Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  "You mean the wedding's been put off?" asked the laundry maid, a thin, colorless woman with her arms full of folded shifts and petticoats—undoubtedly, Kyra thought as she ghosted around the door and into the steep well of the back stairs, the elaborately lace-trimmed garments suited to Alix's crimson wedding gown.

  Quietly, she ascended the stair.

  The second floor was deserted, shrouded in shadow now that the footmen had cleared the supper dishes and the maids had laid tomorrow's fires in the drawing-room hearth and the porcelain stoves in the library, study, and breakfast room. On her way into the dining room Kyra looked through the breakfast-room doorway to see the elaborate tub of enamel and gold, with its canopy frame taken down and its prescribed pennons rolled neatly into corners, in which Alix would take her ritual bath before being gowned for her wedding. The air—warmer in these smaller upstairs room—was sweet with cinnamon and lilies, as the Texts ruled it must be. Cinnamon for this world and lilies for the next, Kyra remembered from her distant religious training, and shook her head again over the mysteries of people, like Tellie Wishrom, who wanted to be married in the strict form. Reaching the third floor again, she made her way along the ill-lit gallery to the yellow guest room, which was tucked like a poor relation between the girls' old schoolroom and the suite reserved for more notable company.

  There she removed her wet slippers and settled down to wait. As she listened for Alix's step on the main stairs, she debated putting on dry stockings—the damp had soaked straight through to her skin—but realized that what could be done unthinkingly when clothed in her loose gray robe was less easy in a bodice boned to within an inch of its wearer's life. She contented herself with pulling up her skirts and sitting with her feet close to the small coal stove that filled the room with such comforting warmth. Her petticoats would cover the bruises the pavement had left on her knees, and Alix, although she was more observant than she appeared, would have other things on her mind.

  In time she heard voices: her mother and Alix. Closing her eyes, Kyra extended her senses down the hall. But as she'd suspected, the topic of conversation was where things would go in the ice cellar and whether everyone who had been invited to the wedding had been sent a message of postponement. Like her mother's, Alix's mind ran very much to the practical, despite a romantic streak the width and depth of the River Glidden.

  "We're not going to need another before-wedding banquet, are we?" she asked above the soft rustle of petticoats. From the sinuous slither of silk and the pauses of the voices, Kyra guessed that having set all the maids to carrying creams and garlands to the cellar, her mother had come up to unlace Alix before going down to assist in the portage herself.

  "Oh, I hardly think so."

  "Oh, thank heavens! I don't think I could stand another evening at the same table with Esmin Earthwygg."

  "Now, darling, you know her father got your father the contracts of the charity hospital and the Prince Dittony Barracks."

  "What, didn't you see how sweet I was being to her?" There was a kind of rueful brightness in Alix's voice. "Truly, I'll be like a sister to her—I will, really—at the bath and through the wedding and the feast, but honestly, it will be a relief not to have her around all the time, asking how much my jewels cost and insinuating that since Tellie's father owns a factory Tellie must eat with her hands, and poking into boxes and drawers to see what's there." There was a moment's silence. Then, more softly, "It will be a relief not to have… all this hanging over my head."

  In the awkward pause Kyra wondered about the expression in her mother's eyes, for the next instant Alix said, with all her old vivacity, "There! Now you run along and keep Papa from fretting himself into a frenzy.""

  More silken rustlings as Binnie Peldyrin, plump and featherheaded as a little golden partridge, left her daughter's room and descended the stairs.

  Soundless as a cloud in her damp stockings, Kyra moved along the corridor to her sister's room.

  "Kye—" Alix turned, the expression of exhaustion and strain that had added ten years to her face dropping away so suddenly, Kyra was not certain she had seen it; her sister's hand flicked with suspicious casualness across her eyes. A silver-backed hairbrush was in Alix's other hand, but she was not sitting in the fuzzy halo of candlelight that surrounded her dressing table. She stood, rather, before her wedding gown on its wicker frame in the corner.

  Against the white of Alix's nightgown and robe the wedding costume blazed like blood sprinkled in flame. The crimson silk of the bodice sparkled with rocaille and bullion, the stiff gold patterns of the lace repeated on the golden petticoat revealed beneath the swagged folds of the skirt. Above all that color, Kyra thought, Alix's sloping white shoulders and fragile stem of neck would lift like alabaster and honey, glittering with the traditional gems—jasper, beryl, topaz, and tourmaline—covered with the saffron veil like a sheet of fire.

  But in her mind all Kyra heard was that little broken sigh, the whisper, Don't leave me…

  "Are you all right?"

  Alix twinkled like the mischievous girl Kyra had known. "As soon as I get over my palpitations of concern for his grace's health."

  In spite of herself, Kyra giggled. It seemed impossible that they hadn't parted just last week.

  "Here, turn around," Alix went on. "Have you been trapped in that thing since you left the table? You poor darling—not that it isn't absolutely beautiful. I always loved the way you dressed… You could have got Lily to get you out of it; all she's done all evening is flirt with that flute player… although he is the most gorgeous thing in nature. Did you get the stain out of your hem? Soda and salt in cold water should soak it out, or lemon juice… Oh, but you're a wizard, aren't you? You can just make it disappear."

  "According to the other wizards in the Citadel, the best spells involve soda and salt."

  Alix laughed again. Her small, deft hands flew along the lacings. "I shouldn't joke. I'm truly sorry his grace was hurt, but really, he's been so odious about giving Papa the dispensation for the ceremony. You'd think he had a personal patent on the strict form or something."

  She looked as if she were going to say something else, some other bit of trivial persiflage, but looking up, she met Kyra's eyes in the mirror, watching her with narrowed concern. Quiet fell, and in the mirror the two sisters stood for a moment, Kyra in her white chemise with her chestnut hair about her shoulders, Alix white-robed and cloaked with amber glory, the angular face and the delicate oval in some way curiously alike.

  Then Alix put her arm around Kyra's waist and said, "It's so good to see you. I've missed you."

  Kyra sighed and turned, scratching her sides beneath the linen with relief to be free of the whalebone sheath of the bodice. "I didn't realize how much," she said.

  "I know you probably didn't think of me much…" Alix hesitated, toying with the lace of her robe, then smiled ruefully. "I mean, I was twelve—just a little girl, really. So I must seem like somebody else entirely to you now. But you were—well, my older sister." She shook back the corn-silk mantle of her hair, which was crinkled and curled from its coiffure. The dressing table was heaped with combs, pins, forget-me-nots aromatically wilting in the candles' heat; the air was soft with beeswax and lily of the valley. In the yard on the other side of the house a groom crooned endearments; a horse snuffled in reply, and there was the clink of harness buckles.

  "Are you happy in the Citadel of Wizards? Is it all you wanted it to be?"

  Kyra said after long thought, "It's all I would have wanted it to be if I'd had the courage and selfishness to want that much."

  She remembered her first sight of the Citadel. Very small it had seemed against the endless, cold sky of the Sykerst, the black pelt of the spruce forest. A green hill rising above a river like brown glass, shaggy with trees through which jumbled towers and roofs could be discerned: strange mirages, things of air and mist rather than stone.

  She and Rosamund had been walking for more than a month through the vast, deserted
steppes of the Sykerst. The previous night had been spent in the muddy, plank-built trading town of Lastower. At first exhausted by the unaccustomed effort of travel afoot, Kyra had felt her spirits gradually rising in the days of quiet, of unhurried companionship, and the sight of the magic hill with its glimmering towers had been like the fulfillment of some heart-shaking dream of peace. Larks had risen, singing, from the knee-deep grasses of the roadsides. From far off, the wind had borne her the random notes of chimes.

  "Courage and selfishness." Something in Alix's voice made Kyra look sharply at the lovely oval face in the honeyed glow. But Alix moved away—rather quickly, Kyra thought—and fetched her a dressing gown from the armoire, soft and clinging and pink, as unlike as possible the gowns Kyra had once worn here.

  "So magic isn't what the Bishop says? And the wizards—are they anything like old Tibbeth? I mean, the way old Tibbeth seemed…" Alix had gone over to the dressing table to prick up the wick of a candle that had been burning too long, so she did not see how still Kyra had become, holding the pink robe before her.

  "You know," Alix went on as she tweezed the wick straight, "I really did like old Tibbeth. It must have been awful for you to have to testify at his trial." A small line appeared between the perfect brows as she clipped the charred wick off short, the flame outlining her fingers in fragile threads of glowing rose. "And Papa couldn't have made it easier. He was terribly hurt when you told him."

  Kyra frowned. "Told him what?"

  "That you were going to join the real wizards—I mean, that you were going to take the Council vows. I mean, as a dog wizard like Tibbeth, at least you could have stayed with the family, and there wouldn't have been a scandal."

  "Is that what he told you?"

  Alix raised her head, looking at her in surprise. "He said you'd told him you were going to leave and become a wizard. That's when he packed us all up and we left for Aunt Sethwit in Mellidane." The brown eyes regarded her, wide and troubled, puzzled by the down-turned corner of Kyra's square-lipped mouth.

  "Ah," Kyra said softly, and swung the robe around her, stepping clear of the jet and jonquil heap of satin around her feet. "Drat those skirts," she added, remembering how she had been precipitated into her prospective brother-in-law's arms. "No wonder the first thing nouveaux riches do is get their daughters dancing lessons. You need to be a dancer not to break your neck." She went over to give Alix a reassuring hug. "To answer your question, some of the wizards are a bit like Tibbeth in that they're terribly untidy, and they all keep things—rocks and crystals and books and pressed flowers. And speaking of Tibbeth," she added as Alix, with a relieved smile, settled herself on the edge of the great, white-curtained bed, "have you ever been into the old schoolroom where he and I worked? Or did Father have that cleared out?"

  "Father just locked it up," Alix said. "I've never been in it since… er… since you left. I don't think anybody has." She looked worriedly up at her sister while Kyra gathered up the black and yellow dress, shook free the petticoats from their skirts, and draped them over the end of the bed the two girls had once shared. "Kyra, you weren't… you weren't implicated or anything by testifying at Tibbeth's trial, were you? That isn't why you had to join the Council wizards, is it? Just so they'd protect you from the Inquisition? I mean, Papa would have…"

  Kyra was silent a moment, remembering Tibbeth's voice, startlingly small and gentle coming out of that big, bulky body, that mobile pink face. The smell of wood smoke and incense came back to her, of herbs drying, linked forever to the soft deftness of his huge hands, showing her the passes to make, the signs to draw, to call light from darkness, to make a pebble look and smell and feel like a rose in her palm.

  She remembered, too, the blast of the fire's heat against her face, its greedy roaring and the horrible stink of charring flesh, the thick buzzing of the flies in the garbage underfoot. The stench of the crowd. The sound of screaming.

  "No," she said hollowly. "No, I wasn't implicated. That wasn't why I… sought out the Council." She tied the pink robe more closely about her, interested to note that despite her more fragile appearance, Alix had grown to precisely her own size through the rib cage, breasts, and shoulders.

  There was silence once more. Through the open door Kyra could hear the voices of the maids complaining as they carried flowers and refreshments, now and then punctuated by the laundry woman's tired whines and the mild, comforting tones of the young man Algeron.

  "Kyra." Alix spoke after a long time. Her hands— small like their mother's and left oddly unformed by a lifetime of tasks no more exacting than the cutting of pens and the embroidery of silk—turned nervously around a single shining curl. "As a wizard, can you… can you make a love-spell?"

  The blunt, unhandsome face of her sister's middle-aged groom returned to her mind. The way his eyes had followed Esmin Earthwygg. The uncomfortable silences—the hard set of the lips. If the youth Algeron weren't a servant, her father might see the matter differently. Or maybe not. "I can" Kyra said gently, "in that we're taught how. But as I said, the first thing we do at the Citadel is take a vow never to use magic to interfere in any way with the lives of other people."

  The dampness of her stockings, the bruises on her knees, stung her with a momentary rebuke, but she went on. "Those are the only conditions under which they'll teach us true power. That's why people like… like Tibbeth—" Her voice still stuck a little on his name, "—never get proper teaching and stay dog wizards. Because they won't take the vow. That means fortune-telling, or love-spells, or—"

  "Kyra!" Her father's voice cut like an ax across her words. She had been too preoccupied with what might lie behind Alix's question to hear him coming up the stairs from his study below.

  She swung around, startled, clutching the pink wrapper close. He still wore the lush rust-colored suit he'd had on at dinner, his gold-flowered waistcoat mottled with water from the doctor's compresses. The lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper, and behind the anger in his eyes was a glitter of tiredness and the expression of a man who thought something was about to be put over on him.

  "I told you I wouldn't have you speaking to your sister! God knows she's had enough to do, getting ready for the wedding, without you putting your heathen ideas into her head and bringing up things best forgotten!"

  "You mean telling her my side of the story?" Kyra inquired calmly.

  "Papa, Kyra only came in to say good night, so that I could unlace her—"

  "Let her call one of the maids! She may have forced her way back into this house to see you wed, but that doesn't mean I have to let her make of you what she's chosen to be!"

  "You mean a woman who knows her own mind?" Kyra asked. "Or merely a happy one?" She turned to Alix. "I don't suppose we'll be permitted to meet tomorrow, but I'll certainly see you at the bath ceremony the following morning. The Texts do say," she added as her father opened his mouth in furious protest, "that mother and sisters shall attend her, and cousins to the second degree. If you're putting out six crowns the ounce to stink up St. Farinox Church with civet incense, you can scarcely get away with that silly business of temporary adoption when you have a perfectly legitimate sister to hold the towels. Good night."

  She would have made a queenly exit on that line had she not caught her foot on the collapsed pool of her discarded petticoats. As it was, her father had to catch her, and they stood for a moment, hands and arms gripped, topaz eyes looking into topaz, before she broke away and strode serenely down the hall, leaving the gown across the foot of the bed, to be picked up by the maids.

  In the yellow guest room Kyra closed the door, opened the window—Briory had obviously prepared the room for her—and reached under the bed to find her tapestry satchel. The spells she'd left on it told her that the butler had tried to open it—although her dignity would never permit her to listen at doorways, the woman was an unconscionable snoop—but that she'd been turned aside from doing so by the other spells of ward and guard, the spell
s that would cause her to suddenly recall that there were other, urgent things to be done elsewhere in the house that minute.

  Not that it mattered terribly, Kyra reflected. Opening the bag, she pulled out hairbrush, toothbrush, and the plain cotton nightgown she preferred to the tucked and ruffled gauze one—obviously Alix's—that lay across the foot of the bed. The other things she had brought with her—red chalk made of wax and ground silver, vials of powdered silver and elkhorn, a few books and some markers wrought of bone and feathers—were scarcely incriminating, and her Council vows should be sufficient to protect her from the Inquisition even if her family wouldn't.

  Provided that no one found out about the runes she'd drawn on the front step.

  She shivered a little at the thought and felt cold in the pit of her stomach.

  She had only managed to buy a little time.

  Outside, the gallery was quiet. She closed her eyes, listening more deeply, but no sound came from the rooms farther along: the big chamber her parents shared, the little parlor and the dressing room, the bedroom where she and Alix had slept in that same big, white-curtained bed where Alix would now be lying alone, watched by the crimson gown that stood like a specter of familial duty in the corner. Her mother, she guessed, was still down supervising things in the kitchens. Her father, who pretended to find his wife's mundane preoccupations exasperating compared with his larger schemes of social advancement, would be in his study, for he hated retiring alone to sleep.

  Very quietly, Kyra opened the bedroom door again.

  An echoey murmur rose from the hall below, and ember-colored light reflected upward, as from a glowing well. Silent as a ghost now in her chemise and fluffy pink robe, she moved to the next door along the gallery and pressed her hands to the silver mounting of its keyhole. Father just locked it up… Alix had said.