Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  "Here, it goes on over the head." She strode over to help him; he gave her a wry grin as his head emerged from the tangle of bombazine. "Drawstrings cross over, then tie in the front; to be really fashionable you should have another petticoat, but I doubt the guards will notice. You'll need a good deal of stuffing."

  He shook out a lace cap and a muslin mobcap to put over it as she made the necessary adjustments to his attire. "I thought they might be looking for a red-haired youth in company with a man," he said as he arranged the caps over his curly hair. "How do I look?"

  "Like the ugliest woman in Angelshand."

  "Good." He produced his short-stemmed clay pipe from the satchel and proceeded to cram his jacket and breeches into the now-empty sack. "They should be opening the gates for the first of the market carts in a few minutes. By the time we get there, the square should be a bear garden. Ready?"

  Kyra glanced nervously at her reflection in the mirror. In spite of the unfamiliar jut of her ears and cheekbones and the faint film of dirt that darkened her jaw in imitation of beard stubble, she thought she still looked absolutely like herself, and Spenson's disguise, in her opinion, wouldn't fool a nearsighted drunkard.

  "You'd be surprised what people don't see," Spenson told her, gesturing with his pipe as they crossed the worn stone paving of the Great Bridge under the beetling brows of the St. Cyr fortress. The bridge was empty of its usual daytime crowd of flower sellers, old-clothes barrows, and street-corner entertainers. Kyra found it curious to have an unobstructed view of the harbor downriver, the dark masts of the ships pricking up through the floating white seethe of low-lying fog, the riding lights like embers in cinder-gray gloom. The world smelled of morning and low tide. "Just because it isn't done with magic doesn't mean it won't work."

  It was just under a mile from the Great Bridge to the city's southern gate, through soot-blackened slums and jostling crowds of factory workers bound dull-eyed for their day's endless labor. Among them, however, rattled brightly painted farm carts on the way to the city's great markets, costermongers' barrows, donkeys laden with new lettuces and asparagus, poultrymen bearing cages of spring chickens, young girls driving small flocks of lambs in from the sprawling, muddy suburbs to the south. When they reached the square before the massive stone towers of the city gate, Kyra saw that Spenson was probably right. The broad, brick-paved space was a riot of farmers, produce, and animals; the air was thick with the drawl of country patois and the smells of dew and dung. The cavernous old city gate was choked with wagons, donkeys, and countryfolk; the two Church sasenna standing in the shadow of its heavy portcullis and the red-robed hasu beside them couldn't possibly see everything in that milling crowd.

  Sucking on the stem of his pipe, Spenson hung back inconspicuously until a rumble of iron wheels and ponderous hooves behind them in Bridge Street signaled the advent of the Kymil stage. Farmers, pigs, and hen-wives swirled and surged out of the coach's way, forming eddies of barking dogs or women cursing as their fish baskets were upset; Spens ambled through them, nodding greetings and apologies here and there with the lace edge of his mobcap down over his eyes, and edged himself past the coach and into the gate passage while the sasenna and the hasu were stopping the vehicle and peering through its windows at the bleary-eyed and resentful passengers.

  "A pity we can't simply take the stage," Kyra remarked when the coach passed them some time later on the broad street that led down from the gate through the sprawl of small shops and filthy, unpaved lanes that made up the first of the city's suburbs. Dawn was already bright in the sky; the birds were singing in the scrubby trees and backyard gardens, mingling with the bleat of goats and the grunting of pigs.

  "You can bet they have someone on it." Spenson gestured with his pipe after the huge red and yellow vehicle vanishing down the wide, rutted street. Then he pulled a penknife from his skirt pocket and began digging out the bowl. "Thank God we're past the gates, anyway. I thought they'd smell it if I smoked my usual blend and wonder what an old servant was doing puffing on Gentleman's Special at half a crown an ounce."

  Kyra laughed and shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. "They'd assume you'd been pilfering your master's tobacco, of course. It's what all my father's footmen do."

  "Come to think of it, probably mine do as well." He grinned, shoved his mobcap back a little from his forehead, and gestured at the straggling brick houses and gaudily painted taverns lining the road. Farm carts still passed them, jolting heavily where the pavement was broken into mud-filled potholes; the air smelled of brewing beer, young grass, and cows. "These houses go all to hedges once we're outside the town; if you'll keep guard, I can change clothes behind one before we get to the Pelican. If we ride fast, we can probably make Underhythe by midafternoon."

  "Will they get in touch with your teachers at the Citadel?"

  They had slowed the horses to a walk after the first long gallop. The sun had risen, its slanting rays salting the tops of the hedges on either side of the road and making the clumps of elder and rowan visible beyond them glitter as if every fifth leaf had been dipped in gold. The night's damp coolness was passing off, new grass and turned earth thick as perfume in the air, laden with the weight of the coming summer. The sharp pink-pink of the chaffinch and the warbling of robins filled the hedges; now and then, from the farmlands beyond the hedges, men's voices and the lowing of plow oxen could be heard.

  "Of course." Kyra reached for the dozenth time to adjust the thongs in which she habitually bound up her hair on journeys, only to have her fingers encounter nothing but shorn ends. "Officially, they have to notify the Council, usually by scrying-crystal, if a Council wizard is detected in malfeasance, no matter how absurd the charge. I don't think Rosamund will believe for a moment that I actually turned a beggar into a dog because he was bothering me—for one thing, I haven't the faintest idea how to go about it—but the Council and the Inquisition both will be listening for me."

  "Listening?" Spens frowned, squinting as they passed from leaf dapple into a patch of sharp morning sun.

  "They can… can sense if I use powerful magic, can trace me through it—can feel where I am and what I have done. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and several high-level wizards working in concert, so it isn't done as a general rule—I mean, not just to check up on people. And if I do use magic for any purpose whatsoever connected with other human beings, the least that will happen will be that they'll disown me, cast me out of the Citadel and refuse to teach me, or protect me, anymore."

  She looked straight ahead as she said it, over the horse's ears to the green and gold tunnel of the roadway, trying not to show the tight curling of dread that seemed to close around her lungs and heart. Even as Tibbeth's student she had prided herself on her strength and adeptness. Once Lady Rosamund had spoken for her to the Council and sponsored her admission to the Citadel and its teachings, she had striven hard to be the best, to learn all that she could of the riches so suddenly poured into her hands. It had never crossed her mind— even while she was ill-wishing the front steps in the terrified desperation of that first evening—that she would ever be caught in wrongdoing, much less accused of a wrong she had not done. That she would be ejected at this late date from the world she had struggled so doggedly to win.

  I can't let it happen, she thought grimly. I CAN'T.

  And some alien voice in her whispered, But if you did, you wouldn't have to make the choice about staying with Spens or not.

  The thought went through her like lightning that, striking from the sky, burned in seconds on its way through to the ground: heat, enlightment, agony… And then, in its wake, rage at herself for even considering the surrender of her education as an option.

  For a moment she saw the yellow moonlight shine in Alix's open eyes, bleaching them of any human color, she saw the wanton smile of the lust-spells that robbed her of all rationality in the dreamy drug of passion for a man. And superimposed on that, like a doubled image in a flawed glass, herself clutching at S
pens like a desperate teenager, frenzied only for the touch of his hands.

  It crossed her mind to wonder if Spenson was thinking that, too.

  She glanced sidelong at him, for a moment imagining his wishes: If she couldn't go back to that wretched Citadel, I'd have her for myself and her own furious reply, How dare you?

  They had not spoken of what had passed between them in Lesser Queen Street: the urgency of his grasp, the stormy anger in his face. Can't you learn as well here as there?

  But when she looked at him, she saw only his puzzlement and concern, and that, too, irritated her. Dammit, she thought wildly, he has no right to do that to me. No right to make himself this important to me this quickly.

  If the Inquisition caught him with her, he'd be punished, too.

  She shifted her weight forward and kicked her startled mount into a trot.

  By midmorning her annoyance had been swallowed up in the awareness that they were being followed.

  Twice she halted, standing in her stirrups to strain with all her mageborn senses, her mind teased by the suspicion that all was not right on the road behind them. Twice she only heard the distant voices of farmers, the whistle of magpies, and the murmur of trees. Still, uneasiness plagued her. When they drew near the modest posting inn called the Bear and Pig, she remained behind the sheltering trees of an elder copse and sent Spenson, well disguised by a spell so that no one would later identify him as the President of the Guild of Merchant Adventurers, to inquire after a young blond couple who had passed that way the day before.

  Only as she sat waiting for him in the dense, insect-humming shade, listening down the road behind, did she realize that she still heard the voices of those same distant plowmen, though they had not passed a tilled field for some miles, and the magpies whistling in the selfsame way. Closing her eyes, she listened more deeply, probing with her mind at the illusion. And as illusions did, the voices dislimned and changed so that she wondered how she had mistaken for voices the swift, muffled thudding of many hooves and why the clink of harness buckles and the metallic rattle of crossbow bolts in their quivers had sounded so much like harmless bird cries.

  "They've been by here, all right."

  She jerked about, startled. Spens put a hand on her calf to steady her.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I think the Witchfinders are on our trail. They're still three or four miles off—didn't we pass a crossroad back around that bend?" She nodded toward the shady rise of elms behind them.

  He nodded, gathering the reins to mount. "It goes to Byrnefelling Farm and past that to Utter Plunket. Won't the High Council sense it if you use a spell?" He reined around after her as she retraced their steps at a trot.

  "They would if I used anything very violent or very high-level. If I threw a ward across the road, for instance, that the horses refused to pass. But Daurannon the Handsome—one of my instructors—always says that a spell that's too subtle to be detected is just as effective as one that's too strong to be resisted and works better if it's other mages you're trying to fool. They don't have very many high-level wizards in the Magic Office; I doubt they'd send one after me." She sprang down and tossed Spenson the reins, then fished in her pockets for one of the hairpins she'd worn the previous day, an old one wrought of amber and silver.

  She had to write the talismans of light with extreme care, seven or eight of them, very tiny and none containing much power in itself, on stones and the undersides of leaves for some distance down the road before it reached the crossings; small spells of drowsiness, of inattention, of distraction mingled with tiny and unthought convictions that someone had said something about Utter Plunket… The sense that left and downhill was the best way to go—wider, clearer, better. After that she took a makeshift broom of elder twigs and dusted away the tracks on the main road, thankful that no rain had fallen lately to make the path muddy.

  "Now come," she said, and Spenson rode down the farm path, leading her horse, while she followed afoot on the grassy verges, now and then leaving small signs of inattention and illusion so that the pursuers, unless they were quite powerful mages indeed or were looking very hard, would not be sure where exactly the hoof-prints left the road.

  It cost them nearly a half hour, and toward the end she had to fight panic at the thought of how near the Witchfinders were coming. But when they finally cut cross-country back to the Kymil road and proceeded through the thin woodlands at a rapid trot, she heard the sounds of pursuit fade and turn eastward. She did not hear them again for nearly two hours.

  Chapter XVIII

  "Damn. They're behind us again." Kyra drew rein to listen, the noon sun hot on her shorn head and unprotected nape. "Coming fast, with no effort to conceal it."

  "They know you've seen through their illusions, then." Spenson leaned forward and felt his horse's sweaty neck. They'd ridden at a hard trot, trying to make up time, since the crossroad. "We can't outrun them on these beasts, anyway. They must have gotten remounts at the Bear and Pig. Can you tell the horses where to go if we're not on them?"

  "Do you know the way to Underhythe from here?" She regarded him in some surprise as he stepped from the saddle and untied the leather satchel that contained their lunch of bread and cheese.

  "Of course. One of my uncles has a farm at Utter Plunket. I spent my summers tramping this part of the country. Down you get." He reached up to catch her as she dismounted, her legs nearly giving way with the weakness of hours of unaccustomed riding. "There's another crossroads a mile and a half from here, leading out to Far Peddley. Can you get our friends—" He patted his big roan's neck, "—to go as far as they can hell-bent for leather down that road?"

  "I'll do my best." Kyra caught her tall bay's bit, drew its head down close to hers, and whispered the words of command appropriate to the beast's small, skittish brain. From her pocket she took her scrying-crystal, conjured in its depths the sleepy crossroad among the willow trees, and, from that image, sent the vision of the place into the horse's mind, as well as the urge to run to the brink of exhaustion. "Go!" she cried, and stepped back. The bay flung up its head and pounded off at a run, the roan plunging at its heels with the aroused instincts of a herd animal in a stampede. Spens caught her elbow and guided her along the weedy verge of the road to a gap in the hedge—they were in farming country once again—that had been incompletely repaired with a few elm boughs woven into the thick masses of privet. These he pulled free to allow her through and replaced, inexpertly and at the cost of severely scratched fingers, behind them.

  Then, hand in hand, they set off along the rough ground of the hedgerow, avoiding the plowed land that lay, upturned and breathing its thick peaty scents, below.

  "So you spent your summers tramping this part of the country, did you?"

  "Yes!" Spenson said defensively, and leaned against an apple tree to wipe his sweaty forehead with his sleeve.

  Kyra, sitting slumped at the tree's roots, raised her head a little and gave him a dour look. "I can only assume you had either written directions or a competent guide." The back of her neck and the tips of her ears were smarting with sunburn. Though hardened by sword practice and used to walking miles in the cold sprucewoods around the Citadel, she had rarely ridden a horse in the past seven years, and the points of bone at the bottom of her pelvis ached from jarring contact with the saddle. Even lunch had failed to cheer her. She was tired and, as the sun hovered nearer the beech woods away to their right, becoming concerned. Moreover, her shoes, though Spenson had been careful to get a size to fit her feet, had originally belonged to someone else, a matter of less concern while riding than it had become during the past five hours afoot.

  Spenson took his pipe from his pocket, tamped tobacco into it from a small leather pouch, thankfully, Kyra thought, his half-a-crown Gentleman's Blend and not the cheap, stinking variety with which he had camouflaged himself against the guards at the city gates. "I suppose you'd rather we continued on the road and got ourselves arrested by the Witchfinders?"


  Kyra didn't deign to give him a reply. With their wanderings through the woods and hedgerows, turning now east at a swamp that Spenson swore surrounded a pond he had once known, now south to follow a spring that didn't lead at all where it had (he assured her) twenty years ago, her feeling of helplessness had returned, insistent and terrifying. Last night she had known there was nothing she could do. This afternoon it seemed to her that all this green, smiling countryside, with its mossy pools, its chuckling streams in their ivy-shawled clefts, its lichened oaks and pale stands of birch and beech, had become her enemy. Or, if not her enemy in the sense that Tibbeth of Hale and the Witchfinders were her enemies, at least insofar as her parents, and her playmates, and the boys at the dances had always been her enemies: turning her aside from her goals not out of malice but out of a kind of well-meaning stupidity that did not and could not understand the hideous urgency of her quest.

  And Spenson, who had insisted that they stop for food and rest out of a maddening conviction that she was more tired than she thought she was, was no help at all.

  "That pond we passed has to be Mickle's Pond," Spens said reasonably, drawing on his pipe. He'd taken off his jacket and neck cloth in the heat and looked far more at ease, like some bullnecked gentleman farmer or huntsman, a totally spurious impression, she thought bitterly, considering his navigational ineptitude. "That means if we go south from here, we should strike the road that runs from the rectory to Podding's Farm. My guess is that Alix and Algeron went to the rectory."