Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Most things did, of course.

  "Well, one doesn't want to appear cheap, but frequently, at this time of year, what's in season in the markets is the tastiest, and it would hardly make sense to pay half a crown apiece for apples that are mealy or pears that look as if they'd come a hundred and fifty miles on horseback… My dear Esmin, such a beautiful dress…"

  Esmin Earthwygg had been ten when Kyra had left her parents' walls, a skinny, overdressed child who always reminded Kyra of a ferret. As Kyra came to the head of the last, single long flight of stairs down into the hall, she could see that like Lord Earthwygg, Esmin would always be thin and small. Under her pearl-ornamented fair curls, her face had acquired a kind of pixie prettiness, assisted by some well-paid genius with the makeup brushes, but her eyes still looked as if they should be investigating underbrush for mice.

  "Hylette made that, didn't she?" Alix asked, coming over to greet Esmin with a warm embrace and naming the most expensive dressmaker on the Imperial Prospect.

  "Oh, Hylette makes everything I wear."

  "I can always tell the way she cuts a bodice. I have to tell you, I was in her shop yesterday for the final fitting on the wedding gown… don't you wish brides could get married in something other than red? It absolutely turns me into cheese."

  It was a lie, of course, Kyra reflected—Alix looked as spectacular in the crimson and gold dictated for brides as she looked in any other color—but Esmin, flaxen like her father, would go ghastly when it came her turn to proceed up an aisle under the saffron veils the strict-form ceremony required, and it was kind of Alix to put herself in the category of those whom bridal red would not suit. Kyra recognized that sort of generosity these days, though she had never had it herself. In her own years of going to Guildmasters' balls and the dancibles given by the other merchants of the city, she had been a source of both scandalized amusement and dread to those her own age as a result of her scathing and witty observations on the shortcomings of others.

  Alix, she thought, her belly going cold again. Alix is marrying tomorrow… What on earth could she do?

  Briory announced, "His Honor, Mayor Brune Spenson—Master Blore Spenson."

  She stepped back, severe in her dark blue suit, to admit the Mayor of Angelshand—looking even more like a steel mummy than he had six years ago—and his son, the newly made President of the Guild of Merchant Adventurers and Alix's long-negotiated-for groom.

  He was another one, Kyra reflected dispassionately, who ought never to be allowed to wear red.

  In a nuptial mood, however, he had donned a court suit of it—satin, too, always a bad choice on a stocky man—and with his powerful shoulders, broad-boned face, and short, sandy hair, he bore an unfortunate resemblance to a very large apple.

  Not that he was fat, she thought, watching him as he kissed Alix's hand with rigid formality and Alix flung her bright and all-encompassing carpet of small talk over him like a bird catcher's net. He just couldn't wear red without looking fat. He stood mumchance, his whole body radiating stiff discomfort, though whether that was because of the strait fit of his suit or because of Alix's nonstop babble, Kyra couldn't determine. His neck cloth looked as if it had been tied by a particularly unskilled dog.

  "You remember my daughter, Esmin, don't you, Master Spenson? Of course, you met at the ball here when you returned from the spice islands."

  Kyra, lazily beginning her descent of the long marble stair, observed how close to that stocky form Esmin insinuated herself and how his hand first lingered on, then quickly dropped hers. Even at that distance Kyra saw the rise of blood to his face.

  "… going to be taking over the Presidency of the Merchants' Guild now, aren't you, Master Spenson?" Alix chirruped. Always talkative, she was positively blithering this evening. "How exciting for you! It must be quite a change to be living in a house and not a ship's cabin—though it isn't really fair to add to your burdens with all those upholsterers and carpenters… Do you know, Esmin, he's having the master's suite redecorated in their house on Prandhauer Street? With the most enchanting painted wallpapers, a sort of shell-pink, hand-painted silk… Not to mention all the things that have to be done for the wedding and getting his trading fleet ready to sail…"

  "Oh, Master Spenson…" Esmin moved a little closer to him and raised black shoe-button eyes to his. "You aren't leaving us again so soon for the high seas? I thought Father said you had done with journeying." Her hand stole to his lapel, and Master Spenson turned a color that went most unbecomingly with his satin suit.

  Kyra strode forward from the foot of the stairs, her hand extended. "Master Spenson," she said in her deep voice, "I'm Kyra Peldyrin."

  He looked quickly away from Esmin as if Kyra's words had broken some kind of spell, and his eyes widened at the sight of her. Probably, she thought, it's the dress. Merrivale, the housekeeper, had brought one of Alix's gowns up to the yellow guest room, a soft powder-blue silk that would have enchantingly set off the girl's radiant fairness and would have made Kyra look like a week-old corpse. Instead of putting it on, she had gone up to the attic and found hanging in an armoire all her old gowns, gowns that had been the talk of her own set for their flamboyant disregard of current fashion. Centuries out of date in pattern and cut, some of them, they had been made to her instructions in colors darker and bolder than anything that had been worn for seventy-five years. Against the frail rose and ivory of Esmin's costume and the lettuce greens of Alix's, Kyra's black and yellow stripes and face-framing collar of point lace stood out like an orchid among daisies.

  Nevertheless, Spenson reached out to grasp her hand, and at that moment Kyra, who had not worn a formal gown or anything resembling one for six years, stepped on the hem of one of her petticoats and went sprawling into his arms.

  His reflexes were quick. She found herself caught with a surprisingly light strength and set back on her feet, and for a moment she stood looking at very close range into a pair of twinkling blue eyes on a level with her own.

  "I'm so sorry," she said, stepping back a little and shaking straight her voluminous skirts. "I'm always doing that… You're taller than I thought you'd be. And that color doesn't suit you."

  "I thought Father's tailor carried on a little too much about how well it did." Master Spenson ruefully considered one satin sleeve. "And I'm taller than I thought I'd be, once upon a time."

  "Master Spenson…" Gordam Peldyrin appeared, almost impossibly, in the small space between them, caught the arm of his prospective son-in-law, and steered him hastily away. "Lord Earthwygg wanted to ask you about the cargoes you're shipping this week."

  Esmin looked up at Kyra, who was standing now beside her. "Is it true you're a witch?" she asked, her black eyes greedy.

  "Witch?" Lord Mayor Spenson grumbled, glancing around from the crystal glass of muscat the liveried footman was handing him on a tray. He squinted at her belligerently. Kyra met his gaze calmly, knowing what he was going to say and knowing there was no way of stopping him or anyone else. "Aye… You were that old hoodoo's pupil, weren't you? The one they burned…"

  "His Grace Dromus Woolmat," Briory intoned from the door, "Bishop of Angelshand."

  "My dear, I'm so glad you returned for your sister's wedding, and I'm so glad to see you again," Binnie Peldyrin murmured into her elder daughter's ear as they turned the corner from the ascending stair and passed along the wide gallery toward the formal dining hall. "But I hope you don't mind being crowded. Your turning up just now threw my table completely off. If we'd had even a day's notice, we could have invited Mole Prouvet—Tellie Wishrom's intended, you know, and a very dear boy even though the Prouvets do own that factory—or your cousin Wyrdlees or somebody to balance it."

  Entering the dining room, Kyra could see her mother's point. In six years of quiet in the remote Citadel she'd forgotten about the intricacies of properly balancing a dining table.

  She ended up seated between Master Spenson and Esmin Earthwygg, since that was virtually the only place they
could put her. Certainly her father would not have risked seating her next to Bishop Woolmat, who had regarded her with a kind of startled outrage the moment he'd entered the downstairs hall and thereafter had refused to speak to or go near her. Nor could she have been seated next to either Lord Mayor Spenson or Lord Earthwygg, which would have placed her opposite the indignant prelate. As it was, she had Esmin between her and his grace, which was just fine with them both, though Esmin didn't look particularly pleased about the arrangement.

  "It should be the finest wedding this city has seen for years," Gordam Peldyrin predicted proudly from the head of the table, nodding and reaching over to pat his younger daughter's hand. "And a great credit to this little minx of mine."

  "I believe it's the first wedding in your family to be performed in the strict form," Lady Earthwygg purred, glancing along the table at him with eyes as black as—but far more intelligent than—her daughter's.

  "Well…" Binnie Peldyrin began deprecatingly, and her husband said, "Oh, no, far from it, far from it," which Kyra knew was a lie. As a rule, strict-form weddings were performed only among the nobility and the very rich. There was a kind of social cachet to them, but the complications of getting an episcopal dispensation, coupled with the sheer expense of the materials prescribed by the ancient Texts, discouraged even the wealthy merchant classes from going to the trouble when marriage by signature would serve just as well. "Why, my parents were married in the strict form down in Parchasten…"

  The two footmen, very stiff in their purple and yellow livery, bore in the fish course; at the far end of the long dining room the musicians played some airy piece of nonsense, like a fill of starlight that softened the clinking of tableware and the small slurps and crunches of eating. The musicians, Kyra had been informed by the maid who'd laced her, had been hired by her father to play for the wedding procession, the wedding itself, and the feast afterward, and were among the best in the city. The flute player was currently making sheeps' eyes at Tellie Wishrom, Alix's closest friend and, with Esmin Earthwygg, her maiden of honor for tomorrow's ceremony. On the other side of the Bishop, Kyra could see Lady Earthwygg eyeing the young man, too.

  "Personally, I can't imagine why any woman would want to be married in the strict form," Kyra drawled, just barely stopping herself from spearing one of the honeyed quails. She let the footman—she knew he'd been with the family before her departure, but she never could remember servants' names—put it on her plate for her. Even before she'd spent six years waiting on herself in the Citadel, her family had not had the servants put the food on the plates for them. This, like the musicians and the tale of strict-form weddings in Parchasten, had been rehearsed to show the Spensons and the Earthwyggs how grandly the Peldyrins lived.

  "Oh, but it's tradition," Alix said a little too quickly, and Tellie sighed, her large blue eyes brimming with sentiment. The Wishrom grandparents, Kyra suspected, had gotten married by jumping over a broom, and in that household signature marriage was undoubtedly considered the apex of respectability.

  "Tradition to get up at the crack of dawn for a ritual bath and spend hours in the church breathing incense that smells like carrion… ? Whyever did the prophets choose civet as the proper incense for the rite, your grace?" She leaned around Esmin to address the Bishop, who was sitting rigidly between Lady Earthwygg and her daughter. "And then afterward one has to put up with being married in the strict form…"

  "The strict—or true—form of marriage is not a matter for disparagement," the Bishop said in the golden-voiced baritone that every week had the congregation of St. Cyr Cathedral sighing and weeping like some delicately played wind instrument to the rhythm of his sermons. "Its form—and its symbolic materials—were all specifically laid down in ancient times and recorded in the Texts—"

  "Aye, and damned wealthy those old-timers must have been," Lord Earthwygg jested in his thin, drawling voice. He raised a quizzing glass to one heavily painted eye. "Just watching poor Peldyrin here buying the incense, and the jewels, and the golden vessels, and the proper music… the horses drawing the bride have to be white mares and twenty ells of saffron silk to make the bridal tent… Makes me think I'll invest in a good broomstick when time comes for my Esmin to wed."

  "Oh, what a japester you are, my lord," his lady laughed, with a glare that could have fleshed a deerhide.

  "Well, I can easily understand how people started marrying by signature as a place holder to promise the Church that a real ceremonial would take place as soon as everyone could afford it," Kyra remarked. "Which, of course, then nobody ever did."

  "Kyra!" her mother said, shocked.

  "And once the women found out how much more convenient it was not to be legally their husband's chattel—"

  "A woman shall enter into a man's house and become as his daughter," the Bishop quoted sententiously. He patted the corners of his mouth with his napkin with great care not to upset either his makeup or the black velvet beauty patch glued just beside his lips—a silly place for a patch, Kyra thought, if one was going to dinner. "He shall be a father unto her, and she shall come into his home with bowed head and contrite heart …"

  He leaned forward as he said it, to see around Esmin to Kyra, so Kyra was aware of Lady Earthwygg reaching behind his gray velvet episcopal back to hand something to her daughter.

  "I think that's… that's very touching," Tellie Wishrom said hesitantly. "I mean, to be taken care of as a daughter…"

  The Bishop beamed paternally.

  "Well, that's all very well if your father keeps his accounts straight and doesn't drink," Kyra remarked, ladling applesauce onto a fragment of ham.

  "Accounts!" Lord Mayor Spenson raised his wrinkled visage from his plate for the first time during the meal. The same dog, Kyra thought, must have tied his neck cloth as well—beside him, his son sat stolidly consuming baby peas and fricasseed goose, radiating consciousness of Esmin Earthwygg like heat from a stove.

  "Just taking the time for this wedding is putting our accounts out of balance!" the old man went on, jabbing with his oyster fork in Kyra's direction. "Our ships should have set sail two days ago when the first of the easterlies began to blow—and a week early they are—and old man Nyven's fleet is already on the sea. Ours would be, too, but for this wedding, for there isn't a trader in the fleet up to Spens for getting his cargoes past the islands and away! No, nor for avoiding pirates in the Jingu Straits, either!"

  His hand trembled with a slight, continuous quiver of palsy, but his eyes were pinpoints of blued steel. It wasn't difficult to see how this man had built the old banking house's modest family fortune into a staggering trade empire on will and stubbornness and bulldog strength.

  "Pirates!" Esmin gasped, clutching her hands—and whatever her mother had passed her—to her bosom. "It sounds thrilling!"

  "When a boy's young, I suppose it is," he allowed dourly. "But a man can't keep at it forever, and time comes when he must settle and tend his nursery." He cast that steel-hard eye on his only son and then past him to the flowerlike beauty of his daughter to be. "Though what with the clothing for him for this precious rite, and horses of this color and that color, and all those candies and trinkets that need to be flung out, and hiring maskers and learning dances and meantime the corn factors are cheating us out of our eyeteeth every chance they get and two ships down this autumn… Two ships! There's witchery in it, I tell you…"

  "Nonsense," Kyra said, while her father—who was a corn factor—only glared.

  "You say nonsense, girl," the mayor snapped testily, while Lady Earthwygg signaled a footman for more wine for her daughter. "But you can't tell me it's coincidence that two of my ships went down and none of Dutton Droon's did, any more than you can tell me that great storm two winters ago that wrecked the entire fleet wasn't cooked up by dog wizards in the pay of those whose ships survived! Not to mention all that talk of ruin and abominable things just a year ago! And you should know more about that, miss, than anyone at this table!"

&
nbsp; "Father, there's no proof—"

  "You stay out of this, Spens!"

  Master Spenson looked as if he would say something else, but his father had already turned away.

  Gordam Peldyrin, red-faced with mortification, glared at Kyra as if by his will he could make her disappear, and Lady Earthwygg turned to Binnie Peldyrin with some piece of gossip from the Court to distract her from the powder that Esmin was rather clumsily dropping into the wineglass she held.

  "If I know anything about it," Kyra said calmly, "it's only as a matter of academics. Real wizards—those trained by the Council, as I am—take a vow not to meddle in human concerns, and most dog wizards don't have the training to call enough power to sink a ship. You might ask his grace. The Church has wizards working for it."

  "The Magic Office is strictly advisory," the Bishop grated.

  "Well, why does it need to be?" she asked. "Why can't each guild have its own wizard as a consultant in matters such as this?"

  "They shouldn't have it at all!" the Lord Mayor stormed. "Nor that worthless Inquisition, paid a fortune for doing nothing but poke and pry! Waste of public money, I call it!"

  "Oh!" Esmin made an exaggerated grimace over her wine. "What a strange taste."

  "Perhaps," the Bishop majestically—and politically —said, ignoring both Esmin and the Lord Mayor, "because the guilds are formed under the aegis of the Church and its saints. Wizards, having been born without souls, as agents of illusion and evil—"

  "Really, you can't believe that if you follow the advice of your own wizards."

  "You keep a civil tongue in your head, girl!"

  "Would you try this, Master Spenson, and tell me if you think it's all right?"

  Esmin started to hand her blown-glass goblet of wine to Spenson behind Kyra's back. Kyra had only to jerk her elbow back to knock it spinning from the girl's grip, shattering it in an explosion of shards and Chablis.

  "Oh, dear!" she said, springing to her feet. "How terribly clumsy of me. You—er…" She still couldn't recall the footman's name. "We need a towel here."