The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “It isn’t... it isn’t magic itself, you know.” Anyone else, she thought, and she would have sprung hotly to the defense of her art—or she would have a few weeks ago. “Most of the wizards I know are good people,” she went on hesitantly, “powerful and dedicated to their art. It isn’t even the dog wizards, really. I mean, Hestie Pinktrees is the sweetest woman you could meet.”

  “Who’ll sell a total stranger the means to cause another total stranger to pledge marriage to a girl who’ll make him miserable for the rest of his life?” Spenson cocked an eyebrow at her. Kyra sighed and scratched uncomfortably at her cropped hair.

  “Anything can be turned to evil,” Spenson continued after a moment, speaking slowly, as if framing his thoughts with difficulty. “Wealth, law, magic—the longing to please God...”

  “Love,” Kyra said softly, remembering the yellow moonlight in Alix’s open, dreaming eyes.

  “Love is the worst.” Spenson’s hand reached out to hers, thick fingers closing around thin, cold bone. “Because it’s so difficult to tell whether one is doing evil or good.”

  “There’s the barn.” Kyra stopped and pointed to the ramshackle structure, barely to be seen among the trees on the rising ground above the meadow. “That means the house can’t be—”

  She froze in her tracks as a drift of magic came to her, a waft of the strange, vibrant knowledge of illusion being worked... and under the illusion, suddenly, the jingle of bridle bits and the rattle of crossbow bolts, the smell of horses and of men. An instant later, from the dark behind the barn, a mounted shape appeared, and a man’s voice called out, “Halt in the name of the Inquisition and the Witchfinder of Angelshand!”

  Kyra looked around desperately. From the concealing trees a line of riders filed, black-clothed Church sasenna and gray-coated Witchfinders, and with them, one red-robed young man with a shaven head whose gaze, she knew, penetrated both darkness and any illusion she cared to fling. “Cover your face!” she gasped, and Spenson pulled up his loosened neck cloth, wrapping the lower part of his face so that only his eyes were visible. “Tibbeth’s wife must have ridden with them. If Tibbeth is in her, he can track his own curse.”

  “How many hasur?” he asked, catching her arm again and drawing so close to her that their shoulders touched. His eyes were as used to darkness as ordinary eyes ever got; she could see him peering in the direction of the oncoming riders.

  “Just one—in the robe. Can you see him?”

  “No, just shapes. Can you put an illusion on me so that I look like you?”

  “What? He’ll see through that.”

  “The others won’t. Make yourself look like me, and when the fighting starts, dive for the bushes.” They were retreating already in the direction of a stand of laurel on the other side of the pasture ditch. “Can you summon a horse if I free one of theirs? Some of them will have to dismount to arrest us.”

  “If not, I can summon one of those at the top of the pasture. Spens,” she whispered, even as she began the spell of illusion.

  “Put some distance between us.” He hefted his stick, his craggy face grim but his eyes, in the overcast darkness, bright with the peculiar glee of a born fighter.

  “Spenson, no; they’re armed.”

  “Use magic if you have to, to get free and save Alix, but not till it’s desperate. Now do what I say and get ready to dive.” A sudden, ghostly glare of witchlight flared into being over their heads, half blinding them and illuminating them for the advancing sasenna. The warriors dismounted: three men and two women, middle-aged but lean as wolves, with the oddly youthful faces of those who had been without responsibility for years, since they had made the final decision of then-lives and had sworn their vows to be the weapons of the Church. Their black clothing was marked with the many-handed red sun of the Sole God. Two of them carried crossbows; the other three, swords. All wore pistols in their belts.

  Spenson hesitated visibly, then tossed his stick to the ground some three feet away from him.

  The sasenna came forward, the hasu at their heels.

  He waited until they were close enough to touch him before he swung at the nearest with the satchel he’d carried in his other hand, almost concealed against his side. The flying mass of leather and buckles caught the man across the face, staggering him back for a fraction of a second; Spenson wrenched the pistol from the man’s belt and shoved past him to smash the butt across the hasu’s temple with all the force of his arm. Kyra dove for the laurel bushes, her heart frozen with terror. She heard someone cry out and smelled blood but dared not raise her face from the leaves on the thicket floor. The noise of the struggle seemed to go on forever—-he couldn’t possibly break away from five of them!—and it was all she could do to keep her mind on the spells of illusion that surrounded him, the spells that would fade and break once he was out of her vicinity.

  A horse whinnied furiously. There was a clatter of hooves, a woman swearing, the slapping wallop of a crossbow firing, and a moment later the hollow boom of a pistol, sulfur mingling with the blood. Other horses thundered away; she whispered the words of illusion and kept her face buried, for she heard the scuffle of clothing and the creak of a sword belt’s leather, and then a man’s voice said, “Your honor? Your honor?” Flesh patted softly, hesitantly, upon flesh.

  Wrapping herself in illusion, Kyra snaked out of the thicket. One of the sasenna still knelt over the hasu’s body. The Church wizard’s crimson robe looked black in the starlight, as Alix’s gown had in the dark of her room. So did the blood trickling sluggishly from the man’s face. Silently, as she had been trained among the High Council’s own sasenna, Kyra moved away, thirty, forty feet, not daring to send any but the smallest of illusions to the mind of the kneeling man for fear that the touch of magic would waken the hasu back to consciousness. The hoofbeats had faded into distance, but they could catch Spens and be back at any time.

  She thought of the crowsbows and the smell of the blood. There was no trace of Spenson or his pursuers. He had put his life at risk, she thought, to leave open her path back to the Citadel, her path away from him.

  Dear God, she thought, don’t let him die.

  When she was fifty feet away, she reached out with her mind, and the lone sasennan’s horse, patiently cropping the roadside grass, flung up its head and wheeled. The sasennan looked up with a cry, but Kyra had already seized the beast’s bridle, her heart hammering in panic; she missed the stirrup twice, between native clumsiness and the stiffness from her earlier ride. The man shouted at her, leveling his pistol.

  The roar of it was like the clap of doom, but in the moonless dark of the night the ball didn’t come anywhere near her. The horse sprang nervously to the side, jerking on the bit; panic alone gave Kyra the agility to spring up, belly over saddle, her feet groping for the stirrups, and she dragged herself upright even as the horse moved off. The sasennan put on a burst of speed and got a divot of sod from the flying hooves in his face for his trouble. Kyra wheeled her mount, put it in the direction of the tiny farmhouse the priest had assured them lay at the end of the road, and galloped for all she was worth.

  Chapter XIX

  DARKNESS LAY UPON HYTHE FARM like the shadow of the plague. Riding hell-bent for leather up the overgrown cart ruts, Kyra felt the stirring of evil in the air before she ever saw the house: a hot wind swirled briefly around her, causing the horse to shy with such suddenness that Kyra was nearly hurled over its head. As she fought for balance and shortened a rein to keep the beast from bolting, she thought she heard from somewhere, quite close by, the fading sea whisper of a crowd.

  She knew better than to try dragging her terrified mount any closer to the house. Her legs gave way again as she sprang down, though their strength came back in less time than before. The horse tried to jerk away, and she pulled the big head down close to hers and stroked the velvet nose. “Stay as close as you may,” she whispered, weaving the words with understanding, with a Summons, with the beast’s true name. “Come to me
when I call.”

  Released, the horse trotted back down the road a few yards, but—running already toward the house—Kyra heard it stop and begin to graze.

  Please don’t let me be too late. Please...

  Her shoes jarred the uneven roadbed, the blister biting her foot as if she’d trodden on broken glass. In the cold her breath left a feather trail of whiteness, and the sharp air sawed her lungs. But now and then on her cheeks she felt a sticky warmth, as if she had stumbled through a patch of summer noon, and that brought the sweat to her face and lifted the hair of her nape. Somewhere quite close to her she caught a whiff of the rankness of sweaty wool, dirty hair, unwashed humanity—mobbed, packed, thick in some hot open daylight space.

  Before her the house crouched lightless, eyeless, and the nightjars and owls that had cried in the manse woods were silent. Only the buzzing of flies sawed at the darkness, and though, looking up, Kyra saw no smoke from the cottage chimneys, still she smelled burning.

  The door was locked. “Alix!” Kyra pounded desperately on the thick oak of the planks. “Algeron!” The smoke stench was stronger close to the house, but there was a quality to it of strange distance, as if it came to her from far down a corridor whose end was lost in darkness. Panting, she ran the cottage’s length, ducking through a rickety gate to the kitchen yard, but the door, too, was latched fast. It was a tiny place, perhaps four rooms in all, ivy blanketing two walls and invading the braided thatch that overhung the eaves. When she rattled the door handle, she felt for an instant that the brass was burning hot to the touch, so she jerked her hand back in pain; a moment later, as she tested it with the backs of her fingers, it was cold.

  Stumbling into the woodpiles and rain barrels and stray pieces of scrap lumber that country houses collected about their walls, she ran back toward the front of the place, testing the heavy windows, wondering if she might drive some piece of wood through the tiny diamonded panes.

  Had the image of Tibbeth of Hale not been so branded into her mind, she would never have heard the footfall behind her. Her pounding on the window drowned everything, it seemed to her, but the hammering of her own heart. Later she wasn’t sure that it had actually happened, but for one paralyzing second she smelled the acrid pungence of burned, half-rotted flesh—close, almost on top of her—and veered around in time to take four feet of swung plank across her left shoulder instead of on the back of her skull.

  For that first second, through a stabbing shock of pain, she could have sworn that the colorless, wild-haired woman attacking her had Tibbeth’s face.

  Kyra ducked, catching a second blow on her upflung left arm. The wood was being threshed at her with almost superhuman strength; the pain was incredible, taking her breath away. As her instructors in the arts of war had taught her at the Citadel, she dove straight in at the woman—Gyvinna, Merrivale had called her, she thought distractedly; of course it was Gyvinna, she remembered Tibbeth speaking that name now—smothering her next attack and robbing her of the advantage of the plank’s length. Gyvinna kicked at her stomach, hard and straight, like a man. Kyra blocked it and twisted aside, her left arm barely responding to the shock of impact, and Gyvinna grabbed with insane strength at her throat.

  Kyra’s mind had been responding slowly, still balking over the fact that she barely recognized this woman, that she had no quarrel with her. But when those harpy nails dug into the skin of her throat, when the distorted mouth, the eyes bulging with mad hatred, hovered inches from her face, her training took over. She swung her arm up and over Gyvinna’s wrists and dropped her full weight like a hammer on top of them, shoulder and body behind the blow. She felt flesh tear from her neck as the other woman’s grip broke. The next instant, left hand pushing her right fist for force, she smashed her elbow straight into Gyvinna’s nose, slamming her backward. Blood poured down the blond woman’s face as she grabbed, snarling, again, but Kyra was taller and in far better training. She caught Gyvinna by the neck and slammed the back of her head as hard as she could into the wall beside them, once, twice, until she heard the plaster crack.

  Gyvinna sagged in her grip. Kyra dropped her and ran once more for the front door.

  It was open. The woman must have been in the house, heard her, and come out.

  Smoke filled the house, so thick that Kyra’s mage-born eyes could not pierce it, and she stumbled over a footstool and banged her shins on some unknowable article of furniture on her way through the dark front room, her lungs burning with heat. Flies swarmed, huge, stable flies as long as her thumb, snagging in her hair and crawling on her eyelids; the voices of the crowd were very clear in here, the smell of their filthy clothing, the chanting of the Inquisitors... even the rank, sewery stink of the river.

  She heard no flames, but she knew where the evil was centered and called around her the strongest spells of protection she knew as she groped her way with streaming eyes to the door that had to lead into the bedroom. Don’t let me be too late...

  Tibbeth was in the room. She knew it.

  Moaning, a thin sob; then, desperate, Algeron’s voice. “Alix, stay with me! Don’t fall asleep... Don’t leave me... Hold on, Alix...”

  “...hurts...” Almost unrecognizable, slurred with pain and fever. “Oh, God, hurts...”

  From somewhere Kyra heard a noise that could have been the buzz of a monstrous fly or a whisper of laughter.

  “Alix!” she cried. “Algeron! It’s me, Kyra.”

  She summoned light.

  It sputtered, fuming and sulfurous, above the bed where they lay, a yellowish glare that died almost instantly, then wavered into being again. Light slithered over Alix’s apricot hair, which was hanging disordered nearly to the floor; Algeron’s beautiful, sensitive face was twisted with agony as he released one of the ivory shoulders he was holding to clutch, sobbing, at the calf of his leg. White showed all around the gray of his pupil, itself only the thinnest of lines rimming an iris swollen like that of a man drugged. He barely seemed to recognize Kyra as she strode across the little bedroom.

  “Fever,” he whispered desperately. “Pain. Alix...”

  He swung around with a gasp, staring into the room’s darkest corner, where the armoire loomed. Kyra felt her own eyes dragged there. There wasn’t—not quite—anything there.

  “Hold on to her!”

  He managed to nod, tears of pain streaming from his eyes. Kyra reached across him and ripped Alix’s shift open down the front, dragging it over the girl’s head. From the darkness in the corner she thought she heard another buzzing, another sound that could have been a thick indrawn breath, a satisfied giggle.

  She couldn’t be angry, she thought. Anger was the foe of magic, the ruin of concentration.

  Her hands were quite steady as she drew chalk from her pocket. She laid the shift on the floor and around it drew the broken Circle of Ingathering, the inside-out star that imprisoned, the long grounding lines and the runes of lightning and water. She felt, as she summoned the essences of those elements, nothing except a cold perfection, a triumphant exactness, precisely as when she had driven her training sword straight through Cylin’s guard to the red circle marked above his heart, and knew she had forgotten nothing.

  “Hold her, Algeron,” she said again, the calm of her own voice astonishing her. “Don’t let her slip away.”

  He whispered, “My legs... burning. We’re burning up.”

  She glanced back, making herself not feel anything, half expecting to see genuine flames. Alix, naked among the tangled sheets save for the gold ring on her hand, moved and whispered something neither of them could hear.

  “Hold her.”

  She turned back, facing into the darkness in the corner. Behind her she could hear Algeron’s voice murmuring:

  “If my love be a song, then you are the harpist’s strings,

  Were I a purling river, they would find you at the springs...”

  The yellowish witchlight flared again, then dimmed away, and it seemed to Kyra that the armoire was ca
sting a shadow like the shape of a man’s shoulders and head.

  Hestie Pinktrees had spoken of the magic of hatred, the magic woven of ill. For six years Kyra had been aware of the hatred buried deep in her, a nameless thing dwelling in a well whose cover was secured with chains. Deliberately, chain by chain, Kyra unloosed it, opened the cover, called it forth, and gave it a name, her own name. Like the ancient witches who wove spells with their own hair, their own tears, their own breath, she wove of that hatred a rune of power, surrounding herself in it as in a cloud: the rage of her betrayal, the fury of learning that the hunger of her soul to him had been no more than a blind, a means to an end.

  She could see Tibbeth very clearly now, standing in the corner. He looked as he had looked that night in the garden, douce and reasonable in his dark robe, even to the moonlight that seemed to shine out of nowhere on his high, age-spotted forehead.

  “My dear Kyra,” he said softly. “Aren’t you getting just a trifle hysterical about this?”

  “You murder my sister and you ask me that?”

  He made a little tutting noise through his teeth. “It’s her choice, Kyra.” Even the soft, high voice was the same. “You weren’t there; you wouldn’t have understood if you had been. But she said to me one night in the garden... She said, ‘Before I would have another, I will love you until I die.’ She did say that.”

  “Under your spells!”

  He moved a little. She could see, under the hem of his robe, his bare foot, the red and black flesh glistening with charring, the burned bones sticking through. “What are spells, Kyra? I knew you wouldn’t understand, not the deeper secrets. Not the love a man can bear for a ripe and innocent girl, not that girl’s first, undying love for the man who could lead her, could show her—”