Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  The woman only stared at her with huge, protesting eyes, panic and pain turning her face blank. A renewed spasm of torment swept Kyra's flesh; Algeron tried to get to his knees, tried to lift the scythe but collapsed, clutching his legs and weeping. Furious, Kyra drove her words like a spear into Gyvinna's consciousness, willing her to understand before they were all consumed. "It wasn't me he hated, Gyvinna, it was Alix! Think about it!" she shouted as Gyvinna turned her face away, her eyes closing again, seeking the comfort of her dream. "Think about it, damn you! Remember what you did! Remember why you came here, why you followed the draw of the spells to this place, how you knew to lead the Witchfinders to ambush us. Because he couldn't have her, and he couldn't stand to see her in another man's arms!"

  "No…" Her voice was barely a whisper. And then, in a scream that ripped the night like a murderer's knife, "Nooo!"

  "I conjure you!" Kyra screamed in the same instant, swinging back to the darkness of the corner, the darkness of pain and rage, the darkness whose magic was shredding her flesh and mind. "I conjure you to the sigils you have wrought; I bind you and charge you to hold to them."

  Gyvinna's screaming scaled upward, louder and louder, as if with the sound she was vomiting forth all the memories of what she had willed herself not to suspect about the man she had loved. And with those screams Kyra saw the shadow in the corner shrink and change, dwindling in size as the pain in her own flesh became transparent, revealed as illusion and not reality. The pain in her heart remained, a core of blackness intensifying, seeming to shrink in upon itself and to grow at the same time—rage, grief, and torture, hurting her as she had tried to forget that she could be hurt.

  She was barely conscious when she saw the thing come crawling out of the shadows at last, a thing like a twisted insect the size of her hand. Her will drew it to the broken Circle of Ingathering; when she saw it crawl over her sister's torn chemise, the sight set her teeth on edge, as if it were groping at her own flesh with its dirty, fingerlike feet. But her teachers in the Citadel had taught her well. She kept her mind focused on the spells of power and mastery as she closed the circle with fingers trembling so badly that they could barely hold the chalk.

  Behind her, Gyvinna was moaning brokenly. No sound at all came from the bed. The flies had gone. The darkness in the room cleared slowly, yielding to the witchlight that gradually brightened from yellow to white, like a softly shining candle. There was nothing in Kyra's consciousness but the building core of pain in her breast: no triumph, no joy, no relief.

  Within the circle the shift burst into flame. The filthy clot of shadow that had crawled upon it wriggled a little in the fire, then was gone. A few minutes later Kyra began to cry, the black core within her cracking open, the pain running away, first thick as ebony syrup, then thinning, until at last it seemed to her that it was only the water of her tears.

  Chapter XX

  The smell of bacon woke Kyra, and that of coffee. By the slant and color of the light, it was early afternoon.

  She lay on an old-fashioned wooden settee by a cold fireplace in a completely unfamiliar room. Quilts were piled beneath and around her in an inadequate attempt to mitigate the settee's hardness. Her body ached as if she'd, been beaten with a plank.

  She had, now that she recalled it, been beaten with a plank. When she moved, huge bruises made themselves felt on her back and arms beneath her ragged and soiled linen shirt. Her right arm was bound with rough bandages, the flesh beneath shrieking with pain. Her back and legs ached… Burns… She recalled the pain of fire.

  Her hand flew to the back of her neck to encounter the angry flame of sunburn. Hesitantly, she brought her hands down to touch her calves and thighs beneath the quilts. The sunburn was the only burn on her body, though she felt stripped and scorched inside.

  Slowly she looked around. The room where she lay was a large one, sparely and simply furnished: two settees by a wide brick hearth, a big table beneath the windows, spread with a cloth of tatted lace. The walls were plaster the color of clotted cream, mottled with old leaks and discolorations. The ceiling beams were black with decades of soot. Around the small panes of the half-open casement windows, ivy hung like a street urchin's untrimmed hair, the light shining through the new leaves so that they seemed to glow of themselves. The smell of trees drifted in, and the clucking of a nearby stream. A robin warbled in the hedge.

  A lot of quilts, blankets, and pillows were heaped along the walls. She remembered, as out of the depths of a half-obscured dream, helping Algeron carry Alix from the bedroom.

  Shaken, exhausted, and broken as she had been last night, she had still had that much sense. She half raised herself on her left elbow—it hurt excruciatingly, but her bandaged right arm was worse—and saw that the door that led into the bedroom was shut. That chamber would probably be unfit for anyone to sleep in ever again.

  She wondered if poor widow Summerhay would charge them for damages.

  In the kitchen a cup clinked on a saucer, a tin pan rattled against a metal stove top, and she heard Spenson say, "Even without cinnamon to put on them, I'd say these are the best I've ever eaten."

  Algeron was explaining how honey and cider could be used in the making of sweet rolls when Kyra, wrapped in a faded quilt, limped through the kitchen door. Happiness and relief flooded his face like spring sunlight when the clouds rolled away, replaced immediately by such shocked concern that Kyra wondered what the hell she looked like. Spens, who'd been sitting with his back to the door, a plateful of bacon and rolls before him, was turning even as he rose to his feet. He caught her, quilt and all, in the arm that didn't have a sling on it and drew her into a hard, coffee-flavored kiss.

  In spite of the care both of them took for their own and each other's bruises, the ensuing embrace was quite painful. Neither cared.

  "God, I thought I'd never see you alive again!"

  "I was terrified for you; did they hurt you badly?" She drew off a little, touched the sling, and began reviewing spells of healing in her mind. Not, she thought, that she'd have the strength to so much as charm warts for days.

  Spens grinned. The kitchen had broad windows in its planked walls and a divided door whose open top half afforded a view of the overgrown farmyard and the vine-covered well. Sunlight flooded the room, making his eyes bright as blue tourmaline.

  "The crossbow bolt just nicked my thigh, which was damned good shooting in the dark. It did more harm to the horse, and not much of that. I got this—" He indicated his disabled right arm with his left. "—in the woods when the stupid beast blundered into a tree. But you…"

  He cupped her cheek with his hand and looked worriedly into her face.

  She whispered, "You risked your life."

  "Without you I wouldn't have wanted it."

  She shook her head. "You risked it so I wouldn't be caught. So I could go back to the Citadel."

  He grinned a little. "I never said I was a good businessman. When I last saw them, the Inquisitors were following a false trail south like somebody in Kymil was selling tea at a penny a pound; I sent that hasu and his guard after them about an hour ago."

  "Kyra!" A pale and haggard-looking Alix appeared in the open half of the divided kitchen door. She pushed open the lower half and hurried in, in passing setting on the table the small basket of eggs she carried and the tin pail of milk. "Oh, Kyra, are you all right? I dreamed…" After a swift embrace she drew back, looking at her sister with the same worried expression Spens had. "Your hair! Why did you—"

  "It's a long story," Kyra said.

  Alix was wearing a simple brown dress over a coarse chemise clearly obtained from some old linen chest in the cottage's attic. Her fair hair was braided and wound coronetwise about her head, and her eyes were blue-smudged with fatigue. Algeron guided her gently to one of the several bent beechwood chairs that surrounded the kitchen's painted table; even the short walk to the neighboring farm for milk and eggs seemed to have exhausted her.

  "Kyra, what happened?" sh
e asked softly, putting her hands over her older sister's as Kyra, too, sat. "I dreamed… ugly things. Evil things. There was something about Tibbeth, your old teacher… I felt frightened. I kept wanting to run away, down the road into the dark, but Algeron held on to me and kept telling me I shouldn't run, that he'd protect me."

  "And he did protect you," Kyra said softly, glancing up at the fair young man who stood behind her chair. The cook blushed hotly and looked away, but Alix's hand stole up to where his rested on her shoulder.

  "I think I must have had a fever," Alix said after a moment, her brows drawing down into a frown. "I felt so tired this morning, drained. And then…" She looked across at Spenson, who had just returned from the stove with two enameled tin cups of coffee, and color flooded to her pale cheeks.

  "Oh, Master Spenson, I'm so sorry," she whispered. She rose, taking half a step toward him and extending her hand. "So terribly, terribly sorry…"

  He put one of the coffee mugs into her grip, something she clearly did not expect. As she stared blankly at it, he asked, "Sorry you didn't saddle me with the pain of eternally wondering why my wife doesn't love me?"

  She colored even more deeply; he raised a warning finger and said, "Now, don't burst into tears. I've already been through this with Algeron… who makes better sweet rolls than my cook, I might add. If you weren't going to go make your fortunes in Kymil, I'd think about hiring him myself."

  Kyra dug a chunk of butter wrapped in oak leaves from the egg basket and smeared a lavish quantity on one of the aforesaid rolls. "I'm afraid that now he's married to Alix, you couldn't do that without raising a tremendous scandal. But you're quite right."

  "As a matter of fact," Spens said, guiding Alix back into her chair, "I'd begun to think about other plans myself."

  Kyra didn't see Alix's startled glance pass from her sister to her former affianced groom; she was far too busy pouring honey over a second roll.

  Alix carefully ladled a little milk off the top of the pail to put in her coffee, then took a sip. "What I really don't understand is what 'Vinna the laundry maid was doing here. And what happened to her? The poor thing looks like she was set on by robbers."

  Kyra set down her roll. She remembered thinking, when she'd risen from the settee in the other room, that the figure half-invisible under the quilts on the other settee had been Alix. "I'll see to her," she said softly.

  Gyvinna was standing in the outer doorway when Kyra entered the sitting room, starting out into the ivy-dappled sun of the porch. She didn't look around, only held the quilt closer about her shoulders, and bowed her head with the resignation of one who had all her life submitted to the will of others. Someone had wiped her face, though her nose was swollen grotesquely and both her eyes were blackened. Brown blood still streaked her colorless hair.

  Kyra said softly, "I am so sorry."

  Gyvinna only shook her head.

  "What will you do now?" Kyra came around to stand beside her in the sunlight of the door. Try as she would, she could remember very little of what the woman had looked like six years ago. She was like Cousin Plennin, ordinary to the point of invisibility, especially, Kyra reflected bitterly, to one who habitually ignored servants and paid scent attention to those who had no immediate bearing on whatever matter lay at hand.

  "I realize I should have sought you out and asked you that six years ago," she continued quietly. "I'm humiliated to say I never thought of it."

  "No." The laundrywoman's voice was a gluey, nasal drone. She turned to look at her, and there was no malice, no anger, only resigned and hopeless weariness in the blackened, tear-reddened eyes. "No. Nobody did. Not my family, neither. They'd been scandalized, Tibbeth marrying me so young. Thirteen, I was. And even before that he'd… Well, I knew he was fond of little girls. But he said I was special, you see. His only one." She raised one broken-nailed, work-worn hand to pick at the blood in her hair, concentrating on it as if it were far more important than what she said or the woman who, last night, she had tried to kill.

  "In a way I did know. But I didn't want to. And if I just closed my eyes and… and let my mind sort of drift, I didn't have to know."

  How easy it would have been, Kyra thought with a sudden rush of disgust, for him to mark her garments, her bed sheets, the doorsills of the kitchen over which she daily passed, with the sigils that would make her love him, believe him, and turn a blind eye to all that he did. The full foulness of the magic the man used came to her like the taste of bile, the perversion of the art, the joy, the splendor of the magic that was her own life. No wonder there were laws against it.

  On the other hand, she thought with a sudden rush of sympathetic pain, it was equally possible that he had needed no magic to make this poor woman love him.

  "It's hard to explain how it was with Tibbeth." Gyvinna's voice was barely audible, and she did not raise her eyes, or cease picking at her hair. "He made me feel I was special. Not just… not just then, when I was little, but even after we was married, every day of my life."

  The clotted voice was wistful. Kyra closed her eyes. Now even that was gone from her. To take from her the memory of that love's specialness had been an act of cruelty, no matter how desperately required. As for Kyra, she no longer felt the swollen core of rage inside her, but it had left an empty space, a hollow where the echo of the pain drifted now and then like wind down an alleyway vacant of life.

  Gyvinna raised her head, looking sidelong at the woman beside her—her husband's prize pupil, the rich daughter of rich parents, the woman who had consigned to the flames the only thing she had loved in her life. "I was jealous of you, you know," she said simply. "Of the time he spent teaching you. But I knew even then he… there was things in his life that I wasn't a part of. But as long as he'd come home to me at night, that was all I cared for. And after he was gone, when his voice came whispering at me in dreams…"

  She shook her head warily, wiping a cautious hand under her swollen nose. In her voice was the resignation of a woman who had finally faced what she had known in her dreams to be long true. "I know he was magic. I knew when he formed up beside me in the bed that… that there was some ill being done. I know he shouldn't have done what he did. I truly do. I knew it last night. I think maybe I knowed all along he wasn't… wasn't good. But I'll miss him. Like I've missed him every day of my life."

  "What did happen?"

  "You don't remember any of it?"

  Alix shook her head and picked a daisy from the grass of the stream bank where Kyra had found her, in the dappled shade of one of the old farm's apple trees. The priest had been right. Even half in desolation, the little cottage with its thatched roof and ivied walls was beautiful, restful beside its clucking stream. A pity, Kyra thought, that it would be haunted now. She would have to warn the widow Summerhay lest others try to spend the night in that room.

  From the direction of the house came the soft noises of packing, Spenson and Algeron assembling the young couple's few effects preparatory to their departure for Kymil immediately after lunch. The bedroom had proved to contain no signs of last night's events save a burned spot on the floor within the chalked Circle of Ingathering and hundreds of dead flies.

  "Only that I was afraid," the girl said softly. "And that Algeron was there." She regarded her sister with grave, apologetic eyes. "He really is competent with pastries and cream, you know; I don't think there will be any problem of him finding work. I mean, I know he made a botch of Master Milpott's accounts, but I'm certainly not going to let him run his own business, so we should do well."

  Kyra laughed at Alix's matter-of-factness. "I daresay, and he may even make a name for himself with his poems one day. That was a stroke of genius, by the way, getting the money from Lady Earthwygg."

  Alix giggled, which drove the wanness from her face and made her look more like herself. "I did feel guilty about asking for so much, but the way she'd been pushing that hateful Esmin at Master Spenson, I felt she deserved it."

  "More than you k
now." Kyra grinned. "You do know, by the way, that if you open a dressmaker's shop, you're going to have to deal with a steady parade of the Esmins of the world."

  "Oh, yes." Alix nodded. "But I'll just do as Hylette does and charge them an annoyance tariff. Hylette also charges what she calls the surcharge of horror if some girl comes to her with a design she thinks is dreadful, but I think that's unfair."

  "Ah," Kyra said. "So that's why she always charged so much to make up my dresses."

  "She was just jealous," Alix said quickly. "Because your designs were so much more original than hers. And in any case," the younger girl went on, lowering her eyes and gently stroking the daisy's white petals, "if I'd… done what Father wanted… I'd have had to deal with all the Esmins of the world anyway, you know, and not gotten paid for it." She raised her eyes, and Kyra saw that they were filled with tears again. "Is Father very angry?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

  "Have you ever known him not to be when his will was thwarted?"

  The trembling of Alix's mouth tweaked into a hasty attempt to cover a grin, but a tear slipped down her cheek nevertheless. "It's just that… well, Master Spenson is right." She glanced back in the direction of the barn. Algeron was hitching a nice-looking pair of gray ponies to a two-wheeled red gig. "You see, after that awful scene in the church, I went to… to talk to Algeron. And it was just to talk. We must have fallen asleep. And when we woke up…"

  "I know what happened," Kyra said softly, and Alix blushed. More quietly still, Kyra added, "And I understand, God help me," causing her sister to look up with a quick, inquiring look of surprise.

  Alix opened her mouth to ask, but Kyra shook her head, and after a moment the younger girl said, "How did you find us?"

  Kyra's grin returned. "What do you think I've been doing for six years in wizards school? Learning to pull doves out of my sleeves?"