The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  She looked up to see Blore Spenson standing over her with the articles of her kidnapping in one hand and a stout walking stick in the other.

  “Miss Kyra!”

  She scrambled to her feet, trod on her hem, and stumbled again, cursing as she banged her knees once more. Spenson dropped the blanket and cord and extended a hand to her. She shook free, furious at herself for reacting so slowly, for not realizing more quickly that she might be in danger in the first place... in fact, for not expecting something of the kind. “Thank you, I’m quite all right.”

  Her tone of assurance was somewhat marred by the need to pick flecks of dirt and cat fur out of her mouth. She pushed at her hair; it had come loose from its pins and hung like a crazy woman’s down over her shoulders and around her face. A couple of chair carriers and a match vendor were running toward them but halted, uncertain, when they saw she was unhurt. She heard a woman loudly proclaiming that she was going directly to the local magistrate—why, they might all be murdered in their beds! So much, Kyra thought dourly, for the secrecy of her errand.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “Do you wish they had so it could have been a more impressive rescue?” Her sister’s haggard eyes still prickled in her mind, the question about a love-spell. Then she saw the chagrined look on his face and added, “No, I’m sorry. Thank you for coming the way you did. I don’t expect I was in any genuine danger, you know, though you probably spared me a couple of days in uncomfortable quarters.” She brushed the dirt from her skirt and examined her skinned palms. “She’d want me out of the way, but she would hardly assassinate me.”

  “Who?” Spenson asked, baffled.

  Kyra pulled a hairpin free, looped up what was left of a braid, and pinned it back into place. “Lady Earthwygg, of course.” Past him, a few yards down the road, she saw a two-wheeled gig standing, drawn by a beautiful liver-bay mare. Judging by the way Master Spenson was dressed, in a dark-green broadcloth suit, he had been on his way to call on Alix, though his cat-skin waistcoat looked like something a tout would wear and he had obviously tied his own neck cloth again.

  “At least I assume it was Lady Earthwygg. Spell-cord that thick—and that powerful, for it’s quite high-quality—” She gingerly nudged with one toe the finger-fat silk braid lying like a crimson snake on the blanket at their feet. “—isn’t cheap, and if it was the Inquisition who wanted me, they’d have come to the house and talked to Father.”

  “Well,” she added with a conciliating smile, “at least you aren’t wearing that dreadful red suit anymore.”

  He was still looking at her as if she were speaking Old High Trebin.

  “Why on earth,” he asked, “would Lady Earthwygg want to have you kidnapped?” Automatically he bent and picked up the cord and blanket. He looked the kind of man, Kyra thought dispassionately, who’d pick up coins from the flagway, too.

  “Oh, because of you and her daughter.”

  He froze in midmovement, and slowly his whole blunt countenance flushed a furious red. “There is nothing between—” He couldn’t even manage Esmin’s name. “—between her daughter and me.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think there was, but I’m sure it’s not for want of her trying.” Kyra replaced another hairpin. “That was quite a strong passion powder Esmin tried to get you to drink last night. I wasn’t sure I could have counterspelled it just in passing, so I had to knock it out of her hand, which was a terrible shame, because there were only twelve goblets in that set and the glassblower who made them has long ago retired.”

  “Are you telling me,” Spenson said in a strangled voice, his color deepening alarmingly, “that Esmin Earthwygg was trying to... to give me love-potions?”

  Kyra shrugged. “Well, as Father keeps pointing out, you are a splendid match, and the Earthwyggs have been outrunning the constable for years. At least they were doing so six years ago when I last heard, and that isn’t a habit one changes overnight. Don’t tell me that comes as a surprise. It’s hardly like Lady Earthwygg to start proceedings so late in the day.”

  She looked up from straightening her skirt to see his blue eyes bulging at her like those of an enraged bull.

  “That’s the most immodest, outrageous thing I’ve ever—”

  “Don’t look at me,” she protested calmly. “I’m not the one who’s been sending you dreams about the girl.” His eyes widened with a fury that told her she’d hit square on the mark. “If you wish me to, I can give you a comprehensive counterspell—”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort!” Spenson shouted, causing a couple of nuns hurrying down the other side of the street with market baskets in their hands to stop and turn, eyes wide with surprise behind their veils. “Keep your arts to yourself, my girl, if you know what’s good for you!”

  Turning heel, he stormed back to the gig, caught up the reins—without, Kyra noted, jagging the mare’s mouth, as another man in that much of a temper might have done—and rattled away with such abruptness as to almost collide with a poulterer’s wicker cart that had come dashing around the corner from the other direction. She heard Spenson curse mightily as he swerved to avoid it, and he was still cursing as he vanished down the lane, shawl and spell-cord flapping about the wheels.

  “Well!” Kyra shoved a final pin into her hair and pulled her cloak about her once more. Across the street, the two nuns were whispering to one another and two servant girls and the yardman from the big house on the opposite side of the lane were staring at her as if she were a tattooed lady in a raree show. “Some people have no tolerance.”

  She continued her progress via a more circuitous route and stayed as much as was possible to the well-traveled streets.

  The Church of St. Farinox was a relatively new one, built fifty years earlier, when all the great mansions that lined the city wall between Salt Hill and Parsley Hill had been pulled down to accommodate the rising guildsmen and new-rich factory owners in their demand for spacious city residences. The old banking families, whose wealth antedated theirs by three generations, were already firmly ensconced around Governor’s Square on the other side of the most fashionable district. The owners of the factories that were making Angelshand one of the wealthiest cities of the Empire wanted, and were willing to pay for, something equally grand.

  Like nearly everything else in Angelshand, the church was constructed of granite, so darkened with factory soot that even its handsome proportions and pillared portico couldn’t make it appear light; it loomed above its small forecourt like an iron ox, head bowed, ready to charge. Kyra approached it casually through the colonnade that ran around its court, where shopkeepers had just begun to open the boutiques of fashionable lingerie, perfumes, and chocolate; she wove about herself again the spells of disvisibility, slipping the eyes of passersby away from her like quicksilver.

  On the great bronze doors of the church a notice was affixed, informing all and sundry that the marriage between Master Blore Spenson and Miss Alixenia Peldyrin would take place on the following day. No garlands had been woven on the porch pillars yet. As she’d come downstairs that morning, Kyra had overheard the footmen complaining—as they moved the tubbed gardenias back out onto the steps—that they’d have to do so this afternoon.

  Quietly she made her way around the church, through a tiny garden—only the older churches down near the river had churchyards anymore, tradition being satisfied with minute handkerchiefs of grass and flowers in the expensive urban properties. The side door was also bolted. A hand pressed to the carved oak panels, a murmured word of power. The sliding whisper of steel against steel, the vibration of the moving latch.

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The smell of smilax, roses, and lilac here was overwhelming, drowning the mustiness of the last sabbath’s incense and the faint, fusty amalgam of dust and altar cloths. The golden sun canopy over the altar of the Sole God had been garlanded already, probably yesterday; the blossoms were drooping a little but still looked in fairly good shape. A
long the wall by the door through which she had just come, Kyra saw the poles of the bridal canopy: cedar, cypress, oak, and ash, as the rite demanded, with their fittings and finials of silver. In ancient houses the fittings were handed down from generation to generation. Her father had purchased these new. The poles themselves would be burned on the wedding night, after the banquet, when the bride and groom had been put to bed.

  The bride and groom.

  Alix and Blore Spenson, who, in spite of the awful neck cloth and red suit, now seemed a bit more like the pirate fighter and commander of men her father had described.

  If Alix lived that long.

  She shook away the thought of Blore Spenson, her anxiety flooding back. With hands that trembled slightly, Kyra bolted the door behind her, threw back her cloak, and dug in her pocket for the few things she had brought with her: chalk, a vial of mixed staghorn and powdered silver, and, wrapped in greased kitchen paper, a few bits of cheese.

  “I can understand swearing not to use one’s magic for ill,” she’d said that first night in the Citadel of Wizards, sitting before the fire in the Junior Parlor with the woman who would be her teacher, her mentor, her sponsor during the long and tedious days to come. “And it isn’t fair, of course, to use it for one’s own amusement on the innocent, though I suspect that a touch of magic would liven up their days, poor things... But not to use it for good? What is magic for, then?”

  “What magic is for is a question that no one has ever succeeded in answering.” The Lady Rosamund Kentacre leaned back against the chimney breast, folding her beautiful hands in her lap. There was nothing about the Lady that was not beautiful: her alabaster skin, her absinthe-colored eyes, her low, clear voice. Like Alix, she was just tall enough to be striking, without Kyra’s height; her hair so black that it was almost purple, massed in springy, sensuous curls. She was, at the time of Kyra’s arrival, in her midthirties, the daughter, they said, of the Earl Maritime, ejected by him from the household when she had refused to use her powers for the betterment of the family. Perhaps this was the source of the sympathy and kindness Kyra had detected in the older woman’s aloof green eyes.

  “I suppose,” the Lady went on after a moment, “one could ask, ‘What is good?’ What is the good that you would use your magic for?”

  “To heal the sick,” Kyra said.

  “Then why did you not become a doctor? Many who are mageborn do. What else?”

  “Well,” Kyra said diffidently, “there are a lot of extremely poor people in the cities, people who can’t feed their children, people who struggle, and die, just to put wood in the stoves through the winter. Surely one could lay words of good fortune on them, words of luck that would bring them money—or use one’s magic to... to compel the rich to open their hearts and their purses a little more than they do.”

  “Thus taking from them whatever merit they might win from God—or fate—or whatever it is that controls the lives of ordinary men—from their own free choice to help? Taking from them, in fact, their free will?”

  “Well...” Kyra said.

  “You know as well as I do, Kyra, that magic cannot make something from nothing. The money that a word of good fortune could bring one man is money that is taken from another. And just because you are a good judge of which man or woman is deserving of help doesn’t mean that another wizard, with equal ability, wouldn’t be deceived by a plausible scoundrel’s charm or tempted by an offer to split the takings of whatever that ‘good-luck word’ would bring.”

  Kyra was silent, aware that she was being argued around but for the first time in her life not certain enough of her ground to argue back. She had worked, and hungered, and given up so much to be in this place, with this woman and the others she had met during that first day, and this checked her unthinking assumption of her own correctness.

  At length she said, “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lady Rosamund said softly. “But what is permissible for one must be permissible for all, you see, where magic is concerned. Else self-righteousness, and corruption, and narrow-mindedness would spread down the generations, and we would have war among the wizards, who must stand together against those who fear magic because it is a power over them that they cannot understand.

  “For centuries, Kyra, every man who could afford to hire a wizard or keep one as his courtier could gain ascendancy over other men by unfair means. Thus wizardry came to be hated by all, even though there were good wizards, mages who refused to do evil for pay—or what they perceived to be evil. But many of those who did evil did so believing to their deaths that they had done good.”

  Rosamund sighed and, leaning forward, took a poker and made up the fire again with the neat competence of a kitchen maid. “It is not a condition,” she added, “exclusive to the mageborn.” The renewed light showed her beautiful face sad and gleamed in the gold pins that held back the delicate braids of her hair.

  “With the coming of machines, and mills, and factories—with the coming of guns, and stronger governments, and armies, and colonies, and intricate politics of money and trade and industry—few issues are clear anymore. You know that. Your father is in business; you’ve kept his books. It takes very little magic to damage a machine or blow up a gun, and there were wizards who believed themselves to be doing great good in upsetting factories, destroying machines, not realizing that the factories were only a part of the changes taking place. All it left was families starving and jobless, for they could not return to the farms. And then they had to defend what they had done against armies, against politicians, who themselves had wizards who believed themselves in the right. At last, all we could do was withdraw. Just because we can command the natural world doesn’t mean that we can command our own passions or understand what is truly right, truly best, for all concerned. It is too easy for someone to believe that what he or she greatly desires is right.”

  Kyra was silent at that, but she felt her own memories bleed. She found she had to look away from the fire.

  Beside her, the Lady Rosamund finished gently. “That is why the vows. That is why, if any mage be found breaking his or her vows to the Council by meddling in human affairs in any fashion whatsoever, that mage shall be hunted down and punished, no matter who he or she is, to the limit of the Council’s strength.” Her green eyes grew cold and hard as diamonds. “No matter who they are, and how firmly they believed themselves to be in the right.”

  Standing in the silence of the church, Kyra smelled again the bite of the wood smoke and heard the Lady’s voice. Rosamund had warned her before her departure against using her magic for any purpose but to scry out the source of the danger to her sister, something she probably could have done in the week or more she thought she would have between her arrival and the wedding.

  Discovery of what she had done last night—of what she had come here to do—would in all probability result in her expulsion from the Citadel, the end of the education in the greater magic that had become her life. At the very best, she could look forward only to becoming a dog wizard, begging what learning she could from other dog wizards... like Tibbeth.

  She closed her eyes.

  And felt again the terror, the knowledge, that had come to her in her dream.

  It was, she reasoned, opening her eyes once more, only a very small spell, undetectable by the Council and completely harmless in itself. And in fact, there was no violation of human free will involved.

  Taking a deep breath, she moved quickly, her footfalls making barely an echo, past the altar rails and up to the narthex of the church.

  Chapter V

  “MICE!” GORDAM PELDYRIN’S harsh-voiced outrage carried quite clearly up to his elder daughter in the third-floor gallery that circled the hall.

  Kyra paused and smiled with an emotion utterly unworthy of an academically trained mage. She focused her mind, letting her perceptions reach down through the lofty spaces of the hall, though in this case it was scarcely necessary. The door of hi
s study, which opened onto the gallery below, stood ajar, and like Kyra’s, his deep voice had considerable carrying power.

  “You’re telling me that the priest of St. Farinox is refusing to hold the wedding there tomorrow because of mice?”

  “It’s... it’s the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever seen, sir,” stammered a young woman’s voice, presumably the messenger from St. Farinox. “We’ve sent for the rat catcher, but the church is alive with them.”

  “This is ridiculous!”

  Kyra’s brows quirked upward. As she’d been changing out of her borrowed servant’s dress and into the brilliant gown of emerald green she now wore—chosen because it was one of the several she’d designed to be put on without the assistance of a maid—she’d heard the chimes of St. Farinox and the slightly dimmer echo of St. Creel over on Great Cheevy Street speak eleven. The spell she’d laid that morning had worked with gratifying quickness.

  Her plum-colored petticoats rustling, she sought her sister’s chamber.

  In spite of her fear for Alix, which gnawed like a rat at her nerves, she had taken her time returning home, detouring by a bookshop she’d once patronized in Ditch Street and stopping to assuage her hunger on steamed noodles from a cart in front of the Bremenntine Convent. Though everything within her screamed to be doing something, anything, she knew absolutely that Alix wouldn’t be ready to leave her room until almost noon. Even at age twelve Alix had never been on time for lessons, dancing class, or dinner; putting herself together for the children’s parties at the houses of her father’s friends or sitting with her mother when she was “at home” to callers had involved hours of curling irons, lacing and unlacing, and consultations over the relative merits of baby’s breath and forget-me-nots for her hair. There was no reason to think she had changed.

  As she had suspected, Kyra heard her sister’s silvery voice through the shut door of the bedroom and the light, quick tread that had to be Merrivale.