Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Sleep, she thought.

  Sleep fill this house.

  Sleep fill this house.

  She heard the clock chiming again, unable to believe that an hour had gone by. Settling back on her heels, she listened to the house before her.

  Where before her wizard's senses had brought to her the hivelike drone of voices and movement, a blended murmur of anxiety and trivial concerns, she now heard only deep breathing and a snore or two. To her inner perception of magic, the spell felt hard and smooth, like blown glass cooled perfectly to its final shape; if she'd tapped it with her nail, it would have rung like a bell.

  It was, she realized, the first great magic she had done in truth, not as an experiment, not under the guidance of some other mage, not in concert with others who had more experience than she. At the Citadel she had done magic under pressure; indeed, during the previous spring's troubles she had performed spells that had saved lives, including her own. But there had been others around her.

  This was completely hers.

  And completely illegal, too. Nevertheless, the joy of it swept her, a golden exultation that sponged from her mind the last daydreams about Blore Spenson's kisses.

  This was beauty. This was warmth. This was delight.

  This was also, she realized, the beginning of what could be an extremely long and dangerous night. There was little chance either the Church wizards or the Council members were listening for her, particularly at this hour, but the fear added a shaky edge to her emotions, a sense of danger and risk.

  Quickly—though her head was aching and she had a terrible craving again for sweets—she formed in her mind and cast out around the house the same spells with which she had surrounded the attic room where she'd slept: less an unwillingness to enter than a sort of spiritual laziness, the sense that whatever business needed to be done in that house would be better done tomorrow; the sense that there were more important things to do. The image she conjured in her mind was that of getting out of bed on a very cold morning—unpleasantness that could just as easily be put off.

  Carefully, so as not to unravel the spell itself, she took back the circles and the gateposts she had drawn, ritually confirming their actual existence while erasing all physical traces. This was magic at a higher level than she'd ever practiced, but it would make them safer from discovery. It was, she realized, cold in the garden, and the moon had vanished for good. Even its silver stains on the clouds were fading. Spenson was hunkered on his heels by the door, but he rose in one smooth movement as she came toward him, the gravel scrunching softly beneath her feet.

  "Done?" he whispered, and she nodded.

  "We can whisper all we want, though I shouldn't like to shout." She took his hand and led the way along the house wall toward the brightly lit windows of the kitchen. "Oh, wait a minute. Do you have two pieces of silver you can loan me?"

  A little startled, Spens opened again the wash-leather bag from which he'd paid his bravos. Kyra drew her thoughts about her again and with careful precision drew upon each coin a Limitation, exempting her and Spens from the effects of the spells of sleep that now filled the house like curling, invisible smoke. "There. Put that in your pocket—I'll need it back at the end of the evening. What I should like is something sweet. I feel like I've just come out of sword training and having the stuffing whacked out of me by Cylin and Mick."

  "Cylin and Mick?"

  "Friends of mine at the college." She climbed the high brick steps and pushed open the kitchen doors, the warmth and sweetness of its atmosphere drenching her like a summer afternoon. "Cylin's one of those men who'll stay up till dawn, memorizing his lists and spells and theories, and then spend the rest of the day worrying that he hasn't learned enough, or that they won't work, or that the laws of the universe have changed overnight and nobody told him. Mick's so scatterbrained, he'll start to memorize a list and then go off digging through seven or eight encyclopedias or bestiaries if he finds a reference to something that interests him. Or he'll go hunt for it in the gardens, if it's a flower or an insect, and spend the rest of the day chatting to Tom the gardener about caterpillars. Like two big kittens, both of them."

  And she smiled at the thought.

  "Yet they beat the stuffing out of you?" Spens pushed up his leather mask and raised an eyebrow. By the glow of a dozen oil lamps, the kitchen had the strange, disjointed feeling of things seen very late at night. Imper Joblin sat slumped at the big oak table, a plate of half-picked quail bones before him and his head on his folded arms. The remains of what would have been dishes from the wedding feast strewed the table's length, a ruin of elaborately wrought creams and jellies, roulades and molds. Two footmen, still wearing the breeches of their formal livery, were likewise sprawled asleep in chairs; the two scullions were curled up against the wall near the wood box, heads tilted back, breathing heavily with slumber. Wood lay piled around them and near the big copper boiler where water was being heated to wash all the cake plates and goblets.

  Kyra took a clean plate, picked a sweet crepe and a fragile little fruit tart from the general ruin, and perched on the edge of the table to eat them. With a shrug, Spens found the pot of coffee keeping warm on the back of the stove and poured out two cups.

  "Well, all novices have to go through sword training," Kyra explained. "Thank you—oops! You are getting quick."

  "Practice makes perfect."

  "I was a little horrified myself when I was told that I'd have to train with the Council's sasenna for a couple of years. I couldn't imagine what sword practice and hand-to-hand combat had to do with learning magic. I still can't explain how they're connected, but they are. A warrior's training—or at least the way sasenna are trained to be perfect warriors—borders on meditation. You reach a point where your body thinks, not your mind. Where things flow. And suddenly magic makes sense, too."

  She shrugged and licked custard from her fingers. "But, of course, one has to be a fairly competent swordsman to get to that point, and in the meantime there's a great deal of blundering about and getting beaten black and blue and wondering why one didn't just stay home and be an accountant."

  "Why didn't one?" He held out his hand to help her get to her feet.

  "Well, for one thing, you… you just can't. Not if you're born with power." She frowned at the memories of trying to do precisely that and shook them away. Turning, she made a move to begin going through the kitchen as she had gone through the cellars and the drying room a thousand years ago this morning.

  But Spens laid a staying hand on her elbow. "And for another thing," he concluded softly, "because your father had your teacher killed. Was that it?"

  Kyra's eyes met his, tawny into blue, and she shivered at the recollection of those days. After a moment she looked aside. "No," she said, her voice equally quiet.

  Spenson followed her as she began to go over the kitchen, systematically touching, turning over pots, note tablets, daybooks, and canisters, running her hands over shelves and along the edges of stacked plates in cupboards, feeling the gold rims of frail shell goblets and delicate mother-of-pearl trays. The kitchen was a good place for a wizard's mark, easily entered by any mage disguised as a tradesman, busy enough to distract, and a place where Alix could be expected to go—especially, Kyra added to herself, if the caster of the curse was aware that Alix went down several times a day to talk to the cook's assistant.

  "That isn't the source of the enmity between you and your father, then?" Spens asked. "As I said, I was away at the time—Father was still head of the guild. He told me your father turned in evidence that Tibbeth of Hale was poisoning wells or casting death-spells, something completely stupid for a man of Hale's reputation. Yes, he said he'd caught Tibbeth red-handed, laying a death-hex on one of his corn warehouses. It was obviously a trumped-up charge."

  Gently, he put his hands on Kyra's arms just above the elbow, looking worriedly into her face. "I wondered, since you were Tibbeth's student and a wizard yourself, if he did that so that you would
n't leave him."

  Kyra sighed. Even with the sweets she'd consumed, she felt very tired. The glare of the kitchen lamps, combined with the sleeping forms around the table—even the cat was asleep in a corner where she'd been watching a mouse hole—deepened the air of unreality; it was as if she and Spens had stumbled into some other world, some enclave of dream. The fact that she knew the kitchen so well increased rather than decreased the sense of disjunction of place and time.

  She wondered what she could tell him about the scandal, about Tibbeth's trial—-about why she had proclaimed to the city, to her father's friends, to the Witchfinders, that she was what she was. Wondered what he would accept and what he would understand.

  Facing him, with the warmth of his hands on her arms and his face concerned for her beneath the pushed-up mask and the feathery tumble of his curls, she decided to tell him the truth.

  "No," she sighed. "Having Tibbeth of Hale arrested and… and burned… wasn't Father's idea, you see. It was mine."

  Chapter XIII

  She hadn't even realized that Tibbeth was putting sleep-spells on her at first. The awareness came gradually, like shapes seen through fog in the shadowlands just before full wakefulness returned in the mornings or as she was passing over at night into full sleep. Then those strange memories would be swallowed by the images of her dreams or would vanish, like the bloom on a plum, over the breakfast table or the maids' chatter as they brought up wash water and shook out petticoats from the armoire.

  But Kyra knew that for a month or two she had been sleeping much more soundly than before. Since her earliest, troubled dreams of magic, she had waked once or twice in the night. Sometimes she'd just use the chamber pot and curl back under the quilts beside Alix, who always slept like a log, and drift into her dreams at once. Other times she'd lie awake for a half hour or more, admiring the familiar beauty of the furniture in her room with her mageborn sight in the darkness or listening with a mage's meditative hearing to the breathing of every sleeper beneath her father's roof, to the skitter of the cats in the yard and the flick and whisper of mice in the attic, to the watchman's tread in the square and the occasional rattle of a carriage with its outrunners and link boys, and to the soft chiming of the St. Farinox clock.

  When she realized it had been many weeks since she had done so—when she remembered, first vaguely, then more clearly, Tibbeth laying a hand on her head and saying, You will not remember my saying this—it came to her as something she had already known and then forgotten.

  Had he really said that to her?

  She couldn't be sure.

  For nearly two years Tibbeth had been coming to the house on Baynorth Square to teach her the arts of magic. As her father had commanded, he always came under cover of a spell that cloaked him from the notice of the neighbors, always entered through the garden door so that even the servants in the kitchen would make no remark. On those few occasions when Kyra went to the house on Little Potticary Lane, she did the same. Her secret remained a secret. Meanwhile, her father worked gradually but steadily on making Tibbeth of Hale known and accepted by the men of standing in the guilds so that one day the news that Kyra Peldyrin was his pupil would not come as an offense.

  Tibbeth himself made this easy. He never offered to use magic for her father's benefit, never put him in a position to examine the relative ethics of magic and business. But he was weather-wise and skilled in the lore of plants and farming, and generally his advice on when there would be gluts or shortages in the markets of corn and wheat was sound. Likewise, he was widely traveled and well read, and other corn brokers came to rely on his advice as well. Gordam Peldyrin might look askance at this big, easy-mannered man who had triggered such a change in his elder daughter, but he could not complain that the dog wizard took the least advantage of his position in the household.

  For Kyra it was a time of uninterrupted wonder and delight. She felt like a ragged orphan turned loose in a shop of silk dresses and toys, like a starving woman seated unexpectedly at a feast. Learning and spells came easily to her, as easily as mathematics had, and, as with mathematics, she found her thirst for knowledge unslakable. Tibbeth gave her lists of books, for which she would comb not only the barrows of old books on the esplanade of the river quays but the catalogues of the booksellers and antiquarians in the more elegant parts of town, on Queen's Square and the Imperial Prospect, and he would take her through the volumes she bought, spell by spell, explaining, demonstrating, and correcting. She studied the parts and properties of plants and animals, the movements of stars and wind and clouds, the migrations of fish and birds. She memorized the various circles of power, drawn to ingather the energies of the earth and air: circles of light and fire, of blood and water, silver and earth and darkness. She learned how to trace runes and sigils, either in silver or in light, drawing them in plain air with her fingertip, learned how to cast illusions about herself and glamours upon others.

  During this time Kyra barely noticed that she was growing from girl to woman or that the boys who had danced with her at those balls she was still obliged to attend decked in her increasingly flamboyant gowns now danced with her less. It was as if they sensed the heat of the fire within her and feared that alien, coruscating joy. Even Larmos Droon, who was officially betrothed to her when she turned seventeen, was frequently absent from the parties she attended. She didn't mind, for it gave her a good excuse to leave early and return to her studies. If he had little to say to her, this was not so very different from his usual reticence in the face of her breezy erudition.

  Alix, budding from a coltish schoolgirl into a promise of heartbreaking beauty, was delighted for her happiness. She frequently accompanied Kyra on her rambles along the esplanade and to the strange little shops on Angel's Island where odd flowers or herbs and salts from foreign lands might be bought and occasionally, under the cover of Kyra's spells, to Tibbeth's house afterward. She had at that time a blue velvet cloak lined with swansdown, and her daffodil hair scattered across it was like lamplight sprinkling in the waters of the harbor at the fall of summer night. Tibbeth got into the habit of helping Alix, too, with her studies, though she was occupied with no more than the usual polite education of a well-brought-up girl: poetry and essays, geography and history, enough science so that she would not be an ignoramus and sufficient arithmetic to keep household books. Like Kyra, Alix had a facility for numbers, the only scholarly subject she truly enjoyed, though her arithmetic cleverness never reached into the joys of mathematical logic. Alix's own interests, when she wasn't involved with dancing classes and the harp and spinnet lessons so necessary for girls her age, tended to center on her own sewing and hatmaking—at which she was brilliant—and cooking.

  But, mostly to be with Kyra, she took up the study of arithmetic under Tibbeth, bringing her books into the schoolroom and sitting under its broad window, the sunlight making a primrose halo of her hair. Frequently Kyra would look up from her memorization and practice to see her master sitting beside the beautiful child, patiently explaining cosines or theorems, a smile on his face.

  Then one night she'd wakened and found Alix gone.

  "Alix?" Her hand groped at the hollowed pillow, the comforter drawn carefully up to cover the empty spot. It was spring, and the air was chilly. The smell of the soap Alix used, glycerin and lilies, clung to the embroidered sheets. Kyra sat up and saw that her sister was nowhere in the room.

  And immediately a wave of sleepiness washed over her. The image of Alix going down to the kitchen for a piece of fruit came to mind. Surely Alix had said she was going down for that purpose and was due to return at any moment. Anyway, this must be all a dream.

  Far off, the clock chime spoke thrice.

  Kyra shook her head, pushing aside the stifling warmth of sleep, feeling, in the way it clung just too long, the curling hints of magic in it.

  She remembered again—not for the first time, she realized, but this time the memory stayed, clear and sharp—Tibbeth putting his hand on her hea
d, saying, You will not remember this…

  Cold touched her. A hundred stupid servants-hall tales returned to her, of wizards who kidnapped children for use in demon sacrifices.

  Tibbeth? If he wanted children for such purposes, he could have kidnapped her the first time she came into his shop.

  And anyway, Tibbeth was extremely fond of Alix.

  Nevertheless, something made her get out of bed and find her robe, white wool, long and trailing, like a shroud. Closing her eyes, she listened, questing in her mind through the house, seeking the soft tread of a bare foot on the floor.

  And she heard, very quietly, the closing of the garden door.

  She knew the sound of it, the peculiar muted creak of its brass hinges. She thought of her scrying-crystal, but that required light, and light, she thought, would be seen from her window. Instead she pulled her enormous, gaudily colored wool shawl over her robe and stole in barefoot silence out into the gallery, down the two long flights of stairs to the hall below. The little passage at the back of the hall was dark, but the air there held a trace of ice and the raw smells of wet earth and compost, as if the doors had been opened. She smelled again, very faint, the odor of glycerin and lilies.