Stranger At The Wedding (7 page)

The blunt, unhandsome face of her sister's middle-aged groom returned to her mind. The way his eyes had followed Esmin Earthwygg. The uncomfortable silences—the hard set of the lips. If the youth Algeron weren't a servant, her father might see the matter differently. Or maybe not. “I can” Kyra said gently, “in that we're taught how. But as I said, the first thing we do at the Citadel is take a vow never to use magic to interfere in any way with the lives of other people.”

The dampness of her stockings, the bruises on her knees, stung her with a momentary rebuke, but she went on. “Those are the only conditions under which they'll teach us true power. That's why people like… like Tibbeth—” Her voice still stuck a little on his name, “—never get proper teaching and stay dog wizards. Because they won't take the vow. That means fortune-telling, or love-spells, or—”

“Kyra!” Her father's voice cut like an ax across her words. She had been too preoccupied with what might lie behind Alix's question to hear him coming up the stairs from his study below.

She swung around, startled, clutching the pink wrapper close. He still wore the lush rust-colored suit he'd had on at dinner, his gold-flowered waistcoat mottled with water from the doctor's compresses. The lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper, and behind the anger in his eyes was a glitter of tiredness and the expression of a man who thought something was about to be put over on him.

“I told you I wouldn't have you speaking to your sister! God knows she's had enough to do, getting ready for the wedding, without you putting your heathen ideas into her head and bringing up things best forgotten!”

“You mean telling her my side of the story?” Kyra inquired calmly.

“Papa, Kyra only came in to say good night, so that I could unlace her—”

“Let her call one of the maids! She may have forced her way back into this house to see you wed, but that doesn't mean I have to let her make of you what she's chosen to be!”

“You mean a woman who knows her own mind?” Kyra asked. “Or merely a happy one?” She turned to Alix. “I don't suppose we'll be permitted to meet tomorrow, but I'll certainly see you at the bath ceremony the following morning. The Texts do say,” she added as her father opened his mouth in furious protest, “that mother and sisters shall attend her, and cousins to the second degree. If you're putting out six crowns the ounce to stink up St. Farinox Church with civet incense, you can scarcely get away with that silly business of temporary adoption when you have a perfectly legitimate sister to hold the towels. Good night.”

She would have made a queenly exit on that line had she not caught her foot on the collapsed pool of her discarded petticoats. As it was, her father had to catch her, and they stood for a moment, hands and arms gripped, topaz eyes looking into topaz, before she broke away and strode serenely down the hall, leaving the gown across the foot of the bed, to be picked up by the maids.

In the yellow guest room Kyra closed the door, opened the window—Briory had obviously prepared the room for her—and reached under the bed to find her tapestry satchel. The spells she'd left on it told her that the butler had tried to open it—although her dignity would never permit her to listen at doorways, the woman was an unconscionable snoop—but that she'd been turned aside from doing so by the other spells of ward and guard, the spells that would cause her to suddenly recall that there were other, urgent things to be done elsewhere in the house that minute.

Not that it mattered terribly, Kyra reflected. Opening the bag, she pulled out hairbrush, toothbrush, and the plain cotton nightgown she preferred to the tucked and ruffled gauze one—obviously Alix's—that lay across the foot of the bed. The other things she had brought with her—red chalk made of wax and ground silver, vials of powdered silver and elkhorn, a few books and some markers wrought of bone and feathers—were scarcely incriminating, and her Council vows should be sufficient to protect her from the Inquisition even if her family wouldn't.

Provided that no one found out about the runes she'd drawn on the front step.

She shivered a little at the thought and felt cold in the pit of her stomach.

She had only managed to buy a little time.

Outside, the gallery was quiet. She closed her eyes, listening more deeply, but no sound came from the rooms farther along: the big chamber her parents shared, the little parlor and the dressing room, the bedroom where she and Alix had slept in that same big, white-curtained bed where Alix would now be lying alone, watched by the crimson gown that stood like a specter of familial duty in the corner. Her mother, she guessed, was still down supervising things in the kitchens. Her father, who pretended to find his wife's mundane preoccupations exasperating compared with his larger schemes of social advancement, would be in his study, for he hated retiring alone to sleep.

Very quietly, Kyra opened the bedroom door again.

An echoey murmur rose from the hall below, and ember-colored light reflected upward, as from a glowing well. Silent as a ghost now in her chemise and fluffy pink robe, she moved to the next door along the gallery and pressed her hands to the silver mounting of its keyhole. Father just locked it up… Alix had said.

Just as Nandiharrow had taught her they would, the tiny mechanisms of the lock ticked over in response to her whispered words. Gently, Kyra pushed open the door.

The smell of dust overwhelmed her, of air too long uncirculated, of mold. Someone had in fact been through here, probably before the room was shut up for good. The little terra-cotta jars that had lined the two shelves above the narrow pine worktable were gone. So were the books. Kyra felt a flash of anger at the stripped shelves on the opposite wall, remembering how diligently she'd searched for those thirty or so volumes of astrological, herbal, and theurgic lore through the barrows of the secondhand dealers along the riverfront and in every bookshop from Butter Hill to the city's southern gates.

Her father had burned them. She knew it. There had been nothing there that wasn't available in the libraries of the Citadel, but those books had been hers…

Memory sliced at her again with the recollection of how the Inquisitor's headsman had kindled the pyre in St. Cyr Square with Tibbeth's books. There had been hundreds of them, and she remembered very clearly how the heat had carried burning pages aloft like huge yellow leaves swirling in a gale.

The thought made her clench her teeth until her jaw ached.

It did not take her long to search the room.

She hadn't really expected to find anything there, since Tibbeth had left the household before the scandal had broken. But she knew that the kind of mark she sought, though made in a room locked up for years, would not have lost its strength. This room, however, was singularly clear of magic. Even the old echoes of the spells Tibbeth had taught her here had been worn away by time, by the friction of stirring currents of life, by the changing seasons and the far-off turning of the stars.

The implements he had taught her to use—the divining-bowl, the mirror, the crystals, wax, chalks—had gone the way of the herbs and books, the spell-treated parchments for talismanic work, the bits of copper, silver, and gold. Here and there, in the corners, she came upon bits of her own old magic, like whiffs of perfume clinging to the folds of old garments: childish cantrips and piseog, laborious illusions, the clumsy echoes of attempts to imbue sigils and seals.

Of Tibbeth himself there was not even that.

She got out quickly, knowing how easy it would be to open the windows and look down at the familiar view over the garden, visible to her mageborn eyes in the darkness now that the fog would be dispersing. How easy to reminisce about the girl who spent so many hours in that room, intoxicatedly pursuing a dream that had been all that she could then comprehend of the greater dream of knowledge and power. How easy to shed cheap tears, when what she really needed to do was sleep, and plan, and figure out what to do next.

In her own room again, she opened her satchel once more and took out Alix's note. This is to let you know that Father has finally arranged a marriage for me, a truly splendid match.

With a pug-faced merchant almost twice her age who had no better sense than to wear red satin.

Kyra shook her head, running the fine, stiff parchment over and over through her fingers.

Through the half-open window, the lingering rawness of the fog drifted, the pong of the river, of wet stone, soot, and sewage, the lowering, crowded smells of too many human beings living too close together. Cramped dreams, sordid secrets, desperate strivings for the most minimal of gains, petty greeds and confused issues, mixed feelings and information that read both ways, and small victories of love blossoming like flowers on a dung heap. The Citadel was not free of its greeds and griefs and private secrets, but they were for the most part troubles whose nature she understood, whose meaning stemmed from the magic that was the common heart of them all. Even those she disliked or distrusted there had goals that were her goals and experiences that paralleled her own.

She lay back on the bed, looking up at the painted ceiling, an architectural perspective of the kind that had been popular fifty years ago, garlanded with painted flowers. The room was too small for it, and the artist hadn't been particularly good; there was something disconcerting about the way those trompe l'oeil archways seemed to lean on one another against the perpetually sunny sky.

On the dressing table the candles were smoking from the draft. Kyra waved an impatient hand, and all the flames snuffed to simultaneous lifelessness, four thin scarves of smoke curling ceilingward from the amber eyes of the coals amid thready scents of smoke and wax.

Her other hand continued to turn, over and over, Alix's letter.

Water changing to blood in the scrying-bowl. Winds that rushed down when she summoned slow clouds. The guttural hum of flies in the astringent darkness of the Citadel gardens.

And the sheer horror of jolting from sleep eleven nights ago, her pulse pounding and tears on her face and the knowledge in her heart, deeper than dreams or fears or guesswork: the knowledge that her sister Alix was going to die on her wedding night.

It was impossible at this distance for Kyra to remember the first time she saw Tibbeth of Hale.

His shop had always been there, halfway down a seedy alley off Potticary Court, in the district of Angelshand that lay halfway between the fashionable town houses and shops of the north and east and the downright slums along the riverfront. The houses there, though tall and narrow and crowded elbow to elbow along the cramped streets as they were elsewhere in the city, lacked the architectural handsomeness and the uniformity of the newer districts. With their projecting upper stories, their bow windows, their random turrets, penthouses, and balconies, they had the appearance of having grown organically from the round, moss-furred cobblestones, fighting like insalubrious plants for a share of the sunlight. In the long, stifling summer afternoons when lessons were done and on into the endless glimmer of twilights that lingered until ten, Kyra would lead her band of schoolfellows on expeditions through the mazes of court and lane east of Baynorth Square, and they'd invariably pass down Little Potticary Lane on the opposite side from the house of painted bricks, with its round turret above the blue-painted door. “A witch lives there,” Dann Brecksnift had said.

Kyra did remember the first time she'd gone inside.

Alix had come down with a fever—as a child Alix had been susceptible to chills and colds—and their father had gone to Respin Phylgard's shop in Potticary Court one rainy afternoon to get some of Phylgard's tisanes for her. Phylgard was the premier apothecary in the city, head of the Apothecaries' Guild and consultant to innumerable members of the Court. Thus, a visit to his shop, with its lines of shining glass bottles, its mysterious cabinets of tiny drawers, its smooth marble counter and mosaic marble floor, was always an adventure. Even at ten Kyra was already her father's pet and was beginning to grow into her role as his secretary, her sharpness with mathematics and her shrewd observations of the business of corn factoring winning not only his approval but confidences he never gave to his largely uncomprehending wife. As a result, she was much indulged and was given the books she demanded and the extra tutoring she asked for when she discovered the mathematics master at her school couldn't tell a sine from a tangent and was allowed to dress in richer colors and more dramatic styles than were considered proper for little girls.

She couldn't recall why she'd grown bored in Phylgard's shop. Most likely, she thought, looking back, her father had been involved in some interguild politics and had gotten into a close discussion of the matter with the great apothecary, something she was not able to follow without explanations the men had no time to give. She'd gone out into the court, which was dark and nearly deserted under the pregnant, charcoal-colored sky of autumn, and had stood for a few moments with her hands deep in the silk-soft squirrel fur of her muff. The chair menders, the hurdy-gurdy man, the vendors of steamed buns, flowers, and scarves who usually inhabited the flagways had all been driven indoors by an earlier rain squall. A few streets away a woman was singing, “Oranges and limes! Golden sunshine from the south!” but Kyra wasn't sure in which direction the vendor lay, and she knew the streets were so tangled around here that she would probably have trouble locating her.

So she'd tucked up her brilliant red and purple skirts and picked her way among the puddles of Little Potticary Lane to visit the shop of the witch.

She'd seen Tibbeth outside his shop on enough occasions, tending the flowers that grew in pots on his tiny doorstep or bringing back pails of water from the fountain in the square, to know him by sight, and so she felt no fear of the tall, plump, handsome man with his lined face and deep-set eyes. He wore a long and very old-fashioned gown or robe, like an apothecary or a physician, but without those dignitaries' stiff, ruffled collars. On the day she first came into his shop, he was wearing a fraying velvet cap with ear flaps such as her father sometimes wore when it was cold, and from beneath it, fine, silky sandy-gray hair hung to his shoulders.