The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  For Kyra it was a time of uninterrupted wonder and delight. She felt like a ragged orphan turned loose in a shop of silk dresses and toys, like a starving woman seated unexpectedly at a feast. Learning and spells came easily to her, as easily as mathematics had, and, as with mathematics, she found her thirst for knowledge unslakable. Tibbeth gave her lists of books, for which she would comb not only the barrows of old books on the esplanade of the river quays but the catalogues of the booksellers and antiquarians in the more elegant parts of town, on Queen’s Square and the Imperial Prospect, and he would take her through the volumes she bought, spell by spell, explaining, demonstrating, and correcting. She studied the parts and properties of plants and animals, the movements of stars and wind and clouds, the migrations of fish and birds. She memorized the various circles of power, drawn to ingather the energies of the earth and air: circles of light and fire, of blood and water, silver and earth and darkness. She learned how to trace runes and sigils, either in silver or in light, drawing them in plain air with her fingertip, learned how to cast illusions about herself and glamours upon others.

  During this time Kyra barely noticed that she was growing from girl to woman or that the boys who had danced with her at those balls she was still obliged to attend decked in her increasingly flamboyant gowns now danced with her less. It was as if they sensed the heat of the fire within her and feared that alien, coruscating joy. Even Larmos Droon, who was officially betrothed to her when she turned seventeen, was frequently absent from the parties she attended. She didn’t mind, for it gave her a good excuse to leave early and return to her studies. If he had little to say to her, this was not so very different from his usual reticence in the face of her breezy erudition.

  Alix, budding from a coltish schoolgirl into a promise of heartbreaking beauty, was delighted for her happiness. She frequently accompanied Kyra on her rambles along the esplanade and to the strange little shops on Angel’s Island where odd flowers or herbs and salts from foreign lands might be bought and occasionally, under the cover of Kyra’s spells, to Tibbeth’s house afterward. She had at that time a blue velvet cloak lined with swansdown, and her daffodil hair scattered across it was like lamplight sprinkling in the waters of the harbor at the fall of summer night. Tibbeth got into the habit of helping Alix, too, with her studies, though she was occupied with no more than the usual polite education of a well-brought-up girl: poetry and essays, geography and history, enough science so that she would not be an ignoramus and sufficient arithmetic to keep household books. Like Kyra, Alix had a facility for numbers, the only scholarly subject she truly enjoyed, though her arithmetic cleverness never reached into the joys of mathematical logic. Alix’s own interests, when she wasn’t involved with dancing classes and the harp and spinnet lessons so necessary for girls her age, tended to center on her own sewing and hatmaking—at which she was brilliant—and cooking.

  But, mostly to be with Kyra, she took up the study of arithmetic under Tibbeth, bringing her books into the schoolroom and sitting under its broad window, the sunlight making a primrose halo of her hair. Frequently Kyra would look up from her memorization and practice to see her master sitting beside the beautiful child, patiently explaining cosines or theorems, a smile on his face.

  Then one night she’d wakened and found Alix gone.

  “Alix?” Her hand groped at the hollowed pillow, the comforter drawn carefully up to cover the empty spot. It was spring, and the air was chilly. The smell of the soap Alix used, glycerin and lilies, clung to the embroidered sheets. Kyra sat up and saw that her sister was nowhere in the room.

  And immediately a wave of sleepiness washed over her. The image of Alix going down to the kitchen for a piece of fruit came to mind. Surely Alix had said she was going down for that purpose and was due to return at any moment. Anyway, this must be all a dream.

  Far off, the clock chime spoke thrice.

  Kyra shook her head, pushing aside the stifling warmth of sleep, feeling, in the way it clung just too long, the curling hints of magic in it.

  She remembered again—not for the first time, she realized, but this time the memory stayed, clear and sharp—Tibbeth putting his hand on her head, saying, You will not remember this...

  Cold touched her. A hundred stupid servants-hall tales returned to her, of wizards who kidnapped children for use in demon sacrifices.

  Tibbeth? If he-wanted children for such purposes, he could have kidnapped her the first time she came into his shop.

  And anyway, Tibbeth was extremely fond of Alix.

  Nevertheless, something made her get out of bed and find her robe, white wool, long and trailing, like a shroud. Closing her eyes, she listened, questing in her mind through the house, seeking the soft tread of a bare foot on the floor.

  And she heard, very quietly, the closing of the garden door.

  She knew the sound of it, the peculiar muted creak of its brass hinges. She thought of her scrying-crystal, but that required light, and light, she thought, would be seen from her window. Instead she pulled her enormous, gaudily colored wool shawl over her robe and stole in barefoot silence out into the gallery, down the two long flights of stairs to the hall below. The little passage at the back of the hall was dark, but the air there held a trace of ice and the raw smells of wet earth and compost, as if the doors had been opened. She smelled again, very faint, the odor of glycerin and lilies.

  She touched the hinge of the garden door so that it would not creak and wrapped about herself the thickest cloaking of spells she could muster.

  But Tibbeth saw her. The only reason he did not see her immediately was that his head was bent down, his tall height stooped, over Alix, who had to stand on tiptoe to get her arms around his neck. It was a rare, clear night for autumn, and the late moonlight bleached her golden hair to ivory where it cascaded down over his hands, one supporting her head, the other stroking her slim waist, which was outlined by the thin linen of the nightgown she wore. For the first moment, seeing them together, the enormously tall man half-doubled-over to press his lips to the child’s, Kyra thought only of how grotesque the scene was, framed in the dense shadows of the garden gate.

  It was only when Tibbeth bent a little farther to kiss the white stem of Alix’s throat, only when she sighed like a woman, though in her twelve-year-old treble, and under his hand the nightgown slipped a little off the delicate point of her pale shoulder, that Kyra felt a wave of sick disgust that almost nauseated her, so that she had to fight not to gag.

  Even six years later she did not know what she would have done had Tibbeth not looked up then and seen her. She was so shocked, so nonplussed, at the scene that she doubted she could have said a word. Every look Tibbeth had ever given Alix as the girl began to ripen, every time his hand had touched hers during their arithmetic lessons... all these were flooding into her protesting mind. All she could think was No... No...

  But he did look up. And being a wizard, and her master, he saw through the clouds of illusion that concealed her as easily as he saw through the chancy dark of the quarter moon.

  He must have known that as a wizard, too, she would be able to hear him. Still, he lowered his voice to barely the whisper of a cricket as he laid his palm along Alix’s cheek. “Return to bed now, my darling,” he murmured. “You will remember none of this.”

  For one instant Kyra saw her sister’s face, the half-slitted eyes swimming with a woman’s passion, the loose mouth shining with moisture in a filthy and incongruous caricature. Then the features changed, relaxing into the slack expressionlessness of dreams. Obedient, Alix came back toward the door where Kyra stood, her eyes still open but with the glazed look of a sleepwalker, the hem of her thin nightdress trailing over the pebbles of the path.

  She passed Kyra without a look, ascended the stairs like a ghost, and vanished into the darkness. Tibbeth was coming down the path toward her, explanations almost visible upon his lips. Kyra turned and closed the door and, as she barred it, wrote the strongest spells of ward she
knew upon the latch. She retreated down the hallway almost to the arch that led into the lightless gulfs of the entry hall, not quite sure why she didn’t want to be anywhere near the door when Tibbeth touched it but knowing that she could not bear his sight, or his smell, or the sound of his voice ever again.

  She waited in the dark hallway for nearly an hour, watching the door, but saw nothing. She had heard, through the door, his footsteps retreat along the pebbles of the path, and they did not return.

  “Kyra, I’m sorry.”

  She raised her hand a little, as if to touch Spens’ lips in the half-light of the pantry—to stop whatever words he had to say. For a moment she couldn’t look at his face. Indeed, as she told him the story, she’d been going through every cupboard and shelf of the little room where the crocks of flour and sugar, the good dishes and the gold- and silverware were kept, her eyes on what she was doing, speaking as if it had all happened to someone else.

  Turning to stop his words, she expected to see appalled disgust on his face, loathing and horror that—would they have? she wondered—covered a little puddle of relief that he hadn’t actually gone through with it and married the girl.

  But in his blue eyes she saw nothing but pity and concern.

  “It happened to one of my cousins,” he said slowly, at long last. “An uncle of mine... Nothing was ever done to him, of course, because she had to remain marriageable...” His lip twisted with distaste at the word. “Father sent him away—made him factor of a fur station in the Sykerst—but poor Nilla blamed herself for it for years. If Alix has been holding that inside herself...”

  Kyra shook her head. “Alix remembers nothing of it,” she said softly. “He saw to that... and I made jolly damn sure of it.” There was a sudden ragged viciousness to her voice, like a flint knife skinning a beast.

  She shook her head and moved on through the drying room—which she had already searched—and out into the hall. The tables there had already been taken down, moved discreetly back to storage in the stable loft. No wonder the footmen looked tired. The new banners still hung on the walls, to annoy and infuriate her father whenever he looked at them, but the garlands had all been removed from the railings of the gallery, the balustrades of the stair. The tubbed gardenias clustered around the book-room door, sweetening the air with their scent, and the Holy Widow within her niche seemed to wear a miffed expression on her round porcelain face.

  Kyra’s hands roved almost automatically over the usual occasional tables in their niches and corners, the panels and thresholds of the great outer doors, the ancestral masks in their curtained niche, and the marble steps of the single long, straight flight that ran up the north wall. Though it was not impossible that some dog wizard had come this way—with a good cloaking-spell it was astounding what one could do, as Kyra had learned—it was doubtful, and she could feel no trace of either the magic of Hestie Pinktrees or that of the Pilgrim in the somber flagstoned room.

  As she searched, touching each of the hexagonal stones underfoot in turn, probing for the queer psychic heat of a talisman, she continued, “When I got back up to our room, I searched for a wizard’s mark by which he could have laid the spells of love on her and summoned her.” Her hands trembled with remembered rage as she fingered in turn the masks’ vigil lamps. “He’d written them on every one of her nightdresses. Sigils of yearning, of illusion... the kind of sigil Lady Earthwygg might have paid a tame wizard to put on your pillows, the kind a lover puts on the garments of his beloved. And he came to me the next day.”

  “My dear Kyra, I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand.”

  For a moment all Kyra could do was stare at Tibbeth. In a way his words shocked her, off-balanced her, as much as had the sight she had seen in the moonlit garden the previous night. “I would understand?”

  “Kyra...” He reached out a broad, brown-spotted hand to guide her into the chair opposite his. Around them, above them, the great house was quiet save for the small stirrings in her parents’ rooms, where Foodret was shaving her father and the footmen were bringing hot water and towels for her mother’s morning toilette. In the kitchen Kyra was aware of Joblin supervising the preparation of breakfast kidneys and muffins, of Merrivale giving orders to the maids for the day, and footmen stocking the dumbwaiter that supplied the breakfast room on the floor above. The book room in which she and her master sat still held the chill of the night, and outside its window only vague shapes could be seen, stirring about the square. The maids had laid the fire in the stove but had not lit it, and the faint odors of cold ash mingled with the fusty nose itch of dampness, old paper, and dust.

  Kyra yanked her hand from Tibbeth’s as if there had been a roach in his palm.

  “Kyra...” He looked hurt. “I haven’t harmed her, you know. I wouldn’t—you must know I wouldn’t. One doesn’t eat green fruit—”

  “Only rolls it around in his mouth to savor the taste?” she demanded, her voice shaking.

  “It was she who savored.” He folded his hands and looked at her with those wise, gentle light blue eyes. “And why not? A man—a grown man—who cares for her, who will handle her gently, kindly... Not those callow bumpkins you put up with at balls, those smutty, giggling boys she deals with in her dancing classes. And she’s more sensitive than you are, Kyra. She hasn’t your defenses. That ripening sensuality, mingled with the wonder of a child...”

  His hand made a small gesture, as if in his thoughts he was tracing the curve of her hip. Kyra had to close her hand around the arm of her chair to keep from striking him. The heat that went through her shocked her, the blind rage and the will to do murder.

  As if unaware of her thoughts, as if unaware of the slightest incongruity in his words, he went on. “I couldn’t let that budding femininity be bruised out of existence by silly boys who see only her golden hair and doelike eyes... or, worse, who see only your father’s moneybags.”

  “Is that why you put spells of Summoning on her nightgowns?” She almost spit the words at him, lurching to her feet, trembling all over with fury that he would have dared to come here, that he would have stood in the hall and sent Briory up to fetch her.

  Tibbeth sighed and shook her head, as at a child’s willful rage. “Kyra, you don’t seem to want to believe that I would never hurt Alix. Or that I would ever do anything to cause her—or you—grief. But—like you, I see now—she was raised with all the prejudices of your parents’ class. She wanted me. Don’t pretend she didn’t come around asking for ‘help,’ just as if she didn’t have a tutor of her own. She wanted love, and she wanted the kindness, the gentleness she sensed that I could give. But even at her age she has been blinded into believing that ‘love’ is proper only to a boy of twenty who is pretty in the fashion she has been taught to think of as pretty and of whose family her father approves.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “What do boys of twenty know about a soul like Alix’s?”

  “They know,” Kyra said slowly, “better than to use spells to bring her to their arms when she’s only twelve years old!”

  A look of infinite patience crossed his face. “Kyra,” he sighed, “a girl is a woman at twelve, and you know it.”

  “Get out of this house,” was all she said.

  Tibbeth rose, his long, dark robe—almost new these days and of the finest-quality wool—straightening about him with a kind of grandeur. His face was sad and kind. “I will,” he said quietly. “And I promise I will make no further attempts to see her. I have said I would not for the world hurt Alix. I can only ask that you not hurt her, either. And you know as well as I do the way of the world, my child, and what would happen to her should any word of this get about either to your father or to anyone else. I presume you will tell him yourself that you have decided, after all, to give up your studies in magic.”

  Shaking now as if she stood naked in a snowstorm, Kyra could only repeat, in a voice she scarcely recognized as her own, “Get out of this house.” She walked to the book-ro
om door to make sure that he did so, but after he was gone, she stood there for a long time, staring straight ahead of her into the shadowy hall, sick with rage at him and with guilt at the overwhelming grief she felt, the sudden shock of the loss of the learning that she now would never have.

  Chapter XIV

  THERE WAS SOMETHING EERILY reminiscent of a fairy tale, Kyra reflected, in walking like her own ghost through the house while others slept. A sense of possession and of power, such as she had had when a small girl, waking in the very early morning to the first creakings of the servants coming down the back stairs to start the kitchen fires. As a teenager she had been lazy, seeking, as many teenagers did, the comfort of her pillows in the morning to make up for the private world of late-night reading, but as a child she had liked to rise in the predawn darkness, wrap herself in a shawl, and tiptoe through the house for the strange enjoyment of seeing it gray and empty, without fires in the stoves, or daylight in the windows, or people chattering in the rooms. She remembered standing beside her parents’ bed, reaching out—very gently—to touch the saffron hawser of her mother’s hair where it coiled across the snowfield of the pillows, stealing across to the cradle where Alix slumbered and looking down wonderingly at that tiny, exquisite angel wrought of pink pearl, alabaster, and gold. She seldom went around to her father’s side of the bed, for the sight of him asleep disturbed her. It was not right that he should be so vulnerable, that he should show her, even unknowingly, the worried frown he wore in dreams.

  The sight disturbed her still. She and Spens found him sleeping with his head on his desk in the book room, half-written arrangements for yet another church—Sun-on-the-Hill—spread out all around him and the pen, sticky with drying ink, still in his hand. He was unshaven and looked very tired. By the glow of the candles beside the standish, she could see how his red hair had almost completely faded to gray and how prominent the blue veins in his hands were. She had not remembered his wrists being so thin. A wave of sadness passed over her, drowning the anger she had felt at him while she’d watched him shouting at Alix in the crystal. He was, she thought, only doing the best he could. She searched the room as quickly as possible, avoiding looking at him, for something in the way he lay, with his hand curled around the quill, made her want to weep; when she left, she felt somehow dirty, as if she had spied upon him in his bath.