The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “I suggest you speak to your friend the Bishop, then. Another hundred crowns or so should—”

  “Be silent!”

  Kyra raised her eyes languidly to meet his, schooling her face to the armor of unconcern. Despite having had no lunch and only noodles for breakfast, she found she had lost all interest in food.

  His wide, square mouth, so like hers, grew taut; Binnie whispered, “Gordam, please.”

  “I don’t know why you came back to this house. God knows you had little enough use for us when you left.” The china rang softly with the tremor of his fork against it. “You’ve brought nothing but trouble in your wake, and I won’t have you undoing all the care I’ve taken to guarantee an heir for my business, all the pains I’ve taken to increase our family’s credit and to establish your sister as she deserves. She’s going to have everything that a woman could ask for.”

  “Ah, but the question is, Did she ask for it?” Kyra ate another mouthful of quail just to demonstrate that he hadn’t upset her, then set down her knife and fork with a crisp clink.

  Bitterly, he said, “I gave you what you asked for, girl, and it nearly cost me everything I had.”

  Well, Kyra admitted to herself back in the yellow guest room later, I can’t argue with him there.

  She had been thirteen when first she had begun to dream of magic.

  ...pushing out of me like flowers from the ground, Algeron had said of his poems, of his love for Alix.

  Kyra turned her scrying-crystal over in her fingers, letting the images she’d been seeking in it scatter in the flash of the candlelight. The Inquisition must have equipped its spies with talismans of scry-ward as well as spells of Who-Me?... They couldn’t possibly be using the few mages they have for routine surveillance of a wizard new to the town. It was unlikely they’d detected any jiggery-pokery with the front steps; if they had, they’d have moved on her at once. Still, their presence—their nosiness—irked her.

  She let the anger pass.

  Pushing out like flowers from the ground.

  Not flowers, she thought. Chicks within the egg, when their life quickened and they knew they must break the shell or die.

  She sighed and moved a little closer to the stove. She hoped that the man in the brown coat and anyone else observing the house were shivering miserably in their places of concealment. The night was cold for spring. She was aware of a malicious desire to summon rain or sleet but let that also pass.

  Even now she could remember that first dream so clearly.

  Kyra had never dreamed much as a child. When she did, her dreams were completely prosaic: sewing sleeves on a dress, embroidering a cuff and having to pick the stitches out... She’d never been the expert seamstress Alix was even at the age of seven. Once she dreamed of adding up the month’s ledgers and neglected to do it the following day out of a bone-deep conviction that she’d already accomplished the task. Working trigonometric proofs. That particular night she dreamed that she’d been driven home late from one of the dancibles given by the banker Janson Milpott: an accurate recollection, down to the color of the dress she was wearing—the outlandish ocher yellow with a spreading linen collar like an antique fop’s—and her sense of nagging depression at having spent most of the evening among her girlfriends, keeping them in gales of laughter with her sarcasm but unwanted by any of the boys.

  But in the dream she had been alone in the carriage, and when she had arrived at the house, it had been to find the place dark. She had thought, even dreaming, that she must have been a good deal later than she supposed. The front door opened under her hand, but no Briory, no footman, no parent came to meet her in the great front hall in a comforting blaze of yellow candlelight. The vast room stretched before her, black and echoing as a cavern a thousand feet below the ground. The silence frightened her.

  So she had held out her right hand and summoned a ball of glowing white light to her palm, its rays shimmering to every corner of the hall, driving back the darkness and the fear.

  Waking, she had sat up in her bed for a long time, staring into the moonless darkness beyond the bedposts and listening to Alix’s breathing, soft among the clouds of linen and goose down at her side.

  She hadn’t told anyone about that dream. The next one didn’t come to her until nearly six months later, when she dreamed that she’d lost Alix in the crowds along the river quays. Losing Alix was a fairly common dream for her in those days, for she often took the little girl with her when she went trawling through the secondhand book barrows, and the silly child wouldn’t stay where she was told.

  But after the usual growing anxiety, the usual horrible desperation of the dream search that always before had ended with Kyra waking herself up in a queasy sweat with a sense of disaster narrowly averted, she had gone to the nearest junk dealer’s stall and purchased a mirror—she even remembered what she paid for it in the dream and recalled thinking what a bargain it was at three coppers. And passing her hand across its face, she had called Alix’s image to it and had seen her sister trying to feed vegetable parings out of the gutter to the caged rabbits of a meat dealer with a red canopy over his stall.

  The red canopy had been clearly visible above the crowds. Kyra had gone over to it, mirror still in hand, and there, for the first time in any losing-Alix dream, she had found her sister.

  She had waked again in the darkness, knowing that the dream had been a true one.

  Sliding out from under the light cotton sheets that were all they could bear in the sticky Angelshand summers, Kyra had ducked from beneath the mosquito bar and tiptoed across the room in the darkness to the dressing table. Picking up her mirror, she passed her hand across it as she had done in the dream and tried to will to it the images of her parents, who were sleeping several rooms away.

  When she had seen in it the pale gray shape of the window in their room, outlined in the darkness but unmistakable by its scrolled fanlight, she had put the mirror down quickly and gone back to bed. For another three months she’d managed to make herself believe that this sequel had actually been part of the dream.

  But the dreams hadn’t gone away. After she started menstruating, they increased in frequency and concreteness, nagging at her with a certainty that she did her best to bury beneath her studies of mathematics and the sciences. She had long been used to the idea that she was, at fourteen, regarded as a bluestocking and therefore would never be one of the beautiful girls, the courted girls, the laughing beribboned flirts whose beaux begged for the flowers from their hair. She expected that her father would find some man for her to marry who wouldn’t get in her way too much and she’d go on pretty much as she was, helping her father run the five bakeries he owned and learning to be a corn broker herself.

  The idea that she was a witch had never entered her calculations.

  By law, there were strict limitations on the amount of property the mageborn could hold. By law, the mageborn could not enter any business that involved the employment of others, nor would any contract they signed be legal. By law, those born with the powers of magic could not marry.

  She had seen witches. Lying awake in bed, night after night while Alix slept, she would remember how her girlfriends whispered when Marin Corbina, the flamboyant and disreputable soothsayer who lived in the St. Creel district, walked by in her gypsy shawls and jangling jewelry; remember the strange, somber black figures of the reclusive Council wizards, glimpsed from a carriage window as she had been driven once past the place in the Old Quarter called the Mages’ Yard; remember the dirty sense of tumbledown poverty that seemed to hang about Tibbeth of Hale’s shop on Little Potticary Lane. Obviously none of them had any money. They dressed poorly and looked as if they lived on bread and herb tea, and people got out of their way as they passed.

  Her father would kill her.

  The thought of losing his love, of having him explode into one of his tempers, was a terror before which all her customary lemon-ice sangfroid melted to nothing.

  She couldn’
t tell him. Fourteen years old, the underpinnings of her life crumbling away like broken pilings in a flooding river, she sat awake and sweating in the darkness, listening to the silent sleep of the house all around her and the slow, chiming progress of the St. Farinox church clock.

  “Miss Kyra?”

  She raised her head, startled. In the half-open door stood the red-haired maid, glancing back over her shoulder as if fearing to be interrupted or overheard. The small noises of the footmen clearing up after dinner had long since ceased. Through the half-open window casements, the air smelled of river fog.

  Kyra pressed her hands to her temples, which had begun to ache, too tired to be angry with herself for letting the time drift away as she had. Merrivale should be finished with her more pressing duties by this time. She’d be able to question her unobserved.

  “There’s a man to see you, down the kitchen door,” the maid said softly. “A toff, he is; he says not to let no one know.”

  “Thank you...” She searched her mind and remembered the harpsichord player’s voice gasping “Lily” through the wall of the parlor. “Thank you, Lily.” She hoped that was correct.

  The maid got quickly out of her way and disappeared through the door that led to the back stairs; Kyra caught the nervous look in her eye. One of the stock sources of tales about wizards, of course, was their former servants. By the time she was fourteen, Kyra had heard them all. She sighed as she followed the same way the girl had gone, down the pitch-dark back stairs to the kitchens.

  The curious servant who opened the forbidden door and found assorted body parts, sometimes, but not always, including those of wife, children, or acquaintances.

  The dishonest servant who stole some trifle that later came alive to engulf him or her in a dreadful retribution. (That should teach the little pest to steal from his betters.)

  The servant whose mind and will were taken away by the sorcerer’s smokes and perfumes and who assisted in unspeakable—but nevertheless exhaustively described—atrocities.

  The servant who was hired with promises of riches and later was sacrificed or almost sacrificed to demons.

  Kyra wondered whether, when those stories were whispered in the servants hall these days—as she was absolutely certain they were—Briory and Merrivale and the others who had known her from girlhood spoke in her defense or simply produced even more chilling anecdotes of their own.

  The man waited for her near the gate, far from the misty yellow glow of the kitchen doorway and the flickerings of candle- and lanternlight around the pit of the cellar doors. She need not, she noted with relief, have worried about whether Merrivale would still be awake at this hour. Late as it was, the housekeeper and Briory were supervising the disposition of the 120 pounds of cake ice that had arrived while the family was at dinner. The cobbles of the yard gleamed with puddles, and a drippy trail led between the pile of ice blocks and the cellar, embroidered in friezes of straw and sand.

  Kyra approached her visitor cautiously. She had pilfered her father’s heaviest stick from the rear hallway on her way through and held it half-hidden behind her back. If she had time to scream, she supposed that Briory and the others would come hotfoot to her assistance, but there was no telling how many might be waiting outside the gate. The one she saw clung close to its shadows.

  Darkness had never presented Kyra with a problem, but the fog blurred his outline until she was close to him, and she kept warily beyond the reach of his arm. He was masked and wore a hooded black cloak, but his chin and lips were young, so young, she noted automatically, that they still boasted a pimple or two. The lock of hair straggling from under his hood was mouse-brown and of the telltale wispy consistency that hinted of a premature retreat. The wool of his cape was high-grade worsted at six crowns a yard. The perfume that imbued his gloves was nearly a royal an ounce, sandalwood and cloves, with a touch of musk. The gloves themselves were stamped with gold.

  Not the Inquisition, she thought, and relaxed just slightly. The sheer cost of his apparel definitely set him apart from the man in the sloppy brown coat who’d trailed her to the market and back—had it only been this afternoon? Certainly he was no colleague of the two roughs in the cab.

  “Mistress Kyra Peldyrin?”

  Kyra glanced back over each of her shoulders in turn. “I hardly think that, having been paid half a crown for her trouble, Lily would have made a mistake about who she brought.”

  The young man looked severely taken aback, though Kyra knew that half a crown was considered an extravagant but acceptable tip. The next largest single coin was a crown, and Lily would have been even more awed if he had tipped her that much. It would have been a copper if the errand had been respectable.

  The young man stammered, “Is it—it is true you are a witch, isn’t it?”

  Irritation flashed in her like a skin rash, wrought of keyed-up uncertainty and the frustration of being, at day’s end, no closer to knowing what was afoot than she had been when she had set forth that morning. She leaned on the stick and raised her brows ironically. “You certainly wouldn’t have chosen a damp milieu like this one for a meeting if you didn’t believe that already.” Definitely not the Inquisition, unless it was an effort to entrap her. But if it was, it was incredibly clumsy.

  He hesitated, nonplussed. He was expecting her to ask, What can I do for you? so she didn’t, merely regarded him with acerbic amber eyes and waited for him to speak. It was mildly entertaining to watch him try to come in without an opening.

  “Mistress Kyra, I’ll be brief.”

  “Please do. It’s chilly, and I have things to do.”

  A pale tongue stole out and wet the Cupid’s-bow lips. “How much... I have with me a purse of a hundred royals. It’s yours, if you’ll weave a love-spell upon... upon your sister, causing her to forsake Blore Spenson and love me.”

  Kyra tipped her head a little to one side. “Does she know you?”

  He blushed. He didn’t do it nearly as attractively as Algeron Brackett. “I have known her—that is, I have worshiped her for years.”

  “And you didn’t mention it to our father?”

  “No—yes—my heart is breaking...”

  “You don’t sound as if your heart were breaking,” Kyra remarked calmly, and scratched at a fleck of dirt on the stick’s brass horse-hoof handle. “You sound rather nervous and incompletely rehearsed. I assume that without theurgic assistance, neither Alix nor Father thinks much of your suit.”

  “A hundred fifty royals,” he persisted, somewhat single-mindedly, Kyra thought.

  “Oh, do you have a holdout purse in case I run the price up?”

  “Don’t toy with a man whose... whose soul is perishing of grief, Mistress Kyra.”

  “I think the line is ‘from grief.’ It’s from The Inflexible Uncle, isn’t it?”

  “No! A hundred fifty royals now and another hundred after the wedding—that’s all I can give you, truly.”

  “The other hundred presumably to come out of my sister’s dowry?” Kyra finished her examination of the stick’s handle. “That’s rather crass. I take it the dowry—and the connections with my father’s brokerage—are what prompted this investment in the cause of unrequited love in the first place. No, please don’t offer me a draft on your bank. Think how embarrassing it would be if I were to blackmail you later on the strength of the signature, not to mention the fact that at a guess there are insufficient funds to cover it.”

  “Then what do you want?” the young man demanded, losing his temper and every trace of loverlike demeanor. The lower lip pushed out unbecomingly under the pathetic attempt at a mustache. “I know that for a woman like you a spell to make a girl love a man is nothing, a bagatelle. And it isn’t as if I’ll treat her badly or that she’ll live in poverty—all it will take is her father’s connections, and her dowry, to recoup our fortunes. And I’m certainly more to a girl’s liking than some fat elderly pen pusher.”

  “If you think Blore Spenson is fat, elderly, or a mere
smatterer in other people’s money,” Kyra retorted with a sudden surge of anger that completely erased her own earlier reservations about Master Spenson, “you clearly are too inattentive or too prejudiced to recoup any family’s fortunes. Now, I suggest, if your family fortunes are in need of recouping, you take your hundred fifty royals and invest it in one of Master Spenson’s spice ships, and that will pay you considerably better in the long run than marrying my sister. Or was that borrowed, too?”

  He flushed again. “Very well,” he said with an attempt to recover some of his dignity. “If you won’t oblige me, I’ll find someone who will.”

  And he melted away into the fog. A few minutes later Kyra heard the clatter of a gig’s iron wheels in the street beyond the wall of the narrow yard. She wondered if he’d actually find a dog wizard foolhardy enough to risk her father’s prosecution and shook her head.

  Six years wasn’t such a long time. Every dog wizard in the city would remember.

  But the thought troubled her as she swung the stick over her shoulder like a shotgun and turned back to the house. She felt exhausted at the triviality of the incident and a hundred years old.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” she heard the dark-haired maid, whatever her name was, saying as she approached the rear steps. “My sister knew this woman who was hired as a maidservant by a wizard in Parchasten, and he forbade her ever to go into this one chamber up at the top of his house, but she used to hear noises coming out of it—”

  Abrupt silence fell as Kyra entered the kitchen once again. The girl nearly dropped the goblet she was drying—the last of the supper dishes—and covered her mouth with her hand; the harpsichord player hastily took his feet off the kitchen table and the maid Lily off his lap. Algeron, who was cleaning the last bits of straw and sand from the rear steps, tried to look as if he hadn’t been listening to such things.

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” Kyra said blithely as she walked through, cane over her shoulder, in a thick rustle of stiff green and purple skirts. “Do go on.”

  In the drying room next door Merrivale was writing wedding announcements to be sent out in the morning while the faded, tired-looking laundrywoman ironed sheets. The room was hazed with the smell of steam and linen and soap and thick with heat from the stove where the irons ranged. Briory had gone to bed, leaving a list of directions behind; the half-darkened room was filled with an air of finishing up, of small details that had been put aside in the midst of larger concerns.