“Sorry! Sorry! Don’t go without me!”
It was her, valise in hand, hurtling toward him. His heart almost bursting with joy, he grabbed her hand. They sprinted together toward the lighthouse.
Explanations spilled from her. The train from Edinburgh to Inverness had been delayed en route because a section of the tracks had been covered by a small-scale landslide. She, the great elemental mage of their era, who could now move tons of soil at a snap of her fingers, had to remain in her seat while railroad workers cleared the tracks with shovels. Shovels!
But all he heard was poetry, verses of hope and friendship and courage and everything else that made life worth living. She was here. She was here. She was here.
She panted with exertion. “And I couldn’t leave the train, since I had to get within a hundred miles of Cape Wrath before I could vault. More than that on my own in a day might kill me.”
“You cannot vault a hundred miles at a go.”
“I split the distance into four segments, and did some blind vaulting in the middle.”
He pushed open the door to the laboratory and thrust the potions at her. He was turning her into a tiny turtle this time—just in case anyone still wanted to confiscate his canary. “Blind vaulting, are you mad?”
She threw aside her valise and gulped down the potions. “Of course I am. I am here, am I not?”
He was choked up. “I am—I am glad you are here.”
She smiled at him. “Ready?”
Perhaps she was only asking him whether he was ready for her to transform. But when he answered, he answered for all the possible futures that awaited them.
“Yes,” he said. “I am ready.”
NOTES
1. FOR CENTURIES, historians and magical theorists have debated the correlation between the rise of subtle magic and the decline of elemental magic. Were they merely parallel developments or did one cause the other? An agreement may never come, but we do know that the decline has affected not only the number of elemental mages—from approximately 3 percent of the mage population to less than 1 percent—but also the power each individual elemental mage wields over the elements.
Presently, quarry workers still regularly lift 20-ton blocks of stone, the record of the decade being 135 tons by a single mage. But most elemental mages make few uses of their dwindling powers and are capable of little more than parlor tricks; all the more astonishing as we look back upon the great elemental mages of an earlier age, those individuals who set mountains in perpetual motion and destroyed—and created—entire realms.
—From The Lives and Deeds of Great Elemental Mages
2. THE DOMAIN’S classification as a principality rather than a kingdom has often confused mages. It is certainly not a microrealm: at more than one hundred thousand square miles in area, it is one of the largest mage realms on Earth—and historically, one of the most influential.
Legend has it that the night before his coronation, Titus the Great, the unifier of the Domain, had a dream in which a voice cried, “The King is dead and his house fallen!” To avoid that fate, he had himself crowned Master of the Realm, styled His Serene Highness, a prince instead of a king. The ruse worked: He lived to a ripe old age, and his house has endured. Today, when most other monarchs and princes are figureheads without actual power, the House of Elberon remains that rare phenomenon among mage realms: a ruling dynasty.
—From The Domain: A Guide to Its History and Customs
3. THE SEPARATION of mage and nonmage populations has never been absolute, on account of vestigial mage communities that either opted not to join a larger mage society or subsequently left.
The nonmages, with their burgeoning advances in science and technology, may someday pose a threat to magekind. But throughout history, the greatest menace to mages has always been other mages. Never was a successful witch hunt mounted without the cooperation of mages willing to turn on their own. For that reason, mages who dwell among nonmages are subject to the strictest regulations.
The Exiles from the January Uprising presented a curious scenario. By the time the revolt had been quelled, there were no other mage realms to which its sympathizers could flee: Atlantis was the master of the entire mage world. So they chose instead to live among nonmages and to plot their return therein.
—From A Chronological Survey of the Last Great Rebellion
4. THESE DAYS, the term “beauty witch” has become quite diluted.