The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Kyra looked away quickly. “My name is Rosamund,” she said. She hadn’t counted on a dog wizard having the kind of perceptions that occasionally made conversations with the real Lady Rosamund such uncomfortable affairs.

  Pinktrees smiled. “Of course, sweeting. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.” She sat down, her two cats springing gracefully—though they were almost as fat as she—to her lap.

  “I never ill-wish anyone,” she went on, and her delicate soprano voice grew grave, “because I’ve never wanted to do that kind of thing to myself. The magic of ill, though it is bounded about with spells to completely protect the mage who uses it, is, when you strip everything away that makes it almost automatic in its effects, a magic of hatred, of rage, of dirty, festering inner pain. Now, there are many wizards who can lay such spells without feeling those things toward the object of the curse, indeed, who can lay the spells without even knowing the person they’re cursing, except by the scent of them on the glove or pillow slip or whatever they’re given by the one who’s paying for it. But it still leaves its mark on the wizard’s soul.”

  Her light eyebrows, two dainty half circles like the finest brush strokes, pulled together with distress. The mild afternoon sunlight winked in the jewels of her rings, small and delicate and oddly in scale with her tiny hands, as she nibbled on the confection of dates and sugar she’d brought to the table. Kyra concluded after one exquisite bite that it was no surprise that the little dog wizard resembled nothing so much as a steamed pudding if she was in the habit of making such tidbits regularly.

  “In a way,” Pinktrees went on, “it’s worse to cast such spells for pay, upon people one doesn’t even know. If, when Master Peldyrin and those awful men from the Bakers’ Guild turned up and told me they’d rented my rooms right out from under me—and would do the same in any rooms I took anywhere in the West Side, though what business it was of theirs I can’t imagine!—I’d put an ill word on their businesses, or sent spells to make all their accountants fall in love in the same week so they wouldn’t be able to add straight for daydreaming, or given their wives and mistresses and daughters an unslakable craving for diamonds... Well, it would have served them right, and I don’t think I’d have taken much ill from it myself. But it still would have left a stain on me, a little char where the fire of hate had been fanned up. And I wouldn’t have felt right, let alone that it would have gotten their poor accountants and ladies in trouble over it later.

  “But if you came to me and said, ‘This or that man hurt me; I want you to make him fall down the front steps and break his ankle...’ ”

  It was all Kyra could do not to start.

  “...then to feel that kind of hatred for him, for pay... Well, it would feel to me a bit like taking a man into my bed for pay rather than because I cared about him. Do you understand me?”

  Kyra put a note of bitterness into her voice. “And what of me? What of the hatred I feel that I’m not able to do anything about? What of the pain and humiliation that... that weasel put me through for the mere sport of it?”

  “I’m sorry, my dear.” The dog wizard leaned over and put a plump hand like a tinted silk pincushion without the pins over Kyra’s wrist. “I’m truly sorry, and I will give you the names and directions of others who... who can help if this is really something you want to do. People you can trust, who do have power, and who won’t cheat you. But please, go home and think about it first. And if you need help with any other thing or if, when you’ve hated enough, you want something to... to ease you... do come back.”

  Kyra got to her feet, shaking out her brilliant yellow skirts; Hestie Pinktrees disposed of her cats and hurried in a great flouncing of taffeta to take Kyra’s patched black cloak from the hall tree that nearly filled one end of the wall. As she put it on, Kyra reached out quickly to touch the wall, which was papered with a bright imitation of the beautiful eastern silks that were so popular in middle-class homes, and absorbed the sense, the feeling, of the woman and her magic, so that if she found it anywhere in the big stone house on Baynorth Square, she would know it again.

  Hesitantly she said, “Mistress Pinktrees, I... I’m sorry Master Peldyrin wronged you. It was a shameful thing to have done.”

  The childlike mouth pinched, and a look of annoyance flickered in the back of those mild hazel eyes. “Well, I think so,” she admitted frankly. “And it’s not the first time by a long way that he’s trumped up charges against the mageborn. Why, six years ago—”

  “I heard about that,” Kyra said hastily.

  There was a little pause. “Well,” Pinktrees went on after a moment, “it all did work for the best, though the custom I’ve been able to get in this neighborhood isn’t near what I’d have commanded north of the river. The man has some cankerworm inside him, and I’ve found—or at least I like to think—that such a thing will give him more hurt than any spell I could find to cast. And as for your trouble, my child—I don’t know how badly you were hurt. But at least think on what I’ve said.”

  “I will,” Kyra promised softly and took her leave.

  Seyt the Pilgrim was the name they’d given her at the Feathered Snake when they’d said they didn’t know what had become of him after the Witchfinders had taken him away. But as she’d hoped, his was one of the three names on the piece of cream-tinted paper in Hestie Pinktrees’ effusive script, names that, she later found, faded away entirely after a week. The direction was at an inn called the Iron Cock in the Algoswive district; from there she was directed to a large, rambling old house on Tupping Lane where girls sat in windows turned jewel-bright in the dusk, talking with one another or with passersby as they waved bright satin fans or combing their own or each other’s hair. Watching them, Kyra realized that several of them she had seen already in the Cheevy Street Baths—good heavens, had it only been this morning? They were the ones who had worn the longing-spells like diaphanous gauze cloaks.

  She smiled a little.

  A boy in jeweled earrings and a coat of embroidered peacock eyes as gorgeous as any of the women’s dresses showed her around to the kitchen in back. Kyra waited in the smoky glare of cheap grease lamps and an overwhelming odor of sausages, and a few minutes later the Pilgrim came down the endless flight of the old back stairs, leaning carefully on a stick.

  “Depends on what kind of magic you want,” he said cheerfully in answer to her first question. His voice was light and husky, like a young boy’s. “I’m willing to do anything, up to a point. It wasn’t my original intention to be the house mage in charge of barrenness and temporarily earthshaking love.” The hand that made the airy gesture at the kitchen around them—and the musk-laden dark yammering of the rooms beyond—had a slight tremor in its fingers. His wrist was thin, and under the colorless, shabby clothing, his body had an unhealthy fragility; the echo of pain haunted the back of those bitter-coffee eyes.

  “A death-spell,” Kyra said, and watched how the dark eyes shifted.

  “On whom?”

  She hesitated artfully, then said, “A member of one of the merchant houses.”

  He looked away. His hands, never steady, shook more, so he casually closed one around the other to still them. Kyra became aware of one of the girls, a busty redhead who’d come into the kitchen to fetch wine, catching the wizard’s eye and nodding vigorously. Seyt opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Big Blossom said you’re out on the street Tuesday if you don’t pay what you owe her,” the girl pointed out, hitching her bottom up onto the soapstone counter and dangling her jeweled feet.

  “I’ll deal with Blossom,” Seyt promised, and turned back to Kyra, fear now as well as pain imperfectly concealed in his face. “That’s something I can’t deal with,” he said frankly, like a bootmaker confronted with a request for a baby’s slippers.

  “I’ll make it worth your while.” Kyra knew better than to bring out money in a place like this, but she knew that her jewelry—though probably not worth the brouhaha of ste
aling—announced what her price range would be. She watched the young man’s face narrowly but saw no guilt there, no uneasy self-questioning, only fear, and pain, and the memory of still worse pain.

  He shook his head. “I... had a run-in with some of the great merchants two years ago,” he said after a moment. “God knows why—I’m not claiming I’ve led a blameless life, but I never did the things they said I’d done, I swear it. But they put the Witchfinders on me anyway.” Under his white-shot mustache, his mouth flinched, and Kyra felt a sudden rush of rage at her father, that he would have done this, that he would have trumped up a charge so casually to eliminate a man who was inconvenient to him.

  And then she blushed, furious, despairing, remembering...

  But the Pilgrim’s gaze was momentarily distracted into some terrible middle distance, and he did not see. In the common room, to judge by both sound and smell, someone was being violently sick, to everyone else’s uproarious amusement. Kyra’s color was fading again when his attention flicked back to her.

  “If anything happens in that neighborhood,” he pointed out quietly, “I’m the first one they’ll come looking for.”

  “With the result,” chimed in the red-haired girl, still perched on the pitted counter, her ruffled crimson skirts gathered up to show a startling flash of chubby white leg, “that you haven’t had the nerve to do a spell worth more than two coppers to anyone since you got out of prison.”

  The dog wizard flinched a little, as if she’d struck him, but turned in his chair and remarked, “The point is that I got out of prison... and that I still have my fingers, and my tongue, and my eyes, and my balls.”

  “That’s debatable,” the girl muttered, hopping down and collecting her wine tray. She made her departure as Seyt turned back to Kyra again and took her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in his light, quiet voice. “I just... can’t have dealings with that group of people. At all. I can’t risk it. I’ll be glad to give you the names of others you could trust, as much as you can trust anyone in this business. But don’t go to anyone who isn’t on the list, because they’ll cheat you for sure.”

  As he wrote—and Kyra knew she’d be able to take a sense of him, enough of a feeling of him and his magic from the paper to identify any sign he might have left in the house—she asked him, “What about Hestie Pinktrees? I see she isn’t on your list.”

  He looked up with a crooked grin. “I thought you wanted ill-wishing. Pinkie wouldn’t wish hairballs on a cat who scratched her, but if you’re after something like a love-potion, or a scry-ward, or one of those little glass oojahs that’ll keep your pet bird from flying away, Pinkie’s your girl.”

  “And you?” she asked.

  The dark eyebrows quirked. Then, understanding, he said, “Well, it’s true that one of the things they did cut out of me was my nerve—if I knew you better, I’d show you the scar—but that’ll grow back. A word of warning, though. If you really are talking about a death-word on a member of one of the big houses, don’t go sashaying into the mage’s parlor unmasked and wearing your own jewelry or your own perfume. The Witchfinders know a lot more than you’d think. If they trace it to the mage who lays it, it’s good odds they’ll find you, too.”

  He got carefully to his feet and bent unexpectedly to kiss her hand.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, because I don’t know who you’re after or why,” he said softly. “But think about it real hard. I can’t call to mind offhand a whole lot that’s worth what they do to you if you get caught.”

  And leaning on his stick like a very old man, he made his way to the small door of the back stairs, and thence, Kyra guessed, back up to whatever heatless attic was going to be his until Tuesday, at least.

  Dammit, Kyra thought, striding fast through the darkening alleyways. Poison, magic, passion, grief... Her nails bit her palms with the clench of her hands. The wedding tomorrow. Night closing in like the shadow of waiting death. There were other dog wizards in the city, and merchants who’d pay them to keep the alliance from going through.

  The screaming rage of her heart she forced into curses, measured to the beat of her feet on the muddy cobbles of Algoswiving Street.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit...

  “Ill, she says!” Gordam Peldyrin threw up his hands in disgust.

  “I’m sure it’s just nerves, dearest.” His wife rose from the yellow-striped love seat to try to coax him down to her side; opposite them, Cousin Leppice flicked open her fan to cover her prominent teeth and tried to look helpfully inquiring instead of avid and Uncle Murdwym surged forward to the edge of his chair.

  “Ill? Any daughter of mine started playing off her tricks after all you’ve done for her, and I’d have given her something to keep to her room about.”

  One appalled glance through the drawing-room door was enough for Kyra. She quickened her step along the gallery, gathered her skirts, and hurried up the stair to the floor above, terror of poison filling her mind. In addition to Uncle Murdwym—chunky as his brother Gordam was lean but with the same golden-brown eyes, the same red hair—his crushed-looking wife, a thin-faced and discontented daughter, and her nonentity of a husband, the drawing-room contained Cousin Wyrdlees, a large, strapping, fair man with a hearty way of talking that accorded ill with his finicky refusal to touch any piece of furniture the dogs might have lain upon. He was looking around nervously at the moment and relating a story about a family in Parchasten whose youngest child had complained of a sore throat at tea time but that had died down to the last servant by supper.

  Her father snapped impatiently, “Oh, don’t be a fool!”

  Kyra shuddered. The Mellidane side of the family was there, too: the widowed Aunt Sethwit, her son Plennin and his wife, and two children who, from their fair hair and small, plump stature, had to be Plennin’s children, currently engaged in trying to pat Angelmuffin the lapdog. As she ascended the steps, Kyra heard Angelmuffin’s warning growl and then Blore Spenson’s light, good-natured voice saying, “Oh, I think we’ve got a cranky princess here, Pinny. Why don’t you leave her be and come have a look at these birds’ eggs. Did you know your Aunt Binnie collected birds’ eggs?”

  Oh, the poor man, Kyra thought distractedly, but in the face of the sick dread in her heart that thought, too, blew aside like ash in chilly wind. Faintly from the drying room floated the gay strains of rondes and gavottes, begun, broken off, started again in a different key or, oddly changed but recognizable still, in a different modality or tempo. When she’d slipped quietly into the hall via the garden door, she’d seen Briory supervising the footmen in the hanging of new tapestries and curtains; the hall itself was redolent of fresh flowers, as it had been the night of her arrival.

  Alix’s wedding.

  Alix’s wedding night.

  And now she was ill...

  “Who is it?” Her sister’s voice was muffled behind her door. A moment later she appeared, clothed in the pale green undergown she’d had on that morning, creased and flattened as if she’d lain down in it most of the afternoon, her hair a half-untwisted skein of newly wrought gold and fading flowers. Her eyes were a ruin of tears.

  “Are you all right?” Kyra stepped quickly into the room and caught her younger sister in her arms.

  Alix’s breath came in a long intake, a shuddering release; she turned her face aside. “I’ll be all right. It’s just... I’m just very tired.”

  Kyra stepped around quickly, took the cold hand in hers, and stared intently into her face. “How do you feel?”

  Alix blinked at her, puzzled. “I said all right.”

  “Father said you were ill.”

  “Well...” The rueful echo of an old twinkle danced at the back of her eyes. “If necessary I’ll eat soap or something and really be ill rather than go down to that drawing room. Did you see who appeared this afternoon just as Mother finally got that poisonous Lady Earthwygg settled in her carriage? And of course nothing will do but that they have to be invited to
dinner, the whole pack of them. Aunt Sethwit and Plennin and their children are staying with Murdwym and his wife, so of course Murdwym is feeling put upon and thinks Papa owes him a dinner at least.”

  Kyra’s tense body relaxed, and she felt a rush of irritation. At the same time, it was very unlike Alix to malinger in the face of family duties—and even in the dim light from the bedroom, she could see that her sister’s face was marked with strain and that she looked far from well. “Did you know Master Spenson is here also?”

  Alix turned away, tears flooding her eyes.

  Reaction to the fears that had driven her up the stairs at a run made Kyra’s annoyance deeper. “So it’s just love.”

  The two candles burning on the dressing table picked out the burnish of her hair; the gleam changed a little as Alix nodded, but she did not look around. “Just,” she said.

  Footsteps padded in the gallery, nearly soundless. Kyra looked around quickly as the doorway darkened. “Here’s for you to wear tomorrow,” began the laundry maid’s soft voice; then the woman paused, her arms filled with freshly-ironed linen, as she saw Kyra, and with a stammered, “Oh, I’m sorry,” she fled.

  Kyra sighed. Another one who listened to the tales of what sorcerous masters kept hidden behind locked doors. “Twit,” she muttered savagely, and Alix glanced back at her.

  “It’s not her fault,” Alix said, and studied her sister’s face for a moment in the doubled, flickering light. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have told Papa I was ill.” She wiped quickly at her eyes. “It’s just that—”

  “So you’re not really sick.”

  “Kyra, what is it?” Alix picked the last bits of flowers out of her hair, a fumbling gesture that let them fall to the tufted rag rug beneath their feet. “I’ll be fine in the morning, I promise you. I just don’t want any dinner. What is it?” She pulled away from Kyra’s testing fingers, which sought first the heat of her forehead, then the movement of the pulse in her wrist.