Stranger At The Wedding (22 page)

“And yet here you are in my house, on the very eve of the wedding!”

He fell momentarily silent as the petite, dark-haired maid emerged squeaking from the back stairs and skidded to a halt at the sight of him, her hair tumbled about her shoulders; she was hastily straightening her bodice when the mandolin player came springing out on her heels. With elaborate casualness the two of them strolled off in opposite directions along the gallery.

Gordam turned back to his elder daughter with a snort. “In my house,” he went on, “while my business languishes, a hundred and forty crowns' worth of flowers rots in the midden, my servants gorge themselves on three hundred crowns' worth of cake, sweetmeats, and imported southern raspberries, and those lute strumming Senterwing savages cover every maid in the place!”

Kyra removed a fleck of invisible lint from the caramel satin of her bodice. “Well, under the circumstances, even Lady Earthwygg can scarcely accuse me of having come to lay spells of good fortune on your business. Bid Aunt Sethwit hello for me and tell her I'll see her, Aunt Hoppina, and Leppice at the ritual bath in the morning.” She turned and started up the stairs.

“I curse the day when I heeded your demand to be tutored by Tibbeth of Hale!” His harsh, despairing voice echoed in the narrow confines of the ascending stair. “All my troubles stemmed from that demand!”

Kyra stiffened in her tracks, half turning to look at him through the chestnut tangle of her hair. “It wasn't a demand, Father,” she said softly. “It was a plea.” And she walked up the stair and made her way back to the yellow room.

It was a plea.

And her father had said no.

Wrapped in Alix's fluffy robe, Kyra lay for a long time on the yellow room's high, old-fashioned bed, staring once more into the ascending chimney of trompe l'oeil clouds on the ceiling as if she expected to see the Moon Fairy with her handfuls of sleep dust flitting among the painted putti and birds.

Downstairs, she could hear the muted voices of the footmen, the soft scrapings and clunkings as they brought the long trestle tables in from the stable loft and assembled them, ready for tomorrow's feast. Her ride in Blore Spenson's gig over the jolting cobblestones of Upper Tollam Street seemed weeks ago; her visit to the Cheevy Street Baths, loosening her muscles in the antiquated marble tubs with the steam rising about her face, a memory from some previous lifetime. Lady Earthwygg… poison… Hestie Pinktrees' comfits and the smell of sausages and cheap perfume… Algeron shedding tears into the wedding cake…

And nothing to show… nothing learned… nothing gained.

All my troubles stemmed from that demand …

It had been the last time she'd let her father see her cry.

But having worked up the courage to finally ask, to finally step out of the column of red pain in which she lived, every hour when she was pretending to be what she once had been—her father's clever helper with the books and the business, the designer of increasingly outrageous dresses and jewelry, the caustic arbiter of social nuance for the amusement of her friends—she could no longer have the refuge of his ignorance.

She'd admitted she was mageborn. There was no going back from that.

“I want you to forget this nonsense,” he'd stormed at her toward the end of that stomach-twisting, throat-burning interview in the book room. “It won't do, Kyra. You can see that it won't do. People will find out. People always find out things like that. Good God, people may suspect already if they've seen you going to that man's house in the afternoons. How could you deceive your mother and me the way you have?”

But he couldn't forget. He hadn't asked her to help him with the bookwork that evening or the next. She'd lain in her room and heard his step hesitate on the gallery, then pass by. And the omission had lodged in her stomach like a lump of uncooked bread, leaden and indigestible, a nausea that remained with her for days, a silence between them that flooded her eyes with heat and her throat with pain but that neither of them could break.

Once he'd opened the door of her room and come in unannounced, saying brusquely, “You have to understand my position. You're a businesswoman, Kyra; you understand that no other businessman in the city, in the Realm, is going to trust us if you become a wizard! Let alone what Lord Earthwygg will do. The Court's absolutely against wizardry, and without his backing, we'd certainly lose the charity hospitals contract and probably the Imperial
Ballet
School and the barracks as well! I've worked for thirty years to build our reputation. I can't let you destroy it on a whim. It's your future, too.”

“I didn't ask for it!” she cried desperately. In the past year she had found that Tibbeth was right: During those times when, knowing all that her father was telling her now, she had tried to put her studies aside, the pain had only grown worse. It was pain such as she'd never known, a pain of desiring, of yearning, of half guessing, half knowing what that unknown life could be, a pain she hadn't even guessed human beings were capable of experiencing.

“Oh, nonsense, girl; you asked for it only the other day! I'm not trying to be hard-hearted,” he went on in a more kindly tone. “But you just aren't thinking of what this will mean for you. And what I'm going to say to Dutton Droon about your marriage negotiations…”

“I didn't want to be born this way!” she pleaded. “But I am, and I have to follow what I am!”

He sighed. “Kyra,” he said gently, “men and women are born with free souls and free minds. We can choose what we will be, choose which paths we wish to follow. Yes, I know it's difficult. I know you want this now, but you're young.”

“It isn't being young!” She half raised herself from the bed where she had lain—it sometimes felt—for all of those two days, though she knew objectively that she'd been downstairs for meals and had gone walking with her mother and even done a little shopping, all activities seen, as if through glass, through the feverish, alternating colors of yearning for the unknown new life and a desperate yearning for the cool peace of the old. “It isn't want! It's need, Father.”

He said nothing, but in his eyes she could see him thinking in sentences that started Girls your age…

Sometimes she thought she was going to die of the pain. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep from taking a fork or a hairpin and stabbing it repeatedly into the flesh of her hands and arms, though she didn't know exactly why she wanted to do that or what she fantasized it might accomplish. Sometimes she was able to talk to Alix, or read books, or design dresses as if it were all two weeks ago and everything was fine.

She hadn't realized she'd stopped eating until her mother began pleading with her to do so. Then she threw most of it up.

Her father shouted at her for being willful while she lay on her bed with her face turned toward the windows, watching the pigeons wheeling over the gray roof tiles against the cloud-piled sky. Later Alix came in and lay down in the bed beside her, wrapping Kyra's bony, growing limbs with her own soft coltish ones, holding her close and crying.

It was only when Tibbeth of Hale came to the house and took her parents aside into the book room and talked to them that her father called her down.

“Now, I want you to understand me,” he said, his narrow, square-lipped mouth clipped-looking and grim. “I'm not paying this man—” He'd jerked his thumb at the dog wizard, sitting quietly in the carved blackwood (“company”) chair by the tiled stove.“—one single copper, and I don't want to find anything missing from this house; not food, not money, not bed sheets, not silverware, not anything.”

“Really, Father…” Her eyes blazed, but Tibbeth only smiled a little and raised one big brown-mottled hand.

“I understand your concerns,” the dog wizard said. “I'm a wizard; it would be easier for me than it would be for most teachers to convince your daughter to demand my services as a tutor in order to gain admittance to a rich man's house. I can only hope that in time, when you know me, you'll understand that I could no more refuse to teach a mageborn child to use her powers than she can help seeking out a teacher. But it's something, truly, that only the mageborn can understand.”

“What I want you to understand,” Gordam snapped, “is that I won't have you teaching her charlatanry. And I won't have you teaching her anything that goes against the tenets of the Church. And you, my girl, had better keep up your studies in mathematics, and bookkeeping, and foreign tongues—you're not to let the education I've paid for slip away while you chase a rainbow you may well decide tomorrow you've had enough of.”

Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but again she caught Tibbeth's eye and the small movement of his fingers that said These are things that can be worked out in time. She held her peace.

“And above all,” her father concluded, and his oak-colored gaze cut sharply to the two of them together, the tall, bulky man in his dark robe, so relaxed in the big carved chair, and the girl standing beside him with her outlandish gown of crimson silk bagging about her sunken body, “I don't want one word of this, not one word, to get out. My daughter tells me your kind have spells to keep them unseen as they come and go. Use them. And you, miss… You're not to miss a ball, you're not to absent yourself from visiting our friends, you're not to whisper to one solitary soul of what you're learning until I can find some way to make it acceptable to the other members of the guild. There's no hope it can be covered up forever, but until I've come up with a way to keep our house from being tarred as wizards, you're to be silent about it. And that goes for your sister, too. Understand?”

“I understand,” Kyra said, not in the frightened whisper she had thought would come out of her mouth but with the old ironic accents that she immediately saw he had perceived as arrogance. She said, “Father—thank you,” but he was already turning away.

Alix was waiting outside the book-room door. “Father said yes!” she trumpeted, flinging herself into Kyra's arms, holding her as tightly as only a ten-year-old champion could do. “He said yes, he said yes, you're going to be a wizard!” And turning in a swirl of white silk and flying golden curls, she threw her arms around Tibbeth's waist, pressing her cheek to his stomach and holding him tight.

“I see we have a partisan.” Tibbeth smiled and stroked the sunny aureole of the little girl's hair.

Kyra turned over with a gasp at the sound of horses in the court below. The windows were flat slabs of ash. From somewhere she smelled incense. Olibanum—the Text prescribed this for the bride's ritual bath.

She rolled to her feet and stumbled to the window. For one blinding second she imagined she would see the entire wedding procession assembled, the bright new banners unfurled in the hands of the footmen, the white carriage mares shaking their crimson-tasseled bridles, and her father just handing Alix into the coach in her crimson gown: see all that and know they hadn't even bothered to call her.

But the sound had only been the grooms bringing in the Earthwygg carriage with its silver door mountings and its yellow emblems of salamander and mushrooms. A moment later Kyra heard the faint commotion of guests entering the hall and, at the same time, the renewed strike of hooves and clatter of iron wheels below her window: Frittilaire Nysett and Cira Prouvet. She glanced out the window again in time to see Tellie Wishrom, her white gown fluttering under the enveloping folds of a stylish cloak with a gray fur collar, hurrying across the yard from the little postern gate and pausing to greet Algeron on the kitchen steps.

Two footmen came out of the kitchen door bearing furled banners between them, in tandem like fence rails; they set them upright against the wall with the slowness of men who had had too little sleep. Kyra felt a pang of sympathy. Their voices and the uneasy stirrings of activity in the house below had formed a continuous background to her thoughts the previous night. She remembered neither those sounds ceasing nor falling asleep herself.

The grooms rugged the Earthwygg and Nysett horses but didn't unhitch them; Lord Earthwygg's matched blacks tossed their heads, breathing faint puffs of white steam. Casting her mind down through the floor below her, Kyra heard the laborious chanting of women's voices attempting to read in unison from copied crib sheets:

Let me bow my head to kiss my husband's knee,

Let me still my voice that his singing may be heard;

Let me shear my hair that he may wind of it bowstrings

and take up in his help the sword, the plow, the

distaff…

“As if women haven't been serving as warriors, working in factories, and managing businesses on their own for two hundred years,” Kyra muttered, who had never had any real intention of participating in the ceremony.

Someone scratched at the door, and Kyra walked over to admit the dark-haired maid with cans of hot water for her own, thankfully nonritual, bath. The maid, too, had faint blue lines of sleeplessness beneath her eyes, but that, of course, might simply have been due to the musicians. Past her, Kyra could see Lily and the blond maid whose name Kyra didn't know carefully bearing the crimson wedding gown down the stairs, the saffron veil trailing behind like a river of sunshine. In their wake the laundrywoman carried a freshly ironed chemise and the saffron stockings prescribed by the rite. She noted also that the gallery rail had been twined with ivy and vines.

Kyra washed and dressed quickly, choosing one of her simplest gowns, a narrow dress of purple and black that made her, in the mirror, seem older, ageless and thin; it gave her the stern, remote wizard face she knew from the masters at the Citadel. In a way it comforted her, as if she had looked ahead into the future and saw herself there, calmly ensconced in her chosen position, like skipping ahead to the end of a book and reassuring herself that yes, she did indeed live happily ever after.

Yet in her heart she felt a streak of uneasiness as the voices of Tellie, Frittilaire, Cira, and Esmin rose, giggling now as the solemn part of the rite was done. She remembered one of the poems Algeron had written, a falconer's love song to a hawk, and the look in Alix's eyes when she spoke his name.