The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  But still she would have kept her silence—or, looking back on it, she thought she would have—had not Tibbeth summoned Alix to him again.

  Just why Kyra had made herself a talisman to counter spells of sleep and wore it around her neck, she didn’t consciously explain to herself. If asked, she would have professed her wholehearted belief in Tibbeth’s honor, at least in his given word. It was the first time, too, that her spells had proved stronger than the spells of another wizard, the first time her power had gone up successfully against another power, though she didn’t think of that at the time.

  She wasn’t clear what she thought at first, waking to see the moonlight in a hard, clear bar across the foot of her bed, so vivid that she felt she could have plucked it up and wound it around her like a veil. And in that moonlight, only the thrown-back coverlet and dented pillow where Alix had lain.

  Then anger rushed through her, a wave of killing heat, like throwing open the door of a stove. It was as if she knew, absolutely and at once, what had happened and where her sister had gone.

  She rose soundlessly, pulled on her robe, and intercepted Alix at the foot of the long stair down into the hall. Her sister’s eyes were open but filled with a dreamy, wanton glassiness; they did not focus on Kyra as she stopped her and put her hands to the alabaster temples beneath the cascades of moon-bleached hair.

  The dream of Tibbeth was there, and it was foul. It fled away before Kyra’s touch like roaches before light, but not before she had read in it reveries that the most unclean of prostitutes would not have entertained: a man’s reveries, not a woman’s. Even at the age of eighteen Kyra was aware of the difference between men’s dreams and women’s, on that subject at least.

  She had sat awake through the night in the chair beside the bed, watching Alix sleep, while anger coursed through her veins like a poison that burned and nauseated so that she felt that she would never sleep again.

  In the morning she had gone to her father.

  “Tibbeth?” He stared at her, more startled at first than anything else, over the big ledgers in his book room. “That’s nonsense. Alix is only twelve years old.”

  Kyra said nothing, only looked at him, her own face rigid and white with anger; his expression slowly darkened with suffusing blood as what she told him sank in, and his topaz eyes grew pale. It took him a few moments, sitting there, staring at her dark-circled eyes and white mouth, but he began to believe.

  “Sweet saints of God, I will kill him.”

  “Yes,” Kyra said softly, savagely.

  Something changed in his eyes. “But I won’t have her name brought into it. Dear God, it will ruin her chances of any kind of decent marriage! Nor will I have yours come up.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyra snapped, feeling her anger heat in return: anger at Tibbeth and anger at her father, sitting there and thinking about his precious alliances, his reputation among his peers. “Who else are the Witchfinders going to believe?”

  “The Witchfinders?” He was aghast.

  “Who else would have the power to arrest him?” she demanded. “He’s powerful, Father. He could escape the regular constables; they’d never catch him. What are you going to charge him with, if not a crime of magic? Stealing your silverware?”

  And she saw by the shift of his eyes that he’d been thinking exactly of that, of some charge that did not touch upon magic, that would not reveal to the other members of the guilds that the dog wizard had been free in his house, teaching his daughter.

  Bitterly, she said, “Whatever you charge him with, you know my name is going to come up at his trial.”

  They had argued about it long and viciously. She was eighteen, with an eighteen-year-old’s intolerant righteousness; he was her father, with the swollen resentful boil of three years of her rebelliousness bursting in his soul. What was said in the book room that morning on both sides would never be forgiven. In the end Kyra had manufactured talismans of death and plague, marking them with Tibbeth’s mark, and had set them about her father’s warehouse, and he then went to the Witchfinders and claimed that he had seen the dog wizard lurking there.

  At the hearing before Sergius Peelbone, the cold-eyed man who at that time was Witchfinder Extraordinary of the Angelshand Inquisition, Kyra testified that Tibbeth had been turned away from his position as her teacher when she had decided she would no longer endanger her immortal soul by tampering with such an evil thing as magic.

  The scandal had been tremendous.

  Most of it she had pushed from her mind. Her memory of those days consisted largely of fight after fight with her father, who shouted new recriminations at her every time he returned from the meetings with guild members demanding explanations of how he had happened to be training a dog wizard in his house, interspersed with the razor-suave questions of the Witchfinder at endless sessions in the dark, round chamber of the Inquisition on Angel’s Island. At some of them Tibbeth had been present, his wrists manacled with chains overwritten in runes of na-aar—thaumaturgical silence, deadness, immunity to all spells—and bound with the scarlet threads of spell-cord, staring at her with hatred as she answered the same questions over and over, told the same seamless, plausible lies. The summer’s heat was beginning—under ordinary circumstances the family would have been making plans to retreat to their country place. The clammy heat and the smell of men’s sweat gummed her memories of those days like filthy glue. Sometimes, coming in and out of the hearing room, she would pass Tibbeth’s childlike, colorless wife, who was sitting on a bench in the hall with her head bowed down to her hands. Kyra wondered how young that girl had been when the dog wizard had first taken her to his bed, and the thought made her stomach turn.

  Very clearly indeed, she remembered standing in the square before the Cathedral of St. Cyr, when they’d led him, shaven-headed and wearing a long white shirt of cotton so thin that the summer sunlight had showed his body through, to the stake. His books were heaped among the huge piles of twigs beneath his feet, though later Lady Rosamund had told her that the Magic Office of the Church had probably been through them and taken anything of interest. Mostly what she felt then was a kind of surprise that the pile of wood was so huge—more than five feet high—that Tibbeth had to be helped up it with a ladder and stood like a man atop a haystack. The spell-cord twisting the ropes that bound him to the stake looked like long trails of blood.

  She made herself watch and listen to his screams. Having betrayed him, she felt obscurely that this was something she had to do. The day was grillingly hot, the air thick with the sewage smell of the river and, here where the old black slums crowded close around the ancient city fortress, buzzing with flies. They swarmed around the pyre, crawling on the sweaty faces of the watching crowds. Though she was some distance away, she could see them crawling on Tibbeth’s bald scalp as the executioners bound him, and he twitched as the insects bit and rolled his head like a drunkard, trying desperately to shake them off. It was summer, and the wood was dry. She’d heard somewhere that for wizards, the Inquisition picked fast-burning wood that gave little smoke so that the victim would not suffocate before the fire began to blister and then consume his ankles.

  Tibbeth had not suffocated. Thanks to the Inquisition’s care, there was very little smoke, so Kyra saw everything clearly. She had given little thought to what it actually meant for a man’s body to burn from the feet up. She tried to call to her mind the picture of him bending over Alix’s bare shoulders in the moonlight, the fleeting images of that filthy dream, while she watched. The stink of charring flesh, the smells of the people around her, the roar of the fire, and the crawling feet of the flies never afterward left her dreams.

  It took a lot longer than she’d thought it would. Long before it was over, she slipped away from the crowd—and there was a huge crowd in the square, packed so tightly that she was afraid she wouldn’t make it to the shelter of a side street in time—to vomit until she thought she’d faint.

  When she had gone back home, li
ght-headed and shaky, her belly muscles aching—and they’d ached for days—Briory told her that she’d been given orders no longer to admit Kyra to the house. “I’m sorry, miss,” she said, staring stonily into middle distance beyond Kyra’s left shoulder. “Master Peldyrin has taken your mother and your sister out to the summer place at Meadowford until St. Ploo’s Day.”

  “Nonsense,” Kyra managed to say, though she felt her face and hands grow even colder than they already were. “If he didn’t want me being a witch, it isn’t terribly intelligent of him to force me into being a prostitute, either.”

  “That’s as may be, miss,” Briory said, still carefully avoiding her eye.

  “Don’t be an ass, Briory—open this door.”

  But it closed in her face.

  “Briory...”

  She beat the panels with her open hand.

  “What about my things? What about my jewelry, damn you? Briory!”

  Turning, she caught a glimpse of a man loitering in the square, picking his teeth with a straw and carefully not looking at her. She recognized him vaguely. She thought he’d been in the outer offices of the Inquisition one day during the trial. The Witchfinders were watching the house, watching her.

  Waiting for—what? Her to use magic against her family? To show signs that she had lied, that she intended to set up as a dog wizard for herself?

  Remembering Tibbeth’s screams—the fire wouldn’t even have burned out yet—she felt a cold, sinking sense of terror she had never known, the terror of being truly alone and utterly without help.

  “Damn him,” she whispered, anger flooding in to replace the fear. “Damn him, damn him, damn him...”

  The beauty of her magic, like some enchanted glass goblet, seemed to shatter in her hands, cutting them to the bone. Standing on the high steps, she was conscious of the Wishroms’ scullery maid and a couple of chair carriers down in the square staring curiously at her, a tall red-haired stick of a girl in a gaudy pink and white dress, pounding on the shut door of the big stone house.

  It came to her that she had no idea where she was going to spend the night.

  Head high and pearls jiggling, she’d stridden down the steps, across the square, and away into the city again.

  Chapter XV

  STRANGE, KYRA THOUGHT, LYING with the lightweight quilt drawn up over her chin. After all that, to be back in her parents’ house again.

  She blinked drowsily up at the painted ceiling of the yellow guest room. Idly, she identified the various birds the painter had depicted: a pigeon there, a dove there, a couple of well-executed sparrows, a cloud of finches like gray and white sunflower seeds scattered over the top of a salad, a startlingly pink parrot. Then she closed her eyes again, shutting out the pale slant of the morning sun.

  Not a very welcome guest, perhaps. But here.

  Six years.

  It had been nightfall that summer afternoon six years ago when she reached the Mages’ Yard. It was situated in the quarter of the Old Believers, a shabby slum on the east side of town in the shadow of the old walls, where tightly packed half-timbered houses leaned wearily against one another, their jutting upper stories nearly meeting over the narrow streets. Every third shop seemed to sell old clothes or the bizarre icons of their religion. Men in faded black robes stared at her as she passed, men with long hair hanging in elaborate braids to their shoulders, or waists, or sometimes longer, their beards similarly dressed and tied with ribbons of all colors, to the glory and honor of their twenty-one half-forgotten gods. An old woman, filthy beyond description in a yellow gown that looked as if it had been stolen from a duchess a century previously, caught her arm and muttered at her toothlessly; Kyra pulled free and hurried on her way. Instead of the familiar images of leaden saints in street-corner shrines, the garish, stylized seals of the Old Gods were sometimes visible, painted on the brick walls under decades worth of filth. Strange odors drifted from doorways, and children darted around her like flights of half-naked swallows, vanishing into alleyways too narrow for a cart to have passed. The street was paved with cobblestones the size and shape of cannonballs; green water lay between them, buzzing with gnats and stinking.

  She knew where the Mages’ Yard was. She had passed it occasionally on her solitary rambles, had once visited Tibbeth’s house to find him in conversation over tea with the Archmage. In the gathering gloom she could see that four or five of the dozen houses that bordered the narrow cobbled court were dark. Tibbeth, she recalled, had frequently read in his study without lights. In other houses orange lamplight flickered where men and women crossed the torn sacking of the curtains; not all the houses there were occupied by wizards. Windows and doors were open everywhere to the warm night, and though the rest of the streets in this riverside quarter hummed with mosquitoes, there were none here. Cat eyes gleamed at her from windowsills and broken brick steps. A fat woman in the peculiar five-pointed head scarf of the Old Religion came out of one house, shaking a dishcloth, and Kyra walked over to her, feeling horribly conspicuous in her pink taffeta, her flowerlike collar and cuffs.

  “I’m looking for the wizards,” she’d said, and immediately had felt completely foolish.

  The fat woman smiled. “Well, you come to the right place, dearie.”

  And behind her a voice said, “Can we help you?”

  She turned to see a tall woman standing at her elbow, nearly as tall as herself. The open door of the fat woman’s little house let fall a bar of grubby light; by it, Kyra saw that this new arrival wore a plain black robe, un-corseted and belted simply, over an equally plain shift. But her eyes—pale green like pearly jade—were the eyes of a queen, and her black hair was pinned back with small gold clasps whose workmanship Kyra identified at once as coming from the most expensive jeweler in the city.

  Tired, empty, and queasy from her long walk and the terrible shocks of the afternoon, Kyra held out her hand and said, “My name is Kyra Peldyrin. I—”

  “I saw you this afternoon in the square,” the woman said quietly as the stout Old Believer housewife retreated to her own house like a turtle’s head withdrawing into a shell. She left the door open, however. Its light and the light from the single tall window downstairs threw irregular shadows over Kyra and the dark-haired mage. “And we have followed the trial. Was the man truly your master?”

  Kyra nodded wearily. Of course, she thought, the Council wizards would take an intent interest in the judicial slaying of even a dog wizard. In her years with Tibbeth she had acquired an acute interest in the slightest shifts of public opinion regarding the mageborn. For them, even with the protection of the Council, it would have been the same. And thus they would know her as what she had spent the last two weeks swearing she was: a girl who had seen the light, gone over to the Inquisition, and sold her teacher’s life out of spite.

  Bitterness and exhaustion flooded her. There would be no welcome for her here, either. She was astonished she hadn’t thought of that before and saved herself the walk.

  But the woman asked, “Did he try to have you? Is that why you did it? You look a little old for what we know of his tastes.”

  Kyra’s jaw tightened so that she could not speak; she felt that she’d never be able to speak again. She only felt tired, unable to come or go, and so dirty inside that it surprised her, looking down at her dress and her hands, that she wasn’t black with filth. Surely, she thought, what she had done had to show somehow on the outside.

  She didn’t cry, but she felt herself begin to shake all over and could not meet those sea-colored eyes.

  The woman stepped forward and put a strong, slim arm around her waist. “I am Lady Rosamund,” she said in a voice like molten gold and sunrise. “Come in and tell me about it.”

  Below and around her the house murmured with talk. Uneasy talk, sharp and jabbing, not the usual chatter of the maids at their work or the footmen gossiping in the servants hall. The clatter of breakfast dishes was missing. Frowning, Kyra sharpened her concentration, listening down thr
ough the house, and picked up, three floors below, her father’s angry voice.

  “By God, this wedding was cursed from the start!”

  “You mean the day was cursed when you hired on those drunken dockside reprobates!” the voice of their neighbor, Neb Wishrom, retorted. “Best musicians in the city—faugh! Best wenchers! Best troublemakers! Let my daughter tell you what they’re best at!”

  From the attic above Kyra heard the scuffle of feet and an opening door, then the voice of—she thought—the harpsichord player asking, “And what’s the delegation for, then?” while somewhere below she heard—thought she heard—light, rapid feet springing down the back stairs and the flute player’s voice whispering, “Get out through the postern gate and down the cellar next door. She said she’d have it open for me and make sure none are down the cellar. The rest of you cover for me and meet me at the Bountiful Peaches tavern tonight.”

  Kyra closed her eyes and sighed as Master Wishrom stormed on. “I’ll have the magistrates on those worthless tosspots!”

  “And you’ll have my word behind yours!” She could almost see as well as hear her father smite the top of his desk with his fist. “All they’ve done since I hired them has been drink my wine and debauch my servants—and now, I find, my neighbors’ daughters as well!”

  Only a few days ago, Kyra thought, she would have sniffed with wry amusement at the thought of the good-looking young flute player stealing kisses from Tellie Wishrom and would have said to herself, Silly little goose.

  As she had said, and thought, about Alix.

  Now...

  The Cherry Orchard on Algoswiving Street, as Spens had promised, catered a very good meal indeed to the wealthy rakes who frequented it after small-hours gambling bouts. The place had been almost full when she and Spens entered, the bright coats and lace-edged ruffles of the men and the overly tawdry finery of the local girls and pretty boys half obscured by veils of blue tobacco smoke. The air had been thick with the smells of coffee, ambergris, and beer, but the roast duck and braided breads brought to their table by a black-clothed servant girl had been excellent, and Kyra had been surprised at how hungry she was.