The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “I know what you wanted to show her!” Kyra nearly spit the words at him. “And I know where you wanted to lead her! I looked into her dreams.”

  “Oh, tut. A fearful virgin’s judgment on something she doesn’t even comprehend. How were they different from the dreams that I see now in your eyes that you’ve dreamed? It’s all the same hunger, you know.”

  “They were different,” Kyra said thickly, “because I am twenty-four and she was twelve. Because I chose and you had to put runes of lust and filth all over her nightdresses to get her dreams to reflect your longings.”

  “Kyra, Kyra,” he chided, and stirred again in the shadows. The stench of his burned flesh came off his robes. A fuzzy black fly crawled along the curve of his head; another one struck Kyra from behind, tangling in her cropped hair, but she did not take her eyes from the man before her.

  “That’s your family’s prejudices speaking, you know,” he said. “Your father’s morbid respectability, his terror of what others might think of the slightest deviation from what they consider normal, your mother’s fear of her own body. When a man finds gold, of course he sponges the dirt off it so that it will shine. But if you will have it so, if you will take it upon yourself, like all your family, to dictate even the thoughts of those around you, I will let her free. I had thought better of you, but I bear you no ill will.”

  “But I bear it to you!” Kyra raised her arm and summoned to herself all the power of the lines she had drawn, all the strength of the lightning that burned unseen in the air, all the deep serenity of the earth and the passion of the sea. “And I will not let you go, to return to her again when I’m far away. Thus I conjure you to enter this circle, to be one with the runes you have drawn on that cloth. I bind you to them, that they compass you about, so that you cannot stir from them ever again.”

  In the darkness of his corner the ghost began to laugh. It was a thin, flickering sound like the squeaking of wind, through which Tibbeth’s real voice appeared only in flashes, as color appeared in changeable silk. It was echoed behind her by a thick, guttural bubbling from the door.

  As Kyra swung around, pain arrowed through her legs, the searing burn of fire, though when she struck at them, there was no fire to be seen. This only came glancing through her mind, for at the same instant Algeron cried out, leaping to his feet as the woman Gyvinna rushed through the door, a rusted scythe upraised in her hands and broad ribbons of blood flowing down her mouth and chin.

  Kyra fell back, clamping her mind down on the spells of protection that guarded her and Alix from the worst of the dead man’s malice; on the bed Alix sobbed with agony, clutching at her calves and thighs among the tangled sheets, and the pain of flameless fire seared again through Kyra’s legs as well. In the doorway Algeron seized the haft of the scythe, struggling to wrest it from Gyvinna’s grip. But the woman was strong. She thrust him aside and slashed at Kyra, the filthy metal missing her neck but opening a gash in her forearm and hand as she dodged, and with the heat of the blood and the shock of the pain came another blaze of anguish in her legs as her concentration cracked. The smell of smoke was thick in the room: the heat of a summer afternoon, the stench and fevered mutter of the crowd. Algeron caught the madwoman from behind, gasping as she writhed in his grip to knee at his groin and, when that failed, bite at his hands and arms. Her face was barely human, running with blood out of which two pale eyes stared like an animal’s; perhaps it was that which allowed him, when he wrenched the scythe from her grip, to strike her with all his force across the side of the head.

  He would never, Kyra thought obliquely, with the detached part of her mind not given entirely over to the spells she held about them, have struck something that he considered a woman.

  Gyvinna collapsed to the floor. For a moment the only sound in the room was her sobbing breath.

  Then Alix moaned. Standing above Gyvinna, the scythe in his hands, Algeron threw an anguished look back at the bed but held his ground.

  When Tibbeth spoke again, his voice came out of Gyvinna’s dripping mouth. “I am your master, Kyra. The magic in your mind is my magic. You can’t fight me.

  “My magic is my own,” Kyra said softly. “I am my own. I cast you out. You are none of me, and I none of you.” She turned back to face the corner and saw that Tibbeth’s dark robe was gone, his legs and thighs a charred and blackening mess, dripping yellowish fluid that seemed to puddle about him on the scrubbed oak planking of the floor. Flies swarmed about it as they whined through the darkness over Alix’s bed.

  Shakily, Kyra repeated the words of the conjuration, bending her will upon Tibbeth, drawing him toward the rune-written shift that lay in the magic circle’s center. She heard Alix cry out, striking with feeble agony at the flies that crawled over her naked flesh, felt renewed pain flash through her own legs, charring sinew and muscle while her mind was still alive to feel. The smell of smoke filled her throat, burned her eyes; she was certain that beneath her borrowed breeches the skin was blackening, blistering, sloughing away. He had felt that, she thought, and had kept his mind focused on the magic of his hate. She could do no less.

  For the first time she felt Tibbeth’s will give, felt it writhe and twist like a monstrous fish when it felt the hook.

  Alix screamed. Behind her Kyra heard a faint sob, and a woman’s voice, thick with blood and hurt, whispered, “Tibbeth?”

  By his breathing she could tell that Algeron was still there as well; by his breathing also, she knew he was in terrible pain. “He’s using you, Gyvinna,” Kyra said softly, her voice stammering slowly over the words, forcing them out around the strain of concentration. “He’s using your mind to channel his own. As he used your hands, your body, as a tool of his revenge.”

  There was silence, then another thick, broken sob. The pain grew less, and she felt Tibbeth’s spirit jerk against her will. Glancing behind her, she saw the laundrywoman’s face ghastly in the yellowish blear of the witchlight, the pale eyes blinking rapidly, trying to remember, or fighting the overwhelming urge to sleep again.

  “I don’t...” Gyvinna whispered. “I’d just close my eyes, and he’d be with me again.”

  “To use you.”

  “No... Yes.” The woman sat up a little, her head rolling, the bloodied hair leaving stripes on the lead-hued cheeks beneath. From the tail of her eye Kyra saw Algeron, still standing between Gyvinna and the bed, his eyes staring, fighting to keep from doubling over with pain.

  Gyvinna sniffled and wiped her bleeding nose with the back of her wrist. “And why not? It wasn’t true, what they said of him. About Miss Alix. It was me he loved, so why... why shouldn’t I be with him, whatever way he wants? He loved me...” Her eyes slid closed.

  Algeron’s breath scaled into a short, shallow sob, and his knees buckled; Alix whispered something about fire, and her hands threshed helplessly at the swarming flies. The pain in Kyra’s legs redoubled, sweat pouring down her face, her body shaking as part of her mind drew back from the spells of conjuration to fight the physical shock that would soon render her unconscious. She was aware of the blood running down her gashed arm, of the flies swarming over the raw, ragged flesh.

  “He loved you when you were a little girl,” she said quietly. “Because you were a little girl. He loved you because you were helpless, and pretty, and in his power. As he loved Alix... and probably others besides.”

  Gyvinna’s china-blue eyes flared open again. The worn face, prematurely lined, showed suddenly how young she really was. “That’s a lie!” she sobbed. “A dirty lie! A man’s first true love... What does age matter? A girl can be a woman...”

  “How old were you,” Kyra pressed, “when first he came to you?” Her lungs were burning, as if the air she breathed were nothing but scalding smoke. She felt the skin of her face, her hands, sear and crinkle, felt fire lancing through the cut on her arm, the blistering weakness of her legs. “Did he call you in dreams as he called my sister?”

  “You’re making that up!”


  The pain lessened. Kyra gasped, her chest hurting as if a sword blade had been driven through her lungs; she had to fight for the breath to speak. “Then why is he taking revenge on Alix? Why is it her wedding night that woke his ghost to murder, and nothing to do with me? Why did he call you to write the death-marks on her wedding clothes?”

  The woman only stared at her with huge, protesting eyes, panic and pain turning her face blank. A renewed spasm of torment swept Kyra’s flesh; Algeron tried to get to his knees, tried to lift the scythe but collapsed, clutching his legs and weeping. Furious, Kyra drove her words like a spear into Gyvinna’s consciousness, willing her to understand before they were all consumed. “It wasn’t me he hated, Gyvinna, it was Alix! Think about it!” she shouted as Gyvinna turned her face away, her eyes closing again, seeking the comfort of her dream. “Think about it, damn you! Remember what you did! Remember why you came here, why you followed the draw of the spells to this place, how you knew to lead the Witchfinders to ambush us. Because he couldn’t have her, and he couldn’t stand to see her in another man’s arms!”

  “No...” Her voice was barely a whisper. And then, in a scream that ripped the night like a murderer’s knife, “Nooo!”

  “I conjure you!” Kyra screamed in the same instant, swinging back to the darkness of the corner, the darkness of pain and rage, the darkness whose magic was shredding her flesh and mind. “I conjure you to the sigils you have wrought; I bind you and charge you to hold to them.”

  Gyvinna’s screaming scaled upward, louder and louder, as if with the sound she was vomiting forth all the memories of what she had willed herself not to suspect about the man she had loved. And with those screams Kyra saw the shadow in the corner shrink and change, dwindling in size as the pain in her own flesh became transparent, revealed as illusion and not reality. The pain in her heart remained, a core of blackness intensifying, seeming to shrink in upon itself and to grow at the same time—rage, grief, and torture, hurting her as she had tried to forget that she could be hurt.

  She was barely conscious when she saw the thing come crawling out of the shadows at last, a thing like a twisted insect the size of her hand. Her will drew it to the broken Circle of Ingathering; when she saw it crawl over her sister’s torn chemise, the sight set her teeth on edge, as if it were groping at her own flesh with its dirty, fingerlike feet. But her teachers in the Citadel had taught her well. She kept her mind focused on the spells of power and mastery as she closed the circle with fingers trembling so badly that they could barely hold the chalk.

  Behind her, Gyvinna was moaning brokenly. No sound at all came from the bed. The flies had gone. The darkness in the room cleared slowly, yielding to the witchlight that gradually brightened from yellow to white, like a softly shining candle. There was nothing in Kyra’s consciousness but the building core of pain in her breast: no triumph, no joy, no relief.

  Within the circle the shift burst into flame. The filthy clot of shadow that had crawled upon it wriggled a little in the fire, then was gone. A few minutes later Kyra began to cry, the black core within her cracking open, the pain running away, first thick as ebony syrup, then thinning, until at last it seemed to her that it was only the water of her tears.

  Chapter XX

  THE SMELL OF BACON woke Kyra, and that of coffee. By the slant and color of the light, it was early afternoon.

  She lay on an old-fashioned wooden settee by a cold fireplace in a completely unfamiliar room. Quilts were piled beneath and around her in an inadequate attempt to mitigate the settee’s hardness. Her body ached as if she’d been beaten with a plank.

  She had, now that she recalled it, been beaten with a plank. When she moved, huge bruises made themselves felt on her back and arms beneath her ragged and soiled linen shirt. Her right arm was bound with rough bandages, the flesh beneath shrieking with pain. Her back and legs ached... Burns... She recalled the pain of fire.

  Her hand flew to the back of her neck to encounter the angry flame of sunburn. Hesitantly, she brought her hands down to touch her calves and thighs beneath the quilts. The sunburn was the only burn on her body, though she felt stripped and scorched inside.

  Slowly she looked around. The room where she lay was a large one, sparely and simply furnished: two settees by a wide brick hearth, a big table beneath the windows, spread with a cloth of tatted lace. The walls were plaster the color of clotted cream, mottled with old leaks and discolorations. The ceiling beams were black with decades of soot. Around the small panes of the half-open casement windows, ivy hung like a street urchin’s untrimmed hair, the light shining through the new leaves so that they seemed to glow of themselves. The smell of trees drifted in, and the clucking of a nearby stream. A robin warbled in the hedge.

  A lot of quilts, blankets, and pillows were heaped along the walls. She remembered, as out of the depths of a half-obscured dream, helping Algeron carry Alix from the bedroom.

  Shaken, exhausted, and broken as she had been last night, she had still had that much sense. She half raised herself on her left elbow—it hurt excruciatingly, but her bandaged right arm was worse—and saw that the door that led into the bedroom was shut. That chamber would probably be unfit for anyone to sleep in ever again.

  She wondered if poor widow Summerhay would charge them for damages.

  In the kitchen a cup clinked on a saucer, a tin pan rattled against a metal stove top, and she heard Spenson say, “Even without cinnamon to put on them, I’d say these are the best I’ve ever eaten.”

  Algeron was explaining how honey and cider could be used in the making of sweet rolls when Kyra, wrapped in a faded quilt, limped through the kitchen door. Happiness and relief flooded his face like spring sunlight when the clouds rolled away, replaced immediately by such shocked concern that Kyra wondered what the hell she looked like. Spens, who’d been sitting with his back to the door, a plateful of bacon and rolls before him, was turning even as he rose to his feet. He caught her, quilt and all, in the arm that didn’t have a sling on it and drew her into a hard, coffee-flavored kiss.

  In spite of the care both of them took for their own and each other’s bruises, the ensuing embrace was quite painful. Neither cared.

  “God, I thought I’d never see you alive again!”

  “I was terrified for you; did they hurt you badly?” She drew off a little, touched the sling, and began reviewing spells of healing in her mind. Not, she thought, that she’d have the strength to so much as charm warts for days.

  Spens grinned. The kitchen had broad windows in its planked walls and a divided door whose open top half afforded a view of the overgrown farmyard and the vine-covered well. Sunlight flooded the room, making his eyes bright as blue tourmaline.

  “The crossbow bolt just nicked my thigh, which was damned good shooting in the dark. It did more harm to the horse, and not much of that. I got this—” He indicated his disabled right arm with his left. “—in the woods when the stupid beast blundered into a tree. But you...”

  He cupped her cheek with his hand and looked worriedly into her face.

  She whispered, “You risked your life.”

  “Without you I wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  She shook her head. “You risked it so I wouldn’t be caught. So I could go back to the Citadel.”

  He grinned a little. “I never said I was a good businessman. When I last saw them, the Inquisitors were following a false trail south like somebody in Kymil was selling tea at a penny a pound; I sent that hasu and his guard after them about an hour ago.”

  “Kyra!” A pale and haggard-looking Alix appeared in the open half of the divided kitchen door. She pushed open the lower half and hurried in, in passing setting on the table the small basket of eggs she carried and the tin pail of milk. “Oh, Kyra, are you all right? I dreamed...” After a swift embrace she drew back, looking at her sister with the same worried expression Spens had. “Your hair! Why did you—”

  “It’s a long story,” Kyra said.

  Alix was wea
ring a simple brown dress over a coarse chemise clearly obtained from some old linen chest in the cottage’s attic. Her fair hair was braided and wound coronetwise about her head, and her eyes were blue-smudged with fatigue. Algeron guided her gently to one of the several bent beechwood chairs that surrounded the kitchen’s painted table; even the short walk to the neighboring farm for milk and eggs seemed to have exhausted her.

  “Kyra, what happened?” she asked softly, putting her hands over her older sister’s as Kyra, too, sat. “I dreamed... ugly things. Evil things. There was something about Tibbeth, your old teacher... I felt frightened. I kept wanting to run away, down the road into the dark, but Algeron held on to me and kept telling me I shouldn’t run, that he’d protect me.”

  “And he did protect you,” Kyra said softly, glancing up at the fair young man who stood behind her chair. The cook blushed hotly and looked away, but Alix’s hand stole up to where his rested on her shoulder.

  “I think I must have had a fever,” Alix said after a moment, her brows drawing down into a frown. “I felt so tired this morning, drained. And then...” She looked across at Spenson, who had just returned from the stove with two enameled tin cups of coffee, and color flooded to her pale cheeks.

  “Oh, Master Spenson, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She rose, taking half a step toward him and extending her hand. “So terribly, terribly sorry...”

  He put one of the coffee mugs into her grip, something she clearly did not expect. As she stared blankly at it, he asked, “Sorry you didn’t saddle me with the pain of eternally wondering why my wife doesn’t love me?”

  She colored even more deeply; he raised a warning finger and said, “Now, don’t burst into tears. I’ve already been through this with Algeron... who makes better sweet rolls than my cook, I might add. If you weren’t going to go make your fortunes in Kymil, I’d think about hiring him myself.”