breakfast about how Persephone went for nine days in the Underworld before eating the pomegranate seeds, and I quite lost track of time. Do you know?”
“Know what, Professor?” Motthers asked warily.
“How she survived all that time without even drinking water, of course.”
“Um.”
“Never mind. I’ll ask someone from the classics department when I get back.” She hung the helmet on the velocipede’s handlebars and began to gather up her hair, looking around as if clips might appear midair for her convenience. Then she noticed Motther’s dazed stare. “What?”
“T-ticket, ma’am,” he said, holding it out in a trembling hand. Elodie took it from him, her hair tumbling down again.
“Much obliged.”
But Motther was not done trembling. “There’s, um, a small problem.”
“Oh?” Elodie asked, not really listening, as she inspected the ticket. It provisioned her with a second-class seat from Oxford to Aberystwyth, after which she and Motthers would take a hired carriage to Dôlylleaud. This was altogether a journey of several long, dull hours, but Elodie didn’t mind, feeling that tedium was best described as an opportunity for imagination.
“Just a very small problem,” Motthers persisted. “Which is to say, quite large actually, and—and—problematic.”
“Uh-huh.” Elodie experienced so many problems in her profession that they had to be literal disasters before she started worrying. Motthers, however, was only a master’s student, and had not yet been caught in a raging flood, let alone outrun fiery boulders that chased him uphill. He needed several more catastrophes under his belt before he developed perspective. As a result, his voice tried to hide behind his tonsils when next he spoke.
“You recall how the telegram yesterday requested aid from Professor Tarrant?”
“Sure,” Elodie said, barely listening. Suitcase in hand, she began striding across the train platform, the heels of her sturdy half boots knocking against the ground as if to announce to other travelers that a professional heroine had arrived—although apparently this was not clear enough for Professor Palgrave, who was forced to leap aside, muttering about “sinful blindness.”
“Um,” Motthers said, scurrying to keep pace despite his legs being several inches longer than Elodie’s (which prompted him to wonder if he should mention the knotted-up skirt, but his courage failed). “It’s just, well, it seems a copy was made of the telegram, and someone who shall go unnamed Ralph Sterling delivered it to a second office.”
“Oh?” Elodie stopped near the edge of the platform and shielded her eyes with her free hand from the morning sun as she peered south along the tracks for a glimpse of a train.
“To be fair, we’re not exactly sure who the message was meant for in the first place, you or…the other Professor Tarrant.”
Elodie continued gazing out beneath her hand at the horizon, mainly because she had frozen. Then, very slowly, she turned to look at the small crowd on the platform.
And there he was.
“You,” she muttered with such ferocity, it must be cause for amazement that the gentleman did not spontaneously combust.
He did not even so much as flicker, however. Indeed, he might have been a statue erected in honor of Elodie’s worst memory. All the familiar details were present: tidy black hair, almost-black eyes, olive skin, suit so immaculate he could have worn it to meet the pope, were he not an atheist. Absent was any human warmth. Behind him, a graduate student fussed with their Emergency Response kit, but he ignored them, ignored the entire world, staring into the middle distance with an expression so stern it made a rock seem like quivering jelly.
Yet Elodie knew that he’d seen her, without a doubt. He saw everything.
