The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Grudgingly, he held out his hand to her. “A safe journey to you.”

  She brushed the hand aside and took him in her arms. For one moment he stiffened as if she’d been one of the ladies at the Cheevy Street Baths. Then, with a strange little movement of his shoulders and back, he seemed to put aside his anger, remembering not the outrageous and outraging teenager who had so wantonly disrupted his plans but the bright-gowned, bright-eyed little girl he’d used to hug.

  They embraced with the elbow-bumping awkwardness of two scarecrows kissing. Then he pulled on his fur-collared mantle as if it had personally affronted him and strode imperiously from the room.

  Binnie smiled up at her daughter. “Brittany Nemors will know where Alix sets up her shop; Brittany went to school with me. She knows all the new dressmakers.” They passed through the common room, where a very stout man and a thin woman were gathering several noisy and uncomfortably dressed offspring around a fortress of baggage. The largest of the girls was singing tunelessly about the personal habits of her next-younger sibling; the smallest boy was crying. Kyra shut her eyes in horrified anticipation, realizing that these were to be her fellow passengers for perhaps as much as ten days and nights of constant company.

  At her elbow, her mother’s voice pattered cheerfully on. “Mark my words, dearest. Before Alix bears her first son, your father will be so sick of Cousin Wyrdlees that he’ll take that nice boy Algeron into the family business; corn factoring can’t be so very different from baking.”

  Kyra rolled her eyes.

  “And in any case, you know that he’ll want to raise up his grandson to inherit. It’ll all work out. These things do.”

  Kyra looked down at her as they stepped into the muddy yard. It had rained last night—she could have told to the minute when it had begun and when it had ceased—and the wheels of the coach were clotted thick with mud, the morning air filled with the high, damp warmth of the coming summer. The coach itself looked very gay; all the government mail coaches had been newly painted the previous summer to celebrate the birth of the Regent’s heir.

  Hostlers were leading out her parents’ gig and team, with Sam sitting up already on the coachman’s seat. Her father climbed impatiently in and settled the lap robe about his bony knees, for all the world like an affronted tomcat washing itself in a corner. Other grooms were hitching the fresh team to the mail coach, massive horses shining like new coppers, twitching their haunches and flicking their docked tails at the flies.

  “Do write me. I know your father will take a little time to come around to that, too... But it was good to see you again.”

  Binnie stood on tiptoe to kiss her one last time; Kyra hugged her again, pushing aside the start of fresh tears, and picked up the carpetbag she’d left by the inn’s door. As she watched her mother pick her way across the muddy yard, her mind was already occupied with the journey ahead: ten ghastly days through the deeper and ever-deeper mud of the Sykerst’s abominable roads, two nights at most of decent inns followed by a succession of straw-covered plank beds in post houses—thank God most people refused to share beds with wizards! Black bread and hard cheese and smoke-flavored tea with honey and listening to endless chatter about childbirth and illnesses and love affairs from the women on the coach, interspersed with inaccurate and maddening questions about magic.

  The coachman was calling, “Board up! Board up!”

  It occurred to her belatedly that she should have written a note for her parents to take to Spens. But, her throat tightening again, she knew there was nothing she could have said.

  He had his life. She had hers. The mere fact that the Inquisition would make it impossible for her to return to Angelshand for months, perhaps years, told her how futile was any thought of being with him.

  She’d have to ask Lady Rosamund if there was some kind of unlove potion, some counterspell for the heart. She certainly couldn’t continue to go through the kind of pain she’d been in last night. “I suppose I should have done all that when I was sixteen, as Alix did,” she sighed to herself. “Measles are worse when you get them as an adult, too.”

  She swung her carpetbag up to the footman on top of the coach, missed her distance, stepped back to avoid having the heavy bag come crashing down on her head, stepped on the hem of her robe, and would have collapsed back into the mud if someone hadn’t come around the side of the coach at that moment and caught her in one strong arm.

  “I thought it was just because of all those silly petticoats women wear,” Spenson said, righting her and taking the bag. His right arm was still in a sling—sprained rather than broken, she had ascertained—but he moved with all his old buoyant lightness. His neck cloth certainly looked as if he’d tied it with one hand.

  Behind them, the stout man in the red coat handed child after child up into the coach. Kyra replied, “Nonsense, you should have seen me before I learned to manage petticoats,” but her heart was hammering so painfully in her ribs that she could barely think. The part of her not singing with delight at the sight of him throbbed with a bitter ache, wondering why he had come to renew the pain yet again. More awkwardly, she said, “I didn’t know you’d come out with Father.”

  “I didn’t.” He tossed her satchel to the waiting hands on top of the coach and handed her in, climbing up after her and wedging himself between her and the two oldest girls, who had already embarked on what promised to be a week of pinches and hair pulling. “And believe me, the only thing that I can think of worse than riding half a day from Angelshand with the parents of my erstwhile bride is what did greet me in the courtyard of my house when I returned there last night.”

  Kyra stared at him blankly. The hasu who had ridden with the Witchfinders returned to her mind, the ability of a mage to see through darkness and illusion. Good God, he wasn’t a fugitive himself because of her...! “Not the Witchfinders?”

  “Worse,” Spens said darkly, but there was a sparkle in his eyes. The coachman cracked his long whip. The Sykerst mail jolted forward, nearly pitching Kyra, Spens, and their two squabbling seat mates into the welter of red coat, striped skirt, and diapers opposite them. As Kyra groped, completely breathless, for something to think, let alone say, he went on. “Though the Inquisition may have been watching the house. That’s certainly the excuse I made to Father when I told him I was leaving Angelshand for two years to be our house’s factor to the Sykerst fur traders at Lastower.”

  Kyra stared at him. “Lastower... Two years?”

  Lastower. A day’s ride from the Citadel...

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing I’ll repeat in front of those little girls across from us,” he replied cheerfully. “ ‘Traitor’ was the mildest. ‘Ingrate,’ ‘dilettante’ ...I’m inclined to think you were right.”

  “About what?”

  “About him being the one who put my responsibilities into my head when he became eligible for Mayor. A post he’ll have to quit now. And finding me a wife to keep me from running off to sea again. I sent that poor Gyvinna woman a hundred crowns, just on the strength of her calling down the Inquisition and giving me a reason to get out of Angelshand.”

  Kyra was shocked. “You’re the heir! You can’t just walk out!”

  “You did.”

  “That was different!”

  His blue eyes twinkled as he took her hand. “Not as different as you think.”

  She recalled the look on his face during the fight in the garden, the wild brightness of his eyes in the field of Hythe Farm. Remembered his silence as he faced his duty to family in Angelshand, a stocky man in a red suit with nothing to say.

  “Spens,” she said, her eyes glinting, “I do believe you’re a fraud.”

  “I do believe you’re right.”

  The shadow of the inn-yard gate darkened them for a moment, then vanished in the warm dappled light of the country sun.

  “Are you a witch?”

  Kyra raised her head a little from Spenson’s good shoulder to look past his back at
the small, pinch-faced girl tugging her sleeve.

  “Luce...” the girl’s mother hissed reprovingly.

  The child refused to be deterred. “Are you going to turn him into a toad ’cause he kissed you?”

  Spens looked around at the girl with a grin; Kyra said, “Good heavens, what good would that do me? I’m trying to come up with spells to make him handsomer than he is.” She drew back her head and looked into his smiling eyes. “Not that it would be necessary,” she added, and frowned. “Two years? You’ve obviously never visited Lastower. It’s the most deadly place imaginable.”

  “Well,” Spenson said, “with luck I’ll get out to the Citadel now and then. And there are worse fates.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well,” he said quietly, “not seeing you again was one of them. And after a day’s drive thinking of you—and of Father and my duties—the still worse fate, as I said, was waiting for me in the courtyard of my house.”

  “For heaven’s sake, what?” Kyra asked.

  Spens shuddered and drew her more closely into the circle of his arm, as if for protection. “Lady Earthwygg and her daughter Esmin,” he said. “So you see, there was nothing for it but flight.”

  “Spenson,” Kyra sighed in exasperation, dropping her head once more to the broad tweed shoulder, “one of these days I really will turn you into a toad.”

  The little girl asked, with glowing eyes, “Will you teach me how?”

  A Biography of Barbara Hambly

  Barbara Hambly (b. 1951) is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction, as well as historical novels set in the nineteenth century.

  Born in San Diego and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Montclair, Hambly attended college at the University of California, Riverside, where she majored in medieval history, earning a master’s degree in the subject in 1975. Inspired by her childhood love of fantasy classics such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, she decided to pursue writing as soon as she finished school. Her road was not so direct, however, and she spent time waitressing, modeling, working at a liquor store, and teaching karate before selling her first novel, Time of the Dark, in 1982. That was the birth of her Darwath series, which she expanded on in four more novels over the next two decades. More than simple sword-and-sorcery novels, they tell the story of nightmares come to life to terrorize the world. The series helped to establish Hambly’s reputation as an author of intelligent fantasy fiction.

  Since the early 1980s, when she made her living writing scripts for Saturday morning cartoons such as Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and He-Man, Hambly has published dozens of books in several different series. Besides fantasy novels such as 1985’s Dragonsbane, which she has called one of her favorite books, she has used her background in history to craft gripping historical fiction.

  The inventor of many different fantasy universes, including those featured in the Windrose Chronicles, Sun Wolf and Starhawk series, and Sun-Cross novels, Hambly has also worked in universes created by others. In the 1990s she wrote two well-received Star Wars novels, including the New York Times bestseller Children of the Jedi, while in the eighties she dabbled in the world of Star Trek, producing several novels for that series.

  In 1999 she published A Free Man of Color, the first Benjamin January novel. That mystery and its eight sequels follow a brilliant African-American surgeon who moves from Paris to New Orleans in the 1830s, where he must use his wits to navigate the prejudice and death that lurk around every corner of antebellum Louisiana. Hambly ventured into straight historical fiction with The Emancipator’s Wife, a nuanced look at the private life of Mary Todd Lincoln, which was a finalist for the 2005 Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War writing.

  From 1994 to 1996 Hambly was the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her James Asher vampire series won the Locus Award for best horror novel in 1989 and the Lord Ruthven Award in 1996. She lives in Los Angeles with an assortment of cats and dogs.

  Hambly with her parents and older sister in San Diego, California, in September 1951.

  Hambly (right) with her mother, sister, and brother in 1955. For three years, the family lived in this thirty-foot trailer at China Lake, California, a Marine Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

  Hambly (left), at the age of nine, with her brother and sister on Christmas in 1960.

  Hambly’s graduation from high school, June 1969.

  A self-portrait that Hambly drew while studying abroad in France in 1971.

  Hambly dressed up for a Renaissance fair.

  Hambly at an event for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She served as the association’s president from 1994 to 1996.

  The “official wedding picture” of Hambly and science-fiction writer George Alec Effinger, in 1998.

  Hambly with her husband, George, in New Orleans around 1998. At the time, she was researching New Orleans cemeteries for her book Graveyard Dust (2002).

  Hambly at her birthday party in 2005.

  Hambly (right) with her sister, Mary, and brother, Eddy, at a family reunion in San Diego in 2009.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks goes to Janus Daniels for his workshop on neurolinguistic programming, “Thinking Like a Writer,” for the inception of the seed of this idea, and to Kathleen Woodbury and her Salt Lake City Writer’s Workshop. Although this story takes place in the Empire of Ferryth, neither Antryg Windrose nor Joanna Sheraton is part of it.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1994 by Barbara Hambly

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4532-1668-2

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com