The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “...only Tellie, after all,” Alix was saying. “And everything for the wedding has been done or else can’t be started on until later tonight, like moving the garlands up out of the ice cellar—did that keep you up horribly late last night, Merry? I wanted to help, but Mother insisted that I go to bed... not that I slept a wink.”

  “It all went fine,” came Merrivale’s deep voice with its flattened Mellidane vowels. For as long as Kyra could remember, Merrivale had been her mother’s personal maid, combining that unexacting task with the job of housekeeper. Given Binnie Peldyrin’s own abilities in menu planning and household accounting, Merrivale’s chores consisted mainly of acting as corps-commander of the three chambermaids and whatever laundrywoman was currently in the household’s employ, a position that frequently put her in covert conflict with Briory, who commanded the footmen and took ill any orders given to them that did not come from her. It had been worse, Kyra recalled, when there had been nurses, governesses, and tutors involved in the power struggle as well.

  “So there’s really no reason for me to stay here all afternoon,” Alix went on, to the accompaniment of a soft creak of chair joints and the thick rustle of petticoats as she stood. “And they didn’t have much of that shell-pink toile left at Brussat’s. After the wedding it will be weeks before I can get out again, what with settling into the new house and getting things arranged as they should be, though thank goodness I won’t have to find servants or anything—I mean, it will all just be Master Spenson’s house. But I’ll need to be there and learn to know everyone and how things are done. And I’m dying to make up that new gown I designed—I know it will be more beautiful than anything I’ve seen in Hylette’s shop, or any of the shops, for that matter.”

  Good, Kyra thought. She ‘ll be out of the house entirely.

  Merrivale laughed softly. “And you’ll have every lady of your acquaintance wondering who your dressmaker is.”

  Alix giggled. “And I won’t breathe a word. It’s funny—Mother doesn’t see what difference it would make if I were to mention to Tellie or Frittilaire, not to mention that horrid Esmin Earthwygg, that I make my own dresses... It’s Papa who told me that it ‘isn’t done.’ ”

  Kyra violently suppressed her urge to pound on the wall and scream, Would you get out of here, you twittering numbskull, and let me get on with saving your life?

  Down in the hall she heard the opening of the main doors and muffled voices; a moment later, glancing over the carved railing, she saw Blore Spenson in his bottle-green coat ascending the stair in the wake of Briory and a darting footman who outdistanced them both, clearly bound for the third-floor gallery where she stood. Quietly, Kyra opened the door to the parlor next to Alix’s room and stepped inside.

  Muffled voices, Alix’s small, nearly silent “Oh...” And then, bright as a new silver coin, “Oh, yes, of course...” and the foamy music of her skirts, the click of her heels descending while Merrivale and the panting footman made their way down the gallery to the back stairs.

  Alix’s room was empty.

  At last! Kyra thought.

  In times past the parlor, which opened not only to the gallery but also into both the girls’ bedroom and their parents’, had been used as a schoolroom where Kyra had studied her mathematics and languages, and Alix her embroidery, poetry, and harp. With both girls grown, the broad oak table beneath the wide windows had disappeared, along with the bookcases and globe. Pale yellow paper block-printed with sprays of black and white flowers had appeared on the walls, and fashionable bowlegged chairs with straw-colored cushions had made their debut. At the moment Babycake, the fatter of Binnie Peldyrin’s lapdogs, was snoring stertorously on the seat nearest the white and blue-tiled stove.

  Kyra waited until she heard the door to the back stairs close and felt the soft pressure of footsteps descending; then she flung herself into the room she had once shared with Alix.

  She halted, looking around her.

  Unlike the schoolroom, this had changed little. A small religious painting had replaced Kyra’s lurid Uki-Jen scroll of the serpent eating the heart of the world. A coverlet of white embroidered with wildflowers in yellow and blue—certainly Alix’s masterly work—had replaced Kyra’s adolescent choice of green and scarlet satin. The bed hangings were still white, as were the curtains on the two long windows.

  Kyra walked slowly to the one nearer the bed and pushed the curtain aside. Below her, the garden was a jeweled geometry of pansy and alyssum, irises and lilies between crowding cinder-colored walls, the lilac trees so thick with bloom as to hide nearly all their branches. Water sparkled like quicksilver in the moss-rimmed fountain. Between pillars of soot-darkened brown brick the gateway at the far side seemed even now thick with shadow.

  She turned quickly away. From its corner by the armoire, the crimson wedding dress glittered gently in the diffuse white light.

  If I knew what I was looking for, Kyra reflected grimly, this would be a good deal easier. She only prayed she’d find what she sought in this room or the one adjoining. It was logical, of course, that it would be here.

  A book of romances lying on top of the highboy yielded pressed flowers: violets, hyacinth, and a winter rose. Touching the desiccated petals, Kyra called forth the faces of the men who had given them. Young men, and all of them very handsome, two of them wearing the laces and face paint of wealthy, probably noble families. The third... Yes, one of the musicians had given her the violets. A giggle, a kiss, a flirtation on the dark gallery—the mandolin player whom Kyra had glimpsed only that morning as she’d slipped out on her errand; he’d been smuggling one of Neb Wishrom’s tousle-haired chambermaids down the back stairs in her shift.

  From none of the flowers could Kyra feel any depth of passion either in the giver or in the receiver, though all of them were touched with the kitten joy of pleasant memories.

  Kyra paused, the winter rose in her hand.

  Well-kept soft fingers brushing the hair aside from her cheek. The half-possessive, half-protective hand in the small of her back, guiding her to a chair. A twinkle in someone’s eye. Too many men vying for a dance.

  The crimson wedding gown that would fit her as well as it would Alix.

  Her jaw hurt with the sudden clench of the muscles there, and she pushed the image from herself with the violence of contempt. Really, she thought disgustedly, are you sorry you had better things to do than play silly games with those callow boys who only asked you to dance when their parents ordered them to? Are you really sorry no one ever treated you like a brood mare with a dowry?

  “Yes,” whispered the tall girl who had always sat alone, chin high and eyes sarcastically defiant, watching her friends through too many quandriles, minuets, waltzes.

  Yes.

  Ninny.

  In any case, here was no passion that did murder. Changing her perception, she stroked the flowers but saw nothing of magic, nothing of poison, nothing of ill will.

  “...honestly, Gyvinna, she had the nerve to say to me, ‘You ought to better yourself and not stay a drudge for the rich.’ ”

  Kyra made a bolt for the sitting-room door, barely making it as the red-haired chambermaid entered with the laundrywoman behind her, their arms filled with newly pressed linens. Kyra readied herself to retreat farther into her mother’s rooms and so out into the gallery if necessary should the two young women enter the parlor, but there was no need. Her hooped skirts nearly dragged over an occasional table in her haste to return to the bedroom in the maids’ departing wake.

  So much to search, and there had to be something, some clue...

  The top drawer of the dresser contained poems.

  There were seven or eight of them. One was about one of her mother’s lapdogs, which made her smile; one was about the vendors’ cries in the street before the coming of full light.

  The rest were about Alix.

  They were written on cream-colored paper at two pennies the packet, the sort of thing on which plumbers’ sons wrote lo
ve letters to shop girls. The best that very little money could buy.

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

  Were I a purling brook, they would find you at the springs.

  If your name be the south wind, I am but the clouds which run,

  As one flower in the meadow, I turn but to your sun...

  They were tear-spotted, and the scent of passion, of yearning, of heart-tearing joy rose off them like the musky benison of perfume.

  Her fingers brushed forth the face of the sender from the dry crinkle of the page.

  Lamplight on fair hair, a white sleeve seen through fog. The whispered sigh of a child who knew she could never have that which she truly wanted.

  Kyra whispered, “Oh, dear... beautiful as daylight and a poet to boot.”

  The rest of the dresser drawers yielded nothing. The pomanders, sweetgrass and lily of the valley, were simply pomanders, innocent of the spells she had read of in the books of ill, and she found no talismans of darkness concealed in the headboard of the bed, the favored place for such magics. She passed her hands with light swiftness over the paneled walls, the frames and thresholds of the doors, finding nothing. She was just beginning a systematic search of the floor for loose tiles of the parquetry when her mageborn hearing picked up footsteps in the hall.

  Catching up her skirts, she took temporary refuge in the armoire, listening with her wizard’s skills through the wall to the quick clip of a woman’s feet in the parlor next door, then, a moment later, that of a man.

  A whispered giggle, a little squeak: “What if Miss Alix should come back?” The red-haired maid again.

  A man’s voice—the harpsichord player, Kyra thought—slurred as if he were speaking around some soft obstruction. “I just saw her down the drawin’ room with old Moneybritches.”

  Kyra seriously considered thumping on the wall and demanding, Can’t you two do that in the attic like everybody else did last night? But her own position was as chancy as theirs. In disgust, she wrapped about her more closely the spells of diverted attention, of Look-over-There and Who-Me?, and with great care stepped out of the wardrobe, holding her skirts to keep them from rustling as she glided out the bedroom door—not, she guessed by the sound of it, that I need trouble myself much over being heard.

  Back in her room again, Kyra dug in her satchel for the chunk of smoky white quartz she had brought from the Citadel, as long as two knuckles of her fingers and twice as thick. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she angled the crystal’s central facet so that it caught the light of the window, gazing down into the light and through it into the lattices of the crystal’s heart. For a brief time she was more acutely conscious than ever of the room around her, the smells of patchouli and candle wax and the cedar in the folds of her gown, conscious of the voices of the laundrymaid and Merrivale in the drying room far below, of Alix’s light, airy chatter in the drawing room, of the tune Sam the coachman was whistling as he swept the cobbled yard far beneath her window...

  Then colors swam in the crystal, spiraling down to gray...

  The blur of a very old scry-ward, eroded to nothing with long neglect, momentarily darkened the stone, then crumbled away.

  And she was in the Church of St. Farinox.

  She almost laughed out loud with triumph and delight.

  Her Summoning not only had taken effect quickly, it had succeeded with a wild thoroughness beyond her hopes.

  The golden canopy over the Sole God’s altar scuttered and threshed with tiny scramblings; small, nervous shapes darted wildly across the steps of the altar, up and down the canopy’s garlanded golden pillars, around and over the edges of the waist-high carven pew rails. There were three men in laborers’ clothes beside a harried-looking priest and some black-clothed member of the minor clergy—a young woman with red hair, probably the one who’d brought the message here—and half a dozen terriers such as professional rat catchers owned. The dogs were pelting here and there like lizards on hot glass, not knowing what to go after first; the two clergy were nervously holding the hems of their robes up off the floor. Kyra remembered getting a mouse up her skirts when she was twelve. Though she didn’t have the disproportionate, morbid horror about it that so many women did, the brouhaha of having two friends lift, shake, and fumble through her four petticoats, hoops, overskirt, underskirt, and train in quest of the errant rodent was an experience she didn’t care to repeat.

  There was absolutely going to be no wedding taking place in that church tomorrow morning.

  Kyra breathed a shaky prayer of relief. Another day. She was starting to fold her hand around the crystal to obliterate the image when glowing indigo darkness clouded the stone’s depths. A moment later she saw in it, as if reflected from some great distance away, the face of Lady Rosamund Kentacre.

  “Kyra?” the wizard said, and Kyra felt a sudden wash of relief sweep over her, as if she had stepped from the chill of a stone room out into a windless, sun-flooded summer garden. After less than twenty-four hours of her mother’s twittering, of bustle and servants and petticoats and worrying about what her father was going to say to her, the sight of her teacher’s face was like silence after the nagging whine of a crying child.

  “Rosamund!” she cried. “Oh, Rosamund...”

  “Are you all right?”

  “God, yes... that is...”

  “We’ve been worried about you here,” the mage said. “Worried about how you’re faring in Angelshand and what you may have learned about your sister. Is she well? Have you found aught amiss there?”

  “No!” Kyra cupped the crystal in her hands. “That is—well, as unamiss as one can get, in my father’s house, with a wedding going on that neither the bride nor the groom seems to want and my father looking at me like he’s waiting for me to leave so he can fumigate the furniture.”

  “I see,” Rosamund said quietly. Kyra, remembering Rosamund’s family, knew that she did in fact see. “But no sign yet of a death-spell? Remember, Nandiharrow did say that the... the things that happened might have been the effect of exhaustion, of too much study.”

  “Or they might have been a premonition.” Kyra shivered, remembering the dream, remembering the cold evil she had felt, the image of Alix lying with shut eyes in her crimson wedding gown, the saffron veils sheathing her like flame among the white asphodels that mourners scattered over the dead. “Rosamund, could there be any chance that I would have a premonition over—over a death that wasn’t being caused by magic? That Alix might be in danger from someone, or something, natural?”

  “Such as?”

  “Could I have had premonitions like that if she was in danger from a disappointed suitor, for instance?”

  Rosamund was quiet for a moment, deep in thought. Behind her, Kyra could see the wide arches of her balcony and, beyond them, the overgrown wilderness of the Citadel’s garden, with its peach trees, its dry rock walls, its myriad cats dozing in the afternoon sun,

  “A crime of passion, you mean? Or jealousy?”

  Kyra nodded. Spenson’s angry face flashed across her mind, furious with embarrassment that he had been duped. Like a counterpoint melody she recalled the desperate love that warmed the very paper of the poems.

  “Maybe,” the older woman said slowly. “Maybe. You were very close to her, and we don’t really understand much about premonitions. But it’s far likelier that an Eye of Evil, a mark of ill, has been written somewhere in the house. It could have been placed weeks ago—months ago—to be activated by the marriage. And it could be anywhere.” Rosamund leaned forward earnestly, the sunlight through the lattices of her distant windows flashing on the antique work of the pins that held her hair. “Will the wedding be soon? Will you have time to make a thorough search?”

  “The first of May,” Kyra lied, not wanting to mention that the ceremony had been put forward, only to be delayed by means best not gone into before a member of the Council. “Not long. I don’t know if I can do it in time.”

  “You w
ill, Kyra,” the Lady said, and her green eyes held all the embrace that she would have given had she been in the room. “Trust God and keep working. If a dog wizard has been paid to set such a spell, you can go to the Inquisition; in a matter this serious, there will be no blame to you. Our good wishes will be with you.”

  The crystal faded. Kyra’s hand closed around it, the sharp edges biting into her palm, and for a time she sat, fighting the deeper bite of longing that the sight of her friend, the glimpse through those far-off windows of the familiar herb garden, had brought.

  The place that was her home.

  She looked around her, her panic ebbing for a time, a strange ache filling her at the realization that this house where she had grown up was not her home, had not been so for a long time. It was like something she had read about in a book years earlier, researching and studying the life of a girl named Kyra Peldyrin who had been good with mathematics, brilliant in languages, accounting, the buying and selling of corn. Who had had a father who had loved her and, later, a teacher in magic named Tibbeth of Hale.

  The colors of the walls of the yellow guest room seemed different; the perspectives along the gallery and from the bedroom window where she and Alix had slept were not quite the same.

  She shook her head again. “The mark could be anywhere,” she repeated softly, standing up and shaking out her skirts. The old rhyme echoed in her head, Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber...

  There were plenty of merchants in town who had marriageable daughters, who wanted to ally their houses with the Spenson fortune, plenty more who would want to scupper the alliance on general principles. The grandson who, Kyra knew, was the object of the match as far as her father was concerned, would wield enormous power with the union of the two houses.

  There were even her cousins—such as the penny-counting but otherwise undistinguished Wyrdlees—-who might feel that if they couldn’t marry into the family business, they would at least take steps to see that they’d inherit it. There were dog wizards in the town who would sell a death-mark for a price, beyond a doubt.