The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  Kyra dug a chunk of butter wrapped in oak leaves from the egg basket and smeared a lavish quantity on one of the aforesaid rolls. “I’m afraid that now he’s married to Alix, you couldn’t do that without raising a tremendous scandal. But you’re quite right.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Spens said, guiding Alix back into her chair, “I’d begun to think about other plans myself.”

  Kyra didn’t see Alix’s startled glance pass from her sister to her former affianced groom; she was far too busy pouring honey over a second roll.

  Alix carefully ladled a little milk off the top of the pail to put in her coffee, then took a sip. “What I really don’t understand is what ’Vinna the laundry maid was doing here. And what happened to her? The poor thing looks like she was set on by robbers.”

  Kyra set down her roll. She remembered thinking, when she’d risen from the settee in the other room, that the figure half-invisible under the quilts on the other settee had been Alix. “I’ll see to her,” she said softly.

  Gyvinna was standing in the outer doorway when Kyra entered the sitting room, starting out into the ivy-dappled sun of the porch. She didn’t look around, only held the quilt closer about her shoulders, and bowed her head with the resignation of one who had all her life submitted to the will of others. Someone had wiped her face, though her nose was swollen grotesquely and both her eyes were blackened. Brown blood still streaked her colorless hair.

  Kyra said softly, “I am so sorry.”

  Gyvinna only shook her head.

  “What will you do now?” Kyra came around to stand beside her in the sunlight of the door. Try as she would, she could remember very little of what the woman had looked like six years ago. She was like Cousin Plennin, ordinary to the point of invisibility, especially, Kyra reflected bitterly, to one who habitually ignored servants and paid scant attention to those who had no immediate bearing on whatever matter lay at hand.

  “I realize I should have sought you out and asked you that six years ago,” she continued quietly. “I’m humiliated to say I never thought of it.”

  “No.” The laundrywoman’s voice was a gluey, nasal drone. She tamed to look at her, and there was no malice, no anger, only resigned and hopeless weariness in the blackened, tear-reddened eyes. “No. Nobody did. Not my family, neither. They’d been scandalized, Tibbeth marrying me so young. Thirteen, I was. And even before that he’d... Well, I knew he was fond of little girls. But he said I was special, you see. His only one.” She raised one broken-nailed, work-worn hand to pick at the blood in her hair, concentrating on it as if it were far more important than what she said or the woman who, last night, she had tried to kill.

  “In a way I did know. But I didn’t want to. And if I just closed my eyes and... and let my mind sort of drift, I didn’t have to know.”

  How easy it would have been, Kyra thought with a sudden rush of disgust, for him to mark her garments, her bed sheets, the doorsills of the kitchen over which she daily passed, with the sigils that would make her love him, believe him, and turn a blind eye to all that he did. The full foulness of the magic the man used came to her like the taste of bile, the perversion of the art, the joy, the splendor of the magic that was her own life. No wonder there were laws against it.

  On the other hand, she thought with a sudden rush of sympathetic pain, it was equally possible that he had needed no magic to make this poor woman love him.

  “It’s hard to explain how it was with Tibbeth.” Gyvinna’s voice was barely audible, and she did not raise her eyes, or cease picking at her hair. “He made me feel I was special. Not just... not just then, when I was little, but even after we was married, every day of my life.”

  The clotted voice was wistful. Kyra closed her eyes. Now even that was gone from her. To take from her the memory of that love’s specialness had been an act of cruelty, no matter how desperately required. As for Kyra, she no longer felt the swollen core of rage inside her, but it had left an empty space, a hollow where the echo of the pain drifted now and then like wind down an alleyway vacant of life.

  Gyvinna raised her head, looking sidelong at the woman beside her—her husband’s prize pupil, the rich daughter of rich parents, the woman who had consigned to the flames the only thing she had loved in her life. “I was jealous of you, you know,” she said simply. “Of the time he spent teaching you. But I knew even then he... there was things in his life that I wasn’t a part of. But as long as he’d come home to me at night, that was all I cared for. And after he was gone, when his voice came whispering at me in dreams...”

  She shook her head warily, wiping a cautious hand under her swollen nose. In her voice was the resignation of a woman who had finally faced what she had known in her dreams to be long true. “I know he was magic. I knew when he formed up beside me in the bed that... that there was some ill being done. I know he shouldn’t have done what he did. I truly do. I knew it last night. I think maybe I knowed all along he wasn’t... wasn’t good. But I’ll miss him. Like I’ve missed him every day of my life.”

  “What did happen?”

  “You don’t remember any of it?”

  Alix shook her head and picked a daisy from the grass of the stream bank where Kyra had found her, in the dappled shade of one of the old farm’s apple trees. The priest had been right. Even half in desolation, the little cottage with its thatched roof and ivied walls was beautiful, restful beside its clucking stream. A pity, Kyra thought, that it would be haunted now. She would have to warn the widow Summerhay lest others try to spend the night in that room.

  From the direction of the house came the soft noises of packing, Spenson and Algeron assembling the young couple’s few effects preparatory to their departure for Kymil immediately after lunch. The bedroom had proved to contain no signs of last night’s events save a burned spot on the floor within the chalked Circle of Ingathering and hundreds of dead flies.

  “Only that I was afraid,” the girl said softly. “And that Algeron was there.” She regarded her sister with grave, apologetic eyes. “He really is competent with pastries and cream, you know; I don’t think there will be any problem of him finding work. I mean, I know he made a botch of Master Milpott’s accounts, but I’m certainly not going to let him run his own business, so we should do well.”

  Kyra laughed at Alix’s matter-of-factness. “I daresay, and he may even make a name for himself with his poems one day. That was a stroke of genius, by the way, getting the money from Lady Earthwygg.”

  Alix giggled, which drove the wanness from her face and made her look more like herself. “I did feel guilty about asking for so much, but the way she’d been pushing that hateful Esmin at Master Spenson, I felt she deserved it.”

  “More than you know.” Kyra grinned. “You do know, by the way, that if you open a dressmaker’s shop, you’re going to have to deal with a steady parade of the Esmins of the world.”

  “Oh, yes.” Alix nodded. “But I’ll just do as Hylette does and charge them an annoyance tariff. Hylette also charges what she calls the surcharge of horror if some girl comes to her with a design she thinks is dreadful, but I think that’s unfair.”

  “Ah,” Kyra said. “So that’s why she always charged so much to make up my dresses.”

  “She was just jealous,” Alix said quickly. “Because your designs were so much more original than hers. And in any case,” the younger girl went on, lowering her eyes and gently stroking the daisy’s white petals, “if I’d... done what Father wanted... I’d have had to deal with all the Esmins of the world anyway, you know, and not gotten paid for it.” She raised her eyes, and Kyra saw that they were filled with tears again. “Is Father very angry?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Have you ever known him not to be when his will was thwarted?”

  The trembling of Alix’s mouth tweaked into a hasty attempt to cover a grin, but a tear slipped down her cheek nevertheless. “It’s just that... well, Master Spenson is right.” She glanced back in the direction of the
barn. Algeron was hitching a nice-looking pair of gray ponies to a two-wheeled red gig. “You see, after that awful scene in the church, I went to... to talk to Algeron. And it was just to talk. We must have fallen asleep. And when we woke up...”

  “I know what happened,” Kyra said softly, and Alix blushed. More quietly still, Kyra added, “And I understand, God help me,” causing her sister to look up with a quick, inquiring look of surprise.

  Alix opened her mouth to ask, but Kyra shook her head, and after a moment the younger girl said, “How did you find us?”

  Kyra’s grin returned. “What do you think I’ve been doing for six years in wizards school? Learning to pull doves out of my sleeves?”

  “Will you be going back to your school now?” She was looking past Kyra’s shoulder, and without turning, Kyra knew that Spenson must be helping Algeron, one-handed, strap up the baggage. Spenson in his rough brown jacket and appalling red waistcoat, his high boots and shirt open to show the surprisingly soft skin of his neck...

  She pushed the thought from her mind, though it was some moments before she could speak.

  “I have to,” she said when at length she could trust her voice to sound casual again. And when Alix opened her mouth to protest, she went on. “With you it was a choice of following your heart, Alix, a choice between something that meant nothing to you and something that meant everything. Magic... is my heart. Real magic, properly taught. Having started learning what it is, why it is... having seen its power last night when I—” She hesitated. “—when I saved you—I couldn’t possibly go back to dog wizardry. And besides,” she added a little bitterly, “the Inquisition is looking for me in Angelshand. In fact, considering the magic done here last night, I assume they’re on their way. So I can’t return in any case.”

  Her throat tightened again, and she fell silent lest her voice shake so that Alix could hear it. Fitting, she thought, that after she had robbed Gyvinna first of her husband, then of the ability to cherish his memory, Gyvinna, by forcing a confrontation with the Witchfinders, had been responsible for cutting off any possibility of Kyra returning to Angelshand with Spenson. Too many images went through her mind: the weight and bulk of his shoulders as she clung to him in the loft above the countinghouse, the surprising softness of his mouth against hers, the splash of heatless sunlight on his sandy hair as they walked through the arcades along the Imperial Prospect to breach Hylette’s sacred precincts. But like everything in Kyra’s life, these were interspersed with other images: the servants whispering impossible tales of the doings of mages and old Lord Mayor Spenson’s tirades against dog wizards over dinner, Gyvinna’s blind devotion to the man who’d used her, and the drugged, wanton gleam in the child Alix’s eyes. And behind everything else, the cool shape of the Citadel’s glimmering towers, silhouetted against the pale northern sky.

  “And it’s just as well,” Kyra said. “It’s just as well.” Alix looked surprised. “I thought you loved him. I mean... Well, it seems to me...”

  “I do,” Kyra said softly. Spenson was coming toward the stream bank where the two sisters sat, and Kyra got quickly to her feet. “And that’s the reason I have to leave. Before I destroy myself and everything I’ve worked for to take hold of that love.”

  She turned and headed back to the house, leaving him standing, his hand held out in the brightness of the spring sun.

  “ ‘Don’t think too harshly of her.’ ” Gordam Peldyrin repeated the words as if they had been dipped in tanning liquor before he put them into his mouth. “ ‘Don’t think...’ She has cost me, first and last, over three thousand crowns, what with the veils, and the jewels, and the garlands—the cost alone of two wedding cakes...”

  “Gordam,” his wife murmured, reaching to touch his rust-colored velvet sleeve. Outside the closed doors of the Red Hare’s private parlor, muted voices sounded in the inn’s common room as porters came downstairs bearing luggage and guests shared final cups of the inn’s famous coffee before the arrival of the Sykerst mail coach from Angelshand.

  Peldyrin shook her off as he might have shaken a mom. “She has made a laughingstock of me in front of the town council. She has done something—God knows what, for Earthwygg won’t tell me—to offend the wife of my patron at Court.”

  “Now, Gordam, you don’t know that for certain. Perdita was perfectly polite when she spoke to me.”

  “And if Spenson hadn’t been so obliging as to antedate his repudiation of the contract, we might easily have been sued by the Lord Mayor himself! He was certainly threatening it. And you say don’t think too harshly of her.”

  Binnie turned to her silent daughter. “Is she all right? Did she look well?”

  Kyra nodded. She suspected that at least a part of her father’s irritation had to do with her own appearance, robed once more in the faded black of a Council mage. It was a reminder not only of her own betrayal and desertion but of the insult that whatever current explanations he had to make to the Inquisition regarding his elder daughter added to the injury of the younger’s defection.

  She bit back the sarcasm of her reply to him. He had lost a daughter he cherished and all the hope of an alliance with some powerful merchant house. His anger, she realized, stemmed from considerable pain.

  To her mother she said, “She looked radiant.” It was a politic lie, avoiding the whole topic of the curse, which, she knew, would only hurt and enrage her father more and make her mother anxious. Besides, she knew from the Underhythe priest that when Alix and Algeron had taken hands before the shabby little altar of St. Ploo, Alix had looked radiant, filled with the dizzy joy of allowing herself at last to follow her heart.

  Which was fine, Kyra reflected wryly, if one was that certain about which way one’s heart was going.

  She swatted the image of Spenson as if it had been a bug on the wall and swept it under some mental rug. An entire night’s practice at this exercise—on the average of once every five minutes throughout the sleepless course of the darkness—hadn’t made it any easier. When Spenson had taken the inbound mail coach back to Angelshand yesterday, she had wanted simply to take the outbound one to the Sykerst, to the village of Lastower whence she could walk to the Valley of Shadows herself, to get away from the crowds and stenches and unclear issues of Angelshand, away from this small green countryside, from all reminder of what she was leaving.

  She had to return to college. In the scrying-stone the previous night Lady Rosamund had told her of furious interviews with the Witchfinders, of arguments concerning just what sort of magic had been worked at Summerhay Cottage. It was more than clear to her that she could not go back to Angelshand. Spenson had his father, stubborn, bitter, and masterful, had the business of which he was sole heir, had the responsibilities for which he’d given up the sea. It was he, indeed, who had reminded her of hers. “I’ll send them out to you here,” he’d said yesterday afternoon, in this same parlor after a strained interview that had taken all her willpower. “What they have to hear, they can’t very well hear from me, you know.”

  No, she agreed silently. They couldn’t very well hear of Alix’s marriage and the final ruin of the House Spenson alliance from the rejected bridegroom. But the thought of confronting her father again had made her jaws ache in the dark interstices of last night when she hadn’t been thinking about Spens.

  With a slight tremor in her voice she went on. “Mother, you know Alix. She told me in confidence where she got the money to start up a dressmaker’s shop in Kymil, so I can’t tell you—”

  “A dressmaker!” her father groaned.

  “—but I can say it wasn’t anything shameful, and it was, in fact, very clever.”

  “Wasn’t shameful!” Peldyrin’s thin mouth tightened to a line like a black string. “The mere fact that after her upbringing she’s gone to fetching and carrying for women who should be her social equals is shameful!”

  “Oh, nonsense, Gordam.” To Kyra’s unending astonishment, her mother rounded briskly on the fulminating paterfam
ilias. “You know Alix always loved to design her dresses, and she did a far nicer job of embroidery than Hylette ever did. Personally,” she said, turning back to Kyra, “I think it’s a great shame that she couldn’t open a shop in Angelshand, because I think she’d beat that overbearing Hylette all hollow. But I can see,” she added hastily, seeing her husband begin to exhibit signs of imminent seizure, “that it wouldn’t do.”

  Movement in the courtyard outside made her glance out the window. The huge mail coach, bright red paint and brass fixtures gleaming under a liberal coating of mud, had come clattering into the inn yard. Hostlers hurried from the stables to take the bridles of the six sweating horses. Ordinarily, Kyra would have made the journey to Lastower—and the Citadel beyond—as she had made it that first time, afoot. But after the conference with Lady Rosamund, it had been agreed that speed was the safer course. Once Kyra was safe in the Citadel, negotiations with the Inquisition could proceed more calmly over the fact that, however much she had used her magic last night, she hadn’t used it against another human being.

  In the bright sun of the inn yard the blue-coated coachman clambered down from his high seat, while passengers climbed stiffly out and inn servants began tossing down and sorting luggage from the roof and the basket behind.

  “And there’s your coach.” Binnie Peldyrin stepped forward and embraced her tall daughter; for the first time, Kyra felt no awkwardness in returning the embrace. If nothing else, she thought in the moment before she shoved the memory aside, Spens had taught her how to hug.

  “Father?”

  She turned to him. Sullen anger still gleamed in his eyes. He was a man, she realized, who would see all that he had striven to attain destined to pass to a mere nephew—and one whom he despised, at that—a man who had been cheated of his dreams of dynasty. Though he hadn’t realized yet that he’d been asking his daughters to give up their dreams for the fulfillment of his—it might be years before that thought occurred to him, if it ever did—he was still furious and hurt.