The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  They were walking hand in hand down Fennel Street before Kyra asked, “Where are we going?” In white velvet, Spenson looked as out of place among the housewives, strawberry hawkers, servants, and shopkeepers as a phoenix in a barnyard, and the bright sunlight of midmorning showed up the filth and dust that clung to her dress. Spenson’s estimate that she looked like a chambermaid had been a singularly generous one. Her red hair hung about her shoulders in a tangle; she ran a hand through it and said, “I look like a ragpicker’s child.”

  “You do,” he agreed, and put his arm around her waist. “We’re going to my countinghouse, down near the harbor on Salt Hill Lane. The clerks all got the day off for the wedding, and it will be the last place anyone will look for us. Is that all right?”

  “It will be if you’ll buy me something to eat. I—I only cried because I was hungry, you know.”

  “Good,” Spens said cheerfully. “I can’t stand a lachrymose woman.” He stopped by the cart of an itinerant bun vendor, steam from the little enclosed stove flavoring air that had already begun to smell of salt and tar. “Do you want the kind with bean paste in it or pork?”

  “It’s a poor trade for Joblin’s wedding tarts. Let’s get both.”

  “A woman after my own heart.”

  “No,” Kyra said, licking the sweetened paste off her fingers. “The woman after your heart was Esmin Earthwygg.”

  “Tell me,” Spens said as he closed the door of the countinghouse behind them, shutting out the noise of Salt Hill Lane and the wharves in a sudden quiet of yellow sunlight, whitewash, and bleached pine, “what it is you are trying to do.”

  Kyra turned away and perched one flank on a clerk’s tall stool and concentrated for a time on wiping the last smears of bean paste from her fingers with one of Spenson’s handkerchiefs. Beside her, a many-paned window looked out into a brickyard murky with soot from the factories across the river; on top of the tall desk nearby, the cut-glass inkwell sparkled like a jewel of light and darkness. The place smelled of paper, of dust, of spices from the warehouse next door, of the orris powder of Spens’ coat. For some reason she felt shy about looking at him, wondering that there had ever been a time when he was a stranger to her. The taste of his mouth still seemed somehow on her lips, the warm print of his hands on her back. He wore his ridiculous white velvet like a disguise, his diamonds glinting like dew in the sun.

  “You mustn’t think I’m doing this out of hatred for my father,” she began.

  Spens shook his head. “I know you love your father,” he said quietly, and she looked up, surprised.

  “He couldn’t hurt you this badly if you didn’t.”

  “I suppose.” She looked aside again, not quite knowing where to begin or how to talk about magic and the need of magic with someone who had never felt its yearning.

  But once she had started, with the cards, and the water, the Summonings and the note, with the dream of which she remembered so little, and her panicked journey to Angelshand, desperate with fear for what she might find, it became easier; she even laughed a little when she described watching him and her father through the scrying-crystal in the mouse-infested Church of St. Farinox. “I wish you could have seen your own face,” she said, and, looking up, saw his eyes dance with appreciation. “When that big mouse ran across your foot...”

  “You, my girl,” he said, “are not to be trusted... and does this mean I can’t pat a tavern wench on the bottom anymore for fear you’ll be watching me through that glass of yours?”

  “Good heavens, no! I wouldn’t impose a punishment like that on the poor tavern wenches. I can even make you a scry-ward to prevent any wizard from watching you that way, if you’d like. They’re really quite simple.”

  “Hm,” Spens grumbled. “Like the Witchfinders around your house?”

  “Well, yes. Though the Inquisition watches every mage or suspected mage who comes to the city—and they haven’t forgotten me from... from Tibbeth’s trial. Then, too, Lady Earthwygg might have dropped some rumors in their ears, still hoping to get rid of me and snare you for her repellent daughter.”

  “Her daughter,” Spens retorted, “never had a chance even before you told me what they were up to. I still blush at the dreams I had of her, but I never for a minute considered marrying the little shrew.”

  “Well, at one time I thought it might solve the problem of keeping my sister from having a wedding night.”

  He reached across and took her hand. “Your sister,” he said quietly, “is not going to have any wedding night with me.” There was silence between them, as there had been that morning at the foot of the stairs while all the wedding party surged around them, as if she had come through a door and now saw him anew and differently. Kyra felt frantically that she must say something but could not tell what: Yes, no, go away... Leave me to the life I’ve chosen and fought for... Don’t complicate things... Be in my life always.

  The words seemed to swirl in his silence like bright-hued, brittle leaves dancing, but she could not frame a sentence that did not fill her soul with panic.

  “I didn’t know it could be different,” he said at length. “I didn’t know it could be this. I never would have offered for Alix had I known.”

  And I never would have gone away had I known there was a chance of meeting you.

  But that wasn’t true, and her panic increased, her sense of being unable to either have him or leave him, her fear that whatever she said would shatter forever her chance of future happiness—whatever happiness was.

  “Don’t,” she breathed, not knowing what it was she wanted or didn’t want.

  Spenson drew her to him, and they kissed again, a long deep plunge into dark waters. All the despairing logistics, the helpless sense of uncertainty, cleared and resolved into a single thought: I want this man. I want him as friend, as lover, as companion, every day and every night and every morning. I want this, whatever it’s going to be.

  The wizard in her answered, You want this more than magic?

  She drew away, dizzy, shaken, filled with the conviction that she was probably temporarily insane. Everything that she must say to him and that he must say to her—Your father will die of apoplexy... I can’t give up magic... Alix’s marriage contract—all these were in the look that went between them as they sat, hands upon one another’s shoulders, breaths a soft mingling of sound.

  Then, as if by spoken consent, they each looked away, setting aside that silence and those words until another time.

  Kyra drew a deep breath to steady herself and said in her most businesslike voice, “Well, we’ve bought ourselves a little time, though my father is going to have a stroke when you announce that the entire wedding is off.”

  “I hope you’re a good Healer, then.”

  “But the problem is far from solved. We’re still left with the question of who would want to kill my sister and why and, most urgently, how.”

  Spenson settled back into the wide oak chair beside the desk and folded his hands over his embroidered waistcoat. His square face was thoughtful. “In other words, when it’s clear she’s not to be married because the groom has other fish to fry, will the killer try again?”

  “Precisely. I’ve checked the two dog wizards my father wronged, and it doesn’t seem to be either of them; Cousin Wyrdlees might try murder to prevent the birth of an heir to my father’s business, but he’s just gotten himself betrothed to Milpott’s daughter, which should keep him in patent medicines for quite a while. Do you know of any... any of the great merchant families who would want to prevent the match badly enough to do murder over it?”

  Spenson was silent for a time, stroking his chin; like her, he had heard of such cases before. Finally he said, “Not with business as good as it’s been this year. Whatever else can be said of him, the Regent’s an able ruler; nobody’s scrambling for pickings. And if it was me, I’d try disgracing the girl rather than killing her. It’s safer.”

  “You have a point,” Kyra agreed slowly. “
With the Regent’s hatred for magic and wizards, I suppose it would be foolish to try something with a curse that could just as easily be done with a bribed footman. And I don’t think it’s a crime of passion. Algeron Brackett loves her too much to touch a hair of her head.”

  “Algeron Brackett?”

  “The cook’s assistant. He’s been writing her poems.”

  Spenson looked slightly ill.

  “Oh, they’re quite good poems as far as I can make out, and they’re desperately smitten with one another. In fact, at one time I was afraid—” She caught herself up, unwilling to reveal the depth of that secret, hopeless passion to the man whom she was already forgetting to think of as her sister’s groom. Then she shrugged. “But, well, if the wedding’s called off, that takes care of that possibility.”

  “So all you could do was search the house.”

  Kyra nodded. “I didn’t go to the church this morning because it was the only time I could be sure everyone would be gone. And in three and a half hours all I could cover was the cellars, the laundry, and half of the drying room.”

  “You’d have picked up another three hours, clear, during the ceremony.”

  “Except that I knew there wasn’t going to be a ceremony.”

  He grinned, a white flash of teeth that turned his brown face boyish. “I wish you could have seen old Wooley’s expression—but you did if you used your scrying-glass. And now of course everyone in both families will be all over the house for the rest of the day. How long would you need?”

  “Six, maybe seven hours.”

  “A night’s work, then.”

  “I did consider that,” Kyra admitted. She hooked one slender ankle through the rungs of the stool upon which she sat, with the immediate effect of upsetting it and precipitating herself almost onto the floor.

  As he sprang to catch her, Spenson laughed. “You didn’t happen to have offended some powerful wizard and been cursed with clumsiness, did you?”

  “Of course not,” Kyra replied with dignity, setting the stool to rights. “And I’m not clumsy, precisely. It’s merely that the world is not designed to accommodate women as tall as I am.”

  “I see.”

  “I did think of taking one night to search the house,” she went on, sitting down on the deep window seat at his side. “But in a house that large someone always wakes up, and I don’t think those wretched musicians ever go to sleep. And with the Witchfinders in the alley and the square, I don’t see how I could cast a sleep-spell over the place and do it properly.”

  “I’ll take care of the Witchfinders,” Spenson said. “Well, I took care of Lady Earthwygg’s roughs, didn’t I?” he added as she widened her eyes at him.

  “All of them? A tall order even for such a doughty sticksman as yourself.”

  “Sticks, hell.” Spenson got to his feet and offered his hand. “There’s one thing I learned in the slave and spice ports of the Jingu Straits: if you want serious derring-do... hire someone.”

  “Hi, handsome.” The woman’s voice was a throaty murmur in the dark of Mouch Lane. Though the shadows of the granite houses and the crowding mansard roofs of Baynorth Square hid her face, fragments of ice-white moonlight fell through the moving clouds to light threads of her hair and show it fair rather than dark, decorated with bunches of freesia whose frail scent vied with the general stinks of sewage and horse droppings. “It’s a cold night to be out.” And indeed, her breath was the softest puff of white in the inky dark.

  Though she was far back in the alley, Kyra had a wizard’s hearing. Had she not, the Witchfinder’s muttered dismissal would have been completely inaudible to her.

  “Is that a way to talk to a poor girl who’s only out for a little companionship? Seems to me I’ve seen you here before.”

  Another exhortation, longer this time, exasperated, and cut off rather abruptly in the middle.

  Kyra smiled.

  A carriage passed by in the square, a clatter of harness and hooves and creaking leather springs, the dim yellow beams of its sidelights jarring briefly down Mouch Lane in time to show two men in rough wool jackets bending over the fallen shape of the Witchfinder while the blond woman readjusted her dress. Behind her in the lane Kyra heard Spenson’s unmistakable brisk stride. He passed her without seeing her—even had the windows of the small shops that looked onto the narrow passage been unbarred and lighted, he would not have seen her—and she was able to watch him, as if watching a stranger, as he paid off the three of them.

  “Take him out to Pennyroyal Commons with the other,” she heard him say as silver clinked sweetly from the bag he held. “Make sure their hands are well tied, but don’t take their clothes or their cloaks if you know what’s good for you. I’ll find it out if harm comes to them from the cold, and I know who to tell them to look for.”

  “We’ll treat ’em like they was our little brothers,” a jocular bass voice growled, and in the darkness Kyra could see the glint of Spenson’s smile.

  “I’m sure you already have. Off you go, then.”

  The smaller man, who’d been counting what he’d been given, looked up with a surprised grin and tugged a greasy forelock. “Good hunting, then, guv’nor.”

  The three shapes slid into the grimy shadows, making them, Kyra reflected, probably a little grimier. When the last of their footfalls had faded, she let the spells that cloaked her drop away and, taking care not to trip over the high doorsteps that lined the curving alley or to slip on the wet cobbles, made her way to where Spenson stood looking out into the wan moonlight of the square.

  “Unheroic but efficient,” she said approvingly, and he turned around with a start. She saw the bright twinkle of his eyes within the leather carnival mask he wore.

  “Give me efficiency over heroics any day of the week.” He put an arm around her shoulders and kissed her warmly on the lips, leaving her flustered, startled, and prey to a flood of unaccustomed delight.

  “The man who’s been watching the garden gate is on his way to Pennyroyal Commons as well.”

  “Is that the usual dumping ground for the victims of footpads?”

  Spenson shook his head. “Most bandits just leave them where they lie. Now and then some young sprig who goes whoring in the dives on Buttercup Hill ends up there.”

  “Did you ever?” she asked curiously as they made their quiet way back down the lane to the alley and thence along the wall of her father’s house toward the garden gate.

  His eyebrows shot up. “Great heavens, no! I had more money—and better advice from my disreputable Uncle Drake—than to do my drinking in places like that. But I’ve gone there more than once looking for some of my stupider cousins who feel that the lower a place is, the more fun it’s likely to be.” His hand on her waist had a light strength to it, as sure and as protective as if he, not she, could see in the dark. High above them a dim glow marked one of the attic windows; below that, the stronger radiance of many candles turned her mother’s window and Alix’s to squares of molten gold.

  A pang of guilt pinched her like a bodice laced too tight. At Spenson’s advice she had not gone anywhere near her parents, although, following their interview at the countinghouse, Spens had returned to Baynorth Square and had had what, through the scrying-stone, looked like an extremely stormy and trying talk with her father in the book room. She knew Spens was going to tell Gordam Peldyrin that in the face of such repeated misfortune he thought it better to postpone the wedding to his daughter indefinitely. As she had feared, her father had flown into a towering rage. In the crystal’s silence she was unable to hear any of the bitter recriminations about supplies bought and rebought, the venomous blame for four days business utterly lost, the furious accusations of ruined reputation and the threats of lawsuit. She knew her father far too well to need to. She knew Spenson, too, and could only marvel at the tight-lipped silence in which he met all this. His face grew very red, but he didn’t lash back with counter-threats and counteraccusations, didn’t—clearly—try to thro
w blame back on his attacker, and in the end quieted his prospective father-in-law enough to make an appointment for the following day, bow, and take his departure.

  And as Kyra had known he would, her father then proceeded to storm up the stairs and along the gallery to the yellow guest room, his long purple wedding robe fluttering behind him, and burst into the chamber to stare about him with the blind rage of a thwarted bull looking for something to charge.

  What he had charged—and this was why, though the thought of it nauseated her in advance, she had wanted to be there to have the fight with him and get it over with—was Alix. Her mother, downstairs in what appeared to be an amicable chat with Lady Earthwygg, aunts Sethwit and Hoppina, Winetta Wishrom, and several other influential female merchants or merchants’ wives, was too busy trying to stem the inevitable tide of gossip to be of any help, and Kyra knew absolutely that between keeping the servants from running about the town with a dozen distorted versions of the tale and remedying the tumult that the second cancellation of the wedding banquet would cause in the kitchen, no help could be expected from that quarter. So Alix was alone when her father came raging into her room.

  When Kyra, nearly an hour later, slipped unseen through the Wishroms’ cellar and the postern gate and up the back stairs to Alix’s room—as she had suspected, her mother’s voice could be heard from the direction of the kitchen, frantically trying to mollify a despairing Joblin—Alix had been nearly ill with weeping.

  “He made it sound as if it were all my fault!” she sobbed. “I don’t want this wedding—I never asked for it!—but he’s going to be my husband and I’ll be happy with him! And it isn’t my fault all these things happened! Kyra, he—”

  “It’s all right.” Kyra tried to gather her into her arms, but Alix fought free of her, clutched her pillows again, and buried her face in them, golden hair tangling on the embroidered shams. The wedding dress’s gold and ruby glory lay over a chair in a welter of stiffened linen petticoats; Kyra wondered whether it was considered bad luck to put it on a second time after the first, abortive attempt. She knew to the penny how much wedding gowns cost, particularly those designed and constructed by the redoubtable Hylette.