The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “They’ve been by here, all right.”

  She jerked about, startled. Spens put a hand on her calf to steady her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think the Witchfinders are on our trail. They’re still three or four miles off—didn’t we pass a crossroad back around that bend?” She nodded toward the shady rise of elms behind them.

  He nodded, gathering the reins to mount. “It goes to Byrnefelling Farm and past that to Utter Plunket. Won’t the High Council sense it if you use a spell?” He reined around after her as she retraced their steps at a trot.

  “They would if I used anything very violent or very high-level. If I threw a ward across the road, for instance, that the horses refused to pass. But Daurannon the Handsome—one of my instructors—always says that a spell that’s too subtle to be detected is just as effective as one that’s too strong to be resisted and works better if it’s other mages you’re trying to fool. They don’t have very many high-level wizards in the Magic Office; I doubt they’d send one after me.” She sprang down and tossed Spenson the reins, then fished in her pockets for one of the hairpins she’d worn the previous day, an old one wrought of amber and silver.

  She had to write the talismans of light with extreme care, seven or eight of them, very tiny and none containing much power in itself, on stones and the undersides of leaves for some distance down the road before it reached the crossings; small spells of drowsiness, of inattention, of distraction mingled with tiny and un-thought convictions that someone had said something about Utter Plunket... The sense that left and downhill was the best way to go—wider, clearer, better. After that she took a makeshift broom of elder twigs and dusted away the tracks on the main road, thankful that no rain had fallen lately to make the path muddy.

  “Now come,” she said, and Spenson rode down the farm path, leading her horse, while she followed afoot on the grassy verges, now and then leaving small signs of inattention and illusion so that the pursuers, unless they were quite powerful mages indeed or were looking very hard, would not be sure where exactly the hoof-prints left the road.

  It cost them nearly a half hour, and toward the end she had to fight panic at the thought of how near the Witchfinders were coming. But when they finally cut cross-country back to the Kymil road and proceeded through the thin woodlands at a rapid trot, she heard the sounds of pursuit fade and turn eastward. She did not hear them again for nearly two hours.

  Chapter XVIII

  “DAMN. THEY’RE BEHIND US again.” Kyra drew rein to listen, the noon sun hot on her shorn head and unprotected nape. “Coming fast, with no effort to conceal it.”

  “They know you’ve seen through their illusions, then.” Spenson leaned forward and felt his horse’s sweaty neck. They’d ridden at a hard trot, trying to make up time, since the crossroad. “We can’t outrun them on these beasts, anyway. They must have gotten remounts at the Bear and Pig. Can you tell the horses where to go if we’re not on them?”

  “Do you know the way to Underhythe from here?” She regarded him in some surprise as he stepped from the saddle and untied the leather satchel that contained their lunch of bread and cheese.

  “Of course. One of my uncles has a farm at Utter Plunket. I spent my summers tramping this part of the country. Down you get.” He reached up to catch her as she dismounted, her legs nearly giving way with the weakness of hours of unaccustomed riding. “There’s another crossroads a mile and a half from here, leading out to Far Peddley. Can you get our friends—” He patted his big roan’s neck, “—to go as far as they can hell-bent for leather down that road?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Kyra caught her tall bay’s bit, drew its head down close to hers, and whispered the words of command appropriate to the beast’s small, skittish brain. From her pocket she took her scrying-crystal, conjured in its depths the sleepy crossroad among the willow trees, and, from that image, sent the vision of the place into the horse’s mind, as well as the urge to run to the brink of exhaustion. “Go!” she cried, and stepped back. The bay flung up its head and pounded off at a run, the roan plunging at its heels with the aroused instincts of a herd animal in a stampede. Spens caught her elbow and guided her along the weedy verge of the road to a gap in the hedge—they were in farming country once again—that had been incompletely repaired with a few elm boughs woven into the thick masses of privet. These he pulled free to allow her through and replaced, inexpertly and at the cost of severely scratched fingers, behind them.

  Then, hand in hand, they set off along the rough ground of the hedgerow, avoiding the plowed land that lay, upturned and breathing its thick peaty scents, below.

  “So you spent your summers tramping this part of the country, did you?”

  “Yes!” Spenson said defensively, and leaned against an apple tree to wipe his sweaty forehead with his sleeve.

  Kyra, sitting slumped at the tree’s roots, raised her head a little and gave him a dour look. “I can only assume you had either written directions or a competent guide.” The back of her neck and the tips of her ears were smarting with sunburn. Though hardened by sword practice and used to walking miles in the cold sprucewoods around the Citadel, she had rarely ridden a horse in the past seven years, and the points of bone at the bottom of her pelvis ached from jarring contact with the saddle. Even lunch had failed to cheer her. She was tired and, as the sun hovered nearer the beech woods away to their right, becoming concerned. Moreover, her shoes, though Spenson had been careful to get a size to fit her feet, had originally belonged to someone else, a matter of less concern while riding than it had become during the past five hours afoot.

  Spenson took his pipe from his pocket, tamped tobacco into it from a small leather pouch, thankfully, Kyra thought, his half-a-crown Gentleman’s Blend and not the cheap, stinking variety with which he had camouflaged himself against the guards at the city gates. “I suppose you’d rather we continued on the road and got ourselves arrested by the Witchfinders?”

  Kyra didn’t deign to give him a reply. With their wanderings through the woods and hedgerows, turning now east at a swamp that Spenson swore surrounded a pond he had once known, now south to follow a spring that didn’t lead at all where it had (he assured her) twenty years ago, her feeling of helplessness had returned, insistent and terrifying. Last night she had known there was nothing she could do. This afternoon it seemed to her that all this green, smiling countryside, with its mossy pools, its chuckling streams in their ivy-shawled clefts, its lichened oaks and pale stands of birch and beech, had become her enemy. Or, if not her enemy in the sense that Tibbeth of Hale and the Witchfinders were her enemies, at least insofar as her parents, and her playmates, and the boys at the dances had always been her enemies: turning her aside from her goals not out of malice but out of a kind of well-meaning stupidity that did not and could not understand the hideous urgency of her quest.

  And Spenson, who had insisted that they stop for food and rest out of a maddening conviction that she was more tired than she thought she was, was no help at all.

  “That pond we passed has to be Mickle’s Pond,” Spens said reasonably, drawing on his pipe. He’d taken off his jacket and neck cloth in the heat and looked far more at ease, like some bullnecked gentleman farmer or huntsman, a totally spurious impression, she thought bitterly, considering his navigational ineptitude. “That means if we go south from here, we should strike the road that runs from the rectory to Podding’s Farm. My guess is that Alix and Algeron went to the rectory.”

  “They’ll have married by this time,” Kyra said softly. Her eyes went to the sun, touching the tips of the trees; within an hour, the land would be washed in shadow. Within three, it would be dark. Night. Alix’s wedding night.

  Her heart quickened in her ribs again, a terrible, anxious pounding as the recollection of the evil she’d felt upon the silk returned to her like the backtaste of poison. She got to her feet, pulling away from his help.

  “Kyra, I’m sorry,” Spenson said quietly. A
nd then, when she didn’t look at him, he added, “It’s not far.”

  It was well after dark when they stumbled, quite by accident, upon the rectory of Underhythe. “Dear me, yes, they were married this afternoon.” The local priest made a move toward the low doorway that had to, Kyra guessed by the smells of cooking and the faint rattle of cleaning up, be the kitchen; she shook her head vigorously and caught his gray sleeve.

  “Did they say where they were going?” she asked. “Where they would spend the night?” The concern in his blue eyes—he was an elderly man with a bachelor’s trembly fussiness—irritated her; he looked at her like a kindly father viewing a lost urchin out past her bedtime. With reason, she supposed impatiently. Her clothes were muddied, her face and hands were scratched from a hedge they’d scrambled through, and she’d begun to walk with a decided limp from a blister on her toe. But that was still no reason for him to peer at her as if debating whether to send her around to the kitchen for leftovers handed through the back door.

  Behind her, Spenson stood with folded arms, wrapped in the illusory darkness of her protective spells; the elderly priest barely glanced at him and, unless Spens spoke, would not afterward remember that she had had a man with her at all, much less what he looked like.

  “The young lady said they would be seeking a good inn, but I suggested instead that they rent Hythe Cottage. The widow Summerhay owns it; it stands out on the far field of Summerhay Farm, and it is much nicer for a young couple on their honeymoon than an inn. It used to be a farm cottage, but there’s nothing of the farm left but the orchard. Very pleasant it is, apples and a few pear trees; the cottage itself is just the four rooms, but the barn’s still in fair condition for their team and gig.”

  Alix must have reckoned transportation costs into the amount she braced Lady E. for, Kyra thought. Such practicality certainly didn’t sound like Algeron.

  “They did seem a most respectable young couple or else, of course, I would have had nothing to do with such a scrambling affair.”

  “Where is it?” demanded Kyra. “How far? It’s important,” she added as the man looked miffed at her interruption of his rambling encomium of the virtues of Hythe Cottage. “It’s desperately important that I reach them tonight. Alix is my sister; there has been terrible news.”

  “Ah!” He relaxed a little, and Kyra breathed a sigh of relief. Alix must have given him her right first name at any rate. “You continue down the road to the first crossroad—that leads out through Summerhay Farm. There’s a gate, but it’s easily climbed. You’ll pass a hay barn about a mile in from the gate; Hythe Cottage lies about five miles beyond that, on the other side of the spinney.” He peered at her over the tiny oval lenses of his spectacles. “It will be quite late by the time you arrive, you know.”

  Kyra, already groaning inwardly at the thought of another six or seven miles on her smarting right foot, was burningly aware of that fact. “Is there any chance you can rent us horses?” she asked. “Or a horse and gig of some kind?”

  Spens leaned forward and breathed in her ear, “Since when do you have any money?”

  “Don’t make difficulties.” She turned back to the priest, who was clasping and unclasping his pale blue-veined hands by the dim glow of the oil lamps on the parlor’s little table. “My companion would be glad to pay you, of course.”

  So much, she thought, for keeping Spens invisible—at least the priest wouldn’t be able to describe him later.

  Spenson, for whom she hadn’t had a civil word since shortly after sundown, merely raised his eyebrows at her and got a furious, urgent look in return.

  “My dear child,” the priest said, earnestly, “of course if I could do so, I’d be glad to...”

  Kyra had to close her hand sharply to prevent herself from slapping the man out of sheer irritation. Of course there was some problem.

  “...but my sister, who keeps house for me, has taken the gig to visit our mother over at Mickle’s Farm. Mother is nearly eighty and has severe rheumatics in her joints. Clariss should be back at any time.” He glanced at the heavy blackwood clock, nearly invisible in the shadows that covered the far end of the room like a grimy arras; its ticking had made a thick, subconscious background to their conversation, like the frantic thudding of Kyra’s heart. She followed his eyes. It was eight-thirty. Damn it, damn it, damn it... “I could offer you some supper until she arrives,” he added hospitably, and his thin, pale face acquired a little life at the prospect of a good gossip with people he didn’t see every day in his village rounds.

  “I’m afraid we can’t wait,” Kyra said. “Thank you very kindly all the same. Come along... Bill,” she added, remembering that above all else she must neither speak Spenson’s name where anyone could hear it nor allow to waver the spells that turned people’s eyes from his features. “Stupid old fuddy-duddy,” she added as soon as they were past the rectory’s low hedge and on the road again. “I hope his fool of a sister falls out of the gig and breaks her leg. The least she could have done was put off her visit till another night.” In spite of her ability to see in darkness—and the night was moonless, the shadows that overlaid the road intense—she stepped on a round stone that caused a stab of pain like a knife wound in her blistered foot.

  Spens caught her elbow and held on to it this time in spite of her effort to wrench free. “We’ll get there,” he said.

  “If you hadn’t—” She broke off and limped along in silence for a moment, glad for the touch of his hand on her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at length. “I couldn’t have done any better. And you were good to come with me at all. I’ve been a harridan all afternoon, haven’t I?”

  “Unspeakable,” he replied imperturbably.

  She sighed. “And to think I held your temper against you.”

  “Oh, when it’s something I think is important—a business deal, or my breakfast muffins, or getting you to stay in Angelshand—I get livid if I’m crossed. But I know you’re frightened for Alix, as I am. I never loved her, but she’s a sweet girl if you can put up with her chatter.”

  “I told you she only chatters when she’s nervous.”

  “If I made her that nervous, it’s well we didn’t marry.” He shifted the empty satchel on his shoulder and looked across at her, peering a little in the cricket-shrilling darkness. Though she could see his features clearly, she knew hers were only a moving blur of white to him, and maybe not that much. “When we find them... Will you be able to fight the death-curse that’s on her?”

  They walked in silence, leaning a little now on the stout sticks Spenson had cut for them from beech saplings in the course of the afternoon. Kyra’s whole body shrank from that thought, the dread of it almost smothering the pain in her foot and the gnawing of hunger in her belly. Above the trees a barn owl shrieked like a madwoman’s ghost; fox eyes glinted briefly in the sedgy tangle of the roadside ditch, then vanished. The night air, thick with loam and apple blossoms, seemed to twist with danger, like black silk drawn cuttingly tight around her throat.

  “I don’t know,” Kyra said softly. “Tibbeth was only a dog wizard, but he was one of the most powerful in the city. I’ve had six years of training at the Citadel, but... All the omens, all the readings I was getting before I came here—weak magic would never have caused disruptions like that. And from everything I’ve studied, the spells of the dead are very strong.”

  They reached the crossroads and the gate that notched the dark, cold-smelling loom of the surrounding hedge. The splintery bars creaked alarmingly as Spenson helped her over, and she had to summon a tiny seed of blue light, floating in the air above his head, to guide him as he worked the sticks and the satchel through the gate, then clambered after them. To their left lay rough pasturage dotted with trees—Kyra thought she could see a couple of shaggy-coated horses sleeping near the hedge at the top—to their right, behind a fence of withes, there was a meadow where young hay grew rank and thick in the low ground. A nightjar whistled one or two notes, th
en fell silent. The track between pasture and meadow was rougher than the road had been, potholed and rimmed with stagnant water, and Kyra was glad of the walking stick and the strength of her companion’s arm.

  “You’ve studied them. You’ve come across one?”

  She shook her head. “One—one doesn’t, you see.” She was silent a moment, thinking again about the Citadel’s academic isolation, apart from businessmen and matchmakers and families... and the clamorings of the heart.

  “It’s ironic that the Academic wizards, the ones who have the real power, frequently get very little experience, because our vows forbid us to meddle in human affairs. We learn, we study, but... apart. Alone. Against each other, in test situations—sometimes in quite dangerous test situations, but very few mages are actually killed in training. Last spring was the only time there’s been actual danger at the Citadel in years. I’m told it’s the same with the sasenna, the sworn warriors, in times of peace. It’s the dog wizards who encounter the... the randomness, the peril, of actual events.”

  “And it’s the dog wizards who cause all the trouble,” Spenson said quietly.

  There was a dry anger in his voice, and Kyra glanced quickly over at him. Of course, she thought. His ships had been in port eighteen months earlier, when an unscrupulous wizard had summoned a storm that had wrecked three-quarters of the Saarieque trading fleet so his patron’s ships might scoop the market when they finally came in. Merrivale had written her that her father had lost thousands of crowns’ worth of investments; Spenson would have lost not only money but crewmen whom he knew in that all-encompassing ruin. It was scarcely surprising that her father had been able to find other businessmen ready to follow his lead in persecuting Pinktrees and the Pilgrim. Little wonder that her father had worked so hard to get his friends—and the family of his prospective son-in-law—to forget Kyra’s very existence. That Spenson had not shunned her on sight, as her father did, was a testimony in itself to his tolerance that made her ashamed of her own first judgment of him.