Stranger At The Wedding (3 page)

“None of your pertness, miss. And you'll stay clear of your sister, and I mean well clear. Do I make myself understood?”

“With the clarity of trumpets.” Her hazel eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Papa…”

“And you, missy.” Gordam swung sharply around on the younger girl. Briory had tactfully vanished—Kyra knew the butler had far better manners than to be listening outside the book-room door. Alix had sunk back onto one of the sturdy oak chairs, her eyes wide with anxiety and distress in the swimming amber lamplight. “I won't have you sneaking into your sister's room in the middle of the night for secret talks, understand?”

She almost whispered, “Yes, Papa.”

He turned back to Kyra, his long face with its high cheekbones and square jaw—even the fading reddish hair beneath his black velvet cap—an echo of hers. “As her sister, you have the right to come to Alix's wedding,” he acknowledged grimly. “But as a householder, as your father, I suppose I have some rights, too. Or was that another of the things you swore away when you joined up with the wizards?”

“I wasn't the one who locked the door,” Kyra said, her head coming up and her golden eyes cold. “I wasn't the one who instructed the servants to tell me that you had left town and wouldn't be back.” She looked away and stood for a moment studying the banners she had set awkwardly up against the wall. The design into which the staff of the Merchant Adventurers and the loaves of the Bakers' Guild had been worked had not been well thought out—it would probably provide a certain amount of amusement to the younger apprentices who'd be in the crowd.

“You can't have it both ways, you know,” she went on after a moment with her old ironic lightness, turning back to meet his furious glare. “Either I am your daughter and owe you the obedience of a daughter, and as your daughter have the right to attend the wedding and to ride in the procession if I should wish, or I am not your daughter and owe you no obedience, and shall attend the wedding as and how I might.”

“Don't chop logic with me, miss!” His brows, as straight and thick as hers, plunged down over his eyes, and his wide mouth tightened. “I'll have Merrivale prepare the yellow guest room for you and send you up something decent to wear to supper, and you'll wear it, you understand? Lord Mayor Spenson and his son will be here in an hour, and the Bishop Woolmat—”

“You got Old Wooley to officiate?” Kyra asked interestedly. “The choir at St. Cyr must have been in desperate need of new robes. If you want me to wear something fashionable, you'll need to parole Alix long enough into my presence to lace me.”

“Cannady will lace you,” her parent snapped. “Alix, send someone to the kitchen to see how Joblin and that apprentice of his are coming on the dinner and tell Briory to lay an extra plate. Don't you go yourself, mind! I won't have it said that any daughter of mine spends her time with servants! And tell her to find those damned musicians we hired for the wedding and make sure they're sober enough to play for our guests at supper. I'm told the Spensons have their own house musicians who play for them every night, and I won't have them thinking we're marrying into their family for the money. How I'll get through the next twenty-four hours I don't know.”

He strode from the book room, his elder daughter picking up her tapestry satchel to follow, his younger gathering her pastel skirts and hurrying across the hall to the big double doors that led into the service wing. At the foot of the long flight of stairs he halted, turning to glare at Kyra. “I don't understand why you came back for this wedding at all!”

“Don't you?” Kyra asked softly as her father, not waiting for a reply, left her and headed across the hall likewise, the plush skirts of his old-fashioned coat sweeping behind him like clumsy, rust-colored wings. She sighed and started up the stairs to the first of the galleries above. In an even quieter voice she added, “I'm afraid that makes two of us.”

Tomorrow
!
Panic raced in Kyra's pulse
as she descended the tight, square turns of the second-floor stairs, the heavy taffeta of her skirts rustling over the polished oak steps. Tomorrow, good God!

Alix's note had said the first of May. It was only the third week of April. She had thought she'd have more time.

Wizards did not travel as a rule by the public stage line, which ran from Lastower through the endless rolling hills, the rude villages and sprawling, muddy trading towns of the Sykerst; it was felt that more good would be derived from walking, improving one's acquaintance with the grasses, stones, and sky. The morning after her receipt of Alix's note, however, Kyra had driven into Lastower with Bentick, Steward of the Citadel, and Pothatch the cook and used the money she had begged from Lady Rosamund to purchase a stage ticket, praying it would get her to Angelshand before it was too late.

Her heart hammered thickly under the stiff whalebone of her bodice. Tomorrow.

Damn it, she thought, irritation flashing through her dread. People should make up their minds to a plan and stick to it!

Below her in the hall she could hear the voices of the arriving guests.

“Lord Earthwygg, I cannot tell you how honored I am to welcome you into my home. My lady…” The high ceiling of the hall, designed for the unbearable muggy heat of Angelshand summers, picked up sound like a well; two stories above them Kyra could hear her father's voice as if he were standing in the next room. “And my dear Lady Esmin! You grow more beautiful every time I see you…”

For all his stiffness, Gordam Peldyrin knew how to make himself gracious when he chose, and Lord Earthwygg, though a fairly minor viscount in the Emperor's court, was his patron, his channel both to Imperial contracts and to the higher social position that he had craved as long as Kyra had been conscious of a world outside the walls of the house. From the rail of the gallery she could see them, below the bright glazes and floating lights of the porcelain chandelier. Footmen were divesting Lord Earthwygg, his wife, and his daughter Esmin of their wraps while Briory stood and supervised with a mien considerably haughtier than that of her employer.

Caldyx Prethness, Lord Earthwygg, she recognized from her childhood and teenage years. Small and slender, he looked as if he'd wasted still further, a delicate little shadow of a man in gray satin whose diamonds flung a refracted galaxy of chandelier light. Without the thick cosmetics affected by the Court, he would have been as invisible as her cousin Plennin. The fair, luxuriant hair Kyra judged to be a wig—his had been thinning six years ago, and no human hair was ever that copious. His wife's, on the other hand, was undoubtedly real, coiffed and flowered and looped with jewels, the gray and black of storm clouds setting off a stern, handsome face as her rose-colored gown set off the snow mountains of her breasts. She was saying something exceedingly gracious to Kyra's mother, a plump little woman from whom Alix had gotten both her golden hair and her endless warm loquacity. The condescension in her ladyship's tone, Kyra realized with a smile, had gone straight over her mother's head.

Most things did, of course.

“Well, one doesn't want to appear cheap, but frequently, at this time of year, what's in season in the markets is the tastiest, and it would hardly make sense to pay half a crown apiece for apples that are mealy or pears that look as if they'd come a hundred and fifty miles on horseback… My dear Esmin, such a beautiful dress…”

Esmin Earthwygg had been ten when Kyra had left her parents' walls, a skinny, overdressed child who always reminded Kyra of a ferret. As Kyra came to the head of the last, single long flight of stairs down into the hall, she could see that like Lord Earthwygg, Esmin would always be thin and small. Under her pearl-ornamented fair curls, her face had acquired a kind of pixie prettiness, assisted by some well-paid genius with the makeup brushes, but her eyes still looked as if they should be investigating underbrush for mice.

“Hylette made that, didn't she?” Alix asked, coming over to greet Esmin with a warm embrace and naming the most expensive dressmaker on the Imperial Prospect.

“Oh, Hylette makes everything I wear.”

“I can always tell the way she cuts a bodice. I have to tell you, I was in her shop yesterday for the final fitting on the wedding gown… don't you wish brides could get married in something other than red? It absolutely turns me into cheese.”

It was a lie, of course, Kyra reflected—Alix looked as spectacular in the crimson and gold dictated for brides as she looked in any other color—but Esmin, flaxen like her father, would go ghastly when it came her turn to proceed up an aisle under the saffron veils the strict-form ceremony required, and it was kind of Alix to put herself in the category of those whom bridal red would not suit. Kyra recognized that sort of generosity these days, though she had never had it herself. In her own years of going to Guildmasters' balls and the dancibles given by the other merchants of the city, she had been a source of both scandalized amusement and dread to those her own age as a result of her scathing and witty observations on the shortcomings of others.

Alix
, she thought, her belly going cold again. Alix is marrying tomorrow… What on earth could she do?

Briory announced, “His Honor, Mayor Brune Spenson—Master Blore Spenson.”

She stepped back, severe in her dark blue suit, to admit the Mayor of Angelshand—looking even more like a steel mummy than he had six years ago—and his son, the newly made President of the Guild of Merchant Adventurers and Alix's long-negotiated-for groom.

He was another one, Kyra reflected dispassionately, who ought never to be allowed to wear red.

In a nuptial mood, however, he had donned a court suit of it—satin, too, always a bad choice on a stocky man—and with his powerful shoulders, broad-boned face, and short, sandy hair, he bore an unfortunate resemblance to a very large apple.

Not that he was fat, she thought, watching him as he kissed Alix's hand with rigid formality and Alix flung her bright and all-encompassing carpet of small talk over him like a bird catcher's net. He just couldn't wear red without looking fat. He stood mumchance, his whole body radiating stiff discomfort, though whether that was because of the strait fit of his suit or because of Alix's nonstop babble, Kyra couldn't determine. His neck cloth looked as if it had been tied by a particularly unskilled dog.

“You remember my daughter, Esmin, don't you, Master Spenson? Of course, you met at the ball here when you returned from the spice islands.”

Kyra, lazily beginning her descent of the long marble stair, observed how close to that stocky form Esmin insinuated herself and how his hand first lingered on, then quickly dropped hers. Even at that distance Kyra saw the rise of blood to his face.

“… going to be taking over the Presidency of the Merchants' Guild now, aren't you, Master Spenson?” Alix chirruped. Always talkative, she was positively blithering this evening. “How exciting for you! It must be quite a change to be living in a house and not a ship's cabin—though it isn't really fair to add to your burdens with all those upholsterers and carpenters… Do you know, Esmin, he's having the master's suite redecorated in their house on Prandhauer Street? With the most enchanting painted wallpapers, a sort of shell-pink, hand-painted silk… Not to mention all the things that have to be done for the wedding and getting his trading fleet ready to sail…”

“Oh, Master Spenson…” Esmin moved a little closer to him and raised black shoe-button eyes to his. “You aren't leaving us again so soon for the high seas? I thought Father said you had done with journeying.” Her hand stole to his lapel, and Master Spenson turned a color that went most unbecomingly with his satin suit.

Kyra strode forward from the foot of the stairs, her hand extended. “Master Spenson,” she said in her deep voice, “I'm Kyra Peldyrin.”

He looked quickly away from Esmin as if Kyra's words had broken some kind of spell, and his eyes widened at the sight of her. Probably, she thought, it's the dress. Merrivale, the housekeeper, had brought one of Alix's gowns up to the yellow guest room, a soft powder-blue silk that would have enchantingly set off the girl's radiant fairness and would have made Kyra look like a week-old corpse. Instead of putting it on, she had gone up to the attic and found hanging in an armoire all her old gowns, gowns that had been the talk of her own set for their flamboyant disregard of current fashion. Centuries out of date in pattern and cut, some of them, they had been made to her instructions in colors darker and bolder than anything that had been worn for seventy-five years. Against the frail rose and ivory of Esmin's costume and the lettuce greens of Alix's, Kyra's black and yellow stripes and face-framing collar of point lace stood out like an orchid among daisies.

Nevertheless, Spenson reached out to grasp her hand, and at that moment Kyra, who had not worn a formal gown or anything resembling one for six years, stepped on the hem of one of her petticoats and went sprawling into his arms.

His reflexes were quick. She found herself caught with a surprisingly light strength and set back on her feet, and for a moment she stood looking at very close range into a pair of twinkling blue eyes on a level with her own.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, stepping back a little and shaking straight her voluminous skirts. “I'm always doing that… You're taller than I thought you'd be. And that color doesn't suit you.”

“I thought Father's tailor carried on a little too much about how well it did.” Master Spenson ruefully considered one satin sleeve. “And I'm taller than I thought I'd be, once upon a time.”

“Master Spenson…” Gordam Peldyrin appeared, almost impossibly, in the small space between them, caught the arm of his prospective son-in-law, and steered him hastily away. “Lord Earthwygg wanted to ask you about the cargoes you're shipping this week.”

Esmin looked up at Kyra, who was standing now beside her. “Is it true you're a witch?” she asked, her black eyes greedy.

“Witch?” Lord Mayor Spenson grumbled, glancing around from the crystal glass of muscat the liveried footman was handing him on a tray. He squinted at her belligerently. Kyra met his gaze calmly, knowing what he was going to say and knowing there was no way of stopping him or anyone else. “Aye… You were that old hoodoo's pupil, weren't you? The one they burned…”