Stranger at the Wedding Read online

  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.

  Chapter IV

  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.

  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."