Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

Or the wedding night of the victim, Kyra thought grimly.

  "Other spells draw on the power imbued in them by the wizard himself, and their influence depends on how many times a day the victim comes near it. Again, pillow slips are a favored location; so are the thresholds of the rooms the victim frequents."

  And yet she had felt… something. Some of the malice that surrounded Alix. Closing her eyes, Kyra ran her fingers over the smooth terra-cotta cylinders of the wine racks, seeking the sense, the feel, of either of the two dog wizards her father had wronged. Nothing. Patiently, as quickly as she could, she fingered each bottle in turn, hoping she would find something but hoping also that it wouldn't turn out to be either Pinktrees or the Pilgrim.

  It would, she knew, be easier to detect if it were someone she had met. She was strong enough to pick up some vibration from a third wizard, a wizard she had never met—at least she hoped so. Her experience in this kind of thing was limited, and more than ever she felt the need for more training, more time at the Citadel. There was so much that she did not know.

  She had to find the mark. It had to be here somewhere.

  Cobwebs clung to her fingers, which quickly collected the black dust of the soot that filled Angelshand's air and settled on everything. The procession should be passing through the small plaza before the Guildhall: Lord Mayor Spenson, she thought dourly, would be soaking in the applause like a sponge below the sea. One of the earliest lessons she had learned in the Citadel—from the old Archmage Salteris, now dead—was the accurate subconscious awareness of time, of the position of sun and stars in the sky at any given moment. Moreover, she knew by the hunger headache she was getting that her hasty breakfast of stolen wedding tart had been some while ago. The crowds would be far more dense as the procession passed through the Springwell district. Small children would be clustered on every street corner and fence, thick as pigeons on the bronze statue of the Emperor Pharos II, to watch the red and gold carriages go by. Behind the last carriages of Uncle Murdwym and Cousin Wyrdlees and whatever familial horrors lurked in the House of Spenson, pink and yellow petals would strew the cobblestones like trampled shreds of paper, turning brown in the puddles and sinking into the general muck.

  She shook the thought—and the sleepy ache of prolonged concentration—away and moved on to the room where coals and wood and kindling were stored against the long, awful grind of Angelshand winters.

  The cellar was damply cold, her search there messy and completely without result.

  Kyra knew about when the long string of carriages, footmen, and garlanded flags should reach St. Creel's Church. She was finishing the last of the store cellars, her temples throbbing, her stomach growling, her nose and throat thick with dust, and her eyes itching furiously. She considered again stopping her search long enough to steal some fruit and cheese from the kitchen—and coffee, too, if it could be managed—but she knew her time was running short, and she had the whole upper house yet to search. It crossed her mind, They should be there, and, the next second, a cold shock of horror… Oh, my God, what if the wedding really takes place?

  Fumbling in the pocket of her now-filthy dress, she sat on the stairs up to the pantry. A streak of whitish light fell from above, and to that light she angled the scrying-stone she carried with her. It was hard to keep her hands from shaking. Tired as she was, it took her a long time to get an image, and that disconcerted her, too—she hadn't counted on the search draining her so much.

  Small and clear, as if she stood in a window with her back to the street outside, she saw reflected in the crystal's central facet the line of assembled liverymen bearing their banners: golden buns on a white and violet field in the center, flanked by the red and gold house design of the Spensons—the hand with its five golden coins—and the yellow lizards of the Earthwyggs. Garlanded with smilax and hyacinth, its corners nodding with the lilies of hope and the roses of fulfillment and trembling with spirit bells and tiny glass balls and Hands of God, the wedding carriage followed behind, the four white mares prescribed by the Texts tossing their heads nervously whenever one of the flower throwers flung a handful of petals too close or a child dived too daringly for the thrown coppers. Beyond, Kyra could make out the shapes of buildings.

  Yes. Little Cheevy Street. She recognized the red porphyry columns of the baths, the squat gray toad of the Pantheon Emporium down the way with its brightly painted advertising signs.

  The enormous crowd around the steps of the Little Cheevy Street Baths reminded Kyra momentarily of the crowd of rakes and working girls who had gathered there yesterday morning. Probably a number of them had been there, then. An even bigger mob surrounded the front of St. Creel's Church, directly next door.

  The Bishop's carriage was there, servants in the church's hieratic red holding the bits of the horses. Two acolytes got hastily up from the church steps, clutching the golden censers required by the rite; in the shadows of the church's porch, Kyra could make out the shape of the wedding pavilion, bundled together like a disused white silk tent with its silver finials gleaming softly in the gloom.

  The carriage drew rein. Somebody came running from the church as Gordam Peldyrin, purple velvet robe snapping and face fast achieving a color match from sheer rage, climbed down and went storming up the steps of the church.

  The image in the crystal faded and was replaced by that of the Bishop—fully robed in crimson and gold like a secondary bride, surrounded by more acolytes and leaning heavily on a crutch—Kyra's father, and the shirtsleeved and uncorseted owner of the Cheevy Street Baths, assembled in the blue gloom of the church nave.

  Though spells of scry-ward had been laid on the building long ago, still Kyra could make out broken glimpses of the scene.

  Far over their heads the windows were living gems of stained glass, fragments of the instreaming colors dyeing the faces of the saints—bronze, marble, papier-mâché and plaster, painted and gilded and discolored with age. Most of the garlands required by the Texts were still in place: lilies, roses, hyacinth, and chrysanthemum; the sun canopy flashed in the gloom with the peculiar spooky luster of gold in shadow; the white silk cloths still draped the altars.

  The inlaid marble floor, however, was under five inches of water.

  The owner of the baths was gesticulating furiously, the Bishop—slightly the worse for a pharmaceutical slug of poppy syrup—straightening his wig and trying to placate Master Peldyrin, a tiny and farcical pantomime in the white fragment of the crystal's heart.

  Kyra did not need to hear to know what had happened. She was perfectly well aware and, in fact, quite gratified to have confirmed that a pipe in the baths next door had unaccountably burst in the night.

  Chapter XII

  Kyra had calculated that it would take the carriages, footmen, and sedan chairs at least an hour to return to Baynorth Square, enough time to search the drying room and laundry even though they would return much more quickly than they had gone.

  She was not, however, prepared for Blore Spenson slamming through the drying-room door not fifteen minutes after she had seen her father discover the flooded church; Blore Spenson still in his white velvet wedding suit, minus his cap, with his lace-trimmed stock awry and his blue eyes flashing with rage.

  "All right, miss, what the hell game are you playing!" he bellowed, and Kyra, who only moments before had heard the clatter of hooves in the kitchen yard and hadn't associated the sound of a single horse with any of the wedding party, spun around, dropping the flatiron she was checking with a crack to the hard slate floor.

  "Good heavens, Master Spenson, you really shouldn't let yourself get into a rage like that when you're wearing white," she remarked, straightening up and brushing a strand of cobweb from her sleeve. "Your face turns a most unbecoming—"

  "You'd better get used to it!" He stormed across the room to her, and she ducked swiftly behind the ironing table, which, after one quick step to his left, he evidently decided not to chase her around. Instead he demanded, "What are you up to?"
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br />   "Me?" She looked down at her hands, which had been washed imperfectly, like her face, when she'd come up from the cellar and were still smudgy with dust. Hunger and the fatigue peculiar to long spells of working magic made her fingers shake; she pressed them to the tabletop to still them and said airily, "Oh, well, I was looking for some books my father may have stored in the cellar."

  "Don't play innocent with me! The Bishop falling down the stairs—maybe that could have been an accident; it was damp that night, the step was wet. The mice in St. Farinox—well, all churches have mice. But that stupid charade at St. Creel…"

  "What charade? And shouldn't you be at St. Creel this moment, getting—"

  "You know as well as I do there'll be no marriage this morning!" The drying room was, as usual, hot. His big hand fumbled with his lace cravat, loosening it in sloppy folds like creased laundry around his neck. "You knew it yesterday, when I picked you up at the foot of Little Cheevy Street, with your hair still wet from the baths there and a liar's smile on your mouth! You must have been laughing up your sleeve at me all the way—"

  "I am not a liar!" Kyra lashed at him, her head giving one tremendous throb of pain and her hands starting to tremble again despite all she could do to stop them.

  "Bah! All those questions about other dog wizards to throw me off the track, and me sitting there solemn as an owl, telling you about this and that—"

  "I wasn't deceiving you!"

  "The hell you weren't! Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, you were so cool, getting me to remember the wizards your father offended, wizards who might have put an ill word on his daughter's wedding, when all the while it was you! And me, like a chump, making the world's fool of myself, telling your father not to keep you from the wedding, telling him to seat you at the family table at the banquet, angry at him for your sake for the way he treated you! My God!"

  He slapped his forehead furiously with his hand, his face red and blocky-looking with anger in the frame of his sweat-pointed hair. It seemed to Kyra, exhausted by the morning's search and too little sleep, that her whole attention was focused on those swollen blue eyes, that black hole of a mouth flexing and opening at her, spitting out anger, as her father spit it out, and his friends the guildsmen, and the Witchfinders…

  Rage sickened her, at him, at them all.

  "And Alix! My God, talk about illusion!"

  "Stop it!"

  "Talk about making one carriage look like seven and a single bouquet look like a garland… Was I ever behind the fair! You got her to see you as some kind of loving friend instead of a dried-up stick who's come to disrupt her wedding out of sheer mischief and jealousy that she's been asked to wed at all!"

  "Stop it!" she screamed at him. "That's a lie!" And turning, she strode for the door.

  Her foot caught on her skirt hem and flung her heavily down; her shoulder struck the door frame with bruising force. For a moment she sat on the stone threshold, her head pressed to the wall, too sickened, too tired to get up.

  Behind her Spens raged, "If not jealousy, then what?"

  Kyra drew breath to reply, but the words would not come. She sat on the floor for a long time, her cheek to the dampish, mildew-smelling plaster, her hands twisted together in her lap to keep them from shaking, fighting the pain—not the pain of her bruised shoulder but the pain inside, of memory, of fear, of exhaustion, of the sheer brutal weight of going on with it all. I'll answer him in a moment, she thought, quite calmly. As soon as the pain subsides enough that I can do it without crying, I'll answer.

  The quiet lengthened. In the kitchen, two rooms away, Kyra heard Joblin telling Algeron to go lighter on the jelly. "A spot, a spot only, to keep the meringues from floating away into the air."

  Spens asked very quietly, "What, Kyra? Why have you been doing this?"

  He sounded like he really wanted to know.

  Kyra lowered her face to her hand. In a moment, when I can talk again…

  She heard the rustle of the velvet and smelled the orris-root powder in his clothing; his hand on her back, on her arm, was warm and very strong. With a convulsive move, she tried to turn her face away, but somehow it went in the wrong direction and ended up buried in the lace muddle of his cravat and the scratchy braid of his lapel.

  Tiredly, hurtingly, she began to cry.

  When he kissed her, she cried harder, though not for the same reasons as before.

  After a long time she raised her face and saw his eyes; they kissed again, first gently, then fiercer and fiercer, until it seemed to her they would crush the breath out of one another's bodies and break the bones. There was a reason—several reasons—why she shouldn't be doing this, but it was a long time before she remembered what they were, and then they didn't matter.

  Faintly, hooves and carriage wheels clattered in the square. The gate to the kitchen yard creaked: voices, tramping, banners, and baskets thumping as they were put down. Oaths, questions, exclamations of amazement—Joblin's overriding groan, "My cake! The finest example of the confectioner's art in fifteen years!"

  Spens raised his head, then took Kyra's hand and got her to her feet. "Is there another way out?"

  "Through the garden into the alley; I saw the Witchfinders follow the procession out to the church, and with any luck, they haven't taken up their positions again."

  "Well, in that dress you look like somebody's chambermaid, so we should be all right."

  They were walking hand in hand down Fennel Street before Kyra asked, "Where are we going?" In white velvet, Spenson looked as out of place among the housewives, strawberry hawkers, servants, and shopkeepers as a phoenix in a barnyard, and the bright sunlight of midmorning showed up the filth and dust that clung to her dress. Spenson's estimate that she looked like a chambermaid had been a singularly generous one. Her red hair hung about her shoulders in a tangle; she ran a hand through it and said, "I look like a ragpicker's child."

  "You do," he agreed, and put his arm around her waist. "We're going to my countinghouse, down near the harbor on Salt Hill Lane. The clerks all got the day off for the wedding, and it will be the last place anyone will look for us. Is that all right?"

  "It will be if you'll buy me something to eat. I—I only cried because I was hungry, you know."

  "Good," Spens said cheerfully. "I can't stand a lachrymose woman." He stopped by the cart of an itinerant bun vendor, steam from the little enclosed stove flavoring air that had already begun to smell of salt and tar. "Do you want the kind with bean paste in it or pork?"

  "It's a poor trade for Joblin's wedding tarts. Let's get both."

  "A woman after my own heart."

  "No," Kyra said, licking the sweetened paste off her fingers. "The woman after your heart was Esmin Earthwygg."

  "Tell me," Spens said as he closed the door of the countinghouse behind them, shutting out the noise of Salt Hill Lane and the wharves in a sudden quiet of yellow sunlight, whitewash, and bleached pine, "what it is you are trying to do."

  Kyra turned away and perched one flank on a clerk's tall stool and concentrated for a time on wiping the last smears of bean paste from her fingers with one of Spenson's handkerchiefs. Beside her, a many-paned window looked out into a brickyard murky with soot from the factories across the river; on top of the tall desk nearby, the cut-glass inkwell sparkled like a jewel of light and darkness. The place smelled of paper, of dust, of spices from the warehouse next door, of the orris powder of Spens' coat. For some reason she felt shy about looking at him, wondering that there had ever been a time when he was a stranger to her. The taste of his mouth still seemed somehow on her lips, the warm print of his hands on her back. He wore his ridiculous white velvet like a disguise, his diamonds glinting like dew in the sun.

  "You mustn't think I'm doing this out of hatred for my father," she began.

  Spens shook his head, "I know you love your father," he said quietly, and she looked up, surprised.

  "He couldn't hurt you this badly if you didn't."

  "I suppose.
" She looked aside again, not quite knowing where to begin or how to talk about magic and the need of magic with someone who had never felt its yearning.

  But once she had started, with the cards, and the water, the Summonings and the note, with the dream of which she remembered so little, and her panicked journey to Angelshand, desperate with fear for what she might find, it became easier; she even laughed a little when she described watching him and her father through the scrying-crystal in the mouse-infested Church of St. Farinox. "I wish you could have seen your own face," she said, and, looking up, saw his eyes dance with appreciation. "When that big mouse ran across your foot…"

  "You, my girl," he said, "are not to be trusted… and does this mean I can't pat a tavern wench on the bottom anymore for fear you'll be watching me through that glass of yours?"

  "Good heavens, no! I wouldn't impose a punishment like that on the poor tavern wenches. I can even make you a scry-ward to prevent any wizard from watching you that way, if you'd like. They're really quite simple."

  "Hm," Spens grumbled. "Like the Witchfinders around your house?"

  "Well, yes. Though the Inquisition watches every mage or suspected mage who comes to the city—and they haven't forgotten me from… from Tibbeth's trial. Then, too, Lady Earthwygg might have dropped some rumors in their ears, still hoping to get rid of me and snare you for her repellent daughter."

  "Her daughter," Spens retorted, "never had a chance even before you told me what they were up to. I still blush at the dreams I had of her, but I never for a minute considered marrying the little shrew."

  "Well, at one time I thought it might solve the problem of keeping my sister from having a wedding night."

  He reached across and took her hand. "Your sister," he said quietly, "is not going to have any wedding night with me." There was silence between them, as there had been that morning at the foot of the stairs while all the wedding party surged around them, as if she had come through a door and now saw him anew and differently. Kyra felt frantically that she must say something but could not tell what: Yes, no, go away… Leave me to the life I've chosen and fought for… Don't complicate things… Be in my life always.