The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  She and Spens had meant to stay only the hour or so that it would take for the household to stir and stumble blinking into bed, but in fact it was only an hour short of dawn when they finally left. At the Cherry Orchard Spenson pointed out to her various of their fellow customers, young courtiers or older rakes, identifying their families and political factions and talking with ease of the true business of the Court: trade balances, the proposed national bank, and the colonies in Dhareen. She spoke of her training at the college, and he of the voyages he’d made: “I’m sorry now I never studied the wizardry there, for I’d like to see how it compared with what you’ve told me.”

  Though he said more than once that it was high time he gave up the sea and learned to manage the responsibilities that one day would be his alone, when he spoke of the Jingu Straits under the rising sun, or fog on the wild coasts of the spice lands, or the marketplace intrigues of Saarieque, all the stiffness vanished from him and his blue eyes grew bright. They talked all the way back to Baynorth Square.

  It was only when they reached the garden door and Spens whispered, “I’ll see you tomorrow at the countinghouse,” that silence fell between them. For what seemed a long time she stood in the doorway, looking across into his eyes, visible to her in the darkness though she herself must have been no more than a pale blur and a gleam in shadow, feeling that the night had been too short. That something more was needed.

  Then, as if at some unspoken signal, they stepped together, clenching one another tightly. The part of her that from time to time during the day had raised the question of whether she really loved this man—after all, she had to get back to her studies at the Citadel; she couldn’t really fall in love with her sister’s betrothed—made one faint, protesting sound and perished. All that existed was his mouth, sweet with beer and duck sauce, and the breadth of his back beneath her gripping hands, and the warmth of his arms around her waist, pressing her close against him. Those, and the desperate surge of heat that seemed to rise through her from the soles of her feet to her hair, which she would have sworn lifted like fire from her scalp, a heat unexpected and completely unknown that shook her to her marrow.

  It was what Alix felt for Algeron, she thought dimly, with what portion of her mind was capable of forming thought at all. It was what all those songs were about. All this time it hadn’t been maudlin hyperbole, after all.

  Dear God, I didn’t know it would be so strong...

  They were both shaking, panting, when they drew apart, staring into one another’s eyes; then they closed again, more violently, as if they would devour one another there in the darkness, leaving only a hot glitter of ash.

  She had been trembling when she ascended the stairs, and it was a long, long time before she slept.

  Alix, she thought, remembering her sister’s tears. If it was anything like that for them...

  The memory of Spenson’s arms, of his mouth against hers, wrung her like a soaked cloth.

  Dear God.

  She wondered what on earth she was going to do. She couldn’t simply abandon her studies. After all she had gone through for them, after six of the happiest years of her life... He certainly couldn’t marry a wizard or even take one as a mistress without losing his place in the guild. And what on earth are you thinking about, anyway? You can’t leave your studies to stay here and become Spenson’s mistress!

  Some deep, complex shudder within her whispered, Don’t bet on that, and she shook herself with indignant impatience. No wonder people acted like lunatics when they fell in love. If love was as common as people seemed to think, it was a wonder anybody got anything done.

  And in any case, she thought, now was scarcely the time to think of that. With the furor in the house over the flute player—she could hear the troop of footmen her father had sent to the attic descending, with the harpsichord player talking nineteen to the dozen in their midst—it was good odds she could slip away unnoticed and avoid a confrontation with her father herself.

  Spenson was waiting for her, as he’d said, at his countinghouse on Salt Hill Lane. She felt a flare of annoyance at the completely unaccustomed softening she felt within herself at the sight of him—Good heavens, girl, he’s only a stocky bull of a man in a dreadful striped waistcoat sitting at a desk!—until she saw the smile that broke across his face like sunlight when he looked up and saw her, standing in the doorway between the desks of two of his clerks.

  She stepped forward and tripped on the threshold, and he caught her hand.

  “So what are we going to do?” he asked when they were striding down the street toward the fashionable purlieux of the Imperial Prospect. “Send Hylette’s shop to sleep?”

  Kyra grinned at him. “Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary. You’re just going to go in and engage Hylette in conversation while I look for talismans under the doorsills.”

  His eyes widened with alarm. “I’ll do nothing of the kind!” “

  “Come now, Hylette hasn’t bitten anyone in months, and the rumor that her last victim died was horribly exaggerated. I’m sure any of those nice young men who had breakfast at the next table over from us in the tavern this morning could go in and have a perfectly decent conversation with her.”

  “Then get one of them,” Spens said promptly, and they quibbled about it all the way down to Hylette’s shop.

  Hylette Zharran’s dressmaking premises were located in the most fashionable block of the Imperial Prospect, whose unbroken lines of colonnaded shops stretched from the curlicued iron elegancies of Prince DiHony Circle as far as the pseudo-classical marble facings of the Emperor’s Gate. Beyond that it was a tree-lined boulevard to the gates of the palace grounds, lined with fashionable shops and blocks of expensive flats, but the truly prohibitive real estate was between the circle and the Emperor’s Gate. In the winter the buildings looked like a line of dirty gray cliffs, looming above wheel-cut snow and slushy ice, but the brightness of the spring day mellowed the heavy granite facades and made the dresses of the women—even the servants in their plain dark blues and greens—into flower beds of moving color. The street was one of the widest in the city, and carriages moved easily up and down without the crowding of the sections nearer the river. Doormen in scarlet coats hurried from the bigger shops to help ladies down from the fashionable barouches and landaulets; flower sellers called out to Kyra and Spenson as they passed, comfortably arm in arm, on the wide flagway beneath the arcades. Somewhere a bearded man in the painted leather coat of the Sykerst was playing an accordion; the smell of a fudge vendor’s cart vied with the flowers and the perfume of the ladies that they passed.

  “For the last time, I’m not going to go in and talk to that woman about furbelows...”

  Kyra gestured extravagantly, knocking the hat off a passing gentleman in a pink plush coat. “That from a man who only last night was telling me how he fought off Jingu pirates.”

  “Fighting the Jingu-teks was easy compared to having that woman figuring how much I’m worth.”

  “Well, I’d better not hear any more brave stories the next time you take me into a tavern, then.” They stopped before the scrolled bronze doors of the shop. “Watch.”

  “From a safe distance.”

  “Nonsense. You have to take me inside, at least. My dear Hylette!” She disengaged her arm from Spenson’s the moment they walked through the door and she descried Hylette, exquisitely gowned in pale yellow that matched the rosebuds in her high-piled black hair, sitting at her white-lacquered willow desk in the back of the shop.

  “Ah! It is the farouche Miss Kyra Peldyrin!” The dressmaker rose with the languid grace of a much taller woman. Though she barely came up to Kyra’s shoulder, Hylette had queenly posture and a commanding presence; the mirrors that punctuated the snowy paneling, and incidentally made the narrow shop look three times wider than it was, repeated and emphasized her fragile beauty as she came over and extended to Kyra the two fingers deemed the height of politeness.

  She then raised a quizzin
g glass on a foot-long golden stalk. “But what is this? This dress... you were wearing it the year before you went away from us! Those amazing green ribbons... Surely you have come for something new? Something to celebrate your so-beautiful sister’s nuptials to this excellent gentleman?” And she smiled her famous tight-lipped smile that covered her prominent teeth.

  Amid effusions of delight—Kyra knew Hylette hated her designs but had made them up for her for years because of the prices she paid—and innumerable tiny cups of black coffee, Kyra tried on a walking robe of pink mulled muslin in one fitting room and a polonaise of blue and yellow printed silk in the other. “Ah! These new hemlines—so exquisite if one has, like yourself, the ankles to show off.”

  Spenson, used to seeing Kyra in her darker, stiffer, and more outlandish personal style, blinked in surprise at the sight of her in the fashionable and decidedly girlish pastel garments that were the highest kick of current fashion.

  In the end Kyra bought a pair of lilac-tinted kid gloves, which she managed to drop on the threshold, bump her shoulder when she stooped to get them, and drop again.

  “Ah!” Hylette’s laugh sounded like the shaking of silver bells. “Still my same precious Kyra!”

  “No talisman under the threshold,” Kyra reported as she and Spenson strolled off down the colonnade again, Spenson morosely stuffing sweet-scented tobacco into the short clay pipe he’d taken from one capacious coat pocket. “Nor in either of the fitting rooms. I wonder if this is one of the days when Lady Earthwygg receives guests.”

  It was, judging by the number of carriages present along the curb in Ripinggarth Square. Kyra drew on the lilac gloves—startling against the apple green of her taffeta gown with its dark green silk ribbonwork—and adjusted the spiky ruffles of silk that adorned her hair. “You’ll have to do a little work this time, Spens; d’ you want to rehearse?”

  “I want to go have a beer in the nearest tavern.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  The attack was a two-pronged one and, from Kyra’s standpoint, quite successful. She entered first, presented her card—there had been a packet of them in the back of Alix’s dressing table, yellow with age—and was conducted to the crimson-walled drawing room, where half the fashionable ladies of the Court were gathered to discuss the extraordinary events of the previous morning. There was a little silence, for though Kyra’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the town, he was, when all was said, a tradesman—though not, of course, as vulgar as Neb Wishrom. Lady Earthwygg greeted her silkily—“My dear child, how absolutely barbaric of your father not to permit you to take part in the wedding, had there been a wedding, of course.”—and promptly ignored her, which suited Kyra just fine. Ten minutes later Blore Spenson was shown in.

  Even had Kyra not summoned a spell of misdirection about herself, she doubted that any of the ladies present would have noticed her moving quietly around the drawing room, touching the crimson silk wallpaper here, the polished porphyry of the gilt-edged mantelpiece there. Lady Earthwygg, Esmin, and all their guests closed around the central figure of yesterday’s debacle like sharks around a castaway, listening and exclaiming over Spenson’s stiff apologies and awkward manufactured accounts of just what was being done about it and how the pipes at the Cheevy Street Baths had come to rupture. Kyra found no talisman of ill, but she did find, rather to her surprise, a small packet of herbs, like a sachet, on the marquetry table next to Lady Earthwygg’s chair, herbs whose smell identified them as one of the commoner love-philters and that had been imbued with spells and runes written by Hestie Pinktrees.

  “Wonderful!” Spenson sighed when, after a retreat in good order, he and Kyra met again around the corner in Lesser Queen Street. “Does this mean I’m in for another week of passionate dreams?”

  “After being kissed by you last night, do you think I’d leave those things where they were without putting counterspells all over them?” Kyra retorted.

  Spenson laughed and took her hand. “I can see I’m in for an interesting life.”

  “Spenson...” Kyra stopped in the flagway, forcing him to a halt beside her. There was brief surprise in his eyes before something changed in them, a wariness, an unwillingness to hear or think about what they both knew had to be said. She stepped back from him, all the play, all the easiness, wiped from her face, leaving it harsh-boned and old. “Spens, what kind of life would you have, would we have? What kind of life were you thinking about?”

  He said nothing. Like her, he had not been thinking ahead at all.

  “Spens, this is... impossible. I can’t remain in my parents’ house; you know that. I certainly can’t live with you in yours.”

  He began to speak, then was silent. His father’s harsh voice and cold, demanding eyes seemed for a moment visibly reflected in the doubt that flashed across his face.

  “I said Alix would make you a better wife than I would,” Kyra said slowly. She raised her hand to still his protest. “No, hear me out. You’re the only son, the one who is to take over your father’s business; that’s what you came back here to do.” Once she had begun to speak, the bitter block against even the thought of turning away from his love dissolved, and to her surprise the words came out steadily, without tremor.

  “You can’t do that if you have a wizard for a mistress, even if I could remain in Angelshand, which I can’t.”

  His blue eyes were somber, struggling with the knowledge that he was the newly elected President of the Merchants’ Guild, with the awareness of what his friends would say, his neighbors, his family, and his fellow members of the guild.

  “It doesn’t have to be known,” he said. “And there are places in the city where wizards dwell.”

  “The Mages’ Yard? Since the purge the summer before last, there are few of them there anymore. Their houses were looted; even the few who returned no longer keep the kinds of books and charts I’d need for my education. I won’t give that up, Spens. I fought too hard for it.”

  Even as she spoke, across her heart leapt the memory of the triumph she’d felt in the garden last night, when she knew her sleep-spell to be perfect, that lightning flash of delight that had shaken her to the bones. Magic... power running like a river up from the earth and in from the stars, channeled through her hands, her mind, and her will.

  The key to that power lay in the Citadel. But through that memory, as through a blazing sunburst, she saw the face of the man across from her, his blue eyes stormy with anger.

  “And you can’t study that as well here as there?” he asked. “The town’s full of wizards, powerful ones. Among them you could find a teacher.”

  “Dog wizards!” Kyra said scornfully. “The most they could teach me is to be a dog wizard.”

  “It isn’t as if you’d have to earn your living at it.”

  “And you’d support me, I suppose?”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “To keep you, yes. And what’s wrong with that?” he demanded as she flung up her hands and turned away.

  “You wouldn’t understand!” She broke from the hand he reached to seize her wrist and strode quickly away down the narrow street. Spenson started to dash after her, ducked around a dolefully singing chair mender who emerged from an alley bearing a startling array of his wares on back and shoulders, and overtook her at the corner.

  “Then explain it to me!” His square face was flushed, his sandy hair tumbled across his brow, and his grip on her arm crushed the stiff taffeta of her sleeve. “Kyra, I love you. I want to be with you, to have you near me, a part of my life.”

  The dark of the garden returned to her, the taste of his lips on hers. The craziness, Kyra thought, went two ways, and she became aware that behind the anger in his eyes lay fear. The awareness struck her hard; her body relaxed, and slowly, as the silence lengthened between them, his color and his temper faded.

  “Kyra,” he said. “After all this is done, I don’t want you to go.”

  Kyra sighed. All her defenses of glibness, of c
ertainty, seemed to have developed unexpected edges in her hands, edges that would tear her own flesh if she wielded them. She found herself struggling for words, trying desperately to get them right, filled with a terrible fear of saying the wrong thing, of making some irreparable mistake. “Spens,” she said slowly, all the more hesitant because of her distrust of the madness that had plagued her through the night. “Think about it. If I remained in Angelshand, how long would it be before scandal broke? Before some matchmaking harridan like Lady Earthwygg discovered that you preferred a wizard to her daughter and had me up before the Inquisition on charges of putting love-spells on you? It would certainly cost you your presidency of the guild.”

  “Let it,” Spens retorted hotly. “My ships still carry cargoes, and the people in the market don’t ask about who brings them in.”

  “And it would cost you your pride,” Kyra said, her voice soft. “It would cost you many of your friends, not to mention the business it would lose you, and then you’d be in the position of having to choose between me and what you’ve always had. And even if you chose me,” she went on, raising her hand as he opened his mouth to speak, “it wouldn’t be the same between us.”

  His hand closed around her uplifted fingers. “Let me be the judge of the risks I’ll run,” he said. “Or are you just saying that because, at heart, you want to return to your Citadel more than you want to remain with me?”

  “I don’t know.” Kyra pulled her hand from his and stepped back when he reached for her, fighting to keep her voice from breaking. “I honestly don’t know.” And she plunged into the street, crossing it blindly, her eyes stinging with tears, while he stood behind her, mute, his hand outstretched. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, though her steps turned automatically toward the river quays; a raw ache of grief clutched at her throat, a terrible helplessness, wanting him and knowing it would never work. Absurdly, she thought, All those silly songs are right, as a thread of melody curled through her mind: An empty pillow, the empty hope...