Stranger At The Wedding (4 page)

“His Grace Dromus Woolmat,” Briory intoned from the door, “Bishop of Angelshand.”

“My dear, I'm so glad you returned for your sister's wedding, and I'm so glad to see you again,” Binnie Peldyrin murmured into her elder daughter's ear as they turned the corner from the ascending stair and passed along the wide gallery toward the formal dining hall. “But I hope you don't mind being crowded. Your turning up just now threw my table completely off. If we'd had even a day's notice, we could have invited Mole Prouvet—Tellie Wishrom's intended, you know, and a very dear boy even though the Prouvets do own that factory—or your cousin Wyrdlees or somebody to balance it.”

Entering the dining room, Kyra could see her mother's point. In six years of quiet in the remote Citadel she'd forgotten about the intricacies of properly balancing a dining table.

She ended up seated between Master Spenson and Esmin Earthwygg, since that was virtually the only place they could put her. Certainly her father would not have risked seating her next to Bishop Woolmat, who had regarded her with a kind of startled outrage the moment he'd entered the downstairs hall and thereafter had refused to speak to or go near her. Nor could she have been seated next to either Lord Mayor Spenson or Lord Earthwygg, which would have placed her opposite the indignant prelate. As it was, she had Esmin between her and his grace, which was just fine with them both, though Esmin didn't look particularly pleased about the arrangement.

“It should be the finest wedding this city has seen for years,” Gordam Peldyrin predicted proudly from the head of the table, nodding and reaching over to pat his younger daughter's hand. “And a great credit to this little minx of mine.”

“I believe it's the first wedding in your family to be performed in the strict form,” Lady Earthwygg purred, glancing along the table at him with eyes as black as—but far more intelligent than—her daughter's.

“Well…” Binnie Peldyrin began deprecatingly, and her husband said, “Oh, no, far from it, far from it,” which Kyra knew was a lie. As a rule, strict-form weddings were performed only among the nobility and the very rich. There was a kind of social cachet to them, but the complications of getting an episcopal dispensation, coupled with the sheer expense of the materials prescribed by the ancient Texts, discouraged even the wealthy merchant classes from going to the trouble when marriage by signature would serve just as well. “Why, my parents were married in the strict form down in Parchasten…”

The two footmen, very stiff in their purple and yellow livery, bore in the fish course; at the far end of the long dining room the musicians played some airy piece of nonsense, like a fill of starlight that softened the clinking of tableware and the small slurps and crunches of eating. The musicians, Kyra had been informed by the maid who'd laced her, had been hired by her father to play for the wedding procession, the wedding itself, and the feast afterward, and were among the best in the city. The flute player was currently making sheeps' eyes at Tellie Wishrom, Alix's closest friend and, with Esmin Earthwygg, her maiden of honor for tomorrow's ceremony. On the other side of the Bishop, Kyra could see Lady Earthwygg eyeing the young man, too.

“Personally, I can't imagine why any woman would want to be married in the strict form,” Kyra drawled, just barely stopping herself from spearing one of the honeyed quails. She let the footman—she knew he'd been with the family before her departure, but she never could remember servants' names—put it on her plate for her. Even before she'd spent six years waiting on herself in the Citadel, her family had not had the servants put the food on the plates for them. This, like the musicians and the tale of strict-form weddings in Parchasten, had been rehearsed to show the Spensons and the Earthwyggs how grandly the Peldyrins lived.

“Oh, but it's tradition,” Alix said a little too quickly, and Tellie sighed, her large blue eyes brimming with sentiment. The Wishrom grandparents, Kyra suspected, had gotten married by jumping over a broom, and in that household signature marriage was undoubtedly considered the apex of respectability.

“Tradition to get up at the crack of dawn for a ritual bath and spend hours in the church breathing incense that smells like carrion… ? Whyever did the prophets choose civet as the proper incense for the rite, your grace?” She leaned around Esmin to address the Bishop, who was sitting rigidly between Lady Earthwygg and her daughter. “And then afterward one has to put up with being married in the strict form…”

“The strict—or true—form of marriage is not a matter for disparagement,” the Bishop said in the golden-voiced baritone that every week had the congregation of St. Cyr Cathedral sighing and weeping like some delicately played wind instrument to the rhythm of his sermons. “Its form—and its symbolic materials—were all specifically laid down in ancient times and recorded in the Texts—”

“Aye, and damned wealthy those old-timers must have been,” Lord Earthwygg jested in his thin, drawling voice. He raised a quizzing glass to one heavily painted eye. “Just watching poor Peldyrin here buying the incense, and the jewels, and the golden vessels, and the proper music… the horses drawing the bride have to be white mares and twenty ells of saffron silk to make the bridal tent… Makes me think I'll invest in a good broomstick when time comes for my Esmin to wed.”

“Oh, what a japester you are, my lord,” his lady laughed, with a glare that could have fleshed a deerhide.

“Well, I can easily understand how people started marrying by signature as a place holder to promise the Church that a real ceremonial would take place as soon as everyone could afford it,” Kyra remarked. “Which, of course, then nobody ever did.”

“Kyra!” her mother said, shocked.

“And once the women found out how much more convenient it was not to be legally their husband's chattel—”

“A woman shall enter into a man's house and become as his daughter,” the Bishop quoted sententiously. He patted the corners of his mouth with his napkin with great care not to upset either his makeup or the black velvet beauty patch glued just beside his lips—a silly place for a patch, Kyra thought, if one was going to dinner. “He shall be a father unto her, and she shall come into his home with bowed head and contrite heart …”

He leaned forward as he said it, to see around Esmin to Kyra, so Kyra was aware of Lady Earthwygg reaching behind his gray velvet episcopal back to hand something to her daughter.

“I think that's… that's very touching,” Tellie Wishrom said hesitantly. “I mean, to be taken care of as a daughter…”

The Bishop beamed paternally.

“Well, that's all very well if your father keeps his accounts straight and doesn't drink,” Kyra remarked, ladling applesauce onto a fragment of ham.

“Accounts!” Lord Mayor Spenson raised his wrinkled visage from his plate for the first time during the meal. The same dog, Kyra thought, must have tied his neck cloth as well—beside him, his son sat stolidly consuming baby peas and fricasseed goose, radiating consciousness of Esmin Earthwygg like heat from a stove.

“Just taking the time for this wedding is putting our accounts out of balance!” the old man went on, jabbing with his oyster fork in Kyra's direction. “Our ships should have set sail two days ago when the first of the easterlies began to blow—and a week early they are—and old man Nyven's fleet is already on the sea. Ours would be, too, but for this wedding, for there isn't a trader in the fleet up to Spens for getting his cargoes past the islands and away! No, nor for avoiding pirates in the Jingu Straits, either!”

His hand trembled with a slight, continuous quiver of palsy, but his eyes were pinpoints of blued steel. It wasn't difficult to see how this man had built the old banking house's modest family fortune into a staggering trade empire on will and stubbornness and bulldog strength.

“Pirates!” Esmin gasped, clutching her hands—and whatever her mother had passed her—to her bosom. “It sounds thrilling!”

“When a boy's young, I suppose it is,” he allowed dourly. “But a man can't keep at it forever, and time comes when he must settle and tend his nursery.” He cast that steel-hard eye on his only son and then past him to the flowerlike beauty of his daughter to be. “Though what with the clothing for him for this precious rite, and horses of this color and that color, and all those candies and trinkets that need to be flung out, and hiring maskers and learning dances and meantime the corn factors are cheating us out of our eyeteeth every chance they get and two ships down this autumn… Two ships! There's witchery in it, I tell you…”

“Nonsense,” Kyra said, while her father—who was a corn factor—only glared.

“You say nonsense, girl,” the mayor snapped testily, while Lady Earthwygg signaled a footman for more wine for her daughter. “But you can't tell me it's coincidence that two of my ships went down and none of Dutton Droon's did, any more than you can tell me that great storm two winters ago that wrecked the entire fleet wasn't cooked up by dog wizards in the pay of those whose ships survived! Not to mention all that talk of ruin and abominable things just a year ago! And you should know more about that, miss, than anyone at this table!”

“Father, there's no proof—”

“You stay out of this, Spens!”

Master Spenson looked as if he would say something else, but his father had already turned away.

Gordam Peldyrin, red-faced with mortification, glared at Kyra as if by his will he could make her disappear, and Lady Earthwygg turned to Binnie Peldyrin with some piece of gossip from the Court to distract her from the powder that Esmin was rather clumsily dropping into the wineglass she held.

“If I know anything about it,” Kyra said calmly, “it's only as a matter of academics. Real wizards—those trained by the Council, as I am—take a vow not to meddle in human concerns, and most dog wizards don't have the training to call enough power to sink a ship. You might ask his grace. The Church has wizards working for it.”

“The Magic Office is strictly advisory,” the Bishop grated.

“Well, why does it need to be?” she asked. “Why can't each guild have its own wizard as a consultant in matters such as this?”

“They shouldn't have it at all!” the Lord Mayor stormed. “Nor that worthless Inquisition, paid a fortune for doing nothing but poke and pry! Waste of public money, I call it!”

“Oh!” Esmin made an exaggerated grimace over her wine. “What a strange taste.”

“Perhaps,” the Bishop majestically—and politically —said, ignoring both Esmin and the Lord Mayor, “because the guilds are formed under the aegis of the Church and its saints. Wizards, having been born without souls, as agents of illusion and evil—”

“Really, you can't believe that if you follow the advice of your own wizards.”

“You keep a civil tongue in your head, girl!”

“Would you try this, Master Spenson, and tell me if you think it's all right?”

Esmin started to hand her blown-glass goblet of wine to Spenson behind Kyra's back. Kyra had only to jerk her elbow back to knock it spinning from the girl's grip, shattering it in an explosion of shards and Chablis.

“Oh, dear!” she said, springing to her feet. “How terribly clumsy of me. You—er…” She still couldn't recall the footman's name. “We need a towel here.”

The fast, despairing glance Esmin threw to her mother wasn't lost on Kyra, but Lady Earthwygg had gone back to her quail without a blink.

Alix looked as if she was about to cry with mortification and stress. As the meal progressed, Kyra became increasingly aware of the nervousness that underlay her sister's flood of talk. Not that Alix wasn't a chatterbox under the best of circumstances—Kyra had almost forgotten her capacity for nonstop discourse on fashion, Court events, and the lives of the people around her. But the speed of her words, the restless fussing of her hands, spelled a subtext of unhappiness readable only by the woman who had grown up in the same room with her, sleeping in the same bed.

Unhappiness at seeing how Spenson kept glancing over at Esmin Earthwygg? Kyra wondered. Or unhappiness with the idea of marriage at all? Particularly, she thought, to a blocky merchant nearly twice her age whose red suit and lace neck cloth made him look like a bull in hair ribbons.

“And now I've gotten wine on my dress.” Kyra straightened up. “No, I'll be all right,” she added as Alix showed signs of getting up to help her.

Their father, suspicion gleaming in his eye, added gruffly, “Keep your seat, miss; your sister will do well enough. That's why we've servants.”

Kyra's curtsy took in the entire table. “If you will excuse me, Mother, Father, Master Spenson…”

The elder Spenson and the Bishop were too deep in their increasingly heated discussion of the cost of the strict-form wedding ceremony and the possible dark dealings between the Prophets and traders in silk and gems to take note of her departure. Spenson, who in her opinion hardly resembled the fearless adventurer his father fondly painted, bowed to her as she left.

Once out of the dining room, Kyra did not ascend the stairs to the bedrooms. Instead, and with the silent swiftness they all learned in the Citadel of Wizards, she gathered her black and primrose skirts in her hands and hurried down the long flight into the lamplit well of the hall.

As she passed through the hall toward the inconspicuous archway beneath the gallery at its rear, she deepened her concentration, probing with the hyperacute senses of wizardry at the voices beyond the closed door of the kitchen wing. She heard Imper Joblin, the cook, shouting instructions to the scullions about preparing the delicate creams and fruit tarts to be served at tomorrow's feast: “Algeron, I've told you a dozen times the sugar roses on top of the cake are to be pink!” The voices of the footmen came dimly from the drying room, where they and the housemaids had all been pressed into service frenziedly weaving festal garlands, waiting for the last guests to leave so they could bring in the gardenias for the night and hang the new banners on the walls and galleries to impress tomorrow's guests. She heard Merrivale the housekeeper's soft Mellidane drawl and the muted thump-thump as a laundry maid ironed one of Alix's fine linen chemises.