Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online

stern castle, the scents of tubbed gardenias and field lilies thick as music in the air around it. Gathering her heavy skirts, she climbed the tall steps, wet now and slippery with the moisture in the air. Her mind laid a little spell toward the house—Briory, on her way to the front door to summon the Bishop's sedan chair, stopped by the entry of the kitchen wing to chide the laundry maid, and the chair carriers, on their way through the dense fog from the other side of the square, thought they saw the glint of a coin on the pavement and put down their chair to go back and look.
    The signs Kyra drew on the front steps with her forefinger shone briefly against the scrubbed marble, then settled into the fabric of the stone and brick, sinking out of sight like glowing ribbons laid on still water. It took less than five minutes, counting the faint haze of protective wards Kyra set up that would serve to keep lower-level wizards from noticing that anything had been done there.
    Then Kyra gathered her borrowed cloak about her and hurried down the steps so quickly that she tripped at the bottom and, under her voluminous petticoats, skinned her knees. Cursing, she scrambled to her feet and hurried on. Her hands were shaking.
    Supper, she thought, should be over. She paused by the yard gate and cast her mageborn senses into the house and, sure enough, heard voices in the book room. “Surely you aren't going to let her ride with the family to the Church?” Woolmat demanded, scandalized, and Kyra knew they were speaking of her.
    “Good God, no!” her father answered. “If that's why she showed up here…”
    “Why has she shown up here?”
    “The saints only know.”
    Muffled by fog as by a damp blanket, the chimes of St. Farinox Church struck their treble note. Ten o'clock—Kyra mentally recalculated to the older style of hours that the wizards used. The fourth hour of the night, or just about, given the difference between daylight hours and dark at this time of the year. Some duke, out of gratitude for a forgotten favor, had paid for a clock tower to be built at the Citadel of Wizards, complete with a handsome horologe to which most mages paid scant attention. It was correct, Daurannon the Handsome had once remarked, exactly twice a day, at noon and midnight, but its sound served to remind city-bred juniors of the rhythms of their homes.
    Elsewhere in the house she heard Lady Earthwygg's voice and her mother's, somewhat laboriously discussing the laying out of formal gardens. Esmin's sweet little mew reached her—“Oh, Master Spenson, I did so wish to have a word with you…”—and a servant's: “Gyvinna, get on with them shifts; we need a hand on these festerin' flowers!”
    Ahead of her, over the wet stone and horse smells of the yard, daffodil light stained the fog and threw slick yellow gleams on the cobbles as the kitchen door was opened. A fragrance of sugared comfits, cakes, and fancy breads breathed forth. Dimly, Kyra discerned a dark, slim form hurrying across the narrow width of the cobbles toward the little doorway into the Wishroms' kitchen yard. Alix's voice called out softly, “Watch out for the puddles, Tellie! I'll see you at dawn.”
    The sound of a closing door. Kyra started forward, hoping to duck around the corner of the house and back through the garden before the stablemen began hitching the Earthwyggs' carriage team.
    She had advanced a dozen strides along the house wall when she smelled on the fog the fragile scent of lilies of the valley, whose dried petals made the pomanders scenting Alix's clothes. She stopped, her heart lurching, and, squinting through the roils of mist, saw that Alix still stood on the kitchen porch, her arms wrapped about herself for warmth.
    With her was a man.
    Young, Kyra thought, though she was too far and the mist was too thick to make out his face clearly. The springy movement of his shoulders and back in their white blur of shirt said youth to her as he folded his