The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  The only way to know who would be to find the mark itself.

  But the tear stains on the cheap yellow parchment returned to her, the desperation imbued there like the echo of stifled sobs. Don’t leave me...

  “If a mark is what I’m looking for.”

  Kyra tripped over the threshold, caught herself on the gallery rail, and resolutely descended the stairs.

  As she passed the door of the drawing room on the floor below, Kyra saw that Alix had been joined not only by Tellie Wishrom from next door but by her other two close friends, Frittilaire Nysett and Cira Prouvet, the daughters of other men high up in the councils of the guilds. Tellie, slender and black-haired and with a Senterwinger’s fair skin and blue eyes, as usual had little to say, but Frittilaire, a buxom, sandy blonde, and Cira, a vivacious brunette, were more than making up for this, with the result that they had quite clearly driven Master Spenson from the room. He was leaning, in fact, in the doorway of the study, listening to her father.

  “...know yourself what this delay is costing us! All the business I’d put off till tomorrow for the wedding I’ll now have to put off another day. With ships to be inventoried and gotten under way, God knows what it’s costing you!”

  Kyra studied Spenson’s square face and firm mouth, feeling a little ashamed of her brusque arrogance earlier that day in Upper Tollam Street. She had been angry at herself for walking into the attack and preoccupied with dread over Alix... Still, she knew she had retreated into the old loftiness that had been her armor all her life.

  Considering him now, she recalled his flash of rage, but even in the heat of it he’d been careful of his horse’s mouth. In an odd way, the neat violence with which he’d dispatched her attackers had not been the act of a man who let passion dictate his acts. And in any case, even had she not defused his desire for Esmin Earthwygg by telling him he’d been a dupe, the most that desire would have provoked would have been a lawsuit for breach of contract, not a murder.

  “Not to mention the rental on the white carriage mares and those dratted musicians who are turning the attic into a tavern and a bawdy house.”

  “Maybe Miss Kyra can help us.” Spenson turned, leaning his broad shoulders against the door frame, his blue eyes glinting with teasing malice as he looked across at her. It was the first time she had seen him at ease. His temper seemed to be like her own, of the gunpowder variety, quick-burning and as quickly gone. His burly body had a compact quality of strength in repose, like a big, muscular tomcat. She wondered suddenly if he danced.

  “I don’t think there’s sufficient magic in the world to reform that flute player,” she remarked.

  “No, but maybe you could convince our furry little friends at St. Farinox to breed elsewhere.”

  “No!” Her father’s voice was like the slapping of a leather strap onto wood. “I forbid it!” Framed in the mauve velvet flaps of the cap he wore when he was indoors, his face was pale with anger. His velvet robe, like an old-fashioned scholar’s, billowed around him as he strode forward, his hand raised as though he would strike her.

  “You’ve caused enough trouble to this house with your wretched hoodoo and your stinking spells! You’ve brought scandal and unhappiness, and I won’t have witchery under this roof, do you hear!”

  Kyra’s chin came up, and her hazel eyes flashed into the hazel glare that faced her. “Admirably—as do Alix’s friends down the hall, I should imagine,” she said coolly. “In any case, interference in human concerns is against the ethics of true wizardry, so I’m afraid it would be impossible for me to comply.”

  She gave them her best curtsy and made her regal way to the head of the stairs, a progress marred by turning the high, purple-lacquered heel of her shoe and nearly breaking her ankle. Master Spenson covered the two strides’ distance between them in time to steady her, his big, rough hands surprisingly light on her fingers and waist.

  He must dance, she thought as she disengaged herself and descended the stair toward the kitchen, where, with any luck, she’d locate the man who had written those poems.

  Chapter VI

  “MADAME, WE WORKED THE NIGHT through on this cake!” Joblin the cook’s square, heavy hand, with its inevitable ladle, gestured toward the rococo mountain of garlands, scallops, marzipan trees, and tiny gingerbread palaces, a gesture strangely balletic for a man who looked as if he should be heaving gravel in a quarry somewhere. His dark eyes under their jutting brows were pleading. “It is perhaps the finest confection wrought in Angelshand, certainly the finest in many years. Fifteen eggs went into it! Fifteen! And as for the sugar and the butter...”

  “Well,” Kyra remarked, plucking a shell of pink icing from the base, “in two days it won’t matter if you’d used thirty eggs. It’s definitely forming a crust.”

  “I’m afraid that’s true,” her mother sighed, folding her hands over the waistband of her huge linen apron. “And even after one day, I know how the flavor of a white cake begins to go off.”

  The cook made a noise in his throat suggestive of a man being brave about having his toes severed.

  “We could prolong it by having it carried down to the ice cellar for a day, but you know how things sweat down there, and it would almost certainly make the gingerbread soggy. Kyra, darling, what a shame your father would never tolerate your using just a little spell to keep the cake fresh, with all the work Joblin’s put into it...”

  “Mother...”

  “I’m not sure what Master Gordam plans to do about the mice in the church, though for the life of me I can’t understand what can have drawn them there. I know he inspected the church quite thoroughly when he negotiated with the Bishop to have the ceremony there. What a shame your father’s so set on the strict form, because of course if we were doing this by signature, it could all be done in our parlor. In any case, we’ve worshiped at St. Farinox for years, and never have we seen so much as a mouse hole... For, of course, you know, Kyra darling, that I’d never attend a church that was at all mousy, and St. Farinox was always so respectable. Brentius—that’s the priest there, you know, Brentius Byfillian—is related to Lord March, and was raised in the strictest propriety, and knows how all these things are done. Even if we do have a pew and aren’t obliged to kneel on cushions, which I used to do as a girl because down in Mellidane they don’t have pews, and even the Emperor has to kneel... But in any case,” she went on, returning to the main thread of the discourse with her usual wide-eyed aplomb, “it will certainly not be tomorrow.”

  “Oh, what a shame.” Kyra helped herself to another buttery swirl. Anything Joblin made, from a twelve-course dinner to a poached egg, was always and invariably the best in many years—complete with documentation and extensive examples from the cook’s wide knowledge of other households’ banquets and breakfasts—but he was undeniably one of the finest cooks in the city. Though it was only midafternoon, the exertions of the day were beginning to catch up with Kyra—the long walk to St. Farinox and the struggle in Fennel Street—and the use of her magic always engendered in her a desperate hunger for sweets.

  “But what are we to do with the cake?”

  “We’ll eat it,” the harpsichord player offered cheerfully, pushing his round-lensed spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. He and the viol player had been loitering in the kitchen in the hopes of mooching some jam. At the other end of the room the redheaded chambermaid was doing up sachets of dried verbena, looking sleek.

  “He may be right,” Binnie sighed regretfully. “The family can’t possibly eat it. It would be bad luck to eat the cake before the wedding. You shouldn’t even have taken that taste, Kyra dear. Goodness knows what sort of ill luck that will bring.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kyra apologized blithely, trying to keep herself from stealing another morsel of icing and failing miserably.

  “On the other hand,” her mother continued, “it would probably be a good idea to go down to the market and bespeak fresh eggs, because when things are decided, we may not be able to
get as much as we need. It’s so difficult to get large numbers of eggs at short notice. Oh, and Algeron, dearest,” she added as the handsome young assistant began untying his apron preparatory to making the expedition, “could you go past the fruit market and get some oranges? There are usually some up from the south, and I was thinking of having orange-peel duck tomorrow evening. Since we do have this extra day, I’ve invited Cousin Wyrdlees and my sister and brother-in-law—Sethwit is staying with Master Gordam’s brother, you know. Orange duck is Master Gordam’s favorite, and with things as upset as they are, I’m sure he needs a little extra looking after.”

  Her voice sustained a light, fluty babble as Algeron found his jacket—rough tweed and very worn at the elbows—and waited while Joblin fetched a silver crown and a few silver bits from one of the blue and yellow porcelain crocks on the shelf above the bin table. Kyra, unashamedly plundering the cake’s rear slopes of their chantilly swags, watched him from the corner of her eye. He was very slender, almost delicate-looking, with his long, narrow face and grave gray eyes. He didn’t look capable of violence, but then, Joblin, who looked like an unshaven bandit with his massive biceps and hulking shoulders, was the gentlest man she knew.

  Kyra had learned once about men who seemed harmless. She would not trust her judgment again.

  She stayed in the kitchen for some minutes after the young man’s departure, trying not to make her own exit too closely in his wake. Like Alix, Binnie Peldyrin was capable of strewing the air with commentary for hours on end, the mechanics of the household serving as anchors to embroidered digressions about the habits and personalities of her sister and brothers-in-law, their relative position in the wedding procession and their problems with their servants, the gossip of the Court, which she followed through official gazettes and unofficial broadsides and scandal sheets, and utterly unfounded speculations on why this or that commodity—from attar of roses to chamomile tea—was more or less expensive. Kyra recalled it of old and supposed that six years ago she had only thought nothing of it because she knew no different.

  Now, after years of the studious quiet of the Citadel—after years of dealing with people who studied their arts and concentrated on something other than who would be coming for dinner or how to finagle some future business transaction—she wondered how she could have stood her mother’s relentless prattle and her father’s single-minded pursuit of power in the councils of the town.

  With a certain amount of difficulty she extricated herself from her mother’s persistent account of the logistics of dealing with the Spenson family—Lord Mayor Spenson having certain dietary restrictions that required special menus and a good deal of tact—and, wrapping herself once more in her faded black wool cloak, stepped into the kitchen yard. She could see the flute player standing in the shadow of the postern that communicated with the kitchen yard of the Wishroms’ house, his dark head bent, deep in conversation with someone.

  Kyra shook her head. She had slept poorly the previous night, waking often to the clatter of market carts in nearby Upper Tollam Street, the tapping of watchmen’s staves, the rattle of iron-tired coach wheels, and the occasional riotous voices of those bands of Court rakes who, having exhausted the possibilities of the gambling hells of Prynnak Street and the bawdy houses of the Algoswive district, would rove the city till dawn in quest of mischief. Like her mother’s chatter, it was a sound she had lost the habit of not hearing. Before sleeping, she had let her awareness move through the darkness of the house, listening to the breathing of the sleepers beneath her father’s roof. Once she had heard, not far from her own room, the sound of weeping. Invariably from the attic had floated the clink of tankards, the shuffle and slap of cards, stifled feminine giggles, and now and then voices lifted in soft harmonies whose beauty had twisted her heart as she lay in the darkness.

  Rain in the night, the sound of chimes,

  Thinking of you...

  An empty pillow, the empty hope

  That your bed is empty, too...

  Her mind went back to the poems she’d found in Alix’s dresser, slipped beneath the handkerchiefs and the stockings of pink and lilac silk.

  ...But the sun break sweeps the buttercups

  And the last of my winter’s despair

  Melts to song in the light of your smile,

  and the sunlight on your hair.

  She shook her head, quickened her pace a little, and pushed open the heavy carriage gate.

  The aspect of the square had changed considerably since her expedition that morning. Servants—or the clerks of the merchants who had their countinghouses nearby, which amounted to nearly the same thing—hurried here and there on errands. A nursemaid hustled her overdressed charges on a rapid constitutional around the encircling flagway, her starched white cap wings vibrating and her veil flapping with every step she took. Kyra tried to guess whose she might be, but the children were young, and after six years she had no way to guess. Another nurse, her pink dress announcing the sex of her absent charge, stood gossiping with the day watchman in charge of the square, while a passing cabman pulled briefly up beside a woman selling sausages to buy himself lunch on the move. The blue of the cabman’s long coat, the red of the watchman’s, the bright dresses of the pair of women taking a stroll, showed up like flowers against the heavy gray of the buildings; the sausage woman was singing about steam and grease and sugar, and somewhere someone was again playing a hurdy-gurdy, the sound of it muted by distance and air into something less like the caterwauling of a dying beast and more like music. Some movement caught the corner of Kyra’s eye as she started to cross the square, and she stopped, looking quickly around, remembering the two men in the cab that morning.

  But there was no one near her.

  Frowning, she hurried on.

  It was slightly less than two miles to the great central market of the city, a distance Kyra had been used to walking two or three times daily, even as a child. A rapid and businesslike walker at need, she soon came in sight of Algeron Brackett making his way along the streets of narrow-fronted brown-brick houses that constituted the Springwell district. Small cafes and fashionable rooming houses created bright spots amid erratic turnings and tiny courtyards of crumbling flats, with laundry flapping overhead and squads of shrieking children playing in the gutters. Eastward, past the Imperial Guards’ barracks, the aspect of the town seemed to improve, an occasional house front gaudy with paint or bright with window-box daffodils, until they crossed through Prince Dittony Circle under the bronze prince’s benevolent agate eyes. Kyra picked her way on Algeron’s heels amid the usual tangle of cabs, sedan chairs, private carriages, scarf sellers’ barrows, and the inevitable religious procession, and so through the intensely fashionable colonnade on the other side of the square, half a block of silk shops and merchants in expensive liqueurs, and thence, like diving into a murky swamp, into the densely packed, winding, and odoriferous lanes of the market district beyond.

  Algeron was easy to follow. Though he did not dawdle, he stopped frequently to admire the dark-purple hyacinths an old man was selling from a wheelbarrow, to see the way the sunlight turned the gilded windows of the Woolmarket Hall to a wall of flame, to watch a thin, tired-looking man and a young woman in a scholar’s robe leave sesame candy at the feet of a leaden saint in a street-corner shrine. He seemed oblivious to the smell of putrefying vegetable parings under his feet and the prostitutes who whistled invitingly from the gloom of every doorway. Even on his errand, Kyra realized, he was captivated by the strange, bewildering beauty of the city—to the extent that, as he crossed the Guildhall Square, he was nearly run over by a coster-monger’s barrow while staring dreamily at a little girl feeding doves.

  Kyra’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. Hardly the man, she thought, to do murder in a fit of thwarted passion—his poems had contained nothing but doglike adoration. She wondered if she was wasting her time following him this way. But the whisper of stronger emotions had clung to the paper, deep and biting as triple-s
trong khala liquor, and she lengthened her stride as he stood wiping from his breeches’ knees the mud the barrow had thrown up on him and called out his name.

  “Miss Kyra!” He nearly jumped out of his shoes; clearly he had been deep in his own meditations. But immediately he smiled and swept off his cap to her. The expression in his gray eyes seemed open, clean, and kind. “You shouldn’t have come all the way down here. I was coming to bespeak the eggs. You could have told me what you wanted.”

  From the tail of her eye Kyra had again the brief, nagging sensation that there was something behind her that she ought to see. But when she turned her head, only the gay confusion of the Guildhall Square met her eyes, rainbow movement in which it would have been impossible to distinguish a single element as threatening even if she had known what she was looking for. Still...

  “What I wanted,” Kyra said, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm, “was to speak to you.”

  His eyes widened nervously, and he flinched a little, as if to pull away, then caught himself when he realized how rude that would be. “Uh... Oh?”

  “Yes.” She turned their steps across the square. Though originally intended as an ornament to offset by its spaciousness the intricate statuary that covered the Guildhall in a fashion regrettably reminiscent of her sister’s wedding cake, the square had become over the years a choked and clamorous marketplace of dealers in used clothing and vendors of secondhand household goods. “I came across one of the poems you wrote about Alix. It’s very good.”

  She said it to see what color he would turn—a very becoming carnation, as it happened. Much prettier than Spenson’s blotchy vermilion.

  But he only said, “You didn’t show it... Your father hasn’t seen it, has he?”

  “Well, he may have taken to searching her dresser, but I’m quite sure if he had, we’d all have heard about it by this time. How is it that, with a talent for poetry such as you obviously have, you’re still whipping meringues and grating orange rinds for Imper Joblin?”