Stranger At The Wedding (35 page)

Alix was saying, “I've computed what we'll need to set myself up in a good shop in a good street in Kymil. Algeron can easily find employment as a pastry chef either with one of the established pastry shops or in a private mansion. Five hundred crowns would keep us well until business starts coming my way.”

“Five hundred,” Lady Earthwygg began, aghast either at the sum or at Alix's temerity in asking it.

“How much did you offer my sister to make Master Spenson fall in love with Esmin?” The doelike brown eyes, red-rimmed though they were with spent tears, met the bulging black ones with cold steadiness. “That's got to be easier once I'm out of the way.”

“I always said you were an outrageous hussy, girl!”

“As long as I'm an outrageous hussy in Kymil, you shouldn't have complaints,” returned Alix. Algeron gazed at his beloved with awe at such courage. “Besides…” And here Alix smiled and looked for a moment like her usual teasing self. “I'm not, really. Kyra's the outrageous one. Though I suppose I am a hussy now. I just… want to be happy. I want to be free.” And her hand closed around the slim, muscular ink-stained one that it held.

“My pearls didn't bring very much,” she went on after a moment. “You know girls my age don't get real jewelry, and besides, the best of them were given to me by my mother, and I wouldn't sell them were I starving. You're our only chance, my lady.”

Kyra opened her eyes, slowly drawing her mind back from the images that clung to the pouch, the pouch that throughout the interview had been on that little table at her ladyship's side where Kyra had later found the packet of Hestie Pinktrees' herbs. Pinktrees was nibbling yet another tartlet and talking quietly to Spenson, who was stroking the cat.

“I must say I was rather proud of myself, getting into your house to mark it for the love-spells. At my size, you must admit it's quite a trick to go unseen.” The dog wizard sighed regretfully. “I suppose your lady's going to go through now and take all the marks away.”

She looked around quickly, though Kyra had made no sound, and Spenson followed the direction of her eyes.

Kyra set the pouch down, feeling a vast tiredness within her. “Kymil,” she said. “They're headed for Kymil.”

Spenson guessed that the lovers had made for the village of Underhythe, on the main Kymil road. But to Kyra's urgent demands for immediate pursuit he responded, incontrovertibly, that not only would all the city gates be closed at this hour, they would certainly be watched by the Witchfinders. Anyone attempting to leave before the gates opened at dawn for the market carts would be stopped and questioned at the very least, and there were enough Church dogs in the Magic Office to make Kyra put the thought of cloaking-spells out of her mind.

“I'll be back here before sunup with a couple of horses and some clothes for you.” Spens latched the door of the countinghouse on Salt Hill Lane behind them and led the way through to the inner storeroom whence the ladder ascended to the loft. He moved with calm and efficient briskness, a man long used to getting out of tight places. “I'll bring breeches and a jacket—you can put your hair up under a hat.”

“Nonsense, there's nothing more obvious than a girl with her hair pinned up to look like a boy.” Kyra flipped open the coal box beside the little iron stove; her voice and Spens' footfalls echoed hollowly in the long, bare-walled attic room where in times past the clerks had slept. “You must have a pair of scissors here somewhere. Thank God you're not one of those stingy employers who ration the coal.” She emptied what little kindling was left in the box onto the grate and arranged two or three chunks of coal over it. The room was large, but if she took the bed nearest the stove, she thought, she would be warm enough through the night. The blankets Spenson took out of the cupboard were fusty-smelling but clean and fairly thick; even her best These-Blankets-Stink spells failed to bring a single flea to the surface.

“I never thought to be thankful for my face, but life is full of surprises; it looks far more like a boy's, anyway.”

“No.” Spenson eased down to his knees behind her, where she sat before the open hatch of the stove's black belly; half turning, she saw the coin-bright gold of the new flames glint on the buttons of his garishly striped gold and crimson waistcoat. “That mouth could never be mistaken for a boy's.” His hands slid under the rufous chaos of her hair; very gently, his lips sought hers.

“Spens…”

Slowly, like a collapsing silk pavilion settling over the air trapped within it, they sank to the floor, mouths taking warmth from one another, hands buried in each other's hair. As the firelight flared, it threw their shadows over rafter and wall; the smell of burnt dust from the rarely used stove filled Kyra's nostrils, and the reminiscence of Hestie Pinktrees' lemon tarts on Spenson's breath.

“We should be—”

“There's nothing further we can do for them tonight,” he murmured. “There's nothing further you can do.”

She raised her head, her hair hanging down over the lace of her collar. “They could be dying.”

He only looked up at her, not contradicting; his eyes were somber. He was right, she knew. There was nothing further she could do, not even search for them in her crystal to see if they were dying or not. For the first time the sense of her own complete helplessness washed over her, the sense that even had they somehow gotten out of the city without being seen, they would still not have made it to Underhythe before morning. The helplessness was followed almost immediately by rage, by the desire to spring to her feet, to pace, to kick, to curse, to smash her fists against the lathe of the walls; and that rage, by a wave of trembling and the inchoate, infuriating, nearly overwhelming desire to cry.

She dropped back down on him, clinging to him for a long time in a kind of fever, while his arm closed around her, and through the rustling stiffness of her skirts and petticoats she felt against her legs and thighs the unfamiliar strength and bulk of him. In time her trembling stopped, as if the solid calm of him had come slowly to be absorbed into her flesh.

When the clock on some nearby chapel chimed midnight, Spenson stirred a little; Kyra whispered, “Don't go.” The fire had sunk, though the smoldering coals gave forth a nearly lightless heat. For the first time since she could remember—perhaps, she thought, for the first time in her life—the thought of lying alone in the darkness filled her with dread. By his breathing, by the occasional movements of his hands over the stiff fabric of her back and sides, she knew that he had slept no more than she. He settled again and drew her close. She wasn't sure what she feared in the darkness, the thought of Alix or that last vision of Tibbeth of Hale, eyes popping out, mouth stretched, screams drowned out by the roaring of the fire as the flesh of his legs and feet sizzled and fell away. She pressed her face to the smooth satin of the waistcoat beneath her cheek, breathing its smoky odor and trying to will herself to sleep without dreams.

When the clock chimed three, Spenson rose quietly and departed. Kyra occupied herself with cutting her hair until she heard the muffled clunk of the latch that announced his return.

“There.” She ruffled the coarse brush of what was left. “How's that?”

“Absolutely horrible.” He dropped the bundle of clothes he was carrying and picked his way across the room to her, moving with the clumsy caution of a nonmage in the dark. “It looks like it was cut without the aid of a lamp.”

“Well, I couldn't see around the back with the mirror.”

“Here.” He found a couple of candle ends in a drawer, flipped open the stove to kindle them, and took the scissors. It surprised her how conscious she was of his hand when he touched the side of her face to steady her head, how every finger movement in her hair and the thin flick and whine of the blades seemed to have a tremendous significance.

It's ridiculous
, she thought, that all those silly songs those musicians sang and all Algeron's absurd poems should be so true. If everything in the world did not precisely speak his name, all things seemed to relate to him in some fashion or other, an effect that, when she had read of it in novels, had previously seemed affected and ridiculous. She supposed she would be saner again presently.

“I didn't hear any horses,” she remarked, turning her head a little to glance back at him.

“Hold still or I'll take your ear off. I sent one of my clerks to leave them at the Pelican Inn on the Kymil road; I thought we'd be less conspicuous getting out of the city without them. There.” He handed her the scissors back and gathered the cuttings from the floor. “You'll look like a respectable footman out for a day's errands in the country.”

He crossed to the bundle of clothing and drew out a shirt, a pair of breeches and a coat of the dark, severe cut common to servants, and a pair of stout shoes. He himself had changed out of the bottle-green suit he'd worn the previous day into a countrified short tweed jacket and top boots. Kyra retreated out of the candlelight to the farther end of the attic, shivering a little in the cold as she stripped off her heavy taffeta gown and layers of petticoats, and pulled on the masculine attire. It was only when she had transferred the contents of her dress's pockets to her coat pockets and turned back for the mirror's assistance in tying her neck cloth that she saw Spenson struggling gamely into a voluminous black dress he had to have borrowed from his cook or housekeeper and barely stopped herself from bursting into laughter.

“Here, it goes on over the head.” She strode over to help him; he gave her a wry grin as his head emerged from the tangle of bombazine. “Drawstrings cross over, then tie in the front; to be really fashionable you should have another petticoat, but I doubt the guards will notice. You'll need a good deal of stuffing.”

He shook out a lace cap and a muslin mobcap to put over it as she made the necessary adjustments to his attire. “I thought they might be looking for a red-haired youth in company with a man,” he said as he arranged the caps over his curly hair. “How do I look?”

“Like the ugliest woman in Angelshand.”

“Good.” He produced his short-stemmed clay pipe from the satchel and proceeded to cram his jacket and breeches into the now-empty sack. “They should be opening the gates for the first of the market carts in a few minutes. By the time we get there, the square should be a bear garden. Ready?”

Kyra glanced nervously at her reflection in the mirror. In spite of the unfamiliar jut of her ears and cheekbones and the faint film of dirt that darkened her jaw in imitation of beard stubble, she thought she still looked absolutely like herself, and Spenson's disguise, in her opinion, wouldn't fool a nearsighted drunkard.

“You'd be surprised what people don't see,” Spenson told her, gesturing with his pipe as they crossed the worn stone paving of the Great
Bridge under the beetling brows of the St. Cyr fortress. The bridge was empty of its usual daytime crowd of flower sellers, old-clothes barrows, and street-corner entertainers. Kyra found it curious to have an unobstructed view of the harbor downriver, the dark masts of the ships pricking up through the floating white seethe of low-lying fog, the riding lights like embers in cinder-gray gloom. The world smelled of morning and low tide. “Just because it isn't done with magic doesn't mean it won't work.”

It was just under a mile from the Great
Bridge to the city's southern gate, through soot-blackened slums and jostling crowds of factory workers bound dull-eyed for their day's endless labor. Among them, however, rattled brightly painted farm carts on the way to the city's great markets, costermongers' barrows, donkeys laden with new lettuces and asparagus, poultrymen bearing cages of spring chickens, young girls driving small flocks of lambs in from the sprawling, muddy suburbs to the south. When they reached the square before the massive stone towers of the city gate, Kyra saw that Spenson was probably right. The broad, brick-paved space was a riot of farmers, produce, and animals; the air was thick with the drawl of country patois and the smells of dew and dung. The cavernous old city gate was choked with wagons, donkeys, and countryfolk; the two Church sasenna standing in the shadow of its heavy portcullis and the red-robed hasu beside them couldn't possibly see everything in that milling crowd.

Sucking on the stem of his pipe, Spenson hung back inconspicuously until a rumble of iron wheels and ponderous hooves behind them in Bridge Street signaled the advent of the Kymil stage. Farmers, pigs, and hen-wives swirled and surged out of the coach's way, forming eddies of barking dogs or women cursing as their fish baskets were upset; Spens ambled through them, nodding greetings and apologies here and there with the lace edge of his mobcap down over his eyes, and edged himself past the coach and into the gate passage while the sasenna and the hasu were stopping the vehicle and peering through its windows at the bleary-eyed and resentful passengers.

“A pity we can't simply take the stage,” Kyra remarked when the coach passed them some time later on the broad street that led down from the gate through the sprawl of small shops and filthy, unpaved lanes that made up the first of the city's suburbs. Dawn was already bright in the sky; the birds were singing in the scrubby trees and backyard gardens, mingling with the bleat of goats and the grunting of pigs.

“You can bet they have someone on it.” Spenson gestured with his pipe after the huge red and yellow vehicle vanishing down the wide, rutted street. Then he pulled a penknife from his skirt pocket and began digging out the bowl. “Thank God we're past the gates, anyway. I thought they'd smell it if I smoked my usual blend and wonder what an old servant was doing puffing on Gentleman's Special at half a crown an ounce.”

Kyra laughed and shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “They'd assume you'd been pilfering your master's tobacco, of course. It's what all my father's footmen do.”

“Come to think of it, probably mine do as well.” He grinned, shoved his mobcap back a little from his forehead, and gestured at the straggling brick houses and gaudily painted taverns lining the road. Farm carts still passed them, jolting heavily where the pavement was broken into mud-filled potholes; the air smelled of brewing beer, young grass, and cows. “These houses go all to hedges once we're outside the town; if you'll keep guard, I can change clothes behind one before we get to the Pelican. If we ride fast, we can probably make Underhythe by midafternoon.”