Stranger At The Wedding (13 page)

Someone was using a spell, or a talisman, of Look-over-There on her.

And when she knew that and concentrated on seeing through illusion, she easily glimpsed the sloppy-looking lounger in a brown coat whom—now that she thought of it—she had seen in the square earlier that afternoon, when she'd left to follow the cook's handsome assistant to market.

She had stayed close to Algeron the rest of the way back.

“Alix,” she said now, gently, as her sister turned away to gaze, like her, over the steeply mansarded roofs and clustering chimney pots toward the ash-colored eastern sky. “I have to know about Algeron.”

Alix flinched just a little, the silken fringe of the shawl picking up the vibration like a ripple of water, then for a moment she was still. Her hand went up to her hidden face, quickly touched the feathery curls at her temples, a manufactured excuse, for her eyes were still perilously bright as she looked back.

“He's such a dear,” she said with a tinny falseness to her voice and her smile. “He's been my mainstay through all this, like a brother to me.”

“Are you in love with him?”

The pink mouth trembled, then she made herself laugh. “How could anyone not fall madly in love with someone who has eyelashes like that? Aren't you?”

Kyra said nothing, just continued to look at her, and Alix's gaze fell. She averted her head quickly, to stare out the window again, her fingers in the flower garden of the shawl tearing at themselves while the wedding gown watched like an ironic maiden aunt. Lamplight caught the glisten of a tear.

After a time she drew a shaky breath. “I forgot,” she said. “You were always… impervious. Too sensible.” She met her sister's eyes with a warm little smile, even in her wretchedness concerned to take the sting out of the unsaid words: You never loved. You were never loved. “Even back when I was eleven and desperately in love with Gwillim—you remember that gorgeous footman we had?—and I thought I was going to die of it, I remember thinking how nice it would be to be cool, like you. It's nothing.” She shook her head. “I really should have outgrown things like this.”

“If you truly don't want to marry Master Spenson…” Kyra began, not certain how to proceed and not even sure where she wanted to proceed. The pain in her sister's voice, the evident grief written so clearly on her face, were foreign territory to her. Gorgeous Algeron certainly was and, besides that, a thoroughly nice young man, but nothing to invoke the chasm of misery into which she found herself looking.

“Of course I… I want to marry Master Spenson,” Alix made herself say. She drew her breath again and sounded more natural. “He's a dear, sweet man, and I know that marrying him is going to be the best thing for me.”

“Don't be silly,” Kyra said acerbically. “Spenson is tactless, he has a temper like flashpaper, and he dresses like a fishmonger, and it's quite obvious—”

She bit down on the next words, realizing that telling her sister that her prospective husband quite obviously hadn't two words to say to her—the way Alix babbled, scarcely a surprise—was no kindness. Alix was crying now, tears running down her cheeks, and Kyra felt, in addition to a growing apprehension, a flash of annoyance.

Watching those tears, that utter wretchedness, she found herself wondering suddenly if the death she foresaw would come to her sister, in her despair, by Alix's own hand.

For LOVE
? she thought in disgust. If Algeron had gotten her with child, maybe, though according to Algeron that wasn't the case. If Algeron had been telling the truth…

She wanted to cry, Don't be a ninny, Alix! but decided that the words would only elicit more tears. Upon further thought she realized that they were probably unkind as well. She reached out awkwardly to touch her but had no experience of giving comfort; at the touch of Kyra's hand upon her shoulder, Alix only shook her head, folding her arms again within her shawl and seeming to huddle closer against the window's cold glass. Kyra was left standing helplessly, wondering how she could tactfully ask if her sister was pregnant and thinking uneasily of cases she had known…

Girls of eighteen did commit suicide over lovers without being pregnant, though she herself couldn't imagine why. One of the Nysetts' maids had done so when Kyra was sixteen. Their parents, and Briory, had pretended to know nothing about it, but Merrivale had talked about it in the kitchen. And, she recalled, Merrivale had said that a cousin of hers had done so not many years before.

“I'll be all right,” Alix whispered finally. “It's good of you to be concerned, Kyra, but… I'll be all right. Now would you please… I'd just like a little time by myself.”

Dear God
, Kyra thought as she backed irresolutely from the room. How on earth could I prevent her… ? She didn't even phrase it to herself. The thought that Alix would cut her wrists over that fair-haired, poetic pastry fluffer was inconceivable, eyelashes or no eyelashes.

But not so inconceivable that it didn't lodge in her heart like a fragment of broken glass as she hastened down the stairs.

Alix was still in her room at dinnertime.

“I thought I told you to stay away from your sister,” her father snapped as soon as Briory and her attendant footman had served the soup and borne the lobster-shaped crimson tureen from the room, leaving the family momentarily alone in the smaller of the two dining rooms, which overlooked the garden through intricate panes of beveled glass. “Until you appeared, she was perfectly happy, looking forward to marrying one of the finest men in Angelshand.”

“Well, certainly one of the richest,” Kyra drawled, dabbing at the small dollop of soured cream in the midst of the green lake of peas and sherry. She had forgotten the maddening leisureliness of family meals, and the necessity of sitting still and waiting it through itched like insect venom in her veins.

Small red blotches darkened the thin skin of Gordam Peldyrin's cheekbones. “After all the trouble I've gone to in arranging this match… After all the maneuvering I've undertaken to have people forget what happened, I'm not going to have you stirring matters up now! Bad enough—”

The doors to the little warming room opened again, and he fell quickly silent. Briory and the footman— Lerp or Paskus, Kyra could never tell which was which—reentered, bearing scarlet platters of ham, green goose, jellied quail, and carrots in dill sauce. While they circulated the dishes and then laid them on the sideboard, there was no sound in the dining room save the graceful airs of the musicians, softened and altered to accommodate the smaller room and more modest setting.

Kyra recognized the tune, though it had been shifted from a minor to a major key and had been changed in modality to render it different, innocuous, free of the yearning grief it had held the previous night.

… An empty pillow, the empty hope

that your bed is empty, too
…

The light of the hanging lamps flashed in the harpsichord player's spectacles, glimmered like threads of vibrant gold in the mandolin's strings, and traced the lines of gilt flowers up the milk-white porcelain of the flute. Sensitized by Alix's desperation, Kyra had watched the maids—and Neb Wishrom's maids, who were more and more finding excuses to hang about the Peldyrin kitchen—as they dealt with these young men: tussles in the hayloft, last night's midnight scamperings up and down the back stairs. No wonder her father was irked.

Would this meal never end?

“Bad enough I'm going to have to repurchase every garland and wreath and bushel of rose petals the Texts demand,” her father continued the moment the doors had shut behind Briory's plump blue back. “And the food for the feast, and a hundred twenty pounds of ice for the ices, and you know what ice costs this time of year, and thank God it isn't June! But it's never going to hold until the day after tomorrow.”

“Will the mice be gone the day after tomorrow, dearest?” Binnie Peldyrin inquired anxiously.

Kyra brought up her napkin to disguise a smile. She'd scryed the church again after speaking to Alix and had seen her father and Spenson both there, uneasily shifting from foot to foot and keeping a sharp eye on the floor in their immediate vicinity while they argued in dumb show with the priest.

“They can stay in St. Farinox until midsummer if it suits them,” her husband retorted, jabbing at the squab on his plate as if he were not only eating it but killing it also.

“Oh, don't say that, darling,” his wife pleaded. “Even though Alix will be worshiping down at Holy Slippers in Fennel Street, I simply couldn't abide a church where I even suspected there might be mice, and poor Tellie Wishrom is positively terrified of them.”

“I've spoken to Nissom Elfridge at St. Creel,” Master Peldyrin went on, cutting in over his wife's chatter with the determination of long experience. “It cost me close to a hundred crowns, even with Bishop Woolmat's word added to mine, but arrangements are made to hold the wedding there the morning after tomorrow. I'll have the invitations sent out tonight.”

“How lovely!” Binnie smiled radiantly.

“It's not in the best part of town, but Elfridge is of decent family, and Fyster Nyven worships there,” he said. “And it was the best that could be had on short notice, since neither Holy Slippers nor Holy Sun is available for any money, though I expect if I were related to a member of the Court, they'd agree quickly enough.”

He glanced sharply across at his elder daughter, who was meticulously dissecting a morsel of quail on her plate as a means of stilling the questions still racing in her mind. All the meal yet to go, she thought, and then the wait while Merrivale supervised the cleanup—she'd never find out in time. Never track down what she needed to know.

His voice was carefully controlled but steely with anger.

“Briory tells me the Inquisition is watching the house.”

“Ah,” Kyra said, not looking up from her task. “So that's who the young man in the brown coat is working for.”

“I won't have it!”

“I suggest you speak to your friend the Bishop, then. Another hundred crowns or so should—”

“Be silent!”

Kyra raised her eyes languidly to meet his, schooling her face to the armor of unconcern. Despite having had no lunch and only noodles for breakfast, she found she had lost all interest in food.

His wide, square mouth, so like hers, grew taut; Binnie whispered, “Gordam, please.”

“I don't know why you came back to this house. God knows you had little enough use for us when you left.” The china rang softly with the tremor of his fork against it. “You've brought nothing but trouble in your wake, and I won't have you undoing all the care I've taken to guarantee an heir for my business, all the pains I've taken to increase our family's credit and to establish your sister as she deserves. She's going to have everything that a woman could ask for.”

“Ah, but the question is, Did she ask for it?” Kyra ate another mouthful of quail just to demonstrate that he hadn't upset her, then set down her knife and fork with a crisp clink.

Bitterly, he said, “I gave you what you asked for, girl, and it nearly cost me everything I had.”

Well
, Kyra admitted to herself back in the yellow guest room later, I can't argue with him there.

She had been thirteen when first she had begun to dream of magic.

… pushing out of me like flowers from the ground, Algeron had said of his poems, of his love for Alix.

Kyra turned her scrying-crystal over in her fingers, letting the images she'd been seeking in it scatter in the flash of the candlelight. The Inquisition must have equipped its spies with talismans of scry-ward as well as spells of Who-Me?… They couldn't possibly be using the few mages they have for routine surveillance of a wizard new to the town. It was unlikely they'd detected any jiggery-pokery with the front steps; if they had, they'd have moved on her at once. Still, their presence—their nosiness—irked her.

She let the anger pass.

Pushing out like flowers from the ground.

Not flowers, she thought. Chicks within the egg, when their life quickened and they knew they must break the shell or die.

She sighed and moved a little closer to the stove. She hoped that the man in the brown coat and anyone else observing the house were shivering miserably in their places of concealment. The night was cold for spring. She was aware of a malicious desire to summon rain or sleet but let that also pass.

Even now she could remember that first dream so clearly.

Kyra had never dreamed much as a child. When she did, her dreams were completely prosaic: sewing sleeves on a dress, embroidering a cuff and having to pick the stitches out… She'd never been the expert seamstress Alix was even at the age of seven. Once she dreamed of adding up the month's ledgers and neglected to do it the following day out of a bone-deep conviction that she'd already accomplished the task. Working trigonometric proofs. That particular night she dreamed that she'd been driven home late from one of the dancibles given by the banker Janson Milpott: an accurate recollection, down to the color of the dress she was wearing—the outlandish ocher yellow with a spreading linen collar like an antique fop's—and her sense of nagging depression at having spent most of the evening among her girlfriends, keeping them in gales of laughter with her sarcasm but unwanted by any of the boys.

But in the dream she had been alone in the carriage, and when she had arrived at the house, it had been to find the place dark. She had thought, even dreaming, that she must have been a good deal later than she supposed. The front door opened under her hand, but no Briory, no footman, no parent came to meet her in the great front hall in a comforting blaze of yellow candlelight. The vast room stretched before her, black and echoing as a cavern a thousand feet below the ground. The silence frightened her.

So she had held out her right hand and summoned a ball of glowing white light to her palm, its rays shimmering to every corner of the hall, driving back the darkness and the fear.

Waking, she had sat up in her bed for a long time, staring into the moonless darkness beyond the bedposts and listening to Alix's breathing, soft among the clouds of linen and goose down at her side.