The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  On the other hand, she reflected, Spenson wasn’t going to marry her sister, anyway, and given everything that had happened so far and might yet happen, a little more bad luck connected with this particular wedding was laughably superfluous.

  “I will marry him,” Alix whispered. “I will, and I will be happy, only... Damn it!” Her hand clenched convulsively and buried itself in the down of the pillows with a soft thump. “I wish it would just get over with! I can’t stand this.”

  Again Kyra had tried to hold her, and again she had fought free, as if determined to keep her own sorrow, her own decision, to herself. As if she feared that in surrendering even to that touch, all her other strengths would break down and she would wash away in a flood of emotion that she could no longer control. She curled up on her side, wrapping her arms around herself like someone naked in bitter cold.

  After that Kyra had no stomach for confrontation with either her father or her mother. Climbing the back stairs to the attic, she had settled herself in one of the deserted rooms of the servants wing, surrounded its door with spells of There-Isn’t-a-Door-Here and Don’t-You-Have-Urgent-Business-Elsewhere? had curled up on the floor in her old cloak, and had fallen asleep.

  “They’ll be up till all hours, won’t they?”

  Spenson’s voice in her ear brought her back, startled, to the present. She nodded. “I suspect Mother’s been all day receiving callers, serving up tea and cakes, and trying to act as if everything’s all right, and betweentimes trying to sort things out in the kitchen. Joblin must be ready to commit suicide—that cake was his masterpiece. His latest project is always his masterpiece. I’ve seen him in tears over a fallen shrimp soufflé. God knows what Father’s been up to, and of course the servants are running around like chickens.”

  “The whole town must know what happened,” Spens remarked, narrowing his eyes as he tried to make out something other than the indistinct shape of the roof against the sky. His cool aplomb seemed worlds distant from the stiff silence of the man in the awful red suit—surely it hadn’t been just three days ago!—the night of that disastrous dinner with the Bishop. “Are we going to wait till everyone goes to sleep?”

  Kyra shook her head. “I don’t know how long this will take.” Three streets away, the clock in the tower in front of St. Farinox chimed ten. This close to the equinox of spring, she translated mentally, that was roughly the fourth hour of the night, old-style. She’d slipped out of the house at around sunset to meet Spens in a tavern, where they’d supped. She was surprised to find herself ravenously hungry again. “I only hope that having started out to the wedding, this isn’t technically Alix’s wedding night.”

  “Could it be?” Spens asked, startled.

  “Depending on how the curse is written, yes.” She was silent for a time, struggling with another thought, then said slowly, “Depending on how the curse is written, I could be the... the curse.”

  Spenson smiled. “Well, your father would say so.”

  “No! I mean... The wedding’s been destroyed. Having this kind of scandal break, this kind of pressure put on her, could be what drives Alix to... to do something foolish.” The memory of her sister’s tears returned to her, the brittle, desperate note in her voice. I can’t stand this... Joblin wasn’t the only one in the household who was reacting to pressure. Curses had been used to provoke suicides before this. Nandiharrow had instructed them in several that were designed to do just that.

  He put a warm, powerful arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “You mean that what I feel for you—and what I hope you feel for me—is a result of the curse? Like those dreams about Esmin?”

  “No,” Kyra said, and though a part of her mind had toyed with the idea, the moment he spoke it aloud she knew that what she felt was no illusion. Whatever it was—madness or disaster or some random jest of fate—it was as true and as much a part of her as the bones within her flesh. “No.”

  “No,” Spenson echoed quietly. Turning her face to him, he kissed her again, gently, on the lips. “Come,” he said. “The night’s going to be long enough.”

  In the blackness of her mother’s table-size rose garden, hemmed by the cliffs of the houses all around them, Kyra wrought her spells.

  Spenson stood guard by the door that led to the rear hall of the house, a powerful figure in his coffee-colored leather and concealing mask. She closed her mind off swiftly from all but the most superficial awareness of his presence. It was more distracting than she had thought, and she was novice enough, even after six years of formal training, to fear for the disruption of her magic that such a distraction could cause.

  She concentrated instead on the Circle of Protection she sketched about herself in the soft spring earth; on the ritual gateposts outside it, to establish the field of clarity around her; on the Circles of Light, and Earth, and Air. Within their wall she closed her eyes, sank into meditation, and built within her mind the house she had known since babyhood: the slate of the roofs and the angles of their slopes, the smell of the moss on the chimneys, the bird droppings, the soot. Stone by dirty stone she formed the outer walls in her mind, differing textures, Angelshand granite and Halite brownstone, ornamental marble, plaster, brick, and glass. Room by warm room she touched it inside: the dust smells and dimness of the attics where the musicians celebrated among flute songs, champagne, and the salty sweetness of sex; each bedroom as she recalled it, down to the pattern of her mother’s violet satin comforter and her father’s yellow and white china shaving things; the plaster garlands on the ceilings, the flittering painted cherubs and trompe l’oeil fruit. The rugs in the empty parlors, the books in the library, the smells of dried herbs and dust in the schoolroom where Tibbeth of Hale had taught her... The heat and bustle of the kitchen, smelling of tomorrow’s bread and today’s staling syrups and creams. The hall with its silent chandeliers and smells of cooling wax, cellars with their musty coals and flowers heaped on ice, browning in the darkness...

  Sleep, she thought.

  Sleep fill this house.

  Sleep fill this house.

  She heard the clock chiming again, unable to believe that an hour had gone by. Settling back on her heels, she listened to the house before her.

  Where before her wizard’s senses had brought to her the hivelike drone of voices and movement, a blended murmur of anxiety and trivial concerns, she now heard only deep breathing and a snore or two. To her inner perception of magic, the spell felt hard and smooth, like blown glass cooled perfectly to its final shape; if she’d tapped it with her nail, it would have rung like a bell.

  It was, she realized, the first great magic she had done in truth, not as an experiment, not under the guidance of some other mage, not in concert with others who had more experience than she. At the Citadel she had done magic under pressure; indeed, during the previous spring’s troubles she had performed spells that had saved lives, including her own. But there had been others around her.

  This was completely hers.

  And completely illegal, too. Nevertheless, the joy of it swept her, a golden exultation that sponged from her mind the last daydreams about Blore Spenson’s kisses.

  This was beauty. This was warmth. This was delight.

  This was also, she realized, the beginning of what could be an extremely long and dangerous night. There was little chance either the Church wizards or the Council members were listening for her, particularly at this hour, but the fear added a shaky edge to her emotions, a sense of danger and risk.

  Quickly—though her head was aching and she had a terrible craving again for sweets—she formed in her mind and cast out around the house the same spells with which she had surrounded the attic room where she’d slept: less an unwillingness to enter than a sort of spiritual laziness, the sense that whatever business needed to be done in that house would be better done tomorrow; the sense that there were more important things to do. The image she conjured in her mind was that of getting out of bed on a very cold morning—unpleasantness t
hat could just as easily be put off.

  Carefully, so as not to unravel the spell itself, she took back the circles and the gateposts she had drawn, ritually confirming their actual existence while erasing all physical traces. This was magic at a higher level than she’d ever practiced, but it would make them safer from discovery. It was, she realized, cold in the garden, and the moon had vanished for good. Even its silver stains on the clouds were fading. Spenson was hunkered on his heels by the door, but he rose in one smooth movement as she came toward him, the gravel scrunching softly beneath her feet.

  “Done?” he whispered, and she nodded.

  “We can whisper all we want, though I shouldn’t like to shout.” She took his hand and led the way along the house wall toward the brightly lit windows of the kitchen. “Oh, wait a minute. Do you have two pieces of silver you can loan me?”

  A little startled, Spens opened again the wash-leather bag from which he’d paid his bravos. Kyra drew her thoughts about her again and with careful precision drew upon each coin a Limitation, exempting her and Spens from the effects of the spells of sleep that now filled the house like curling, invisible smoke. “There. Put that in your pocket—I’ll need it back at the end of the evening. What I should like is something sweet. I feel like I’ve just come out of sword training and having the stuffing whacked out of me by Cylin and Mick.”

  “Cylin and Mick?”

  “Friends of mine at the college.” She climbed the high brick steps and pushed open the kitchen doors, the warmth and sweetness of its atmosphere drenching her like a summer afternoon. “Cylin’s one of those men who’ll stay up till dawn, memorizing his lists and spells and theories, and then spend the rest of the day worrying that he hasn’t learned enough, or that they won’t work, or that the laws of the universe have changed overnight and nobody told him. Mick’s so scatterbrained, he’ll start to memorize a list and then go off digging through seven or eight encyclopedias or bestiaries if he finds a reference to something that interests him. Or he’ll go hunt for it in the gardens, if it’s a flower or an insect, and spend the rest of the day chatting to Tom the gardener about caterpillars. Like two big kittens, both of them.”

  And she smiled at the thought.

  “Yet they beat the stuffing out of you?” Spens pushed up his leather mask and raised an eyebrow. By the glow of a dozen oil lamps, the kitchen had the strange, disjointed feeling of things seen very late at night. Imper Joblin sat slumped at the big oak table, a plate of half-picked quail bones before him and his head on his folded arms. The remains of what would have been dishes from the wedding feast strewed the table’s length, a ruin of elaborately wrought creams and jellies, roulades and molds. Two footmen, still wearing the breeches of their formal livery, were likewise sprawled asleep in chairs; the two scullions were curled up against the wall near the wood box, heads tilted back, breathing heavily with slumber. Wood lay piled around them and near the big copper boiler where water was being heated to wash all the cake plates and goblets.

  Kyra took a clean plate, picked a sweet crepe and a fragile little fruit tart from the general ruin, and perched on the edge of the table to eat them. With a shrug, Spens found the pot of coffee keeping warm on the back of the stove and poured out two cups.

  “Well, all novices have to go through sword training,” Kyra explained. “Thank you—oops! You are getting quick.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  “I was a little horrified myself when I was told that I’d have to train with the Council’s sasenna for a couple of years. I couldn’t imagine what sword practice and hand-to-hand combat had to do with learning magic. I still can’t explain how they’re connected, but they are. A warrior’s training—or at least the way sasenna are trained to be perfect warriors—borders on meditation. You reach a point where your body thinks, not your mind. Where things flow. And suddenly magic makes sense, too.”

  She shrugged and licked custard from her fingers. “But, of course, one has to be a fairly competent swordsman to get to that point, and in the meantime there’s a great deal of blundering about and getting beaten black and blue and wondering why one didn’t just stay home and be an accountant.”

  “Why didn’t one?” He held out his hand to help her get to her feet.

  “Well, for one thing, you... you just can’t. Not if you’re born with power.” She frowned at the memories of trying to do precisely that and shook them away. Turning, she made a move to begin going through the kitchen as she had gone through the cellars and the drying room a thousand years ago this morning.

  But Spens laid a staying hand on her elbow. “And for another thing,” he concluded softly, “because your father had your teacher killed. Was that it?”

  Kyra’s eyes met his, tawny into blue, and she shivered at the recollection of those days. After a moment she looked aside. “No,” she said, her voice equally quiet.

  Spenson followed her as she began to go over the kitchen, systematically touching, turning over pots, note tablets, daybooks, and canisters, running her hands over shelves and along the edges of stacked plates in cupboards, feeling the gold rims of frail shell goblets and delicate mother-of-pearl trays. The kitchen was a good place for a wizard’s mark, easily entered by any mage disguised as a tradesman, busy enough to distract, and a place where Alix could be expected to go—especially, Kyra added to herself, if the caster of the curse was aware that Alix went down several times a day to talk to the cook’s assistant.

  “That isn’t the source of the enmity between you and your father, then?” Spens asked. “As I said, I was away at the time—Father was still head of the guild. He told me your father turned in evidence that Tibbeth of Hale was poisoning wells or casting death-spells, something completely stupid for a man of Hale’s reputation. Yes, he said he’d caught Tibbeth red-handed, laying a death-hex on one of his corn warehouses. It was obviously a trumped-up charge.”

  Gently, he put his hands on Kyra’s arms just above the elbow, looking worriedly into her face. “I wondered, since you were Tibbeth’s student and a wizard yourself, if he did that so that you wouldn’t leave him.”

  Kyra sighed. Even with the sweets she’d consumed, she felt very tired. The glare of the kitchen lamps, combined with the sleeping forms around the table—even the cat was asleep in a corner where she’d been watching a mouse hole—deepened the air of unreality; it was as if she and Spens had stumbled into some other world, some enclave of dream. The fact that she knew the kitchen so well increased rather than decreased the sense of disjunction of place and time.

  She wondered what she could tell him about the scandal, about Tibbeth’s trial—about why she had proclaimed to the city, to her father’s friends, to the Witchfinders, that she was what she was. Wondered what he would accept and what he would understand.

  Facing him, with the warmth of his hands on her arms and his face concerned for her beneath the pushed-up mask and the feathery tumble of his curls, she decided to tell him the truth.

  “No,” she sighed. “Having Tibbeth of Hale arrested and... and burned... wasn’t Father’s idea, you see. It was mine.”

  Chapter XIII

  SHE HADN’T EVEN REALIZED that Tibbeth was putting sleep-spells on her at first. The awareness came gradually, like shapes seen through fog in the shadowlands just before full wakefulness returned in the mornings or as she was passing over at night into full sleep. Then those strange memories would be swallowed by the images of her dreams or would vanish, like the bloom on a plum, over the breakfast table or the maids’ chatter as they brought up wash water and shook out petticoats from the armoire.

  But Kyra knew that for a month or two she had been sleeping much more soundly than before. Since her earliest, troubled dreams of magic, she had waked once or twice in the night. Sometimes she’d just use the chamber pot and curl back under the quilts beside Alix, who always slept like a log, and drift into her dreams at once. Other times she’d lie awake for a half hour or more, admiring the familiar beauty of the
furniture in her room with her mageborn sight in the darkness or listening with a mage’s meditative hearing to the breathing of every sleeper beneath her father’s roof, to the skitter of the cats in the yard and the flick and whisper of mice in the attic, to the watchman’s tread in the square and the occasional rattle of a carriage with its outrunners and link boys, and to the soft chiming of the St. Farinox clock.

  When she realized it had been many weeks since she had done so—when she remembered, first vaguely, then more clearly, Tibbeth laying a hand on her head and saying, You will not remember my saying this—it came to her as something she had already known and then forgotten.

  Had he really said that to her?

  She couldn’t be sure.

  For nearly two years Tibbeth had been coming to the house on Baynorth Square to teach her the arts of magic. As her father had commanded, he always came under cover of a spell that cloaked him from the notice of the neighbors, always entered through the garden door so that even the servants in the kitchen would make no remark. On those few occasions when Kyra went to the house on Little Potticary Lane, she did the same. Her secret remained a secret. Meanwhile, her father worked gradually but steadily on making Tibbeth of Hale known and accepted by the men of standing in the guilds so that one day the news that Kyra Peldyrin was his pupil would not come as an offense.

  Tibbeth himself made this easy. He never offered to use magic for her father’s benefit, never put him in a position to examine the relative ethics of magic and business. But he was weather-wise and skilled in the lore of plants and farming, and generally his advice on when there would be gluts or shortages in the markets of corn and wheat was sound. Likewise, he was widely traveled and well read, and other corn brokers came to rely on his advice as well. Gordam Peldyrin might look askance at this big, easy-mannered man who had triggered such a change in his elder daughter, but he could not complain that the dog wizard took the least advantage of his position in the household.