Stranger At The Wedding (41 page)

Peldyrin shook her off as he might have shaken a moth. “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 paterfamilias. “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.

Grudgingly, he held out his hand to her. “A safe journey to you.”

She brushed the hand aside and took him in her arms. For one moment he stiffened as if she'd been one of the ladies at the Cheevy Street Baths. Then, with a strange little movement of his shoulders and back, he seemed to put aside his anger, remembering not the outrageous and outraging teenager who had so wantonly disrupted his plans but the bright-gowned, bright-eyed little girl he'd used to hug.

They embraced with the elbow-bumping awkwardness of two scarecrows kissing. Then he pulled on his fur-collared mantle as if it had personally affronted him and strode imperiously from the room.

Binnie smiled up at her daughter. “Brittany Nemors will know where Alix sets up her shop; Brittany went to school with me. She knows all the new dressmakers.” They passed through the common room, where a very stout man and a thin woman were gathering several noisy and uncomfortably dressed offspring around a fortress of baggage. The largest of the girls was singing tunelessly about the personal habits of her next-younger sibling; the smallest boy was crying. Kyra shut her eyes in horrified anticipation, realizing that these were to be her fellow passengers for perhaps as much as ten days and nights of constant company.

At her elbow, her mother's voice pattered cheerfully on. “Mark my words, dearest. Before Alix bears her first son, your father will be so sick of Cousin Wyrdlees that he'll take that nice boy Algeron into the family business; corn factoring can't be so very different from baking.”

Kyra rolled her eyes.

“And in any case, you know that he'll want to raise up his grandson to inherit. It'll all work out. These things do.”

Kyra looked down at her as they stepped into the muddy yard. It had rained last night—she could have told to the minute when it had begun and when it had ceased—and the wheels of the coach were clotted thick with mud, the morning air filled with the high, damp warmth of the coming summer. The coach itself looked very gay; all the government mail coaches had been newly painted the previous summer to celebrate the birth of the Regent's heir.

Hostlers were leading out her parents' gig and team, with Sam sitting up already on the coachman's seat. Her father climbed impatiently in and settled the lap robe about his bony knees, for all the world like an affronted tomcat washing itself in a corner. Other grooms were hitching the fresh team to the mail coach, massive horses shining like new coppers, twitching their haunches and flicking their docked tails at the flies.

“Do write me. I know your father will take a little time to come around to that, too… But it was good to see you again.”

Binnie stood on tiptoe to kiss her one last time; Kyra hugged her again, pushing aside the start of fresh tears, and picked up the carpetbag she'd left by the inn's door. As she watched her mother pick her way across the muddy yard, her mind was already occupied with the journey ahead: ten ghastly days through the deeper and ever-deeper mud of the Sykerst's abominable roads, two nights at most of decent inns followed by a succession of straw-covered plank beds in post houses—thank God most people refused to share beds with wizards! Black bread and hard cheese and smoke-flavored tea with honey and listening to endless chatter about childbirth and illnesses and love affairs from the women on the coach, interspersed with inaccurate and maddening questions about magic.

The coachman was calling, “Board up! Board up!”

It occurred to her belatedly that she should have written a note for her parents to take to Spens. But, her throat tightening again, she knew there was nothing she could have said.

He had his life. She had hers. The mere fact that the Inquisition would make it impossible for her to return to Angelshand for months, perhaps years, told her how futile was any thought of being with him.

She'd have to ask Lady Rosamund if there was some kind of unlove potion, some counterspell for the heart. She certainly couldn't continue to go through the kind of pain she'd been in last night. “I suppose I should have done all that when I was sixteen, as Alix did,” she sighed to herself. “Measles are worse when you get them as an adult, too.”

She swung her carpetbag up to the footman on top of the coach, missed her distance, stepped back to avoid having the heavy bag come crashing down on her head, stepped on the hem of her robe, and would have collapsed back into the mud if someone hadn't come around the side of the coach at that moment and caught her in one strong arm.

“I thought it was just because of all those silly petticoats women wear,” Spenson said, righting her and taking the bag. His right arm was still in a sling—sprained rather than broken, she had ascertained—but he moved with all his old buoyant lightness. His neck cloth certainly looked as if he'd tied it with one hand.

Behind them, the stout man in the red coat handed child after child up into the coach. Kyra replied, “Nonsense, you should have seen me before I learned to manage petticoats,” but her heart was hammering so painfully in her ribs that she could barely think. The part of her not singing with delight at the sight of him throbbed with a bitter ache, wondering why he had come to renew the pain yet again. More awkwardly, she said, “I didn't know you'd come out with Father.”

“I didn't.” He tossed her satchel to the waiting hands on top of the coach and handed her in, climbing up after her and wedging himself between her and the two oldest girls, who had already embarked on what promised to be a week of pinches and hair pulling. “And believe me, the only thing that I can think of worse than riding half a day from Angelshand with the parents of my erstwhile bride is what did greet me in the courtyard of my house when I returned there last night.”

Kyra stared at him blankly. The hasu who had ridden with the Witchfinders returned to her mind, the ability of a mage to see through darkness and illusion. Good God, he wasn't a fugitive himself because of her… ! “Not the Witchfinders?”

“Worse,” Spens said darkly, but there was a sparkle in his eyes. The coachman cracked his long whip. The Sykerst mail jolted forward, nearly pitching Kyra, Spens, and their two squabbling seat mates into the welter of red coat, striped skirt, and diapers opposite them. As Kyra groped, completely breathless, for something to think, let alone say, he went on. “Though the Inquisition may have been watching the house. That's certainly the excuse I made to Father when I told him I was leaving Angelshand for two years to be our house's factor to the Sykerst fur traders at Lastower.”

Kyra stared at him. “Lastower… Two years?”

Lastower. A day's ride from the Citadel…

“What did he say?”

“Nothing I'll repeat in front of those little girls across from us,” he replied cheerfully. “ 'Traitor' was the mildest. 'Ingrate,' 'dilettante'… I'm inclined to think you were right.”

“About what?”

“About him being the one who put my responsibilities into my head when he became eligible for Mayor. A post he'll have to quit now. And finding me a wife to keep me from running off to sea again. I sent that poor Gyvinna woman a hundred crowns, just on the strength of her calling down the Inquisition and giving me a reason to get out of Angelshand.”

Kyra was shocked. “You're the heir! You can't just walk out!”

“You did.”

“That was different!”

His blue eyes twinkled as he took her hand. “Not as different as you think.”

She recalled the look on his face during the fight in the garden, the wild brightness of his eyes in the field of Hythe Farm. Remembered his silence as he faced his duty to family in Angelshand, a stocky man in a red suit with nothing to say.

“Spens,” she said, her eyes glinting, “I do believe you're a fraud.”

“I do believe you're right.”

The shadow of the inn-yard gate darkened them for a moment, then vanished in the warm dappled light of the country sun.

“Are you a witch?”

Kyra raised her head a little from Spenson's good shoulder to look past his back at the small, pinch-faced girl tugging her sleeve.

“Luce …” the girl's mother hissed reprovingly.