Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  "That's very altruistic of you, Lady Earthwygg. Should I ring for more blitzes? Some truly excellent day-old cake? No? Considered in the light of my Council vows, which make it impossible for me to return the favor by slipping Blore Spenson a love-philter to make him jilt my sister in favor of your daughter, your generosity borders on true kindliness."

  Her ladyship reddened and set her coffee cup quickly aside. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "The cook assures me he used fifteen eggs in the cake."

  The older woman's eyes narrowed again. "Or am I behind the fair?" she asked softly. "Was that your father's price for taking you back into his graces? That you'd work your spells on Spenson and make him cast his eyes on that sister of yours?"

  Through the door, Kyra could catch Esmin Earthwygg's rather shrill voice from the drawing room at the other end of the gallery: "Well, of course Daddy's going to get me a diamond parure for my Court presentation… I suppose yours is, too? Not that you'll ever be presented at Court, which you should be thankful for—it's such a nuisance!—but surely the guilds have something of the kind."

  "If you really think so," Kyra said, "I suppose we could ask the Witchfinders in to thaumaturgically examine the Spenson house for marks. On the other hand, mine might not be the marks they'd find, and think how embarrassing that would be."

  Lady Earthwygg's eyes shifted quickly. "Well, I certainly didn't mean to imply… It's just that these are suspicious times." Her gesture was eloquent of seven centuries of breeding and years of deportment lessons. "Your father has a reputation among the—" She barely bit back the word "vulgar."

  "—businessmen of the city as a 'warm man.' And I'm told that before you fell from his graces you were quite an acute businesswoman yourself. Surely you can see the advantages in patronage. Indeed, if you are on the outs with your father, my husband may help you with that situation as well."

  "Always provided Father doesn't learn that I've scuppered the match he's been working for years to bring about."

  "Oh, my dear." She smiled silkily. "I'm sure you're cleverer than that. What would you say to a thousand crowns?"

  Kyra sighed and pushed her empty coffee cup from her. "I would say no."

  "And four hundred a year."

  "Was that what you offered what's his name? The one you bought the passion philters from that you've been slipping Spenson?"

  The recollection of his face as he'd spoken of them in the gig—the recollection of what he'd gone through—made her voice flare with sudden anger. She forced it steady again. "It does, as I say, border on kindliness, especially considering that they don't seem to have worked. But then, you can scarcely sue your supplier, can you?"

  The noblewoman gave a deep and wholly faked chuckle and brought from her capacious pannier pocket a painted lavender fan. "My dear girl, what are you talking about? And considering the size of your sister's dowry, not to speak of the inheritance, you can't pretend she'd go begging long. Think about it. I know wizardry is an expensive proposition. They're always seeking good-quality gems, proper incense, pure silver and gold. For four hundred a year you'd be able to purchase a house in town and have enough left over to pursue your studies in peace."

  "Unless the Witchfinders decide to come after me." Kyra rose from her chair. "Or someone tries to kidnap me in a cab. I'm afraid the answer is still no."

  "Five hundred a year."

  "Is that your final offer?"

  The Lady snapped her fan shut and got to her feet. "Don't be a fool, girl. If you're cast out by your father, what choice have you? To starve and beg your bread like those raggedy mumblers over in the Mages' Yard? To sell weeds and abortions like that wretched man they burned a few years ago? If he'd had friends in high places—what was his name?"

  "Tibbeth," Kyra said quietly.

  "Tibbeth. If he'd had friends in high places, they'd never have been able to touch him."

  "No," Kyra said softly. "No, he did have friends in high places, as it happens."

  "Then why won't you accept my offer?"

  Kyra regarded her for a moment in silence. Then she said, quite simply, "Because I'm not a whore."

  Lady Earthwygg's nostrils flared. With slow deliberation she lifted her lorgnette again and surveyed Kyra's dress. "No," she said. "Only a frump."

  Kyra curtsied. "But quite a well-jeweled one, you must admit. And one other thing—"

  Her ladyship, the feathers of that last verbal arrow sticking almost visibly from her rib cage, paused on the threshold.

  "Should my sister become… ill… after the tea you've had with her," Kyra said softly, "believe me, the Witchfinders are going to know about that, too."

  Lady Earthwygg's mouth tightened, and she stared for a long moment into Kyra's eyes. Then she said, "Evil to him who evil thinks. It's an idea, my girl."

  Turning, she strode off down the gallery with her high, gilded heels clicking indignantly and all her paste diamonds flashing like the sun.

  Chapter IX

  Kyra sank back into the chair in which Lady Earthwygg had found her and lowered her head once again to her hands. Her sense of triumph evaporated into a gut-deep revulsion.

  "I am not a whore," she repeated in a whisper, the unvoiced shadow of words in her mind.

  And everyone seemed to expect her to behave like one, she thought—to peddle the core and nature of her being for his or her passing convenience. It wasn't just the Inquisition that made the Academic mages seek their isolated city enclaves like the Mages' Yard here and the House of Wizards in Kymil, not just their sense of futility before the injustices of the world that drove them to the Citadel in the empty Sykerst. It was the desire to avoid being pestered by those members of the mundane world who, while agreeing in principle that such powers should indeed be limited, felt that the wizards should make an exception just for them.

  She had been three months short of her fifteenth birthday when she'd walked into Tibbeth of Hale's shop again.

  The jingle of the bell over the door had made her smile. It had brought a sweet-faced girl only a year or so older than herself from the back room, flaxen hair wound in braids around her head. "I'm here to see Master Tibbeth," Kyra had said, and the girl had hesitated, blushing a little.

  "My husband is meditating right now." Her voice had been low and rather dreamy. "Perhaps I can help you."

  It had taken all Kyra's nerve to walk through the door, to turn her steps south from the Springwell Road instead of continuing on her usual route to the river esplanade and its bookstalls and junk dealers. As she'd wound her way down Ditch Street and Pie Lane and all those nameless, narrowing courts of small shops and soot-blackened Gothic churches, she had been tugged and pestered by the sense that she was taking an action from which there was no turning back, entering a door that would close behind her all those other doors: to her father's business, to marriage—even on her own terms and to the most docile of men—to friendship with the bankers and brokers and money-clever merchants whom she had met and liked in her father's house.

  And she wasn't even sure why she wanted to enter that door. Just go back… it still isn't too late… You don't even know what it will be like…

  But she knew what it was like without whatever lay on the other side: the growing pain, the half-guessed wanting of something unimaginable, something she dimly sensed she would crave beyond reason once she knew what it was.

  She wondered how it was possible to yearn for joy of which she had no experience, save in dreams.

  Save in dreams.

  And now she'd have to get up her nerve and do it all again tomorrow, or next week… or next month… Or some other time.

  "No, I'm afraid it must be Master Tibbeth," Kyra had said in her most businesslike voice. She had grown six or seven inches since last she had entered the shop, and with her deep voice and harsh cheekbones, she already had the appearance of a woman. "When would be a good time to find him available?"

  "Now, my dear."

  She turned at the sound of the l
ight, soft voice from the inner doorway. He was standing on the stair with the light falling from the top of the stairwell on the bald curve of his head.

  "Now."

  When his eyes met hers, they were the eyes of an old acquaintance, eyes she had known, it seemed, for half her life.

  He held out his hand as he came toward her, a tall man with the soft bulkiness to him like one of the long-furred, short-faced cats bred in the east. She'd seen him on and off for years, but now she saw him as if for the first time: the brown age spots on the high curve of his brow, the wisps of gray-blond hair that floated like rinsed-out socks around some invisible clothesline strung behind his skull from ear to ear. He was clean-shaven, his mouth and face good-natured, flexible like a rubber doll's, his eyes a light, clear blue. As before, he wore a scholar's long robe. Probably the same robe, with shabby fur at its collar and patches let into its hem.

  "Kyra." When he looked down into her eyes, she knew that he knew. "Come upstairs—tell me about your dreams."

  That first day he took her through two or three simple tests and taught her spells, spells that even on their first repeating seemed like something she had always known, like a word forgotten on the tip of the tongue. It felt entirely natural to light a candle only with the touch of her mind, summoning the flame to the braided wick, entirely natural to will into being a seed of blue-burning light, heatless as marsh fire, flickering in her cupped palm. Natural to see images in the heart of a crystal or in the colored core of flame. The words he taught her came to her as the logical extension of images already in her mind, the answers to riddles that, once told, were laughably obvious, things she had done once already in dreams. The time she spent learning them over an earthenware teapot by the old-fashioned brick hearth of his cramped study upstairs felt no longer than tea with one of her aunts. She was astonished when she looked over to see the window black with night and running with the autumn rain, as if she had fallen asleep in her chair and awakened suddenly to find it far later than she had thought.

  She had a headache, too, a crushing sense of exhaustion that melted with the gentle touch of his fingers on her brow.

  "You've done a great deal today."

  "I must go," she stammered, collecting her cloak and running down the narrow steps, almost breaking her neck when she tripped at the bottom. He lent her an umbrella, and she had to turn back at the end of Little Potticary Lane when she realized she hadn't made any arrangements about when she next would come.

  Already she could hardly wait.

  The walk home through rain and darkness was as clear in her mind as if it had been yesterday: the mossy smell rising from the wet paving stones and the stink of the gutters, the way the raindrops caught the gold of candlelit windows high overhead, like dust motes swirling in slanted sun. Exaltation filled her, made her feel that she could hurl aside her borrowed umbrella, spread her arms, and throw herself like a hawk into the pouring sky. And like a helix of snakes, that core of joy had been wound around with ghastly foreboding, a recurring horror that came and went, and the stomach-sinking conviction that she had done something the repercussions of which would change forever the life she had known and planned.

  Light and darkness alternated in her like a turning carnival lamp.

  She wasn't mad. She wasn't wrong. The power existed; the power was hers…

  And her father would be horrified. If it came to be known, she would be forbidden to marry, and young as she was, she knew he had been negotiating her marriage with Larmos Droon, son of one of the most powerful merchants in the city. Alix was barely nine. It would be five years at least until he was able to negotiate from such strength again.

  He had confided in her, asked her opinion of this boy or that among the families he considered good alliances; Larmos had been mostly her own choice. He was pleasant and malleable and smelled nice, if it had to be someone.

  And now that would never be. Lukewarm as she'd been about the whole idea of marriage, that still stung.

  Even worse, she could never be her father's business partner, never sit in his countinghouse calculating corn futures, never be his heir. For a flashing moment she felt as if those images—those lemon-colored afternoons of dust and ink and the bright, clipped, precise conversation with her father, his dry cleverness and the obvious pride he held in her—had been an object, a carven box or a lacquered bottle holding both past and possible future, something with heft and actuality in her hands, something snatched away from her. Or something she had accidentally dropped or deliberately given to someone else in a flash of impulse, instantly to be regretted.

  Half the time, as she walked among the ring-pocked puddles of the granite flagway, she wondered if there was yet time to pretend this afternoon had never happened. Oh, I fell down and broke the heel from my shoe, and I've spent all this time in the cobbler's waiting for it to be repaired. I'm terribly sorry I've worried you…

  But the thought of never going back to that upstairs room on Little Potticary Lane, of never feeling again this shouting joy, this rush as if she'd drunk sunlight, brought tears of grief and horrible loss to her eyes.

  Damn it, she thought despairingly. Can't I do both? Can't I be both? Can't I have both?

  But she already knew that no one who had training in wizardry could be a merchant. There were too many tales of rival ships wrecked by contrary winds or delayed by sprung planks, while ships in which wizards had invested sailed on past to skim the cream of the market.

  And more than that, she knew that her father would be heartbroken.

  The house had been lighted like a Yule feast when she'd reached it; her father had come down the high steps, right behind Briory, in the rain. "We've had old Sam and the footmen out looking for you for hours. Where on earth… ?"

  "I'm terribly sorry, Father," she'd said, handing Briory the umbrella in the shelter of the hall once more and shaking out the soaked hem of her skirts. "I tripped on the steps down by the quays and broke the heel off my shoe. It took the cobbler forever to repair it."

  Alix had wakened when Kyra had cried in the night, and though Kyra wouldn't tell her the reason, the little girl had held her close in the shelter of the curtained bed until they'd both gone to sleep again in the whispering of the rain.

  Kyra had sent one of the footmen to return Tibbeth of Hale's umbrella, with a polite note canceling their meeting, and for two days succeeded in convincing herself that she really would be more comfortable doing the sensible thing and opting for a life as her father's amanuensis, aide-de-camp, and heir. She'd gone to her long-suffering dressmaker and ordered a glorious scarlet silk; she'd attended a rout party given by the banker Fyster Nyven in his mansion out in Parsley Hill and had danced three dances with boys whose fathers had ordered them to pay court to Gordam Peldyrin's daughter.

  Then she went back.

  "Tibbeth, I can't stand it!" It had been years since she'd wept in front of her father, in front of any adult member of her family or any of the servants. Pacing back and forth in that small study above the apothecary shop, the black and white brocade of her skirts hissing like the passage of wind through grass, she felt the tears pouring down her face without shame, without defensiveness, as if that tall, gentle elderly man had been her friend from tiniest childhood. "I know I shouldn't give up what I have; I know I shouldn't throw it all to the winds for something I don't even know if I'll like to do!"

  "Do you mean you know you shouldn't want to?"

  "Yes!" she'd sobbed, furious with herself for such stupidity. "I do want to—about half the time! And the other half…" She slapped angrily at the streams of water running down her chin and jaw, and Tibbeth leaned across to her—he was sitting on the raised bricks of the hearth—and handed her another handkerchief, as her own two had been reduced to soggy rags.

  "My dear, I'm so sorry," he said gently. Taking her hands, he looked up into her white face, which already bore the marks of strain and exhaustion. "I wish I could give you some grounds upon which to make a choic
e, wish I could tell you that you have a choice. But wizardry…" He hesitated, and she saw the echoes of his own ancient unhappinesses, his own struggles to decide which side of a divided heart to follow.

  "Wizardry has a way of hurting those who are born with it who do not develop their talents." In the corner the green parrot he kept caged scratched its yellow poll and muttered half a dozen words from a love-spell. "Some do it, especially those whose inborn powers are not all that great. But more often than not they are wretched. I know. I was nearly twenty before I admitted to myself that the yearnings, the thoughts, that came and went in alternation with my more sensible moments were not going to go away."

  Kyra turned from him, staring out the distorting panes of the bull's-eye glass window at the row of houses opposite—tall, narrow-fronted, the soot that blackened their brick or half-timbering broken here and there by the vivid pink of window-box geraniums or by white bed linen hung out to air. She whispered, "Damn."

  "Would you like to think about it and come back?" There was a gentleness to him, a deep patience; Kyra felt that if she'd thrown herself into the armchair near the window and announced her intention of staying there until she'd thought the matter through, he would simply have remained by the hearth, toasting muffins and making tea for however many hours it took her.

  She shook her head and pushed tiredly at the hairpins that had come undone from her auburn mane. "I don't know how often I'll be able to come," she said, her deep voice steady now, though rather subdued. She wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks. "It's sometimes hard to get away."

  "Would you like me to teach you a spell for that?" And his eyes twinkled at her look of astonished enlightenment.

  She'd gone to him two or three times a week after that. Sometimes she told her parents she was going shopping or browsing through the old-book stalls along the river. Sometimes she merely left a spell behind her that caused everyone in the house to think that they'd seen her minutes ago and she was just in another room. He sent books home with her so that she could study and memorize the movements of the moon and stars; Angelshand in autumn was seldom clear enough for direct study, though when he'd taught her sufficient weather-witching to help, they summoned a light wind that swept the clouds aside one midnight, while they sat at the window of his pepper-pot roof turret with a telescope. He taught her the properties of the healing herbs that grew in the tiny yard behind his house and how to use them for medicines, poisons, and love-philters; how to witch them so their properties were strengthened; how to summon to them constellations of chance and happenstance, the slight tilting of the balances of the universe in favor of one event over another. In his little workroom behind the study she learned to use a crucible and a gem cutter's wheel and to tan leather for ritual use—learned what metals and crystals were best for which sorts of talismans and how to write words in silver on leather to summon anger, or docility, or sleep in those who passed near.