Stranger At The Wedding (32 page)

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 certainty, 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…

And transmuted itself, as it had at supper last night, into another modality, another key, a transposition…

With it came the sense of having encountered another transposition recently, something else familiar but changed… recognizable only if one knew what it had been changed from…

Then she knew it. She stopped dead in the middle of Faggot Lane as if she had been struck, and behind her a maid selling milk door to door snapped, “ 'Ere, lady, watch where you're goin'!”

“Of course,” Kyra whispered, memory dropping into place. And then, flicking the spilled milk from her sleeve, “Damn. Tastes spoiled, too.” Turning, she ducked across the street under the nose of a plunging butcher's van and, gathering up her skirts, headed back toward Baynorth Square as quickly as she could go.

Her heart was pounding, her mind filled with the memory of the ugliness she'd felt on the wedding gown's muslin lining—weirdly familiar for all its faintness, teasing at her mind like a song transposed.

As the song had, the memory unwound itself and dropped into place.

There was something in that trace of magic that had reminded her—impossibly—of Tibbeth of Hale.

When Kyra returned to the house in the final fading of afternoon to darkness, the tension there was as present, as nerve-racking as the persistent, metallic scrape of some monstrous machine. She had gone out openly, only shaking off the Witchfinder with some rather time-consuming jiggery-pokery in a hat shop in Fennel Street; she waved airily across the square at the disgruntled young man as she ducked through the yard gate upon her return. As she passed unnoticed through the kitchen and slipped up the back stairs, she wondered how that young man's colleagues had fared, explaining to their superiors how they happened to wake up bound hand and foot in the middle of Pennyroyal Common.

The unnatural hush in the house—the kitchen was deserted, which at that time of the day was unheard of— made her wonder if the flute player's peccadilloes with Tellie Wishrom had gone farther than a few kisses by the postern gate. Her first impulse was to think, The silly chit can't POSSIBLY know if she's gotten pregnant yet… Then she recalled her own feelings for Spenson, the terrifying heat of his kisses the previous night, and her own feverish response. I'll skin him alive if he's done anything to her.

The poor girl was only sixteen, after all.

And what, she wondered obliquely as she turned the sharp corners of the pitch-black well of the stair, was she going to do about herself? The thought of not returning to the Citadel when this was all over was unthinkable; the thought of her not being with Spens, more unthinkable still.

Alix's room was empty when she scratched at the door. The wedding dress and its attendant petticoats and veils had been hung in the armoire, out of sight for the first time since Kyra had returned to the house. The wicker dress form was gone. The room looked curiously pale without that flaming watcher of crimson and gold.

She crossed the room swiftly and pulled out the gown and its veils, like billowing armfuls of fire in what dim light remained in the east-facing window.

Now that she was thinking in terms of Tibbeth of Hale, the touch of him on the inside of the bodice, though not strong, was very recognizable.

It shook her to her bones, as if she had seen the man suddenly standing in the room beside her. In a sense, she thought, she had. She felt her breath quicken and a cold shakiness seize her belly; there had to be some explanation for this.

She touched the gown again, trying to quell her fear in analysis.

The sign was definitely his. The magic was… the same but different. Shifted, as she had sensed, into some other modality, some other key that she did not understand. She pressed her lips to the place, trying to further shut out her own confused thoughts and let her magic think for her; frequently, if one's mind was clear or concentrated on something else, images would arise to help, as hers had earlier of the change of key. But all that her mind's eye would see was that final glimpse of his face through the clear, running distortion of the heat dance, mouth impossibly stretched in the single scream that seemed to go on for minutes, eyes bulging with agony and horror and disbelief as the flesh of his thighs fried and swelled and burst…

“Excuse me, miss.”

Kyra whirled. But it was only the laundry maid, who gathered up Alix's discarded shift from the bottom of the armoire and departed, dreamy and colorless as ever.

Kyra sat down on the end of the bed, her hands trembling now. Tibbeth was dead. Yet somehow his magic had reached across the years…

She pushed the gown off her lap, wanting obscurely to wash her hands for having touched the place where the magic had been picked up… Picked up from what? Alix's flesh? She fumbled in the pocket of her gown, drew forth the scrying-crystal, and angled it toward the panes of the window. But too little light remained above the black loom of neighboring roofs and the slate blue of the shadows; she turned her body a little toward the dressing table and gestured a single candle into flame.