The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  And transmuted itself, as it had at supper last night, into another modality, another key, a transposition...

  With it came the sense of having encountered another transposition recently, something else familiar but changed... recognizable only if one knew what it had been changed from...

  Then she knew it. She stopped dead in the middle of Faggot Lane as if she had been struck, and behind her a maid selling milk door to door snapped, “ ’Ere, lady, watch where you’re goin’!”

  “Of course,” Kyra whispered, memory dropping into place. And then, flicking the spilled milk from her sleeve, “Damn. Tastes spoiled, too.” Turning, she ducked across the street under the nose of a plunging butcher’s van and, gathering up her skirts, headed back toward Baynorth Square as quickly as she could go.

  Her heart was pounding, her mind filled with the memory of the ugliness she’d felt on the wedding gown’s muslin lining—weirdly familiar for all its faintness, teasing at her mind like a song transposed.

  As the song had, the memory unwound itself and dropped into place.

  There was something in that trace of magic that had reminded her—impossibly—of Tibbeth of Hale.

  Chapter XVI

  WHEN KYRA RETURNED TO THE house in the final fading of afternoon to darkness, the tension there was as present, as nerve-racking as the persistent, metallic scrape of some monstrous machine. She had gone out openly, only shaking off the Witchfinder with some rather time-consuming jiggery-pokery in a hat shop in Fennel Street; she waved airily across the square at the disgruntled young man as she ducked through the yard gate upon her return. As she passed unnoticed through the kitchen and slipped up the back stairs, she wondered how that young man’s colleagues had fared, explaining to their superiors how they happened to wake up bound hand and foot in the middle of Pennyroyal Common.

  The unnatural hush in the house—the kitchen was deserted, which at that time of the day was unheard of—made her wonder if the flute player’s peccadilloes with Tellie Wishrom had gone farther than a few kisses by the postern gate. Her first impulse was to think, The silly chit can’t POSSIBLY know if she’s gotten pregnant yet... Then she recalled her own feelings for Spenson, the terrifying heat of his kisses the previous night, and her own feverish response. I’ll skin him alive if he’s done anything to her.

  The poor girl was only sixteen, after all.

  And what, she wondered obliquely as she turned the sharp corners of the pitch-black well of the stair, was she going to do about herself? The thought of not returning to the Citadel when this was all over was unthinkable; the thought of her not being with Spens, more unthinkable still.

  Alix’s room was empty when she scratched at the door. The wedding dress and its attendant petticoats and veils had been hung in the armoire, out of sight for the first time since Kyra had returned to the house. The wicker dress form was gone. The room looked curiously pale without that flaming watcher of crimson and gold.

  She crossed the room swiftly and pulled out the gown and its veils, like billowing armfuls of fire in what dim light remained in the east-facing window.

  Now that she was thinking in terms of Tibbeth of Hale, the touch of him on the inside of the bodice, though not strong, was very recognizable.

  It shook her to her bones, as if she had seen the man suddenly standing in the room beside her. In a sense, she thought, she had. She felt her breath quicken and a cold shakiness seize her belly; there had to be some explanation for this.

  She touched the gown again, trying to quell her fear in analysis.

  The sign was definitely his. The magic was... the same but different. Shifted, as she had sensed, into some other modality, some other key that she did not understand. She pressed her lips to the place, trying to further shut out her own confused thoughts and let her magic think for her; frequently, if one’s mind was clear or concentrated on something else, images would arise to help, as hers had earlier of the change of key. But all that her mind’s eye would see was that final glimpse of his face through the clear, running distortion of the heat dance, mouth impossibly stretched in the single scream that seemed to go on for minutes, eyes bulging with agony and horror and disbelief as the flesh of his thighs fried and swelled and burst...

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Kyra whirled. But it was only the laundry maid, who gathered up Alix’s discarded shift from the bottom of the armoire and departed, dreamy and colorless as ever.

  Kyra sat down on the end of the bed, her hands trembling now. Tibbeth was dead. Yet somehow his magic had reached across the years...

  She pushed the gown off her lap, wanting obscurely to wash her hands for having touched the place where the magic had been picked up... Picked up from what? Alix’s flesh? She fumbled in the pocket of her gown, drew forth the scrying-crystal, and angled it toward the panes of the window. But too little light remained above the black loom of neighboring roofs and the slate blue of the shadows; she turned her body a little toward the dressing table and gestured a single candle into flame.

  “Rosamund,” she breathed, and called to her mind the Lady’s coldly beautiful face. “Rosamund, I need you.”

  The long disciplines of her training let her sink quickly into the crystal’s heart, down past the aureate pinpoint of the candle’s reflected light. The familiar flicker of the colors appeared in the fine-grained lattices of its facets, colors that sank and changed into a kind of gray veil. Then the veil cleared, and to her relief she saw her ladyship, seated in the small study of the Porcelain House on the Citadel’s wooded northwestern side. Past her mentor’s shoulder she could see the glow of the hearth, the golden gleam of cat eyes where Imp curled on a footstool beside an open book.

  “Kyra, what is it?” The peridot-green eyes looked anxiously into hers from that tiny, distant image. “Are you well? Have you learned what threatened your sister?”

  Somehow the mere sound of Rosamund’s voice in her mind had a steadying effect, the reassurance that she wasn’t alone. “I’ve learned it,” she said. “But I don’t understand what I’ve learned.”

  As the room darkened around her, she told, as well as she could, of the ghost of magic that still clung to the wedding dress, her unshakable feeling that it was Tibbeth’s, though it was in fact not only somehow changed but so faint as to be almost unidentifiable. “I don’t see how it could be his,” she said at length, having sidestepped the subjects of Blore Spenson and the two abortive attempts at the wedding itself. “He’s dead, Rosamund. I saw him the six years ago. He was... He...” She could not bring herself to speak of the sight of Tibbeth’s abdomen rupturing with the heat, of his screams as his intestines dropped down into the blaze. “He couldn’t have survived the fire.”

  Rosamund was silent for a time, running a lock of her heavy hair thoughtfully through her fingers. In spite of the plain black woolen robe of wizardry, the simple red cotton of her shift, she had all the queenly grace of the daughter of a long line of earls; her green eyes, with their dark rings around the irises, were troubled in the gloom.

  “Not himself,” she said musingly. “But under certain conditions, if the Inquisition didn’t have a very powerful mage attending the death—and as I’ve said, the Inquisition’s wizards aren’t first-class as a rule—a wizard’s ghost can linger if it has something, some place or person, to cling to. Death by violence...” She shook her head.

  “I checked the schoolroom,” Kyra said numbly. “I took special pains with it. Most of his things had been thrown out, but even so, I sensed nothing there.” True, she thought, she had not been thinking of or looking for traces of Tibbeth when she had done so. Not Tibbeth alive, Tibbeth active, Tibbeth twisted with malice.

  But even so, that kind of hate must have left its mark.

  She thought about reentering that room now, in the darkness, fingering once more through the few remaining crocks and bowls. Even playing through that scene in her mind made her shiver.

  “Did Tibbeth have a wife, or a son, or a brother
or sister?” Rosamund asked. “Someone close to him? The ghosts of wizards can possess those who loved them if those loved ones let them in.”

  Kyra said, “He had a wife.”

  A wife who was little more than a child herself. That colorless, dreamy face, that flaxen hair, pale blurs in the dark vestibule of the Inquisition’s courtroom... Kyra couldn’t even recall what she looked like.

  But quite suddenly she saw herself sitting in this very room, on the end of the bed as she was sitting now, on a spring afternoon six years earlier, with a pile of her sister’s nightgowns on her lap. On each of those fragile cotton garments the mark of Tibbeth’s Summoning had been traced, invisible, undetectable to any but a fairly strong mage. He probably hadn’t realized that she had the power to read a mark that subtle.

  When she had recalled the scene before, she had remembered only her own rage at the taste of the foul dreams with which those marks had been imbued, the dirty sensuality, the unclean Summons that Alix had been sleeping with every night, the marks pressed against her skin. Only now it came to her that the marks were placed so that when the garment was on, they would fall just below the breast...

  ...in the precise place where the faint touch of evil lingered on the red bodice’s muslin lining.

  And she remembered, too, the colorless, dreamy-faced laundry maid who only minutes before had come in to gather up Alix’s discarded shift.

  “Dear God!”

  She dropped the crystal, and her concentration snapped with horror and alarm; Lady Rosamund’s image vanished. She scrabbled for it, then sprang to her feet, tripping over the wedding gown and nearly colliding with her mother in the bedroom doorway.

  “Kyra!” Binnie Peldyrin caught her older daughter in her arms. “Oh, thank God you’re here!”

  Kyra stared at her blankly for a moment. Her mother’s pleasant oval face was puckered with worry, and the relief that sprang into her dark eyes at the sight of this less successful daughter frightened Kyra a little. “What is it?” Kyra asked. “I’ve been out; I didn’t think Father would be all that eager to see me around.”

  “Oh, Kyra, your father’s fit to have a stroke!” Binnie gasped, clutching her daughter’s hand. “He’d never ask this of you; he seems to think all you’ve brought on the house is ill fortune, which is quite ridiculous, since these things will happen... I mean the pipes breaking and all those poor little mice...”

  “Ask what of me?” Like her father, Kyra had long ago learned that ruthless interruption was the only way of carrying on a conversation with her mother.

  “Oh, is that your magic crystal? I’m so glad you thought to bring one, though I thought they were supposed to be round balls.”

  “No, they aren’t. What is it? If you want me to find that wretched flute player...”

  “What flute player?” Binnie, deflected from her train of thought, stared up at her tall offspring with distracted surprise. “Oh... Oh, that dreadful young man! Though I must say he played beautifully,” she added, “and he was very handsome. I’m sure I can’t blame Tellie at all for kissing him, even if he isn’t her class and it did make her father furious, but after all, there’s been no harm done, and he has played at Court...”

  “Mother...!” Kyra pulled away from the soft little fingers and restrained herself from shaking her parent. “If kissing him was all she did, I’m certainly not going to spend my time tracking him with a scrying-crystal.”

  “Not him!” Her brow wrinkled tragically, and her eyes glistened with sudden tears. “Your sister!”

  “My...” Her voice trailed to silence.

  “Oh, Kyra, Alix has... has run away with Algeron Brackett!”

  Kyra swore. And yet an instant later the image returned to her... like two children sheltering from the rain, asleep in one another’s arms in the guttering light of the candles, gold hair mingling with gold. Alix had gone to him for comfort after her father’s bawled threats and recriminations, had cried herself to sleep in his arms...

  And had wakened, warm and locked together, in the deep of the night, nearly an hour before anyone else in the house.

  Kyra swore again, mightily.

  “Dearest, your language! Though you always did pick up things from the stable boys.” Binnie wrung her dainty hands, her face twisted with concern in its frame of lace cap and blond curls. “Oh, I know she says she’s going to marry him immediately...”

  “Marry him...!” Her heart turned cold.

  “...but think of the scandal! And your father says—”

  “Wait a minute, she says...”

  “In her note.” With a prolonged sniffle, Binnie Peldyrin produced it, and only many, many years of proper raising kept Kyra from simply snatching it out of her glycerin-softened grip:

  Mother,

  Please, please forgive me for what I do, and please beg Father’s forgiveness as well. I know how dreadfully I wrong him, and still more am I conscious of the wrong I am doing to Master Spenson and to all of his house. Please do not think Algeron and I are simply running away together. We will be married as soon as may be, and we will enter into respectable trades.

  Never do either of us wish to bring shame upon you. But I have realized that for me to marry Master Spenson would be to do him an even greater wrong than this. I love Algeron far more than words can ever say and cannot now exist without him at my side. I know it is too much to ask your blessings, but I pray that at least we may take with us some understanding.

  Give all of my love to Kyra, and I beg of you, do not seek us.

  Your wretched daughter,

  Alix

  “You have to find her!” Binnie raised her eyes once more to her daughter’s face, which had grown still, like blanched bone, in the last glimmerings of the window’s fading light. “Your father sent footmen to all the gates of the city, but nobody remembers seeing them, which in itself is a little strange, since Algeron is so very handsome. But if you can use your magic crystal...”

  Kyra swept her hand in the direction of the dressing table, and all the candles there burst into simultaneous flame as she flung herself down upon Alix’s little stool before it.

  “Really, dearest,” her mother went on, her chirping voice calmer now, “it amazes me how you do that! But I do remember when you were quite a little girl, you used to—”

  “Mother, please! I need quiet for this.”

  Her mother clapped both hands over her mouth in a curiously childlike gesture and sank to a sitting position on the end of the bed. Kyra found it difficult to concentrate with those doelike eyes gazing at her in awed wonder and realized that she had never worked even the smallest magic in the presence of either of her parents.

  “Perhaps you’d better leave the room for a little bit,” she said when no image would appear in the crystal’s central facet.

  Binnie paled. “You haven’t seen something... Oh, Kyra, tell me!” Impulsively she clutched at Kyra’s wrist. “I’m her mother...”

  “I haven’t seen anything,” Kyra said patiently, extricating herself and wondering how her single-minded and efficient father had made it through almost thirty years of marriage to this woman. “I just think I need to be alone.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, of course... Just let me hang up Alix’s wedding dress... I can’t think how it came to be dumped like this across the end of the bed, but the silk crushes so easily, and it cost ten crowns a yard! And that Hylette charges absolutely scandalous prices. I can’t believe Lady Earthwygg has all her gowns made by that woman, because I know the Earthwyggs are all to pieces and it’s only your father’s money—”

  “Mother!”

  “Oh, yes! Yes, of course...” She scampered from the room, still clutching yards of saffron veil.

  They can’t be getting married tonight, Kyra thought desperately, turning her attention back to the crystal. Tonight can’t be her wedding night.

  She angled the crystal to the candles’ light.

  Still no image would come.

  Pani
c mounted in her for a moment. Don’t tell me Mother unnerved me that much. Quickly she searched the crystal for images of her father and saw him at once, talking to—thank God!—Spenson in the book room. She called Alix’s image to her mind again, seeking her, seeking Algeron...

  But the only thing she saw reflected in the crystal’s depth was the dozen points of the candlelight, like golden stars sunk in the fog-white rock. She concentrated on those points, channeling all her thoughts, all her attention, trying to shut out the sudden rise of voices in the hall below. This is ridiculous; I’ve found both of them in the crystal before. It isn’t as if either of them is mageborn.

  So intent was her concentration that she neither heard nor felt the jar of footfalls in the back stairs until the door was thrown open and Spenson grabbed her by the wrist. “Come on!”

  “What...?”

  She found herself dragged to her feet and down the hall in a tangle of long legs and petticoats, still clutching her scrying-crystal in one hand. The sudden breaking of her almost meditative state left her disoriented. She could hear her father’s voice downstairs and the shouting of other men but couldn’t piece together words. Lily the maid sprang out of their way as Spenson hauled her to the back stairs and shoved her through the narrow door.

  “Spens...”

  “Run for it!” he panted as he hauled her down the dark hairpin switchbacks of the narrow stairwell. “The Witchfinders!”

  “What?”

  “They’re here. They have a warrant for your arrest; they came in while I was talking to your father. Lily showed me the back stairs. They say they have a witness who swears she saw you turn a beggar into a dog.”

  “What?”

  Kyra was still cursing with great vividness as they burst through into the kitchen, fled past the startled Joblin and his scullions, and pelted on through into the hall leading to the garden door. As they swept through the pantry, Spens caught up a broom and a three-foot metal candle snuffer, tossing the latter to Kyra; she had recovered sufficiently not to need dragging in his wake and strode at his heels, her voluminous skirts gathered up in her free hand.