Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  "They'll have married by this time," Kyra said softly. Her eyes went to the sun, touching the tips of the trees; within an hour, the land would be washed in shadow. Within three, it would be dark. Night. Alix's wedding night.

  Her heart quickened in her ribs again, a terrible, anxious pounding as the recollection of the evil she'd felt upon the silk returned to her like the backtaste of poison. She got to her feet, pulling away from his help.

  "Kyra, I'm sorry," Spenson said quietly. And then, when she didn't look at him, he added, "It's not far."

  It was well after dark when they stumbled, quite by accident, upon the rectory of Underhythe. "Dear me, yes, they were married this afternoon." The local priest made a move toward the low doorway that had to, Kyra guessed by the smells of cooking and the faint rattle of cleaning up, be the kitchen; she shook her head vigorously and caught his gray sleeve.

  "Did they say where they were going?" she asked. "Where they would spend the night?" The concern in his blue eyes—he was an elderly man with a bachelor's trembly fussiness—irritated her; he looked at her like a kindly father viewing a lost urchin out past her bedtime. With reason, she supposed impatiently. Her clothes were muddied, her face and hands were scratched from a hedge they'd scrambled through, and she'd begun to walk with a decided limp from a blister on her toe.. But that was still no reason for him to peer at her as if debating whether to send her around to the kitchen for leftovers handed through the back door.

  Behind her, Spenson stood with folded arms, wrapped in the illusory darkness of her protective spells; the elderly priest barely glanced at him and, unless Spens spoke, would not afterward remember that she had had a man with her at all, much less what he looked like.

  "The young lady said they would be seeking a good inn, but I suggested instead that they rent Hythe Cottage. The widow Summerhay owns it; it stands out on the far field of Summerhay Farm, and it is much nicer for a young couple on their honeymoon than an inn. It used to be a farm cottage, but there's nothing of the farm left but the orchard. Very pleasant it is, apples and a few pear trees; the cottage itself is just the four rooms, but the barn's still in fair condition for their team and gig."

  Alix must have reckoned transportation costs into the amount she braced Lady E. for, Kyra thought. Such practicality certainly didn't sound like Algeron.

  "They did seem a most respectable young couple or else, of course, I would have had nothing to do with such a scrambling affair."

  "Where is it?" demanded Kyra. "How far? It's important," she added as the man looked miffed at her interruption of his rambling encomium of the virtues of Hythe Cottage. "It's desperately important that I reach them tonight. Alix is my sister; there has been terrible news."

  "Ah!" He relaxed a little, and Kyra breathed a sigh of relief. Alix must have given him her right first name at any rate. "You continue down the road to the first crossroad—that leads out through Summerhay Farm. There's a gate, but it's easily climbed. You'll pass a hay barn about a mile in from the gate; Hythe Cottage lies about five miles beyond that, on the other side of the spinney." He peered at her over the tiny oval lenses of his spectacles. "It will be quite late by the time you arrive, you know."

  Kyra, already groaning inwardly at the thought of another six or seven miles on her smarting right foot, was burningly aware of that fact. "Is there any chance you can rent us horses?" she asked. "Or a horse and gig of some kind?"

  Spens leaned forward and breathed in her ear, "Since when do you have any money?"

  "Don't make difficulties." She turned back to the priest, who was clasping and unclasping his pale blue-veined hands by the dim glow of the oil lamps on the parlor's little table. "My companion would be glad to pay you, of course."

  So much, she thought, for keeping Spens invisible—at least the priest wouldn't be able to describe him later.

  Spenson, for whom she hadn't had a civil word since shortly after sundown, merely raised his eyebrows at her and got a furious, urgent look in return.

  "My dear child," the priest said, earnestly, "of course if I could do so, I'd be glad to…"

  Kyra had to close her hand sharply to prevent herself from slapping the man out of sheer irritation. Of course there was some problem.

  "… but my sister, who keeps house for me, has taken the gig to visit our mother over at Mickle's Farm. Mother is nearly eighty and has severe rheumatics in her joints. Clariss should be back at any time." He glanced at the heavy blackwood clock, nearly invisible in the shadows that covered the far end of the room like a grimy arras; its ticking had made a thick, subconscious background to their conversation, like the frantic thudding of Kyra's heart. She followed his eyes. It was eight-thirty. Damn it, damn it, damn it… "I could offer you some supper until she arrives," he added hospitably, and his thin, pale face acquired a little life at the prospect of a good gossip with people he didn't see every day in his village rounds.

  "I'm afraid we can't wait," Kyra said. "Thank you very kindly all the same. Come along… Bill," she added, remembering that above all else she must neither speak Spenson's name where anyone could hear it nor allow to waver the spells that turned people's eyes from his features. "Stupid old fuddy-duddy," she added as soon as they were past the rectory's low hedge and on the road again. "I hope his fool of a sister falls out of the gig and breaks her leg. The least she could have done was put off her visit till another night." In spite of her ability to see in darkness—and the night was moonless, the shadows that overlaid the road intense—she stepped on a round stone that caused a stab of pain like a knife wound in her blistered foot.

  Spens caught her elbow and held on to it this time in spite of her effort to wrench free. "We'll get there," he said.

  "If you hadn't—" She broke off and limped along in silence for a moment, glad for the touch of his hand on her arm.

  "I'm sorry," she said at length. "I couldn't have done any better. And you were good to come with me at all. I've been a harridan all afternoon, haven't I?"

  "Unspeakable," he replied imperturbably.

  She sighed. "And to think I held your temper against you."

  "Oh, when it's something I think is important—a business deal, or my breakfast muffins, or getting you to stay in Angelshand—I get livid if I'm crossed. But I know you're frightened for Alix, as I am. I never loved her, but she's a sweet girl if you can put up with her chatter."

  "I told you she only chatters when she's nervous."

  "If I made her that nervous, it's well we didn't marry." He shifted the empty satchel on his shoulder and looked across at her, peering a little in the cricket-shrilling darkness. Though she could see his features clearly, she knew hers were only a moving blur of white to him, and maybe not that much. "When we find them… Will you be able to fight the death-curse that's on her?"

  They walked in silence, leaning a little now on the stout sticks Spenson had cut for them from beech saplings in the course of the afternoon. Kyra's whole body shrank from that thought, the dread of it almost smothering the pain in her foot and the gnawing of hunger in her belly. Above the trees a barn owl shrieked like a madwoman's ghost; fox eyes glinted briefly in the sedgy tangle of the roadside ditch, then vanished. The night air, thick with loam and apple blossoms, seemed to twist with danger, like black silk drawn cuttingly tight around her throat.

  "I don't know," Kyra said softly. "Tibbeth was only a dog wizard, but he was one of the most powerful in the city. I've had six years of training at the Citadel, but… All the omens, all the readings I was getting before I came here—weak magic would never have caused disruptions like that. And from everything I've studied, the spells of the dead are very strong."

  They reached the crossroads and the gate that notched the dark, cold-smelling loom of the surrounding hedge. The splintery bars creaked alarmingly as Spenson helped her over, and she had to summon a tiny seed of blue light, floating in the air above his head, to guide him as he worked the sticks and the satchel through the gate, then clambered after the
m. To their left lay rough pasturage dotted with trees—Kyra thought she could see a couple of shaggy-coated horses sleeping near the hedge at the top—to their right, behind a fence of withes, there was a meadow where young hay grew rank and thick in the low ground. A nightjar whistled one or two notes, then fell silent. The track between pasture and meadow was rougher than the road had been, potholed and rimmed with stagnant water, and Kyra was glad of the walking stick and the strength of her companion's arm.

  "You've studied them. You've come across one?"

  She shook her head. "One—one doesn't, you see." She was silent a moment, thinking again about the Citadel's academic isolation, apart from businessmen and matchmakers and families… and the clamorings of the heart.

  "It's ironic that the Academic wizards, the ones who have the real power, frequently get very little experience, because our vows forbid us to meddle in human affairs. We learn, we study, but… apart. Alone. Against each other, in test situations—sometimes in quite dangerous test situations, but very few mages are actually killed in training. Last spring was the only time there's been actual danger at the Citadel in years. I'm told it's the same with the sasenna, the sworn warriors, in times of peace. It's the dog wizards who encounter the… the randomness, the peril, of actual events."

  "And it's the dog wizards who cause all the trouble," Spenson said quietly.

  There was a dry anger in his voice, and Kyra glanced quickly over at him. Of course, she thought. His ships had been in port eighteen months earlier, when an unscrupulous wizard had summoned a storm that had wrecked three-quarters of the Saarieque trading fleet so his patron's ships might scoop the market when they finally came in. Merrivale had written her that her father had lost thousands of crowns' worth of investments; Spenson would have lost not only money but crewmen whom he knew in that all-encompassing ruin. It was scarcely surprising that her father had been able to find other businessmen ready to follow his lead in persecuting Pinktrees and the Pilgrim. Little wonder that her father had worked so hard to get his friends—and the family of his prospective son-in-law—to forget Kyra's very existence. That Spenson had not shunned her on sight, as her father did, was a testimony in itself to his tolerance that made her ashamed of her own first judgment of him.

  "It isn't… it isn't magic itself, you know." Anyone else, she thought, and she would have sprung hotly to the defense of her art—or she would have a few weeks ago. "Most of the wizards I know are good people," she went on hesitantly, "powerful and dedicated to their art. It isn't even the dog wizards, really. I mean, Hestie Pinktrees is the sweetest woman you could meet."

  "Who'll sell a total stranger the means to cause another total stranger to pledge marriage to a girl who'll make him miserable for the rest of his life?" Spenson cocked an eyebrow at her. Kyra sighed and scratched uncomfortably at her cropped hair.

  "Anything can be turned to evil," Spenson continued after a moment, speaking slowly, as if framing his thoughts with difficulty. "Wealth, law, magic—the longing to please God…"

  "Love," Kyra said softly, remembering the yellow moonlight in Alix's open, dreaming eyes.

  "Love is the worst." Spenson's hand reached out to hers, thick fingers closing around thin, cold bone. "Because it's so difficult to tell whether one is doing evil or good."

  "There's the barn." Kyra stopped and pointed to the ramshackle structure, barely to be seen among the trees on the rising ground above the meadow. "That means the house can't be—"

  She froze in her tracks as a drift of magic came to her, a waft of the strange, vibrant knowledge of illusion being worked… and under the illusion, suddenly, the jingle of bridle bits and the rattle of crossbow bolts, the smell of horses and of men. An instant later, from the dark behind the barn, a mounted shape appeared, and a man's voice called out, "Halt in the name of the Inquisition and the Witchfinder of Angelshand!"

  Kyra looked around desperately. From the concealing trees a line of riders filed, black-clothed Church sasenna and gray-coated Witchfinders, and with them, one red-robed young man with a shaven head whose gaze, she knew, penetrated both darkness and any illusion she cared to fling. "Cover your face!" she gasped, and Spenson pulled up his loosened neck cloth, wrapping the lower part of his face so that only his eyes were visible. "Tibbeth's wife must have ridden with them. If Tibbeth is in her, he can track his own curse."

  "How many hasur?" he asked, catching her arm again and drawing so close to her that their shoulders touched. His eyes were as used to darkness as ordinary eyes ever got; she could see him peering in the direction of the oncoming riders.

  "Just one—in the robe. Can you see him?"

  "No, just shapes. Can you put an illusion on me so that I look like you?"

  "What? He'll see through that."

  "The others won't. Make yourself look like me, and when the fighting starts, dive for the bushes." They were retreating already in the direction of a stand of laurel on the other side of the pasture ditch. "Can you summon a horse if I free one of theirs? Some of them will have to dismount to arrest us."

  "If not, I can summon one of those at the top of the pasture. Spens," she whispered, even as she began the spell of illusion.

  "Put some distance between us." He hefted his stick, his craggy face grim but his eyes, in the overcast darkness, bright with the peculiar glee of a born fighter.

  "Spenson, no; they're armed."

  "Use magic if you have to, to get free and save Alix, but not till it's desperate. Now do what I say and get ready to dive." A sudden, ghostly glare of witchlight flared into being over their heads, half blinding them and illuminating them for the advancing sasenna. The warriors dismounted: three men and two women, middle-aged but lean as wolves, with the oddly youthful faces of those who had been without responsibility for years, since they had made the final decision of their lives and had sworn their vows to be the weapons of the Church. Their black clothing was marked with the many-handed red sun of the Sole God. Two of them carried crossbows; the other three, swords. All wore pistols in their belts.

  Spenson hesitated visibly, then tossed his stick to the ground some three feet away from him.

  The sasenna came forward, the hasu at their heels.

  He waited until they were close enough to touch him before he swung at the nearest with the satchel he'd carried in his other hand, almost concealed against his side. The flying mass of leather and buckles caught the man across the face, staggering him back for a fraction of a second; Spenson wrenched the pistol from the man's belt and shoved past him to smash the butt across the hasu's temple with all the force of his arm. Kyra dove for the laurel bushes, her heart frozen with terror. She heard someone cry out and smelled blood but dared not raise her face from the leaves on the thicket floor. The noise of the struggle seemed to go on forever—he couldn't possibly break away from five of them!—and it was all she could do to keep her mind on the spells of illusion that surrounded him, the spells that would fade and break once he was out of her vicinity.

  A horse whinnied furiously. There was a clatter of hooves, a woman swearing, the slapping wallop of a crossbow firing, and a moment later the hollow boom of a pistol, sulfur mingling with the blood. Other horses thundered away; she whispered the words of illusion and kept her face buried, for she heard the scuffle of clothing and the creak of a sword belt's leather, and then a man's voice said, "Your honor? Your honor?" Flesh patted softly, hesitantly, upon flesh.

  Wrapping herself in illusion, Kyra snaked out of the thicket. One of the sasenna still knelt over the hasu's body. The Church wizard's crimson robe looked black in the starlight, as Alix's gown had in the dark of her room. So did the blood trickling sluggishly from the man's face. Silently, as she had been trained among the High Council's own sasenna, Kyra moved away, thirty, forty feet, not daring to send any but the smallest of illusions to the mind of the kneeling man for fear that the touch of magic would waken the hasu back to consciousness. The hoofbeats had faded into distance, but they could catch Spens and b
e back at any time.

  She thought of the crowsbows and the smell of the blood. There was no trace of Spenson or his pursuers. He had put his life at risk, she thought, to leave open her path back to the Citadel, her path away from him.

  Dear God, she thought, don't let him die.

  When she was fifty feet away, she reached out with her mind, and the lone sasennan's horse, patiently cropping the roadside grass, flung up its head and wheeled. The sasennan looked up with a cry, but Kyra had already seized the beast's bridle, her heart hammering in panic; she missed the stirrup twice, between native clumsiness and the stiffness from her earlier ride. The man shouted at her, leveling his pistol.

  The roar of it was like the clap of doom, but in the moonless dark of the night the ball didn't come anywhere near her. The horse sprang nervously to the side, jerking on the bit; panic alone gave Kyra the agility to spring up, belly over saddle, her feet groping for the stirrups, and she dragged herself upright even as the horse moved off. The sasennan put on a burst of speed and got a divot of sod from the flying hooves in his face for his trouble. Kyra wheeled her mount, put it in the direction of the tiny farmhouse the priest had assured them lay at the end of the road, and galloped for all she was worth.

  Chapter XIX

  Darkness lay upon Hythe Farm like the shadow of the plague. Riding hell-bent for leather up the overgrown cart ruts, Kyra felt the stirring of evil in the air before she ever saw the house: a hot wind swirled briefly around her, causing the horse to shy with such suddenness that Kyra was nearly hurled over its head. As she fought for balance and shortened a rein to keep the beast from bolting, she thought she heard from somewhere, quite close by, the fading sea whisper of a crowd.

  She knew better than to try dragging her terrified mount any closer to the house. Her legs gave way again as she sprang down, though their strength came back in less time than before. The horse tried to jerk away, and she pulled the big head down close to hers and stroked the velvet nose. "Stay as close as you may," she whispered, weaving the words with understanding, with a Summons, with the beast's true name. "Come to me when I call."