The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Spenson, too, was quiet, as if, like her, he felt an intruder’s unlawful power. “It’s like those old legends of death visiting the house,” he murmured, standing in the doorway while Kyra moved about in the shadows of her parents’ bedroom, her fingers flickering guiltily over her father’s shaving things, pushing through her mother’s pastel clothing to touch the back of the armoire. “Each taken where he stood, in the midst of what he did. Or like those stories where everyone is turned to stone.”

  “They’re only sleeping,” Kyra said rather too quickly. “And Foodret’s going to be ready to slit his wrists when he wakes up and realizes he actually fell asleep on his master’s bed.” She looked indulgently down at the dapper, elderly valet, lying across the foot of the bed whose sheets he had been turning down when the spell had taken effect.

  In the drawing room next door her mother and Briory sat on either side of the dying fire, snoring gently, each with a lapdog curled like a golden muff upon her knees. On the tea table between them lay plates of half-eaten wedding sweets and a couple of glasses of wine. Both women looked exhausted. In the small dining room they found Merrivale and another footman lying like slain soldiers upon the piles of now-useless garlands in front of the ritualry consecrated tub. It seemed incredible to Kyra that she had listened only that morning to her mother, aunts, and cousins stumbling through soft-voiced chants on Alix’s behalf. The handwritten notes of the appropriate Texts still lay on the sideboard with the required linen towels and consecrated—and extremely expensive—herbal soap.

  At the foot of the back stairs the laundry maid, her head back and her mouth open in nearly soundless snores, sat on the floor with her lap full of newly ironed napkins.

  “Will they all wake at once?”

  Kyra shook her head, passing her hand over the panels of the door to the back stairs, though she suspected that if the Ill-Eye had been drawn there, she would have felt it before. “A few at a time, I think. The servants first, to spare Father getting angry at them.”

  In the attic they found the musicians in a sleepy tangle of wine goblets and maids. Kyra picked up one of the empty clay bottles from the table and shook her head over it. “Father’s best Chablis.”

  Spens frowned. “You don’t think the threat came into the house with the musicians, do you?” He viewed the still-life orgy before them doubtfully. “They’re newcomers to the household for the wedding.”

  Kyra laughed. “Them?” Still, she checked over the room carefully, then touched, each in turn, those four disparate young faces and probed gently into their dreams. She found there innocent lust and startling poetry, longings, odd fears, old pain... but neither magic nor malice.

  In the next attic room, which was scarcely larger than a closet, she found Algeron Brackett, slumped fully clothed upon his bed, with Alix, her face wet with tears, sleeping in his arms. There was something heartbreakingly childlike about them, like playmates taking shelter from the rain together; Kyra pressed her fingers quickly to her lips.

  “Her poet?” Spenson asked softly, standing with fists on hips in the doorway, and she nodded. The candle—a leftover from the family’s use, like all the candles in the servants’ rooms—needed to be trimmed, and the ragged band of smoking flame threw a shuddering limmerance over the two young faces; the boy’s fair hair was unbound from its ribbon and lying over his shoulders, and the girl’s was a kinked swatch like the rapids of some sun-colored river, pouring in half a dozen channels over the protective circle of his arm.

  “Poor things,” Kyra said softly. “Even with the wedding called off, it won’t help them, you know. He hasn’t a bean—well, neither has Alix, when it comes to that, only what Father will settle on her for her marriage portion. I’ll have them waken first to give her time to get back to her room. After the day she’s had, the last thing she needs is another fight with Father.”

  Quietly they descended the stairs.

  Though she had already searched Alix’s room and the schoolroom where Tibbeth of Hale had taught her, Kyra went through them again, touching wall panels, thresholds, furniture, the undersides of the stoves, running her hand among the pillows and comforters on the bed. She found nothing, though whether this was because there was truly nothing to find or whether she was now so weary that she would have been unable to detect a very subtle sign or some unknown form of magic, she did not know. Her temples throbbed with exhaustion as she dumped the wedding dress onto the floor and sat on the end of the bed, bowing her head almost to her knees, her disheveled red hair hanging over her face. Distantly, she heard the clock strike two.

  Warm hands closed over her shoulders. She flinched, startled, at the touch, but Spens ordered, “Hold still,” and his fingers kneaded gently at the big muscles of her nape. He didn’t, like Cylin when he gave neck rubs, work at killing his victim; there was a gentleness to his touch as well as strength, as if he knew how sore the muscles were from the tension of all that had happened that day. Kyra groaned profoundly and then was silent for some time.

  “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She straightened up gingerly and felt at the back of her neck. The candles had been lit on Alix’s dressing table but, like those in the mean attic rooms upstairs, were burning badly, the wicks trailing down the sides in ragged pennons of guttering flame. She looked around, wearily, helplessly, at the familiar room, the milky silks of the counterpane and curtains, the familiar loom of the armoire with its decorative scrollwork along the top and its beautiful porcelain handles, the low, squat shape of the blue-tiled stove.

  “We should have found something. Once we find a mark, you see, we can trace it back to the wizard and then to the one who paid him to place it—whether it’s Fyster Nyven or Dutton Droon or one of the other great merchants.”

  “Except neither Nyven nor Droon believes in magic.” Spenson moved over to the dressing table, his shadow reeling along the ceiling behind him like a drunken giant. Picking up the pincers and candle scissors, he began to trim the wicks. “Most people don’t unless they’ve had contact with it. I’ve heard both of them going on about how the Inquisition should be disbanded as useless. Your father probably didn’t until you came to him and told him you’d been born a witch.”

  Kyra was silent, remembering things her father had said when she was a child. “He didn’t exactly disbelieve, but... like a lot of people, he didn’t think it was anything that had to be taken seriously.”

  “Maybe it’s some other sort of threat,” he said. “You said you felt her to be on the edge of despair in her love for Algeron.” He glanced back at her, his blue eyes grave.

  “Well, initially it occurred to me you might murder her.”

  “I only seriously considered it for fifteen minutes while she and the Wishrom girl were talking about styling their hair.”

  The grin that passed between them faded. “Somehow I can’t see Alix... harming herself. She’s always been too... happy in her heart.”

  He raised his brows a little. “You don’t think girls who are happy one week take their own lives the next when that happiness is shattered?”

  “No... But for another thing, Alix has always been too sensible. I mean, the sensible thing to do is marry you—or whomever it’s going to be now—and take Algeron as her lover.”

  “Can you seriously see Alix doing that?”

  She was silent, thinking about her sister, about Algeron. “No,” she said at last. “No, I can’t. At least, not going into marriage with that in mind.”

  “Is it what you’d do?”

  “Great heavens, no.” Kyra straightened her back, startled at the suggestion. “But then, I wouldn’t put myself in that position to begin with. If I didn’t want to marry a man, I wouldn’t convince myself that I did. And I don’t see what you’re smiling at,” she added a little indignantly.

  He obediently grew serious and returned to trimming wicks. The smell of beeswax filled the room above the all-pervasive scents of potpourri and dying wedding flowers.

/>   “The thing is,” she went on, “Alix is stronger than that. There’s a life in her, a strength that wouldn’t break like that.”

  “I admit I’ve only seen her when she’d been nattering on.” Spenson turned back toward her, folded his arms, and leaned his shoulders against the carved bedpost with its inlay of nacre and glass.

  “Oh, Alix is always nattering,” Kyra said. “Neither she nor Mother ever shuts up. I can’t imagine how Father’s kept his sanity all these years. But don’t let that lead you to think she’s featherbrained. I know she talks even more when she’s nervous, which she must have been, knowing you were to marry her, and she tries to cover up the other person’s silences.”

  The erstwhile groom smiled. “When I’m nervous, I go quiet. And believe me, I was, getting ready to wed the one girl and having the most astoundingly erotic dreams about some little cat I’d met twice in my life. It’s not that I’ve never dreamed of ladies before, but never like that. When I met your sister, I could barely look her in the face.”

  “She’d have made you a good wife, you know,” Kyra said after a moment. “Better than me if you’re going to settle into running the business and the guild. She’s far from silly. She has a positive talent for dressmaking—I know she even altered the fit on her wedding dress, which, given the way Hylette designs, is a miracle to do without destroying the appearance of the thing. But you’d never know it.”

  She bent down and picked up the gorgeous blood-colored overdress, turning the jeweled bodice over in her hands.

  And for a moment she felt it, as surely as she would have felt dampness, as surely as she would have smelled wood smoke trapped in the folds of the silk—the taint of dark magic. It jolted her, though it was barely a whisper, certainly not strong enough to harm anyone no matter how long it was in the room with them.

  But the whisper was there. It was a stain of ill left by the curse.

  Swiftly she turned the bodice inside out, tangling her fingers in the lacings, snagging bullion embroidery with shaking fingernails. Seeing her expression change, Spens came swiftly over. He watched with a grave face while she ran first her fingertips and palms, then her cheek and lips over the white muslin that lined and gave shape to the silk.

  “There was something.” She touched her lips to the place again but felt nothing now. “It’s been near the curse, picked it up.”

  It just stands there watching me, Alix had said of the gown on its stand.

  “Here? In this room?”

  “I don’t know.” She put the dress down, walked to the wicker stand itself, and ran her fingers slowly, carefully over the varnished willow. No trace, no taint of what she had felt on the dress.

  Turning around, she saw Spens holding out to her handfuls of fragile saffron veils. The scent, the taint, on them was so dim that it took her twenty minutes to find it, and then it might only have been her overkeyed imagination. She checked the wedding jewelry over stone by stone, but beryl and tourmaline were stones that held strong vibrations of their own, and any slight vibration of another spell would have been lost beneath them like a single narcissus in a roomful of jasmine.

  “I don’t know how it could be,” she said uncertainly, and stood, her impulse to search the room a third time halting before the thoroughness of her earlier hunts. “I would have felt it. Something that... that definite. I know I would have.”

  She touched the bodice again, trying to deepen her awareness of the curse, to tell at least if it was Pinktrees or the Pilgrim who had drawn the signs of evil there. But the stain of malignancy was no stronger than the faintest breath, like music too distant to make out even the tune, let alone the voice of the singer. She laid it aside and prowled the room again, running her hands through the sheets of the bed, touching the white curtains, the backs of the lace window shams, every jewel in Alix’s open case.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  “Could the talisman be elsewhere, not in the house at all?” Spenson asked, kneeling suddenly beside her when she came to a stop to stoop and feel underneath the armoire. “Someplace she goes all the time—Wishrom’s house next door or Hylette’s shop? It seems like every time I talked to her, she’d been back to that woman’s place for another fitting. You said the talisman might have been under a threshold she had to cross.”

  “Dear God, you’re right.” She sat back amid a dusty lake of skirts and ran an unsteady hand through her hair. Her head had begun to throb again, more painfully than ever. “She’s been shopping like a lunatic for weeks. She must have been in and out of every boutique and bazaar in the city.”

  “It makes more sense in a way,” Spenson pointed out, settling cross-legged beside her. “Not to have it in the house, I mean. My guess would be either this Hylette woman’s shop... or Lady Earthwygg’s.”

  Kyra stared at him, startled that the idea hadn’t occurred to her. “Of course.”

  “For that matter,” he added suddenly, “what about the wedding carriage itself? If whoever put the curse knew the marriage was going to be in the strict form, the carriage itself would be a guaranteed trigger for the night of the wedding.”

  “Let’s go!”

  Kyra felt light-headed and brittle with exhaustion as she and Spens ran down the stairs, her skirts streaming behind her. It was the first time she had worked this many different spells of this intensity consecutively; even examinations didn’t drain the student like this. The only time she recalled feeling this bone-shaking exhaustion had been a year ago, during the magic troubles at the Citadel. And then she had had her masters to back her up.

  The carriage proved to contain no trace of magic at all. “Hylette’s,” Spenson said, standing with his arms folded, one foot propped on the wheel. “Or Lady Earthwygg’s, though how you’re going to search her house...”

  “It would only have to be the drawing room and the front hall.” Kyra scrambled awkwardly down from the high footman’s perch. “Those are the only rooms Alix would have entered.” She sighed again, weary beyond measure. “Come on. Let’s get these spells lifted so I can get some sleep myself.”

  She raised the spells of sleep a few at a time, picturing in her mind what she had seen: first Alix and Algeron so that her sister could return to bed in her own room; then, with time limitations set by the chiming of the St. Farinox clock so that they would come to wakefulness half an hour later and a few at a time, from servants and parents, musicians and maids, cats and mice, and all that dwelled beneath the slanted, pigeon-smeared tiles of the roof.

  Last of all she took back the silver coin from Spenson and removed the sigils from it and the one she carried. Being caught by the Inquisition with such things on them was enough to get her in genuine trouble. What she had done tonight was hideously illegal by anybody’s standards; she only hoped that the Inquisition was relying on its on-site watchers rather than the exhausting and energy-consuming process of “listening” to the magic in the world at large. The chance was slim, she knew, but she had risked, literally, everything that meant anything to her in her life on it: her education as a wizard, her future in her art, perhaps her liberty. Her hands were shaking by the time she finished dispersing the last traces of the invisible circles that had powered the spell.

  “We’ll give them an hour or so to get to bed properly,” Spenson said, unexpectedly taking her elbow as she stood up and brushed away the last of her tracks in the soft earth of the garden bed.

  “What?” She only blinked at him, too shaky to think.

  “I think we deserve breakfast, don’t you?”

  “At this hour?”

  “We’ll take a cab to Algoswiving Street.” He shrugged. “Where do you think the rakes and gamblers dine when they’re done for the night? There’s a tavern there that’s the best in town if you’re not particular about your company.”

  If Tibbeth of Hale had stayed away from Alix, Kyra wasn’t sure what she would eventually have done. He was her teacher, her friend. Between scorching fits of sham
e and rage she missed him with a growing intensity and missed the practice of magic even more. Her own practice, studying by herself the books she had bought, was not the same without his instruction and guidance. When she read new spells and tried them out unsuccessfully, she had no idea what she was doing wrong. When she found new books, she could not tell whether information that seemed contradictory was true or claptrap, and there was a great deal of claptrap magic being written and sold. Other spells, other writings, simply made no sense.

  Yet she shrank from seeking another teacher. She knew by that time that Tibbeth was one of the best dog wizards in the city; she knew also that to seek out the Council wizards in their little enclave in the Mages’ Yard would be to announce to the world at large that she was mageborn.

  Her father, negotiating with colleagues still deeply suspicious—or completely unbelieving—of wizardry in general, would never have forgiven her. He would have asked, too, why she wanted to exchange a very powerful teacher for a lesser one.

  So she kept silent, as Tibbeth had known she would. At times she found it impossible to believe that she had seen what she had seen. Not Tibbeth. Not Alix. She must have been mistaken or dreaming.

  And in time, the hurt of not seeing him, not practicing, not having his instruction, grew so great that she considered going back to him in spite of the fact that she knew that she had made no mistake.

  Her father crowed at her, too, over her abandonment of Tibbeth’s teaching. “I always said you’d get over it, girl.” That was like an ant bite, with the ant’s head still stuck under the skin.