Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Released, the horse trotted back down the road a few yards, but—running already toward the house—Kyra heard it stop and begin to graze.

  Please don't let me be too late. Please…

  Her shoes jarred the uneven roadbed, the blister biting her foot as if she'd trodden on broken glass. In the cold her breath left a feather trail of whiteness, and the sharp air sawed her lungs. But now and then on her cheeks she felt a sticky warmth, as if she had stumbled through a patch of summer noon, and that brought the sweat to her face and lifted the hair of her nape. Somewhere quite close to her she caught a whiff of the rankness of sweaty wool, dirty hair, unwashed humanity— mobbed, packed, thick in some hot open daylight space.

  Before her the house crouched lightless, eyeless, and the nightjars and owls that had cried in the manse woods were silent. Only the buzzing of flies sawed at the darkness, and though, looking up, Kyra saw no smoke from the cottage chimneys, still she smelled burning.

  The door was locked. "Alix!" Kyra pounded desperately on the thick oak of the planks. "Algeron!" The smoke stench was stronger close to the house, but there was a quality to it of strange distance, as if it came to her from far down a corridor whose end was lost in darkness. Panting, she ran the cottage's length, ducking through a rickety gate to the kitchen yard, but the door, too, was latched fast. It was a tiny place, perhaps four rooms in all, ivy blanketing two walls and invading the braided thatch that overhung the eaves. When she rattled the door handle, she felt for an instant that the brass was burning hot to the touch, so she jerked her hand back in pain; a moment later, as she tested it with the backs of her fingers, it was cold.

  Stumbling into the woodpiles and rain barrels and stray pieces of scrap lumber that country houses collected about their walls, she ran back toward the front of the place, testing the heavy windows, wondering if she might drive some piece of wood through the tiny diamonded panes.

  Had the image of Tibbeth of Hale not been so branded into her mind, she would never have heard the footfall behind her. Her pounding on the window drowned everything, it seemed to her, but the hammering of her own heart. Later she wasn't sure that it had actually happened, but for one paralyzing second she smelled the acrid pungence of burned, half-rotted flesh—close, almost on top of her—and veered around in time to take four feet of swung plank across her left shoulder instead of on the back of her skull.

  For that first second, through a stabbing shock of pain, she could have sworn that the colorless, wild-haired woman attacking her had Tibbeth's face.

  Kyra ducked, catching a second blow on her upflung left arm. The wood was being threshed at her with almost superhuman strength; the pain was incredible, taking her breath away. As her instructors in the arts of war had taught her at the Citadel, she dove straight in at the woman—Gyvinna, Merrivale had called her, she thought distractedly; of course it was Gyvinna, she remembered Tibbeth speaking that name now—smothering her next attack and robbing her of the advantage of the plank's length. Gyvinna kicked at her stomach, hard and straight, like a man. Kyra blocked it and twisted aside, her left arm barely responding to the shock of impact, and Gyvinna grabbed with insane strength at her throat.

  Kyra's mind had been responding slowly, still balking over the fact that she barely recognized this woman, that she had no quarrel with her. But when those harpy nails dug into the skin of her throat, when the distorted mouth, the eyes bulging with mad hatred, hovered inches from her face, her training took over. She swung her arm up and over Gyvinna's wrists and dropped her full weight like a hammer on top of them, shoulder and body behind the blow. She felt flesh tear from her neck as the other woman's grip broke. The next instant, left hand pushing her right fist for force, she smashed her elbow straight into Gyvinna's nose, slamming her backward. Blood poured down the blond woman's face as she grabbed, snarling, again, but Kyra was taller and in far better training. She caught Gyvinna by the neck and slammed the back of her head as hard as she could into the wall beside them, once, twice, until she heard the plaster crack.

  Gyvinna sagged in her grip. Kyra dropped her and ran once more for the front door.

  It was open. The woman must have been in the house, heard her, and come out.

  Smoke filled the house, so thick that Kyra's mage-born eyes could not pierce it, and she stumbled over a footstool and banged her shins on some unknowable article of furniture on her way through the dark front room, her lungs burning with heat. Flies swarmed, huge, stable flies as long as her thumb, snagging in her hair and crawling on her eyelids; the voices of the crowd were very clear in here, the smell of their filthy clothing, the chanting of the Inquisitors… even the rank, sewery stink of the river.

  She heard no flames, but she knew where the evil was centered and called around her the strongest spells of protection she knew as she groped her way with streaming eyes to the door that had to lead into the bedroom. Don't let me be too late…

  Tibbeth was in the room. She knew it.

  Moaning, a thin sob; then, desperate, Algeron's voice. "Alix, stay with me! Don't fall asleep… Don't leave me… Hold on, Alix…"

  "… hurts…" Almost unrecognizable, slurred with pain and fever. "Oh, God, hurts…"

  From somewhere Kyra heard a noise that could have been the buzz of a monstrous fly or a whisper of laughter.

  "Alix!" she cried. "Algeron! It's me, Kyra."

  She summoned light.

  It sputtered, fuming and sulfurous, above the bed where they lay, a yellowish glare that died almost instantly, then wavered into being again. Light slithered over Alix's apricot hair, which was hanging disordered nearly to the floor; Algeron's beautiful, sensitive face was twisted with agony as he released one of the ivory shoulders he was holding to clutch, sobbing, at the calf of his leg. White showed all around the gray of his pupil, itself only the thinnest of lines rimming an iris swollen like that of a man drugged. He barely seemed to recognize Kyra as she strode across the little bedroom.

  "Fever," he whispered desperately. "Pain. Alix…"

  He swung around with a gasp, staring into the room's darkest corner, where the armoire loomed. Kyra felt her own eyes dragged there. There wasn't—not quite—anything there.

  "Hold on to her!"

  He managed to nod, tears of pain streaming from his eyes. Kyra reached across him and ripped Alix's shift open down the front, dragging it over the girl's head. From the darkness in the corner she thought she heard another buzzing, another sound that could have been a thick indrawn breath, a satisfied giggle.

  She couldn't be angry, she thought. Anger was the foe of magic, the ruin of concentration.

  Her hands were quite steady as she drew chalk from her pocket. She laid the shift on the floor and around it drew the broken Circle of Ingathering, the inside-out star that imprisoned, the long grounding lines and the runes of lightning and water. She felt, as she summoned the essences of those elements, nothing except a cold perfection, a triumphant exactness, precisely as when she had driven her training sword straight through Cylin's guard to the red circle marked above his heart, and knew she had forgotten nothing.

  "Hold her, Algeron," she said again, the calm of her own voice astonishing her. "Don't let her slip away."

  He whispered, "My legs… burning. We're burning up."

  She glanced back, making herself not feel anything, half expecting to see genuine flames. Alix, naked among the tangled sheets save for the gold ring on her hand, moved and whispered something neither of them could hear.

  "Hold her."

  She turned back, facing into the darkness in the corner. Behind her she could hear Algeron's voice murmuring:

  "If my love be a song, then you are the harpist's strings,

  Were I a purling river, they would find you at the

  springs …"

  The yellowish witchlight flared again, then dimmed away, and it seemed to Kyra that the armoire was casting a shadow like the shape of a man's shoulders and head.

  Hestie Pinktrees had spoken of t
he magic of hatred, the magic woven of ill. For six years Kyra had been aware of the hatred buried deep in her, a nameless thing dwelling in a well whose cover was secured with chains. Deliberately, chain by chain, Kyra unloosed it, opened the cover, called it forth, and gave it a name, her own name. Like the ancient witches who wove spells with their own hair, their own tears, their own breath, she wove of that hatred a rune of power, surrounding herself in it as in a cloud: the rage of her betrayal, the fury of learning that the hunger of her soul to him had been no more than a blind, a means to an end.

  She could see Tibbeth very clearly now, standing in the corner. He looked as he had looked that night in the garden, douce and reasonable in his dark robe, even to the moonlight that seemed to shine out of nowhere on his high, age-spotted forehead.

  "My dear Kyra," he said softly. "Aren't you getting just a trifle hysterical about this?"

  "You murder my sister and you ask me that?"

  He made a little tutting noise through his teeth. "It's her choice, Kyra." Even the soft, high voice was the same. "You weren't there; you wouldn't have understood if you had been. But she said to me one night in the garden… She said, 'Before I would have another, I will love you until I die.' She did say that."

  "Under your spells!"

  He moved a little. She could see, under the hem of his robe, his bare foot, the red and black flesh glistening with charring, the burned bones sticking through. "What are spells, Kyra? I knew you wouldn't understand, not the deeper secrets. Not the love a man can bear for a ripe and innocent girl, not that girl's first, undying love for the man who could lead her, could show her—"

  "I know what you wanted to show her!" Kyra nearly spit the words at him. "And I know where you wanted to lead her! I looked into her dreams."

  "Oh, tut. A fearful virgin's judgment on something she doesn't even comprehend. How were they different from the dreams that I see now in your eyes that you've dreamed? It's all the same hunger, you know."

  "They were different," Kyra said thickly, "because I am twenty-four and she was twelve. Because I chose and you had to put runes of lust and filth all over her nightdresses to get her dreams to reflect your longings."

  "Kyra, Kyra," he chided, and stirred again in the shadows. The stench of his burned flesh came off his robes. A fuzzy black fly crawled along the curve of his head; another one struck Kyra from behind, tangling in her cropped hair, but she did not take her eyes from the man before her.

  "That's your family's prejudices speaking, you know." he said. "Your father's morbid respectability, his terror of what others might think of the slightest deviation from what they consider normal, your mother's fear of her own body. When a man finds gold, of course he sponges the dirt off it so that it will shine. But if you will have it so, if you will take it upon yourself, like all your family, to dictate even the thoughts of those around you, I will let her free. I had thought better of you, but I bear you no ill will."

  "But I bear it to you!" Kyra raised her arm and summoned to herself all the power of the lines she had drawn, all the strength of the lightning that burned unseen in the air, all the deep serenity of the earth and the passion of the sea. "And I will not let you go, to return to her again when I'm far away. Thus I conjure you to enter this circle, to be one with the runes you have drawn on that cloth. I bind you to them, that they compass you about, so that you cannot stir from them ever again." '

  In the darkness of his corner the ghost began to laugh. It was a thin, flickering sound like the squeaking of wind, through which Tibbeth's real voice appeared only in flashes, as color appeared in changeable silk. It was echoed behind her by a thick, guttural bubbling from the door.

  As Kyra swung around, pain arrowed through her legs, the searing burn of fire, though when she struck at them, there was no fire to be seen. This only came glancing through her mind, for at the same instant Algeron cried out, leaping to his feet as the woman Gyvinna rushed through the door, a rusted scythe upraised in her hands and broad ribbons of blood flowing down her mouth and chin.

  Kyra fell back, clamping her mind down on the spells of protection that guarded her and Alix from the worst of the dead man's malice; on the bed Alix sobbed with agony, clutching at her calves and thighs among the tangled sheets, and the pain of flameless fire seared again through Kyra's legs as well. In the doorway Algeron seized the haft of the scythe, straggling to wrest it from Gyvinna's grip. But the woman was strong. She thrust him aside and slashed at Kyra, the filthy metal missing her neck but opening a gash in her forearm and hand as she dodged, and with the heat of the blood and the shock of the pain came another blaze of anguish in her legs as her concentration cracked. The smell of smoke was thick in the room: the heat of a summer afternoon, the stench and fevered mutter of the crowd. Algeron caught the madwoman from behind, gasping as she writhed in his grip to knee at his groin and, when that failed, bite at his hands and arms. Her face was barely human, running with blood out of which two pale eyes stared like an animal's; perhaps it was that which allowed him, when he wrenched the scythe from her grip, to strike her with all his force across the side of the head.

  He would never, Kyra thought obliquely, with the detached part of her mind not given entirely over to the spells she held about them, have struck something that he considered a woman.

  Gyvinna collapsed to the floor. For a moment the only sound in the room was her sobbing breath.

  Then Alix moaned. Standing above Gyvinna, the scythe in his hands, Algeron threw an anguished look back at the bed but held his ground.

  When Tibbeth spoke again, his voice came out of Gyvinna's dripping mouth. "I am your master, Kyra. The magic in your mind is my magic. You can't fight me."

  "My magic is my own," Kyra said softly. "I am my own. I cast you out. You are none of me, and I none of you." She turned back to face the corner and saw that Tibbeth's dark robe was gone, his legs and thighs a charred and blackening mess, dripping yellowish fluid that seemed to puddle about him on the scrubbed oak planking of the floor. Flies swarmed about it as they whined through the darkness over Alix's bed.

  Shakily, Kyra repeated the words of the conjuration, bending her will upon Tibbeth, drawing him toward the rune-written shift that lay in the magic circle's center. She heard Alix cry out, striking with feeble agony at the flies that crawled over her naked flesh, felt renewed pain flash through her own legs, charring sinew and muscle while her mind was still alive to feel. The smell of smoke filled her throat, burned her eyes; she was certain that beneath her borrowed breeches the skin was blackening, blistering, sloughing away. He had felt that, she thought, and had kept his mind focused on the magic of his hate. She could do no less.

  For the first time she felt Tibbeth's will give, felt it writhe and twist like a monstrous fish when it felt the hook.

  Alix screamed. Behind her Kyra heard a faint sob, and a woman's voice, thick with blood and hurt, whispered, "Tibbeth?"

  By his breathing she could tell that Algeron was still there as well; by his breathing also, she knew he was in terrible pain. "He's using you, Gyvinna," Kyra said softly, her voice stammering slowly over the words, forcing them out around the strain of concentration. "He's using your mind to channel his own. As he used your hands, your body, as a tool of his revenge."

  There was silence, then another thick, broken sob. The pain grew less, and she felt Tibbeth's spirit jerk against her will. Glancing behind her, she saw the laundrywoman's face ghastly in the yellowish blear of the witchlight, the pale eyes blinking rapidly, trying to remember, or fighting the overwhelming urge to sleep again.

  "I don't…" Gyvinna whispered. "I'd just close my eyes, and he'd be with me again."

  "To use you."

  "No… Yes." The woman sat up a little, her head rolling, the bloodied hair leaving stripes on the lead-hued cheeks beneath. From the tail of her eye Kyra saw Algeron, still standing between Gyvinna and the bed, his eyes staring, fighting to keep from doubling over with pain.

  Gyvinna sniffled and wip
ed her bleeding nose with the back of her wrist. "And why not? It wasn't true, what they said of him. About Miss Alix. It was me he loved, so why… why shouldn't I be with him, whatever way he wants? He loved me…" Her eyes slid closed.

  Algeron's breath scaled into a short, shallow sob, and his knees buckled; Alix whispered something about fire, and her hands threshed helplessly at the swarming flies. The pain in Kyra's legs redoubled, sweat pouring down her face, her body shaking as part of her mind drew back from the spells of conjuration to fight the physical shock that would soon render her unconscious. She was aware of the blood running down her gashed arm, of the flies swarming over the raw, ragged flesh.

  "He loved you when you were a little girl," she said quietly. "Because you were a little girl. He loved you because you were helpless, and pretty, and in his power. As he loved Alix… and probably others besides."

  Gyvinna's china-blue eyes flared open again. The worn face, prematurely lined, showed suddenly how young she really was. "That's a lie!" she sobbed. "A dirty lie! A man's first true love… What does age matter? A girl can be a woman…"

  "How old were you," Kyra pressed, "when first he came to you?" Her lungs were burning, as if the air she breathed were nothing but scalding smoke. She felt the skin of her face, her hands, sear and crinkle, felt fire lancing through the cut on her arm, the blistering weakness of her legs. "Did he call you in dreams as he called my sister?"

  "You're making that up!"

  The pain lessened. Kyra gasped, her chest hurting as if a sword blade had been driven through her lungs; she had to fight for the breath to speak. "Then why is he taking revenge on Alix? Why is it her wedding night that woke his ghost to murder, and nothing to do with me? Why did he call you to write the death-marks on her wedding clothes?"