The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “Do you mean you know you shouldn’t want to?”

  “Yes!” she’d sobbed, furious with herself for such stupidity. “I do want to—about half the time! And the other half...” She slapped angrily at the streams of water running down her chin and jaw, and Tibbeth leaned across to her—he was sitting on the raised bricks of the hearth—and handed her another handkerchief, as her own two had been reduced to soggy rags.

  “My dear, I’m so sorry,” he said gently. Taking her hands, he looked up into her white face, which already bore the marks of strain and exhaustion. “I wish I could give you some grounds upon which to make a choice, wish I could tell you that you have a choice. But wizardry...” He hesitated, and she saw the echoes of his own ancient unhappinesses, his own struggles to decide which side of a divided heart to follow.

  “Wizardry has a way of hurting those who are born with it who do not develop their talents.” In the corner the green parrot he kept caged scratched its yellow poll and muttered half a dozen words from a love-spell. “Some do it, especially those whose inborn powers are not all that great. But more often than not they are wretched. I know. I was nearly twenty before I admitted to myself that the yearnings, the thoughts, that came and went in alternation with my more sensible moments were not going to go away.”

  Kyra turned from him, staring out the distorting panes of the bull’s-eye glass window at the row of houses opposite—tall, narrow-fronted, the soot that blackened their brick or half-timbering broken here and there by the vivid pink of window-box geraniums or by white bed linen hung out to air. She whispered, “Damn.”

  “Would you like to think about it and come back?” There was a gentleness to him, a deep patience; Kyra felt that if she’d thrown herself into the armchair near the window and announced her intention of staying there until she’d thought the matter through, he would simply have remained by the hearth, toasting muffins and making tea for however many hours it took her.

  She shook her head and pushed tiredly at the hairpins that had come undone from her auburn mane. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come,” she said, her deep voice steady now, though rather subdued. She wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks. “It’s sometimes hard to get away.”

  “Would you like me to teach you a spell for that?” And his eyes twinkled at her look of astonished enlightenment.

  She’d gone to him two or three times a week after that. Sometimes she told her parents she was going shopping or browsing through the old-book stalls along the river. Sometimes she merely left a spell behind her that caused everyone in the house to think that they’d seen her minutes ago and she was just in another room. He sent books home with her so that she could study and memorize the movements of the moon and stars; Angelshand in autumn was seldom clear enough for direct study, though when he’d taught her sufficient weather-witching to help, they summoned a light wind that swept the clouds aside one midnight, while they sat at the window of his pepper-pot roof turret with a telescope. He taught her the properties of the healing herbs that grew in the tiny yard behind his house and how to use them for medicines, poisons, and love-philters; how to witch them so their properties were strengthened; how to summon to them constellations of chance and happenstance, the slight tilting of the balances of the universe in favor of one event over another. In his little workroom behind the study she learned to use a crucible and a gem cutter’s wheel and to tan leather for ritual use—learned what metals and crystals were best for which sorts of talismans and how to write words in silver on leather to summon anger, or docility, or sleep in those who passed near.

  He taught her how to draw power up from the core of her being, from blood heat and breath, how to drink it in from the air around her, from sunlight and starlight and the motion of the tides.

  He taught her the words to speak to control this power, the movements of her hands to concentrate her mind, the paths of power that ran through every human body, every leaf, every feather, every rock and river.

  “A wizard’s greatest power lies in illusion,” he said to her once. “Simple things, mostly. Most people’s lives are lived half in illusion, anyway, so turning it a little here and there is no difficult feat.”

  She frowned. “I don’t live in illusion.”

  “Don’t you?” He smiled. “What an exceptional young lady. What color are your housekeeper’s eyes?”

  Kyra was silent, taken aback. She’d known Merrivale all her life, but though she could conjure the woman’s warm lap and the slow, sweet drawl of her voice, she found herself unable to visualize that detail of Merrivale’s face.

  “If you were to be walking along the quays buying books and one of your footmen, on his day off, not wearing his livery, were at the same stall beside you, would you recognize him? Or would you simply slip your mind past him, as you slip it past him from day to day in your house, he being a footman, not a real man. And I know that you, Kyra, are more observant than most.”

  “Brown,” Kyra said at last. “Her eyes are brown. Though to tell you the truth, I couldn’t say whether the cook’s are brown or blue.” Nor, unless she thought about it, what the names of the scullions were; she thought one of them was something like Pib or Tib, but maybe that was the stable boy.

  “Very good.” Tibbeth smiled, a warm lifting of all the lines of his face. “But how many of the people you know could answer the question even after a little thought?”

  Kyra thought about the young men who danced with her, the cluster of girls, all half-afraid of her, half-awed, in gales of giggles at her dry comments, which she now realized suddenly were always barbed and cruel.

  “And from that,” Tibbeth went on gently, “it is easy to move the mind of—say—some boy you danced with last night, to think that instead of you walking through a room, it’s someone he doesn’t need to take any notice of, a footman or a chambermaid. Though it’s an illusion that won’t hold if he’s on the lookout for a shapely chambermaid or—although surely no young gentlemen of good family would indulge in such interests—a handsome little page.” And his eyes twinkled mischievously again as Kyra sniffed.

  “And once those spells are mastered,” he went on after a moment, “a very good mage can put the illusion into the mind of the subject and make him or her see what he most expects, whatever it is—a cat, or the cook’s helper, or whatever, though quite frankly I’m not good enough to do that every time, and it’s far safer for me to pick what the subject will see. But as you will find, it’s also quite easy to keep the subject from seeing anything at all. A noise at the other end of the room... a violent sneeze... a sudden itch on the bottom of the foot or the abrupt and overwhelming conviction that there’s something in the other room that has to be done that moment...”

  He smiled and spread his big hands, his delight in the small turns and maneuverings of happenstance beaming from his face. “It’s all very simple.”

  And so it was. Everything was that first winter of wonder, discovery, and joy.

  Kyra sighed and got to her feet. Time was pressing; she had wasted too much already. Later, she promised herself wearily, she could rest. Later, when she knew Alix was safe.

  From down the gallery she could hear Esmin Earthwygg’s voice, which had formed a kind of brassy tinkling behind all her ruminations: “...darling, don’t you know anything? His mother slept with the Duke of Spinnaky; that explains how his family got the contracts for the Bureau of Pleasures! They say that his sister is the living image of the old duke, in more ways than one. She picks her footmen for their looks.” Esmin giggled. “Just like the old duke did!”

  “Esmin, that’s the awfulest thing I ever heard!”

  “Goose! It’s the truth, and it’s all over the Court.”

  As she strolled down the gallery, Kyra glanced into the drawing room, where Esmin, thin and fox-faced in extremely becoming oyster-colored silk, shared a love seat with Alix. The mothers of the two girls sat some distance off, doing fancy needlework by the small fireplace.
Most of the rooms in the house had the more modem stoves, but the drawing room, as a fashionable showplace, retained the older—and more tonnish—means of heating. Binnie Peldyrin had her embroidery frame before her and was working deftly with her silks, chatting effortlessly with her guest about so-called garden wall-style panniers as opposed to the hooped style, but Kyra could see by her occasional glances at the ormolu clock that she was thinking about all the preparations for the wedding—garlands to be braided through the banisters, tables to be set in the hall—that could go forward the moment Lady Earthwygg took herself out the front door.

  The house would be topsy-turvy for the day.

  Casually, Kyra strolled into the drawing room, where a tea tray had been placed before each pair of ladies. “Alix, darling,” she said, “I’m just off to do some shopping in town. Can I get you anything?”

  Esmin giggled furiously; Alix glanced up at her with a smile of genuine warmth and pleasure at the sight of her. “No, I’m fine, thank you.”

  With every appearance of unconcern, Kyra picked up in turn each of the pale blue and white teacups on the tray, feeling through their tepid sides for the taint of something besides the finest leaf obtainable from the wilds of Saarieque.

  But the pale liquid felt normal. The reading of tea leaves was considered by the Academics the crassest of dog-wizard tricks—even Tibbeth had looked down on it—so Kyra could only wonder what the delicate patterns strewed wetly on the bottom of the cup might have meant.

  “Not flowers?” she inquired innocently, as if the basement weren’t chockablock with them, and as she’d hoped, Alix’s eyes twinkled with more genuine amusement at the jest.

  “Maybe one or two.”

  “Oh, how can you say that, Alix? You know you have all the flowers you want down in the servants’ quarters!”

  Around Esmin’s uncomprehending chatter, the sisters exchanged a grin, and Kyra strolled out again. As she descended the stair, she thought about the Sigils of Protection. She could lay spells upon a ring that would cause it to heat if it touched any vessel that contained poison.

  But the drawing of such a sigil would be detectable if the Inquisition had an even moderately strong wizard monitoring the house. And if she were arrested, even jailed for a night...

  Kyra wondered how close Lady Earthwygg would sit to Alix during the wedding feast. Probably close, considering her position as the patron’s wife.

  Briory appeared in the doorway of the kitchen quarters, saw it was only Kyra, and shook her head. “Is that woman never getting out of here?” she whispered, and Kyra shrugged.

  “You could always have one of the maids start screaming ‘fire,’ ” she suggested, and Briory gave her a harried look.

  “That’s all we’d need.”

  “Yes, and like as not Father would blame me for it and have me driven out of town before he realized it wasn’t a genuine blaze.” She sighed. Curious, she thought as the butler went to fetch her cloak, that Lady Earthwygg had chosen today to come over and waste her mother’s time. Although it was the sort of thing Lady Earthwygg would do.

  But if Lady Earthwygg plans to poison Alix at the wedding feast, she thought with a grim smile as she descended the high front steps, she’s going to have a surprise in the morning.

  As, for that matter, will they all.

  It took her a few minutes and two changes of cabs to lose the Witchfinder following her; after stepping immediately out the door of the second and watching it rattle off with her pursuer in tow, she turned her steps back through the crowded streets near the harbor, in the direction of Little Queen Street.

  But habit, she found, was strong. Though circumstance had not taken her there for six years, she found herself turning, almost without thinking, down the alleys that led to Little Potticary Lane.

  Even after all these years the route was as familiar to her as the hallways of her father’s house. Every pothole on the pavement, every quirk and gambrel of the crowding houses that grew darker and shabbier as she walked eastward, the steely gleam of the river at the end of the streets to her right. Had she really strode along this granite flagway in the rain, clutching the cane handle of a borrowed umbrella, seriously thinking about not studying wizardry, after all? And then the next moment nearly bursting into tears with the joy of having it, feeling it, knowing that it was alive and glowing like daylight within her breast?

  For no particular reason, she wondered if Blore Spenson had ever experienced that kind of wild vacillation of emotion, that joy so deep that it was almost pain.

  And then wondered why on earth she’d wondered that.

  When first she had met him, she had assumed that he hadn’t, that he was only a merchant with a face like a meat pie and a soul to match. But though without a doubt he fought pirates and passed through the spice markets of the east as phlegmatically as he drove around cabs and circumvented boys rolling hoops, there was a good deal more to him than met the eye.

  Kindness behind the stiff silence, and uncertainty behind the strength.

  It would serve Lady Earthwygg right if he did marry her precious daughter instead of Alix. He wasn’t the man to take kindly to a mother-in-law’s airs, and his horrendous old father certainly wouldn’t put up with her ladyship’s gambling, much less an unexplained four-hundred-crown pension to a wizard. She smiled a little. If she were a dog wizard, she thought maliciously, she’d almost be tempted to do as her ladyship asked, just for the sake of the frustration and rage it would cause her the first time she tried to put something over on that deceptively quiet man.

  But over the satisfaction she felt in contemplating the poetic tightness of the situation came the awareness of the spreading lake of pain it would cause. Quite simply, she wouldn’t do a thing like that to Spens.

  As she had hoped, no one had bought the long, narrow lot halfway down Little Potticary Lane.

  The cellar, and the subcellar where Tibbeth had fermented his potions and his colorless little wife had stored her jams, yawned to the sky, half-filled with rubble and overgrown with the feral remains of the back garden. Automatically Kyra identified aloes and boneset, the brightly colored buttons of tansy and anemone like blood-sprinkled coins. Nettle grew everywhere: to avert danger and ward off ghosts. She could almost hear Tibbeth saying it as they walked in that vest-pocket walled garden, hemmed in by rickety tenements on all sides so that it was like being at the bottom of a well.

  What ghosts, she wondered, haunted that weedy ruin?

  She looked down into the cellar. Puddles at the bottom reflected a steely sky. The houses on either side were just the same, their garish, primitive murals a little more effaced with time and soot but their shabby window-box flowers still as bright. On the redder bricks of the adjoining house walls she could see the raggedy outlines of where the floors and stairway had been.

  Beggar children raced down the lane behind her, shrieking like birds. One of them, a girl no more than eight, dashed ahead of the others almost to the edge of the gaping cellar pit, laughing and clutching a broken toy horse in one hand. In the cool spring sunlight her dirty face was framed by a tousle of raven curls, and for one moment Kyra looked down into eyes that were huge and blue as the sea: a beautiful child.

  Then the girl veered from the empty ruin where Tibbeth’s house had been and fled. As Kyra’s friends had fled when the walls of the shop had still stood. A witch lives there...

  They had used his books, Kyra recalled wearily, to kindle the pyre they had burned him on.

  Closing her eyes, she turned away.

  Chapter X

  “OLD MAN PELDYRIN, PTUI!” The woman they called Hestie Pinktrees turned from the tiled stove of her little parlor with the almost processional grace sometimes acquired by the obese; it was like watching a willow tree pirouette upon its roots, sweeping furlongs of ruffled green skirts and petticoats festooned with lace. “I’ve never ill-wished a man yet, sweeting, but that crabbed old sourpuss made me wish that I could become the black witch you read about i
n fairy tales, just for five minutes! Will you take brown sugar, darling, or white, and do try these scones.”

  She crossed the small, cluttered room with dainty steps, two flat-faced, butter-colored cats fawning around her beaded slippers. Kyra, seated in the old-fashioned upholstered chair with a third cat purring on her lap, looked at the flowered lace curtains, the carefully tended potted plants on every windowsill, the mottled golden sunlight shawling a breakfront crowded with cards, magic mirrors, astrolabes, a famille rose pitcher containing dowsing rods, and dozens of porcelain and cut-glass perfume pots—at a guess containing the ingredients of the more common philters and spells—and mentally scratched her hostess off the list of threats to her sister’s life.

  Considering the relative shabbiness of the neighborhood—a dreary gray street of brick shotgun houses in the factory district south of the river, full of mud, pigs, and children—the place’s cozy, jewel-like prettiness was even more surprising.

  “Do you not ill-wish, then?” She put a very small note of disappointment in her voice as she picked up the tea and looked sidelong at the woman who’d been driven so unceremoniously out of the third-floor flat in Lesser Queen Street.

  Hestie Pinktrees shook her head. “My dear child... May I call you Snow-Tear?”

  “Snow-Tear?” Kyra said, startled.

  “Well, of course you know my customers never do tell me their real names.” Laugh dimples puckered the dog wizard’s apple cheeks. “And the snow-tear is a flower of the far edge of the northern ice, a place where you wouldn’t think flowers would grow at all. But every now and then, when they’ve had enough sunlight—and it has to be a great deal for them, as for so many who masquerade as tough-leaved shrubs—and enough protection from the bitterness of the winds, almost as if they’re unwilling to admit to it, they put out those beautiful pink-edged blossoms, which no one sees except those who venture up to the rocks and ice.”