Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Rosamund was silent for a time, running a lock of her heavy hair thoughtfully through her fingers. In spite of the plain black woolen robe of wizardry, the simple red cotton of her shift, she had all the queenly grace of the daughter of a long line of earls; her green eyes, with their dark rings around the irises, were troubled in the gloom.

  "Not himself," she said musingly. "But under certain conditions, if the Inquisition didn't have a very powerful mage attending the death—and as I've said, the Inquisition's wizards aren't first-class as a rule—a wizard's ghost can linger if it has something, some place or person, to cling to. Death by violence…" She shook her head.

  "I checked the schoolroom," Kyra said numbly. "I took special pains with it. Most of his things had been thrown out, but even so, I sensed nothing there." True, she thought, she had not been thinking of or looking for traces of Tibbeth when she had done so. Not Tibbeth alive, Tibbeth active, Tibbeth twisted with malice.

  But even so, that kind of hate must have left its mark.

  She thought about reentering that room now, in the darkness, fingering once more through the few remaining crocks and bowls. Even playing through that scene in her mind made her shiver.

  "Did Tibbeth have a wife, or a son, or a brother or sister?" Rosamund asked. "Someone close to him? The ghosts of wizards can possess those who loved them if those loved ones let them in."

  Kyra said, "He had a wife."

  A wife who was little more than a child herself. That colorless, dreamy face, that flaxen hair, pale blurs in the dark vestibule of the Inquisition's courtroom… Kyra couldn't even recall what she looked like.

  But quite suddenly she saw herself sitting in this very room, on the end of the bed as she was sitting now, on a spring afternoon six years earlier, with a pile of her sister's nightgowns on her lap. On each of those fragile cotton garments the mark of Tibbeth's Summoning had been traced, invisible, undetectable to any but a fairly strong mage. He probably hadn't realized that she had the power to read a mark that subtle.

  When she had recalled the scene before, she had remembered only her own rage at the taste of the foul dreams with which those marks had been imbued, the dirty sensuality, the unclean Summons that Alix had been sleeping with every night, the marks pressed against her skin. Only now it came to her that the marks were placed so that when the garment was on, they would fall just below the breast…

  … in the precise place where the faint touch of evil lingered on the red bodice's muslin lining.

  And she remembered, too, the colorless, dreamy-faced laundry maid who only minutes before had come in to gather up Alix's discarded shift.

  "Dear God!"

  She dropped the crystal, and her concentration snapped with horror and alarm; Lady Rosamund's image vanished. She scrabbled for it, then sprang to her feet, tripping over the wedding gown and nearly colliding with her mother in the bedroom doorway.

  "Kyra!" Binnie Peldyrin caught her older daughter in her arms. "Oh, thank God you're here!"

  Kyra stared at her blankly for a moment. Her mother's pleasant oval face was puckered with worry, and the relief that sprang into her dark eyes at the sight of this less successful daughter frightened Kyra a little. "What is it?" Kyra asked. "I've been out; I didn't think Father would be all that eager to see me around."

  "Oh, Kyra, your father's fit to have a stroke!" Binnie gasped, clutching her daughter's hand. "He'd never ask this of you; he seems to think all you've brought on the house is ill fortune, which is quite ridiculous, since these things will happen… I mean the pipes breaking and all those poor little mice…"

  "Ask what of me?" Like her father, Kyra had long ago learned that ruthless interruption was the only way of carrying on a conversation with her mother.

  "Oh, is that your magic crystal? I'm so glad you thought to bring one, though I thought they were supposed to be round balls."

  "No, they aren't. What is it? If you want me to find that wretched flute player…"

  "What flute player?" Binnie, deflected from her train of thought, stared up at her tall offspring with distracted surprise. "Oh… Oh, that dreadful young man! Though I must say he played beautifully," she added, "and he was very handsome. I'm sure I can't blame Tellie at all for kissing him, even if he isn't her class and it did make her father furious, but after all, there's been no harm done, and he has played at Court…"

  "Mother… !" Kyra pulled away from the soft little fingers and restrained herself from shaking her parent. "If kissing him was all she did, I'm certainly not going to spend my time tracking him with a scrying-crystal."

  "Not him!" Her brow wrinkled tragically, and her eyes glistened with sudden tears. "Your sister!"

  "My…" Her voice trailed to silence.

  "Oh, Kyra, Alix has… has run away with Algeron Brackett!"

  Kyra swore. And yet an instant later the image returned to her… like two children sheltering from the rain, asleep in one another's arms in the guttering light of the candles, gold hair mingling with gold. Alix had gone to him for comfort after her father's bawled threats and recriminations, had cried herself to sleep in his arms…

  And had wakened, warm and locked together, in the deep of the night, nearly an hour before anyone else in the house.

  Kyra swore again, mightily.

  "Dearest, your language! Though you always did pick up things from the stable boys." Binnie wrung her dainty hands, her face twisted with concern in its frame of lace cap and blond curls. "Oh, I know she says she's going to marry him immediately…"

  "Marry him… !" Her heart turned cold.

  "… but think of the scandal! And your father says—"

  "Wait a minute, she says .. ."

  "In her note." With a prolonged sniffle, Binnie Peldyrin produced it, and only many, many years of proper raising kept Kyra from simply snatching it out of her glycerin-softened grip:

  Mother,

  Please, please forgive me for what I do, and please beg Father's forgiveness as well. I know how dreadfully I wrong him, and still more am I conscious of the wrong I am doing to Master Spenson and to all of his house. Please do not think Algeron and I are simply running away together. We will be married as soon as may be, and we will enter into respectable trades.

  Never do either of us wish to bring shame upon you. But I have realized that for me to marry Master Spenson would be to do him an even greater wrong than this. I love Algeron far more than words can ever say and cannot now exist without him at my side. I know it is too much to ask your blessings, but I pray that at least we may take with us some understanding.

  Give all of my love to Kyra, and I beg of you, do not seek us.

  Your wretched daughter,

  Alix

  "You have to find her!" Binnie raised her eyes once more to her daughter's face, which had grown still, like blanched bone, in the last glimmerings of the window's fading light. "Your father sent footmen to all the gates of the city, but nobody remembers seeing them, which in itself is a little strange, since Algeron is so very handsome. But if you can use your magic crystal…"

  Kyra swept her hand in the direction of the dressing table, and all the candles there burst into simultaneous flame as she flung herself down upon Alix's little stool before it.

  "Really, dearest," her mother went on, her chirping voice calmer now, "it amazes me how you do that! But I do remember when you were quite a little girl, you used to—"

  "Mother, please! I need quiet for this."

  Her mother clapped both hands over her mouth in a curiously childlike gesture and sank to a sitting position on the end of the bed. Kyra found it difficult to concentrate with those doelike eyes gazing at her in awed wonder and realized that she had never worked even the smallest magic in the presence of either of her parents.

  "Perhaps you'd better leave the room for a little bit," she said when no image would appear in the crystal's central facet.

  Binnie paled. "You haven't seen something… Oh, Kyra, tell me!" Impulsively she clutched at K
yra's wrist. "I'm her mother…"

  "I haven't seen anything," Kyra said patiently, extricating herself and wondering how her single-minded and efficient father had made it through almost thirty years of marriage to this woman. "I just think I need to be alone."

  "Oh, yes, of course, of course… Just let me hang up Alix's wedding dress… I can't think how it came to be dumped like this across the end of the bed, but the silk crushes so easily, and it cost ten crowns a yard! And that Hylette charges absolutely scandalous prices. I can't believe Lady Earthwygg has all her gowns made by that woman, because I know the Earthwyggs are all to pieces and it's only your father's money—"

  "Mother!"

  "Oh, yes! Yes, of course…" She scampered from the room, still clutching yards of saffron veil.

  They can't be getting married tonight, Kyra thought desperately, turning her attention back to the crystal. Tonight can't be her wedding night.

  She angled the crystal to the candles' light.

  Still no image would come.

  Panic mounted in her for a moment. Don't tell me Mother unnerved me that much. Quickly she searched the crystal for images of her father and saw him at once, talking to—thank God!—Spenson in the book room. She called Alix's image to her mind again, seeking her, seeking Algeron…

  But the only thing she saw reflected in the crystal's depth was the dozen points of the candlelight, like golden stars sunk in the fog-white rock. She concentrated on those points, channeling all her thoughts, all her attention, trying to shut out the sudden rise of voices in the hall below. This is ridiculous; I've found both of them in the crystal before. It isn't as if either of them is mageborn.

  So intent was her concentration that she neither heard nor felt the jar of footfalls in the back stairs until the door was thrown open and Spenson grabbed her by the wrist. "Come on!"

  "What… ?"

  She found herself dragged to her feet and down the hall in a tangle of long legs and petticoats, still clutching her scrying-crystal in one hand. The sudden breaking of her almost meditative state left her disoriented. She could hear her father's voice downstairs and the shouting of other men but couldn't piece together words. Lily the maid sprang out of their way as Spenson hauled her to the back stairs and shoved her through the narrow door.

  "Spens…"

  "Run for it!" he panted as he hauled her down the dark hairpin switchbacks of the narrow stairwell. "The Witchfinders!"

  "What?"

  "They're here. They have a warrant for your arrest; they came in while I was talking to your father. Lily showed me the back stairs. They say they have a witness who swears she saw you turn a beggar into a dog."

  "What?"

  Kyra was still cursing with great vividness as they burst through into the kitchen, fled past the startled Joblin and his scullions, and pelted on through into the hall leading to the garden door. As they swept through the pantry, Spens caught up a broom and a three-foot metal candle snuffer, tossing the latter to Kyra; she had recovered sufficiently not to need dragging in his wake and strode at his heels, her voluminous skirts gathered up in her free hand.

  "Alix and Algeron have eloped," she gasped as they plunged into the darkness of the garden. "Spens, they're getting married!"

  "Halt, in the Regent's name!" The voice came from the corner of the house, where the cobbled kitchen yard ran back toward the street, but Kyra's mage-sighted eyes picked up dark forms by the black slit of the garden gate. "Two by the gate," Kyra said softly as she guided Spens along the grass verge of the path at a run. Their feet made little sound, and the night, typically of Angelshand in the spring, was thickly overcast. "I can't use magic…"

  "Don't—you'll never clear yourself if you do."

  Footsteps crunched the gravel, then there was a dry, thrashing tangle of feet snaring in low hedges and rosebushes. Kyra heard a man swear; evidently the Inquisition's sasenna lacked the mageborn vision in darkness. Spens swung the broom, and there was a satisfying crack, followed by gasps and curses; he grappled and scuffled with someone, first on gravel, then on grass, then in the thorns. Though not only common sense but every impulse inculcated by her training made the use of magic against another human being nearly impossible, Kyra had no qualms about using her mageborn senses against a man nearly blind in the pitch-black shadows. She bent the candle snuffer over the skull of one warrior when he lunged, clutching at her, and shoved the other, stumbling, off Spens with the broom. Spens finished the operation with an elbow across the man's face, a boot in his groin, and a hard shove that sent him reeling into his advancing fellows while Spens and Kyra dove through the postern and into the stinking gloom of the alley beyond.

  "This way!" She caught Spenson's sleeve and dragged him three steps right and through the gate to the Wishroms' kitchen yard, which thankfully was still unlatched from the flute player's earlier retreat. Instants later they heard the Witchfinders thunder up the alley. "And to think I threatened to skin that nice young man," she muttered, leading Spens quickly to the cellar door, down the steps, through the drying room there, and up on the other side to the pantry. All the Wishroms' servants were, of course, in Baynorth Square watching the excitement. No one opposed them as they passed through the downstairs offices and out a side door into Mouch Lane.

  "What now?" Spens asked as they calmly hailed a cab at the corner of Upper Tollam Road and rattled away from the scene of the crime.

  Looking across at him in the dim flashes of light through the cab windows from the oil lamps in these more elegant streets, Kyra saw that his eyes sparkled as they had in the Cherry Orchard when he'd spoken of pirate fights over breakfast. His face, sweat-streaked with exertion, had turned suddenly young.

  The cab was an old one, badly sprung and stinking of wine and tobacco; the jolting of its iron wheels over the cobblestones jarred Kyra breathless, so that she could barely speak.

  "We have to find Alix! Spens, they've eloped!"

  He blinked at her for a moment, nonplussed; then his eyebrows dove. "Eloped…"

  "The marks—the evil eyes—were on her shifts, probably the one she's wearing and whatever she took with her. The laundry maid…"

  "How could they get there? Who… How do you know?"

  "I found them," Kyra said, trying to call to mind what Tibbeth's wife had looked like. In addition to glimpses in the vestibule of the court, Kyra recalled seeing her half a dozen times during the year she was going to Tibbeth's shop to study but could call to mind nothing of her face—only the impression of extreme youth.

  Tibbeth had been right about the power of illusion in her own life. It had never occurred to her to regard that flaxen nonentity as a person in her own right any more than it had ever occurred to her to note the color of Merrivale's eyes or the names of the footmen and maids.

  She did remember that Tibbeth's wife had been no more than a few years older than herself. She had assumed that the laundry maid was much older, but that, she knew, could be the result of the poverty that lined a woman's face, thickened her figure, and robbed her of teeth when she was no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

  She had never inquired. Her face heated with shame.

  "I think my mother's laundry maid was Tibbeth's wife," she said after a time. "I don't really remember; she wasn't someone I took any notice of in those days. Lady Rosamund says it's possible for a wizard's ghost to occupy part of the mind of someone whom the wizard knew well, if that person lets him."

  "I see," Spens said quietly. "Then it was she who called the Witchfinders."

  "She saw me with the wedding dress," Kyra said. "She knew then I'd guess and didn't want me tracking Alix."

  "And where is Alix?"

  "That's just it!" Kyra cried helplessly. "I don't know! I can't get an image of her in the crystal! It's as if she were mageborn herself—or had a counterspell."

  "Could she?"

  "Well," Kyra said, calmed a little by his reasonableness, "scry-wards do cost a good bit of money, though I suppose Alix could
have traded her jewelry. As young as she is, she doesn't have much—" She broke off again, thinking, remembering the note. Then, abruptly, she half stood and leaned out the window of the cab. "Driver! Yoo-hoo… !"

  The man half turned in his seat, bright green eyes peering over a thick muffler. "Yes, miss?"

  "Never mind Salt Hill Lane; take us to Pea Street south of the river!"

  Chapter XVII

  "Good heavens, child, you know I can't give you that kind of information, even if I knew it!" Hestie Pinktrees looked from Kyra to Spens and back, then paused suddenly and turned to consider Spenson again.

  "Yes," Kyra said. "Him. The one Lady Earthwygg wanted the philters for. I wrote counterspells all over the latest one you sold her this afternoon, by the way."

  Pinktrees chuckled richly, her whole rosy face dimpling with delight at the joke, then rose to her feet like the ascent of the harvest moon. "So you were mageborn all the time! Shame on you, coming in here telling me stories about ill-wishing a man who'd wronged you! Little slyboots." In deep settings of flesh and kohl her eyes twinkled good-humoredly. "But you might have saved yourself the risk of discovery, Snow-Tear, my child. That one looks too stubborn for a philter to give him anything more than itchy dreams. Would you care for some tea, either of you? It's so chilly out tonight." And she bustled from the room in a foam of flowered skirts, as if the Emperor's gardens had suddenly decided to uproot themselves and take a walk.

  "Snow-Tear?" Spenson asked, and Kyra shook her head. "Itchy dreams, indeed."

  "I realize it's nearly suppertime." The plump dog wizard rustled her way back in with an enormous silver tray between round white hands like bejeweled puddings. "I made these this morning; you do look famished."