Stranger At The Wedding (33 page)

“Rosamund,” she breathed, and called to her mind the Lady's coldly beautiful face. “Rosamund, I need you.”

The long disciplines of her training let her sink quickly into the crystal's heart, down past the aureate pinpoint of the candle's reflected light. The familiar flicker of the colors appeared in the fine-grained lattices of its facets, colors that sank and changed into a kind of gray veil. Then the veil cleared, and to her relief she saw her ladyship, seated in the small study of the Porcelain House on the Citadel's wooded northwestern side. Past her mentor's shoulder she could see the glow of the hearth, the golden gleam of cat eyes where Imp curled on a footstool beside an open book.

“Kyra, what is it?” The peridot-green eyes looked anxiously into hers from that tiny, distant image. “Are you well? Have you learned what threatened your sister?”

Somehow the mere sound of Rosamund's voice in her mind had a steadying effect, the reassurance that she wasn't alone. “I've learned it,” she said. “But I don't understand what I've learned.”

As the room darkened around her, she told, as well as she could, of the ghost of magic that still clung to the wedding dress, her unshakable feeling that it was Tibbeth's, though it was in fact not only somehow changed but so faint as to be almost unidentifiable. “I don't see how it could be his,” she said at length, having sidestepped the subjects of Blore Spenson and the two abortive attempts at the wedding itself. “He's dead, Rosamund. I saw him die six years ago. He was… He…” She could not bring herself to speak of the sight of Tibbeth's abdomen rupturing with the heat, of his screams as his intentines dropped down into the blaze. “He couldn't have survived the fire.”

Rosamund was silent for a time, running a lock of her heavy hair thoughtfully through her fingers. In spite of the plain black woolen robe of wizardry, the simple red cotton of her shift, she had all the queenly grace of the daughter of a long line of earls; her green eyes, with their dark rings around the irises, were troubled in the gloom.

“Not himself,” she said musingly. “But under certain conditions, if the Inquisition didn't have a very powerful mage attending the death—and as I've said, the Inquisition's wizards aren't first-class as a rule—a wizard's ghost can linger if it has something, some place or person, to cling to. Death by violence…” She shook her head.

“I checked the schoolroom,” Kyra said numbly. “I took special pains with it. Most of his things had been thrown out, but even so, I sensed nothing there.” True, she thought, she had not been thinking of or looking for traces of Tibbeth when she had done so. Not Tibbeth alive, Tibbeth active, Tibbeth twisted with malice.

But even so, that kind of hate must have left its mark.

She thought about reentering that room now, in the darkness, fingering once more through the few remaining crocks and bowls. Even playing through that scene in her mind made her shiver.

“Did Tibbeth have a wife, or a son, or a brother or sister?” Rosamund asked. “Someone close to him? The ghosts of wizards can possess those who loved them if those loved ones let them in.”

Kyra said, “He had a wife.”

A wife who was little more than a child herself. That colorless, dreamy face, that flaxen hair, pale blurs in the dark vestibule of the Inquisition's courtroom… Kyra couldn't even recall what she looked like.

But quite suddenly she saw herself sitting in this very room, on the end of the bed as she was sitting now, on a spring afternoon six years earlier, with a pile of her sister's nightgowns on her lap. On each of those fragile cotton garments the mark of Tibbeth's Summoning had been traced, invisible, undetectable to any but a fairly strong mage. He probably hadn't realized that she had the power to read a mark that subtle.

When she had recalled the scene before, she had remembered only her own rage at the taste of the foul dreams with which those marks had been imbued, the dirty sensuality, the unclean Summons that Alix had been sleeping with every night, the marks pressed against her skin. Only now it came to her that the marks were placed so that when the garment was on, they would fall just below the breast…

… in the precise place where the faint touch of evil lingered on the red bodice's muslin lining.

And she remembered, too, the colorless, dreamy-faced laundry maid who only minutes before had come in to gather up Alix's discarded shift.

“Dear God!”

She dropped the crystal, and her concentration snapped with horror and alarm; Lady Rosamund's image vanished. She scrabbled for it, then sprang to her feet, tripping over the wedding gown and nearly colliding with her mother in the bedroom doorway.

“Kyra!” Binnie Peldyrin caught her older daughter in her arms. “Oh, thank God you're here!”

Kyra stared at her blankly for a moment. Her mother's pleasant oval face was puckered with worry, and the relief that sprang into her dark eyes at the sight of this less successful daughter frightened Kyra a little. “What is it?” Kyra asked. “I've been out; I didn't think Father would be all that eager to see me around.”

“Oh, Kyra, your father's fit to have a stroke!” Binnie gasped, clutching her daughter's hand. “He'd never ask this of you; he seems to think all you've brought on the house is ill fortune, which is quite ridiculous, since these things will happen… I mean the pipes breaking and all those poor little mice…”

“Ask what of me?” Like her father, Kyra had long ago learned that ruthless interruption was the only way of carrying on a conversation with her mother.

“Oh, is that your magic crystal? I'm so glad you thought to bring one, though I thought they were supposed to be round balls.”

“No, they aren't. What is it? If you want me to find that wretched flute player…”

“What flute player?” Binnie, deflected from her train of thought, stared up at her tall offspring with distracted surprise. “Oh… Oh, that dreadful young man! Though I must say he played beautifully,” she added, “and he was very handsome. I'm sure I can't blame Tellie at all for kissing him, even if he isn't her class and it did make her father furious, but after all, there's been no harm done, and he has played at Court…”

“Mother… !” Kyra pulled away from the soft little fingers and restrained herself from shaking her parent. “If kissing him was all she did, I'm certainly not going to spend my time tracking him with a scrying-crystal.”

“Not him!” Her brow wrinkled tragically, and her eyes glistened with sudden tears. “Your sister!”

“My…” Her voice trailed to silence.

“Oh, Kyra, Alix has… has run away with Algeron Brackett!”

Kyra swore. And yet an instant later the image returned to her… like two children sheltering from the rain, asleep in one another's arms in the guttering light of the candles, gold hair mingling with gold. Alix had gone to him for comfort after her father's bawled threats and recriminations, had cried herself to sleep in his arms…

And had wakened, warm and locked together, in the deep of the night, nearly an hour before anyone else in the house.

Kyra swore again, mightily.

“Dearest, your language! Though you always did pick up things from the stable boys.” Binnie wrung her dainty hands, her face twisted with concern in its frame of lace cap and blond curls. “Oh, I know she says she's going to marry him immediately…”

“Marry him… !” Her heart turned cold.

“… but think of the scandal! And your father says—”

“Wait a minute, she says .. .”

“In her note.” With a prolonged sniffle, Binnie Peldyrin produced it, and only many, many years of proper raising kept Kyra from simply snatching it out of her glycerin-softened grip:

Mother,

Please, please forgive me for what I do, and please beg Father's forgiveness as well. I know how dreadfully I wrong him, and still more am I conscious of the wrong I am doing to Master Spenson and to all of his house. Please do not think Algeron and I are simply running away together. We will be married as soon as may be, and we will enter into respectable trades.

Never do either of us wish to bring shame upon you. But I have realized that for me to marry Master Spenson would be to do him an even greater wrong than this. I love Algeron far more than words can ever say and cannot now exist without him at my side. I know it is too much to ask your blessings, but I pray that at least we may take with us some understanding.

Give all of my love to Kyra, and I beg of you, do not seek us.

Your wretched daughter,

Alix

“You have to find her!” Binnie raised her eyes once more to her daughter's face, which had grown still, like blanched bone, in the last glimmerings of the window's fading light. “Your father sent footmen to all the gates of the city, but nobody remembers seeing them, which in itself is a little strange, since Algeron is so very handsome. But if you can use your magic crystal…”

Kyra swept her hand in the direction of the dressing table, and all the candles there burst into simultaneous flame as she flung herself down upon Alix's little stool before it.

“Really, dearest,” her mother went on, her chirping voice calmer now, “it amazes me how you do that! But I do remember when you were quite a little girl, you used to—”

“Mother, please! I need quiet for this.”

Her mother clapped both hands over her mouth in a curiously childlike gesture and sank to a sitting position on the end of the bed. Kyra found it difficult to concentrate with those doelike eyes gazing at her in awed wonder and realized that she had never worked even the smallest magic in the presence of either of her parents.

“Perhaps you'd better leave the room for a little bit,” she said when no image would appear in the crystal's central facet.

Binnie paled. “You haven't seen something… Oh, Kyra, tell me!” Impulsively she clutched at Kyra's wrist. “I'm her mother…”

“I haven't seen anything,” Kyra said patiently, extricating herself and wondering how her single-minded and efficient father had made it through almost thirty years of marriage to this woman. “I just think I need to be alone.”

“Oh, yes, of course, of course… Just let me hang up Alix's wedding dress… I can't think how it came to be dumped like this across the end of the bed, but the silk crushes so easily, and it cost ten crowns a yard! And that Hylette charges absolutely scandalous prices. I can't believe Lady Earthwygg has all her gowns made by that woman, because I know the Earthwyggs are all to pieces and it's only your father's money—”

“Mother!”

“Oh, yes! Yes, of course…” She scampered from the room, still clutching yards of saffron veil.

They can't be getting married tonight
, Kyra thought desperately, turning her attention back to the crystal. Tonight can't be her wedding night.

She angled the crystal to the candles' light.

Still no image would come.

Panic mounted in her for a moment. Don't tell me Mother unnerved me that much. Quickly she searched the crystal for images of her father and saw him at once, talking to—thank God!—Spenson in the book room. She called Alix's image to her mind again, seeking her, seeking Algeron…

But the only thing she saw reflected in the crystal's depth was the dozen points of the candlelight, like golden stars sunk in the fog-white rock. She concentrated on those points, channeling all her thoughts, all her attention, trying to shut out the sudden rise of voices in the hall below. This is ridiculous; I've found both of them in the crystal before. It isn't as if either of them is mageborn.

So intent was her concentration that she neither heard nor felt the jar of footfalls in the back stairs until the door was thrown open and Spenson grabbed her by the wrist. “Come on!”

“What… ?”

She found herself dragged to her feet and down the hall in a tangle of long legs and petticoats, still clutching her scrying-crystal in one hand. The sudden breaking of her almost meditative state left her disoriented. She could hear her father's voice downstairs and the shouting of other men but couldn't piece together words. Lily the maid sprang out of their way as Spenson hauled her to the back stairs and shoved her through the narrow door.

“Spens…”

“Run for it!” he panted as he hauled her down the dark hairpin switchbacks of the narrow stairwell. “The Witchfinders!”

“What?”

“They're here. They have a warrant for your arrest; they came in while I was talking to your father. Lily showed me the back stairs. They say they have a witness who swears she saw you turn a beggar into a dog.”

“What?”

Kyra was still cursing with great vividness as they burst through into the kitchen, fled past the startled Joblin and his scullions, and pelted on through into the hall leading to the garden door. As they swept through the pantry, Spens caught up a broom and a three-foot metal candle snuffer, tossing the latter to Kyra; she had recovered sufficiently not to need dragging in his wake and strode at his heels, her voluminous skirts gathered up in her free hand.

“Alix and Algeron have eloped,” she gasped as they plunged into the darkness of the garden. “Spens, they're getting married!”

“Halt, in the Regent's name!” The voice came from the corner of the house, where the cobbled kitchen yard ran back toward the street, but Kyra's mage-sighted eyes picked up dark forms by the black slit of the garden gate. “Two by the gate,” Kyra said softly as she guided Spens along the grass verge of the path at a run. Their feet made little sound, and the night, typically of Angelshand in the spring, was thickly overcast. “I can't use magic…”

“Don't—you'll never clear yourself if you do.”

Footsteps crunched the gravel, then there was a dry, thrashing tangle of feet snaring in low hedges and rosebushes. Kyra heard a man swear; evidently the Inquisition's sasenna lacked the mageborn vision in darkness. Spens swung the broom, and there was a satisfying crack, followed by gasps and curses; he grappled and scuffled with someone, first on gravel, then on grass, then in the thorns. Though not only common sense but every impulse inculcated by her training made the use of magic against another human being nearly impossible, Kyra had no qualms about using her mageborn senses against a man nearly blind in the pitch-black shadows. She bent the candle snuffer over the skull of one warrior when he lunged, clutching at her, and shoved the other, stumbling, off Spens with the broom. Spens finished the operation with an elbow across the man's face, a boot in his groin, and a hard shove that sent him reeling into his advancing fellows while Spens and Kyra dove through the postern and into the stinking gloom of the alley beyond.