Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  "Miss Peldyrin?"

  At the sound of Spenson's voice she stopped on the second-floor gallery. He detached himself from the end of the group proceeding into the dining room and strode back to where she stood at the top of the stair, moving with the sure strength of a man walking the deck of his own ship.

  "Is that for your sister?"

  Kyra managed a wry grin and shook her head. It was very good to see him after the exhaustion of a frustrating afternoon. "For me, I'm afraid. Alix said she didn't want anything, though I expect Mother will send her up a tray later." In the glow of the gallery lamps Spenson's sandy hair seemed almost golden; from the rough brown tweeds and regrettable catskin waistcoat he'd had on that morning he'd changed into his bottle-green suit again and looked uncomfortable and slightly untidy. Kyra fought the urge to set down her makeshift meal and repair his cravat.

  "I think Father will be just as pleased with my absence from the dining room, and personally, I'm ecstatic about it."

  His eyes lost their stolidness and began to twinkle. "You didn't happen to bring enough of that for two, did you? We could sit on the back stairs. Would it be against your principles to put spells around us to keep us from being seen by that lot in there?"

  Kyra shook her head with a grin. "I'm afraid it's your destiny to suffer. Though I'm sure Uncle Murdwym's advice on how to fit and command a trading fleet will be of inestimable value to you."

  "About as much value as your esteemed Cousin Wyrdlees' advice on how he cures his boils, which he gave me, gratis, without my asking him at all."

  "Generous of him," Kyra approved with a gracious nod.

  "Though Angelmuffin did finally bite your cousin Pinny. I'm pleased to say her mother told her it served her right."

  "I always did approve of Plennin's wife, whatever her name is. For one thing, she serves to make him visible, like a red bow tied round a sheep's neck to find him again in a herd. Do you have appalling relatives as well, Master Spenson?"

  He laughed, the ruby in his cravat pin—absolutely the wrong thing to wear with that coat even if it was the size of a melon seed—glinting in the branched light of the candles nearby. "Battalions. Well, you've met my father. You'll see the rest of them at the church tomorrow morning." He almost seemed to stumble on the words, and the old expression—or lack of expression—returned.

  "Spenson," Kyra said hesitantly, and he held up a hand.

  "Spens," he said. "We're going to be related."

  "Spens… this marriage isn't easy on her, you know. I mean, it never is. I mean, she barely knows you." She floundered, feeling suddenly like a complete fool, not knowing what she wanted to say, something that had rarely happened to her in her entire sharp-tongued life. And what, she wondered, could she say? That Alix was crying her eyes out upstairs and there was an absolutely penniless and unsuitable young man baking his heart like a carnival coin into the wedding cake down below? That she still harbored, deep in the back of her mind, the fear that her sister would cut her own wrists in a fit of incomprehensible eighteen-year-old despair?

  Spenson was silent for some time. Two days earlier Kyra would have thought that that silence betokened either rejection or complete incomprehension of what she had said; now she understood that this man was a man who chose his words carefully to make sure they truly expressed his thoughts. He just used fewer than Algeron did.

  "No," he said at last. "She barely knows me. I've been at sea since she learned to walk." He stood for a time, looking aside and down, the lights from the hall below casting upside-down shadows on the sudden harshness of his face.

  "We'll both be learning a new thing," he went on slowly. "I can't stay a ship's captain all my life; it's high time I returned to learn the land side of the business, to take an interest in what will be mine. To find a wife and set up a household. To father heirs to follow me. I know that."

  His breath came in a hard sigh, and the bright blue eyes returned to hers. "Are you asking if I'll be kind?"

  She wasn't but could not phrase into words all that she wanted to ask. For a time she only stood, looking across into his face, her own habitual glibness defeating her. She could say anything and everything, she realized, except what she truly felt. In that, this quiet man seemed to have the better of her.

  "Yes," he said. "I'll be kind."

  Kyra looked away, fumbled at the bread she carried, and managed to drop one roll; he caught it neatly, one-handed, and the acrobatic deftness seemed to break the tension between them. She smiled. "You're getting very good at that."

  "I'm getting plenty of practice." He smiled back. Then, with a sudden resurgence of his old awkwardness, he went on. "If you'll be speaking with Alix…"

  "She'll not be speaking with Alix."

  Kyra's head came up; beyond Spenson's shoulder she could see her father, framed in the lamplit brightness of the dining-room door. The brown velvet coat skirts belled behind him as he strode down the gallery, and his mouth had a grim set to it. "Master Spenson." He inclined his head to his guest in a clear gesture of dismissal. "I'll see you in a few moments in the dining room."

  Spenson looked as if he would speak, his temper flaring like blue fire in his eyes. Then he inclined his head in return and strode quickly away. In another man's house there was little he could do.

  "And what's that?" Gordam nodded at the rolls and cheese in Kyra's hands. "Don't you dine among your family like a civilized woman?"

  "I was simply endeavoring to respect your oft-repeated wish to have people forget me," Kyra replied silkily. "I'm sure you wouldn't wish me to impose myself on dear Uncle Murdwym and Cousin Wyrdlees."

  Balked, he hesitated a moment, then went on. "And just as well. Not only do you have the Witchfinders watching this house as if we're harboring a criminal, but now your mother tells me she's heard the rumor running around that I paid you—paid you like a dog wizard!—to cast a glamour on Spenson in the first place to get him to consent to this match!"

  "Heavens," Kyra murmured, and pushed a stray tendril of hair back into place. "My guess is that rumor is only 'running around' Lady Earthwygg's elegant patrician mouth. Considering that she offered me money only this morning to do exactly that in favor of her daughter, the story can't have gotten far."

  "Don't you understand?" Shadow outlined with sudden sharpness the bulge of a vein in his temple, just beneath the thinning wisps of his reddish hair. "It doesn't matter how many people are saying it! From that rumor it's a short step to saying that you and I have been in communication for years, that you've been aiding and assisting me in all my business ventures."

  "Oh, don't be silly. Any of your business friends will know exactly how long it takes to get a letter as far as Lastower, let alone out to the Citadel, if and when they can find a messenger willing to go. If it's the Witchfinders you're worried about, their own Magic Office could tell them the impossibility of communication by scrying-crystal with a nonmage like you."

  "And yet here you are in my house, on the very eve of the wedding!"

  He fell momentarily silent as the petite, dark-haired maid emerged squeaking from the back stairs and skidded to a halt at the sight of him, her hair tumbled about her shoulders; she was hastily straightening her bodice when the mandolin player came springing out on her heels. With elaborate casualness the two of them strolled off in opposite directions along the gallery.

  Gordam turned back to his elder daughter with a snort. "In my house," he went on, "while my business languishes, a hundred and forty crowns' worth of flowers rots in the midden, my servants gorge themselves on three hundred crowns' worth of cake, sweetmeats, and imported southern raspberries, and those lute strumming Senterwing savages cover every maid in the place!"

  Kyra removed a fleck of invisible lint from the caramel satin of her bodice. "Well, under the circumstances, even Lady Earthwygg can scarcely accuse me of having come to lay spells of good fortune on your business. Bid Aunt Sethwit hello for me and tell her I'll see her, Aunt Hoppina, and Leppice at the ritua
l bath in the morning." She turned and started up the stairs.

  "I curse the day when I heeded your demand to be tutored by Tibbeth of Hale!" His harsh, despairing voice echoed in the narrow confines of the ascending stair. "All my troubles stemmed from that demand!"

  Kyra stiffened in her tracks, half turning to look at him through the chestnut tangle of her hair. "It wasn't a demand, Father," she said softly. "It was a plea." And she walked up the stair and made her way back to the yellow room.

  Chapter XI

  It was a plea.

  And her father had said no.

  Wrapped in Alix's fluffy robe, Kyra lay for a long time on the yellow room's high, old-fashioned bed, staring once more into the ascending chimney of trompe l'oeil clouds on the ceiling as if she expected to see the Moon Fairy with her handfuls of sleep dust flitting among the painted putti and birds.

  Downstairs, she could hear the muted voices of the footmen, the soft scrapings and clunkings as they brought the long trestle tables in from the stable loft and assembled them, ready for tomorrow's feast. Her ride in Blore Spenson's gig over the jolting cobblestones of Upper Tollam Street seemed weeks ago; her visit to the Cheevy Street Baths, loosening her muscles in the antiquated marble tubs with the steam rising about her face, a memory from some previous lifetime. Lady Earthwygg… poison… Hestie Pinktrees' comfits and the smell of sausages and cheap perfume… Algeron shedding tears into the wedding cake…

  And nothing to show… nothing learned… nothing gained.

  All my troubles stemmed from that demand …

  It had been the last time she'd let her father see her cry.

  But having worked up the courage to finally ask, to finally step out of the column of red pain in which she lived, every hour when she was pretending to be what she once had been—her father's clever helper with the books and the business, the designer of increasingly outrageous dresses and jewelry, the caustic arbiter of social nuance for the amusement of her friends—she could no longer have the refuge of his ignorance.

  She'd admitted she was mageborn. There was no going back from that.

  "I want you to forget this nonsense," he'd stormed at her toward the end of that stomach-twisting, throat-burning interview in the book room. "It won't do, Kyra. You can see that it won't do. People will find out. People always find out things like that. Good God, people may suspect already if they've seen you going to that man's house in the afternoons. How could you deceive your mother and me the way you have?"

  But he couldn't forget. He hadn't asked her to help him with the bookwork that evening or the next. She'd lain in her room and heard his step hesitate on the gallery, then pass by. And the omission had lodged in her stomach like a lump of uncooked bread, leaden and indigestible, a nausea that remained with her for days, a silence between them that flooded her eyes with heat and her throat with pain but that neither of them could break.

  Once he'd opened the door of her room and come in unannounced, saying brusquely, "You have to understand my position. You're a businesswoman, Kyra; you understand that no other businessman in the city, in the Realm, is going to trust us if you become a wizard! Let alone what Lord Earthwygg will do. The Court's absolutely against wizardry, and without his backing, we'd certainly lose the charity hospitals contract and probably the Imperial Ballet School and the barracks as well! I've worked for thirty years to build our reputation. I can't let you destroy it on a whim. It's your future, too."

  "I didn't ask for it!" she cried desperately. In the past year she had found that Tibbeth was right: During those times when, knowing all that her father was telling her now, she had tried to put her studies aside, the pain had only grown worse. It was pain such as she'd never known, a pain of desiring, of yearning, of half guessing, half knowing what that unknown life could be, a pain she hadn't even guessed human beings were capable of experiencing.

  "Oh, nonsense, girl; you asked for it only the other day! I'm not trying to be hard-hearted," he went on in a more kindly tone. "But you just aren't thinking of what this will mean for you. And what I'm going to say to Dutton Droon about your marriage negotiations…"

  "I didn't want to be born this way!" she pleaded. "But I am, and I have to follow what I am!"

  He sighed. "Kyra," he said gently, "men and women are born with free souls and free minds. We can choose what we will be, choose which paths we wish to follow. Yes, I know it's difficult. I know you want this now, but you're young."

  "It isn't being young!" She half raised herself from the bed where she had lain—it sometimes felt—for all of those two days, though she knew objectively that she'd been downstairs for meals and had gone walking with her mother and even done a little shopping, all activities seen, as if through glass, through the feverish, alternating colors of yearning for the unknown new life and a desperate yearning for the cool peace of the old. "It isn't want! It's need, Father."

  He said nothing, but in his eyes she could see him thinking in sentences that started Girls your age…

  Sometimes she thought she was going to die of the pain. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep from taking a fork or a hairpin and stabbing it repeatedly into the flesh of her hands and arms, though she didn't know exactly why she wanted to do that or what she fantasized it might accomplish. Sometimes she was able to talk to Alix, or read books, or design dresses as if it were all two weeks ago and everything was fine.

  She hadn't realized she'd stopped eating until her mother began pleading with her to do so. Then she threw most of it up.

  Her father shouted at her for being willful while she lay on her bed with her face turned toward the windows, watching the pigeons wheeling over the gray roof tiles against the cloud-piled sky. Later Alix came in and lay down in the bed beside her, wrapping Kyra's bony, growing limbs with her own soft coltish ones, holding her close and crying.

  It was only when Tibbeth of Hale came to the house and took her parents aside into the book room and talked to them that her father called her down.

  "Now, I want you to understand me," he said, his narrow, square-lipped mouth clipped-looking and grim. "I'm not paying this man—" He'd jerked his thumb at the dog wizard, sitting quietly in the carved blackwood ("company") chair by the tiled stove."—one single copper, and I don't want to find anything missing from this house; not food, not money, not bed sheets, not silverware, not anything."

  "Really, Father…" Her eyes blazed, but Tibbeth only smiled a little and raised one big brown-mottled hand.

  "I understand your concerns," the dog wizard said. "I'm a wizard; it would be easier for me than it would be for most teachers to convince your daughter to demand my services as a tutor in order to gain admittance to a rich man's house. I can only hope that in time, when you know me, you'll understand that I could no more refuse to teach a mageborn child to use her powers than she can help seeking out a teacher. But it's something, truly, that only the mageborn can understand."

  "What I want you to understand," Gordam snapped, "is that I won't have you teaching her charlatanry. And I won't have you teaching her anything that goes against the tenets of the Church. And you, my girl, had better keep up your studies in mathematics, and bookkeeping, and foreign tongues—you're not to let the education I've paid for slip away while you chase a rainbow you may well decide tomorrow you've had enough of."

  Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but again she caught Tibbeth's eye and the small movement of his fingers that said These are things that can be worked out in time. She held her peace.

  "And above all," her father concluded, and his oak-colored gaze cut sharply to the two of them together, the tall, bulky man in his dark robe, so relaxed in the big carved chair, and the girl standing beside him with her outlandish gown of crimson silk bagging about her sunken body, "I don't want one word of this, not one word, to get out. My daughter tells me your kind have spells to keep them unseen as they come and go. Use them. And you, miss… You're not to miss a ball, you're not to absent yourself from visiting our friends, y
ou're not to whisper to one solitary soul of what you're learning until I can find some way to make it acceptable to the other members of the guild. There's no hope it can be covered up forever, but until I've come up with a way to keep our house from being tarred as wizards, you're to be silent about it. And that goes for your sister, too. Understand?"

  "I understand," Kyra said, not in the frightened whisper she had thought would come out of her mouth but with the old ironic accents that she immediately saw he had perceived as arrogance. She said, "Father—thank you," but he was already turning away.

  Alix was waiting outside the book-room door. "Father said yes!" she trumpeted, flinging herself into Kyra's arms, holding her as tightly as only a ten-year-old champion could do. "He said yes, he said yes, you're going to be a wizard!" And turning in a swirl of white silk and flying golden curls, she threw her arms around Tibbeth's waist, pressing her cheek to his stomach and holding him tight.

  "I see we have a partisan." Tibbeth smiled and stroked the sunny aureole of the little girl's hair.

  Kyra turned over with a gasp at the sound of horses in the court below. The windows were flat slabs of ash. From somewhere she smelled incense. Olibanum—the Text prescribed this for the bride's ritual bath.

  She rolled to her feet and stumbled to the window. For one blinding second she imagined she would see the entire wedding procession assembled, the bright new banners unfurled in the hands of the footmen, the white carriage mares shaking their crimson-tasseled bridles, and her father just handing Alix into the coach in her crimson gown: see all that and know they hadn't even bothered to call her.

  But the sound had only been the grooms bringing in the Earthwygg carriage with its silver door mountings and its yellow emblems of salamander and mushrooms. A moment later Kyra heard the faint commotion of guests entering the hall and, at the same time, the renewed strike of hooves and clatter of iron wheels below her window: Frittilaire Nysett and Cira Prouvet. She glanced out the window again in time to see Tellie Wishrom, her white gown fluttering under the enveloping folds of a stylish cloak with a gray fur collar, hurrying across the yard from the little postern gate and pausing to greet Algeron on the kitchen steps.