Stranger At The Wedding (8 page)

He was reading in the kitchen behind the shop, where the light came in through the wide window's score of tiny panes, but there was a bell above the shop door that rang when Kyra opened it. She saw him put his book aside and rise—tall, taller than any man she had known up to that time—and come into the shop to bow.

“Mistress Kyra Peldyrin, I believe.”

She looked around the shop. Dann Brecksnift and she used to dare each other to go up and touch the iron door handle of the “witch's house” or look through the front window into the shop, but inside it wasn't so formidable, just gloomy, with the light cut off by the buildings across the street, and filled with strange jars and cabinets, like Phylgard's, only more varied and shabbier. A mummified crocodile hung from the low rafters overhead; a skull stared lugubriously from a niche; on a shelf behind the counter were stacked innumerable paper boxes, each tied up with string.

She asked, “If you're a witch, why do you need the bell to tell you someone's in the shop?”

Tibbeth smiled. “If you're in the back garden and feel thirsty, do you call a maid and ask her to get you some lemonade from the kitchen?”

Kyra shook her head. “I go get it myself. It's easier.”

“Even so. I'd rather give my full attention to the book I'm reading than put part of it into a spell to let me know something a bell could let me know just as easily.”

Kyra had thought about that, looking around at the shop, at the dark, intricate shapes of orreries and celestial globes that stood on the sideboard, at the big sphere of flawless crystal and the strange mirrors of gold and mercury that flashed duskily from the walls, smelling for the first time the thick, characteristic odor compounded of dust, ancient paper, herbs, candle wax, and incense. Strings of dried henbane and borage dangled everywhere from the rafters, their desiccated scents frail yet pungent; one section of shelf held soft pieces of leather of various kinds; another, bottles of what appeared to be water and honey.

“Papa says that you aren't a witch at all, that there's really no such thing as witches. That it's all done by conjuring tricks to make people believe you have power.”

“Your papa's a very wise man, Kyra,” Tibbeth said gently. “Making people believe things is power, and it's one power wizards use. If people truly didn't believe that I have some kind of power—that I could be dangerous to them because of this power—they wouldn't be afraid of me, you know.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have power?”

“Not very much. Your father has far more, because he's a rich man, and people respect him and want to please him. You have power because your father loves you and trusts you—and because you're a rich man's daughter. I'm just a poor apothecary that some people think is a wizard.”

“Are you a wizard?”

He shook his head. “The real wizards live in the Citadel of Wizards in the north,” he said. “They don't use their power at all, and they only teach those who promise to obey them and be like them. The rest of us are just dogs to them—dog wizards, they call us.” And for a moment something glinted in the back of those deep, sky-blue eyes.

Kyra looked around again, at the shop, at the herbs, at the line of blown-out eggshells on the windowsill, the myriad of crystals ranged along the edge of the sideboard, the prisms, star charts, miniature crocks of seeds. The surge of curiosity and delight she had always felt in Phylgard's shop, in the moldy library downtown where half the books were so old, they weren't even printed but handwritten—in the naturalist's shop near the river where her father had gone to buy her Aunt Sethwit a stuffed toucan when such things were a fad—returned to her with a painful insistence, a terrible sense of seeing things pass her by.

“All this isn't for casting spells, then?”

“No, my child,” Tibbeth said. “It is for learning. Because that's what wizards do.”

That's what wizards do
. Kyra remembered the words as she pushed open the heavy gates of the kitchen yard and stepped into Baynorth Square.

By daylight, with the white mists thinning to nothing, the square stood revealed as a broad expanse of wet gray cobblestones in whose center a fountain gurgled softly within its thick-pillared house. A bronze statue of Lord Baynorth surmounted the little building's arched roof, the lord whose private city palace had been torn down to provide his heirs with thousands of royals a year in ground rent for the merchants who built their houses on the sprawling site of its gardens. Most of the noble families had moved out to the Watermeadow precinct of the city between the Imperial Gate and the walls of the Emperor's palace, pretending they would rather live there than in the still more exclusive neighborhoods around Imperial Square and Queen's Square.

Even through the urgency of her dread, Kyra slowed her hurrying steps as she passed the fountain house and smiled a little. There was an Earthwygg Square somewhere in the packed, cabbage-scented streets just this side of Prince Dittony Circle; she wasn't sure how much of that land the Earthwyggs still owned, but in any case, in that district they wouldn't be getting much from it. Then she pulled her dark cloak closer around the plain servant's dress she'd pilfered from Merrivale's mending basket and hastened on.

Shadow still lay over Baynorth Square, the morning cold penetrating her shabby clothes. On the western side of the square, the gate in the old city wall had been opened; sunlight sparkled on the gilded bronze luck gods of its turrets above the line of the eastern houses' shadows, and through it she could glimpse the sparkle of glass, the gaudy unrepentant reds and greens of the saints and birds and flowers painted on lower-class houses, the stir of movement as the merchants of Salt Hill unshuttered their windows and prepared for the day. From the streets on all sides came the jangle of bells, the tooth-jarring rattle of clappers, and the voices of the street vendors: “Hot pies! Hot pies! Meat-apple-pear-mince—hot pies!” “Clams and mussels! Clams and mussels!” “Fresh lovely violets! New from the country!” “Buy my milk! Who'll buy my milk?” As she approached the corner where Upper Tollam Street ran out of the square, amidst the ammonia of horse droppings and the pungency of garbage in the gutters, Kyra walked through a cloud of steamed sweetness where an old woman was selling buns from a cart. Hunger flicked at her like an elf's whip, but her sense of haste, of time running out, kept her moving. Alix's life was at stake, and besides, it would not do to let anyone recall that a tall woman wrapped in a cloak had passed that way.

The time was past when the first crowds had come into the street in the misty darkness of predawn: clerks on their way to the countinghouses; men, women, and children trudging down the dripping lanes to the factories and mills along the river. Now and then a shop girl hurried past her, or a bleary-eyed student headed for the university quarter, or servants on their way to do early marketing. Merchants like her father, if they had any pretensions to gentility—though they might have been awake since before daylight working on their accounts—did not reach their countinghouses until nine.

She started to step off the high stone curb to cross to Fennel Street but paused to let a cab rattle past. Only, to her annoyance, it didn't. It drew up directly in her path, the door opening to let out a couple of stocky men in the kind of rough clothes laborers wore. Her mind still worrying at the problem of Alix, of this morning's secret errand, she started to circle around the back of the cab when it occurred to her to wonder how a couple of laborers had been able to afford a hack's prices. By then it was too late.

Rough hands grabbed her from behind. Someone threw a shawl or blanket over her head; someone else flung a loop of something that felt like braided rope around her arms, though she knew an instant later that it was spell-cord. Cold sickness quenched the magic within her at its touch. She was so startled—so shocked—that she didn't even begin to react until the man behind her started to lift her off her feet.

But at five foot ten, Kyra was not all that easy to lift. Lashing behind herself with one foot, she entangled her assailant's leg and jerked it forward, at the same time throwing her weight back into him. Her impact with the flagstones was considerably softened by the shielding of his body—his, she supposed, was much less so, to judge by the noises he made.

She rolled, twisting, jabbing with elbows and knees as someone else bore down on top of her. She could hear the cab horse whinnying, smell its sweat and the stink of the blanket over her head. The second man was trying to lift her off her feet, and she felt the first one rolling about under her; furious, she began to scream at the top of her lungs. Folds of the blanket got in her mouth, linty and smelling like cats.

Running footsteps. She was shoved sprawling forward onto the pavement, bruising her knees again and skinning the palms she threw out to catch herself. She heard the thump of blows landing, the crack of a whip, the rattle of hooves and harness. Then someone pulled the blanket and the spell-cord away from her.

She looked up to see Blore Spenson standing over her with the articles of her kidnapping in one hand and a stout walking stick in the other.

“Miss Kyra!”

She scrambled to her feet, trod on her hem, and stumbled again, cursing as she banged her knees once more. Spenson dropped the blanket and cord and extended a hand to her. She shook free, furious at herself for reacting so slowly, for not realizing more quickly that she might be in danger in the first place… in fact, for not expecting something of the kind. “Thank you, I'm quite all right.”

Her tone of assurance was somewhat marred by the need to pick flecks of dirt and cat fur out of her mouth. She pushed at her hair; it had come loose from its pins and hung like a crazy woman's down over her shoulders and around her face. A couple of chair carriers and a match vendor were running toward them but halted, uncertain, when they saw she was unhurt. She heard a woman loudly proclaiming that she was going directly to the local magistrate—why, they might all be murdered in their beds! So much, Kyra thought dourly, for the secrecy of her errand.

“Did they hurt you?”

“Do you wish they had so it could have been a more impressive rescue?” Her sister's haggard eyes still prickled in her mind, the question about a love-spell. Then she saw the chagrined look on his face and added, “No, I'm sorry. Thank you for coming the way you did. I don't expect I was in any genuine danger, you know, though you probably spared me a couple of days in uncomfortable quarters.” She brushed the dirt from her skirt and examined her skinned palms. "She'd want me out of the way, but she would hardly assassinate me.

“Who?” Spenson asked, baffled.

Kyra pulled a hairpin free, looped up what was left of a braid, and pinned it back into place. “Lady Earthwygg, of course.” Past him, a few yards down the road, she saw a two-wheeled gig standing, drawn by a beautiful liver-bay mare. Judging by the way Master Spenson was dressed, in a dark-green broadcloth suit, he had been on his way to call on Alix, though his catskin waistcoat looked like something a tout would wear and he had obviously tied his own neck cloth again.

“At least I assume it was Lady Earthwygg. Spell-cord that thick—and that powerful, for it's quite high-quality—” She gingerly nudged with one toe the finger-fat silk braid lying like a crimson snake on the blanket at their feet. “—isn't cheap, and if it was the Inquisition who wanted me, they'd have come to the house and talked to Father.”

“Well,” she added with a conciliating smile, “at least you aren't wearing that dreadful red suit anymore.”

He was still looking at her as if she were speaking Old High Trebin.

“Why on earth,” he asked, “would Lady Earthwygg want to have you kidnapped?” Automatically he bent and picked up the cord and blanket. He looked the kind of man, Kyra thought dispassionately, who'd pick up coins from the flagway, too.

“Oh, because of you and her daughter.”

He froze in midmovement, and slowly his whole blunt countenance flushed a furious red. “There is nothing between—” He couldn't even manage Esmin's name. “—between her daughter and me.”

“Oh, I didn't think there was, but I'm sure it's not for want of her trying.” Kyra replaced another hairpin. “That was quite a strong passion powder Esmin tried to get you to drink last night. I wasn't sure I could have counterspelled it just in passing, so I had to knock it out of her hand, which was a terrible shame, because there were only twelve goblets in that set and the glassblower who made them has long ago retired.”

“Are you telling me,” Spenson said in a strangled voice, his color deepening alarmingly, “that Esmin Earthwygg was trying to… to give me love-potions?”

Kyra shrugged. “Well, as Father keeps pointing out, you are a splendid match, and the Earthwyggs have been outrunning the constable for years. At least they were doing so six years ago when I last heard, and that isn't a habit one changes overnight. Don't tell me that comes as a surprise. It's hardly like Lady Earthwygg to start proceedings so late in the day.”

She looked up from straightening her skirt to see his blue eyes bulging at her like those of an enraged bull.

“That's the most immodest, outrageous thing I've ever—”

“Don't look at me” she protested calmly. “I'm not the one who's been sending you dreams about the girl.” His eyes widened with a fury that told her she'd hit square on the mark. “If you wish me to, I can give you a comprehensive counterspell—”

“You'll do nothing of the sort!” Spenson shouted, causing a couple of nuns hurrying down the other side of the street with market baskets in their hands to stop and turn, eyes wide with surprise behind their veils. “Keep your arts to yourself, my girl, if you know what's good for you!”

Turning heel, he stormed back to the gig, caught up the reins—without, Kyra noted, jagging the mare's mouth, as another man in that much of a temper might have done—and rattled away with such abruptness as to almost collide with a poulterer's wicker cart that had come dashing around the corner from the other direction. She heard Spenson curse mightily as he swerved to avoid it, and he was still cursing as he vanished down the lane, shawl and spell-cord flapping about the wheels.