"Better?"
"Yes, thank you." She straightened up gingerly and felt at the back of her neck. The candles had been lit on Alix's dressing table but, like those in the mean attic rooms upstairs, were burning badly, the wicks trailing down the sides in ragged pennons of guttering flame. She looked around, wearily, helplessly, at the familiar room, the, milky silks of the counterpane and curtains, the familiar loom of the armoire with its decorative scrollwork along the top and its beautiful porcelain handles, the low, squat shape of the blue-tiled stove.
"We should have found something. Once we find a mark, you see, we can trace it back to the wizard and then to the one who paid him to place it—whether it's Fyster Nyven or Dutton Droon or one of the other great merchants."
"Except neither Nyven nor Droon believes in magic." Spenson moved over to the dressing table, his shadow reeling along the ceiling behind him like a drunken giant. Picking up the pincers and candle scissors, he began to trim the wicks. "Most people don't unless they've had contact with it. I've heard both of them going on about how the Inquisition should be disbanded as useless. Your father probably didn't until you came to him and told him you'd been born a witch."
Kyra was silent, remembering things her father had said when she was a child. "He didn't exactly disbelieve, but… like a lot of people, he didn't think it was anything that had to be taken seriously."
"Maybe it's some other sort of threat," he said. "You said you felt her to be on the edge of despair in her love for Algeron." He glanced back at her, his blue eyes grave.
"Well, initially it occurred to me you might murder her."
"I only seriously considered it for fifteen minutes while she and the Wishrom girl were talking about styling their hair."
The grin that passed between them faded. "Somehow I can't see Alix… harming herself. She's always been too… happy in her heart."
He raised his brows a little. "You don't think girls who are happy one week take their own lives the next when that happiness is shattered?"
"No… But for another thing, Alix has always been too sensible. I mean, the sensible thing to do is marry you—or whomever it's going to be now—and take Algeron as her lover."
"Can you seriously see Alix doing that?"
She was silent, thinking about her sister, about Algeron. "No," she said at last. "No, I can't. At least, not going into marriage with that in mind."
"Is it what you'd do?"
"Great heavens, no." Kyra' straightened her back, startled at the suggestion. "But then, I wouldn't put myself in that position to begin with. If I didn't want to marry a man, I wouldn't convince myself that I did. And I don't see what you're smiling at," she added a little indignantly.
He obediently grew serious and returned to trimming wicks. The smell of beeswax filled the room above the all-pervasive scents of potpourri and dying wedding flowers.
"The thing is," she went on, "Alix is stronger than that. There's a life in her, a strength that wouldn't break like that."
"I admit I've only seen her when she'd been nattering on." Spenson turned back toward her, folded his arms, and leaned his shoulders against the carved bedpost with its inlay of nacre and glass.
"Oh, Alix is always nattering," Kyra said. "Neither she nor Mother ever shuts up. I can't imagine how Father's kept his sanity all these years. But don't let that lead you to think she's featherbrained. I know she talks even more when she's nervous, which she must have been, knowing you were to marry her, and she tries to cover up the other person's silences."
The erstwhile groom smiled. "When I'm nervous, I go quiet. And believe me, I was, getting ready to wed the one girl and having the most astoundingly erotic dreams about some little cat I'd met twice in my life. It's not that I've never dreamed of ladies before, but never like that. When I met your sister, I could barely look her in the face."
"She'd have made you a good wife, you know," Kyra said after a moment. "Better than me if you're going to settle into running the business and the guild. She's far from silly. She has a positive talent for dressmaking—I know she even altered the fit on her wedding dress, which, given the way Hylette designs, is a miracle to do without destroying the appearance of the thing. But you'd never know it."
She bent down and picked up the gorgeous blood-colored overdress, turning the jeweled bodice over in her hands.
And for a moment she felt it, as surely as she would have felt dampness, as surely as she would have smelled wood smoke trapped in the folds of the silk— the taint of dark magic. It jolted her, though it was barely a whisper, certainly not strong enough to harm anyone no matter how long it was in the room with them.
But the whisper was there. It was a stain of ill left by the curse.
Swiftly she turned the bodice inside out, tangling her fingers in the lacings, snagging bullion embroidery with shaking fingernails. Seeing her expression change, Spens came swiftly over. He watched with a grave face while she ran first her fingertips and palms, then her cheek and lips over the white muslin that lined and gave shape to the silk.
"There was something." She touched her lips to the place again but felt nothing now. "It's been near the curse, picked it up."
It just stands there watching me, Alix had said of the gown on its stand.
"Here? In this room?"
"I don't know." She put the dress down, walked to the wicker stand itself, and ran her fingers slowly, carefully over the varnished willow. No trace, no taint of what she had felt on the dress.
Turning around, she saw Spens holding out to her handfuls of fragile saffron veils. The scent, the taint, on them was so dim that it took her twenty minutes to find it, and then it might only have been her overkeyed imagination. She checked the wedding jewelry over stone by stone, but beryl and tourmaline were stones that held strong vibrations of their own, and any slight vibration of another spell would have been lost beneath them like a single narcissus in a roomful of jasmine.
"I don't know how it could be," she said uncertainly, and stood, her impulse to search the room a third time halting before the thoroughness of her earlier hunts. "I would have felt it. Something that… that definite. I know I would have."
She touched the bodice again, trying to deepen her awareness of the curse, to tell at least if it was Pinktrees or the Pilgrim who had drawn the signs of evil there. But the stain of malignancy was no stronger than the faintest breath, like music too distant to make out even the tune, let alone the voice of the singer. She laid it aside and prowled the room again, running her hands through the sheets of the bed, touching the white curtains, the backs of the lace window shams, every jewel in Alix's open case.
"Damn," she whispered. "Damn, damn, damn."
"Could the talisman be elsewhere, not in the house at all?" Spenson asked, kneeling suddenly beside her when she came to a stop to stoop and feel underneath the armoire. "Someplace she goes all the time—Wishrom's house next door or Hylette's shop? It seems like every time I talked to her, she'd been back to that woman's place for another fitting. You said the talisman might have been under a threshold she had to cross."
"Dear God, you're right." She sat back amid a dusty lake of skirts and ran an unsteady hand through her hair. Her head had begun to throb again, more painfully than ever. "She's been shopping like a lunatic for weeks. She must have been in and out of every boutique and bazaar in the city."
"It makes more sense in a way," Spenson pointed out, settling cross-legged beside her. "Not to have it in the house, I mean. My guess would be either this Hylette woman's shop… or Lady Earthwygg's."
Kyra stared at him, startled that the idea hadn't occurred to her. "Of course."
"For that matter," he added suddenly, "what about the wedding carriage itself? If whoever put the curse knew the marriage was going to be in the strict form, the carriage itself would be a guaranteed trigger for the night of the wedding."
"Let's go!"
Kyra felt light-headed and brittle with exhaustion as she and Spens ran down t
he stairs, her skirts streaming behind her. It was the first time she had worked this many different spells of this intensity consecutively; even examinations didn't drain the student like this. The only time she recalled feeling this bone-shaking exhaustion had been a year ago, during the magic troubles at the Citadel. And then she had had her masters to back her up.
The carriage proved to contain no trace of magic at all. "Hylette's," Spenson said, standing with his arms folded, one foot propped on the wheel. "Or Lady Earthwygg's, though how you're going to search her house…"
"It would only have to be the drawing room and the front hall." Kyra scrambled awkwardly down from the high footman's perch. "Those are the only rooms Alix would have entered." She sighed again, weary beyond measure. "Come on. Let's get these spells lifted so I can get some sleep myself."
She raised the spells of sleep a few at a time, picturing in her mind what she had seen: first Alix and Algeron so that her sister could return to bed in her own room; then, with time limitations set by the chiming of the St. Farinox clock so that they would come to wakefulness half an hour later and a few at a time, from servants and parents, musicians and maids, cats and mice, and all that dwelled beneath the slanted, pigeon-smeared tiles of the roof.
Last of all she took back the silver coin from Spenson and removed the sigils from it and the one she carried. Being caught by the Inquisition with such things on them was enough to get her in genuine trouble. What she had done tonight was hideously illegal by anybody's standards; she only hoped that the Inquisition was relying on its on-site watchers rather than the exhausting and energy-consuming process of "listening" to the magic in the world at large. The chance was slim, she knew, but she had risked, literally, everything that meant anything to her in her life on it: her education as a wizard, her future in her art, perhaps her liberty. Her hands were shaking by the time she finished dispersing the last traces of the invisible circles that had powered the spell.
"We'll give them an hour or so to get to bed properly," Spenson said, unexpectedly taking her elbow as she stood up and brushed away the last of her tracks in the soft earth of the garden bed.
"What?" She only blinked at him, too shaky to think.
"I think we deserve breakfast, don't you?"
"At this hour?"
"We'll take a cab to Algoswiving Street." He shrugged. "Where do you think the rakes and gamblers dine when they're done for the night? There's a tavern there that's the best in town if you're not particular about your company."
If Tibbeth of Hale had stayed away from Alix, Kyra wasn't sure what she would eventually have done. He was her teacher, her friend. Between scorching fits of shame and rage she missed him with a growing intensity and missed the practice of magic even more. Her own practice, studying by herself the books she had bought, was not the same without his instruction and guidance. When she read new spells and tried them out unsuccessfully, she had no idea what she was doing wrong. When she found new books, she could not tell whether information that seemed contradictory was true or claptrap, and there was a great deal of claptrap magic being written and sold. Other spells, other writings, simply made no sense.
Yet she shrank from seeking another teacher. She knew by that time that Tibbeth was one of the best dog wizards in the city; she knew also that to seek out the Council wizards in their little enclave in the Mages' Yard would be to announce to the world at large that she was mageborn.
Her father, negotiating with colleagues still deeply suspicious—or completely unbelieving—of wizardry in general, would never have forgiven her. He would have asked, too, why she wanted to exchange a very powerful teacher for a lesser one.
So she kept silent, as Tibbeth had known she would. At times she found it impossible to believe that she had seen what she had seen. Not Tibbeth. Not Alix. She must have been mistaken or dreaming.
And in time, the hurt of not seeing him, not practicing, not having his instruction, grew so great that she considered going back to him in spite of the fact that she knew that she had made no mistake.
Her father crowed at her, too, over her abandonment of Tibbeth's teaching. "I always said you'd get over it, girl." That was like an ant bite, with the ant's head still stuck under the skin.
But still she would have kept her silence—or, looking back on it, she thought she would have—had not Tibbeth summoned Alix to him again.
Just why Kyra had made herself a talisman to counter spells of sleep and wore it around her neck, she didn't consciously explain to herself. If asked, she would have professed her wholehearted belief in Tibbeth's honor, at least in his given word. It was the first time, too, that her spells had proved stronger than the spells of another wizard, the first time her power had gone up successfully against another power, though she didn't think of that at the time.
She wasn't clear what she thought at first, waking to see the moonlight in a hard, clear bar across the foot of her bed, so vivid that she felt she could have plucked it up and wound it around her like a veil. And in that moonlight, only the thrown-back coverlet and dented pillow where Alix had lain.
Then anger rushed through her, a wave of killing heat, like throwing open the door of a stove. It was as if she knew, absolutely and at once, what had happened and where her sister had gone.
She rose soundlessly, pulled on her robe, and intercepted Alix at the foot of the long stair down into the hall. Her sister's eyes were open but filled with a dreamy, wanton glassiness; they did not focus on Kyra as she stopped her and put her hands to the alabaster temples beneath the cascades of moon-bleached hair.
The dream of Tibbeth was there, and it was foul. It fled away before Kyra's touch like roaches before light, but not before she had read in it reveries that the most unclean of prostitutes would not have entertained: a man's reveries, not a woman's. Even at the age of eighteen Kyra was aware of the difference between men's dreams and women's, on that subject at least.
She had sat awake through the night in the chair beside the bed, watching Alix sleep, while anger coursed through her veins like a poison that burned and nauseated so that she felt that she would never sleep again.
In the morning she had gone to her father.
"Tibbeth?" He stared at her, more startled at first than anything else, over the big ledgers in his book room. "That's nonsense. Alix is only twelve years old."
Kyra said nothing, only looked at him, her own face rigid and white with anger; his expression slowly darkened with suffusing blood as what she told him sank in, and his topaz eyes grew pale. It took him a few moments, sitting there, staring at her dark-circled eyes and white mouth, but he began to believe.
"Sweet saints of God, I will kill him."
"Yes," Kyra said softly, savagely.
Something changed in his eyes. "But I won't have her name brought into it. Dear God, it will ruin her chances of any kind of decent marriage! Nor will I have yours come up."
"Don't be ridiculous," Kyra snapped, feeling her anger heat in return: anger at Tibbeth and anger at her father, sitting there and thinking about his precious alliances, his reputation among his peers. "Who else are the Witchfinders going to believe?"
"The Witchfinders?" He was aghast.
"Who else would have the power to arrest him?" she demanded. "He's powerful, Father. He could escape the regular constables; they'd never catch him. What are you going to charge him with, if not a crime of magic? Stealing your silverware?"
And she saw by the shift of his eyes that he'd been thinking exactly of that, of some charge that did not touch upon magic, that would not reveal to the other members of the guilds that the dog wizard had been free in his house, teaching his daughter.
Bitterly, she said, "Whatever you charge him with, you know my name is going to come up at his trial."
They had argued about it long and viciously. She was eighteen, with an eighteen-year-old's intolerant righteousness; he was her father, with the swollen resentful boil of three years of her rebelliousness bursting in his soul.
What was said in the book room that morning on both sides would never be forgiven. In the end Kyra had manufactured talismans of death and plague, marking them with Tibbeth's mark, and had set them about her father's warehouse, and he then went to the Witchfinders and claimed that he had seen the dog wizard lurking there.
At the hearing before Sergius Peelbone, the cold-eyed man who at that time was Witchfinder Extraordinary of the Angelshand Inquisition, Kyra testified that Tibbeth had been turned away from his position as her teacher when she had decided she would no longer endanger her immortal soul by tampering with such an evil thing as magic.
The scandal had been tremendous.
Most of it she had pushed from her mind. Her memory of those days consisted largely of fight after fight with her father, who shouted new recriminations at her every time he returned from the meetings with guild members demanding explanations of how he had happened to be training a dog wizard in his house, interspersed with the razor-suave questions of the Witchfinder at endless sessions in the dark, round chamber of the Inquisition on Angel's Island. At some of them Tibbeth had been present, his wrists manacled with chains overwritten in runes of na-aar—thaumaturgical silence, deadness, immunity to all spells—and bound with the scarlet threads of spell-cord, staring at her with hatred as she answered the same questions over and over, told the same seamless, plausible lies. The summer's heat was beginning—under ordinary circumstances the family would have been making plans to retreat to their country place. The clammy heat and the smell of men's sweat gummed her memories of those days like filthy glue. Sometimes, coming in and out of the hearing room, she would pass Tibbeth's childlike, colorless wife, who was sitting on a bench in the hall with her head bowed down to her hands. Kyra wondered how young that girl had been when the dog wizard had first taken her to his bed, and the thought made her stomach turn.
Very clearly indeed, she remembered standing in the square before the Cathedral of St. Cyr, when they'd led him, shaven-headed and wearing a long white shirt of cotton so thin that the summer sunlight had showed his body through, to the stake. His books were heaped among the huge piles of twigs beneath his feet, though later Lady Rosamund had told her that the Magic Office of the Church had probably been through them and taken anything of interest. Mostly what she felt then was a kind of surprise that the pile of wood was so huge—more than five feet high—that Tibbeth had to be helped up it with a ladder and stood like a man atop a haystack. The spell-cord twisting the ropes that bound him to the stake looked like long trails of blood.
Stranger at the Wedding Page 23