Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page A

didn't think there was, but I'm sure it's not for want of her trying.” Kyra replaced another hairpin. “That was quite a strong passion powder Esmin tried to get you to drink last night. I wasn't sure I could have counterspelled it just in passing, so I had to knock it out of her hand, which was a terrible shame, because there were only twelve goblets in that set and the glassblower who made them has long ago retired.”
    “Are you telling me,” Spenson said in a strangled voice, his color deepening alarmingly, “that Esmin Earthwygg was trying to… to give me love-potions?”
    Kyra shrugged. “Well, as Father keeps pointing out, you are a splendid match, and the Earthwyggs have been outrunning the constable for years. At least they were doing so six years ago when I last heard, and that isn't a habit one changes overnight. Don't tell me that comes as a surprise. It's hardly like Lady Earthwygg to start proceedings so late in the day.”
    She looked up from straightening her skirt to see his blue eyes bulging at her like those of an enraged bull.
    “That's the most immodest, outrageous thing I've ever—”
    “Don't look at me” she protested calmly. “I'm not the one who's been sending you dreams about the girl.” His eyes widened with a fury that told her she'd hit square on the mark. “If you wish me to, I can give you a comprehensive counterspell—”
    “You'll do nothing of the sort!” Spenson shouted, causing a couple of nuns hurrying down the other side of the street with market baskets in their hands to stop and turn, eyes wide with surprise behind their veils. “Keep your arts to yourself, my girl, if you know what's good for you!”
    Turning heel, he stormed back to the gig, caught up the reins—without, Kyra noted, jagging the mare's mouth, as another man in that much of a temper might have done—and rattled away with such abruptness as to almost collide with a poulterer's wicker cart that had come dashing around the corner from the other direction. She heard Spenson curse mightily as he swerved to avoid it, and he was still cursing as he vanished down the lane, shawl and spell-cord flapping about the wheels.
    “Well!” Kyra shoved a final pin into her hair and pulled her cloak about her once more. Across the street, the two nuns were whispering to one another and two servant girls and the yardman from the big house on the opposite side of the lane were staring at her as if she were a tattooed lady in a raree show. “Some people have no tolerance.”
    She continued her progress via a more circuitous route and stayed as much as was possible to the well-traveled streets.
    The Church of St. Farinox was a relatively new one, built fifty years earlier, when all the great mansions that lined the city wall between Salt Hill and Parsley Hill had been pulled down to accommodate the rising guildsmen and new-rich factory owners in their demand for spacious city residences. The old banking families, whose wealth antedated theirs by three generations, were already firmly ensconced around Governor's Square on the other side of the most fashionable district. The owners of the factories that were making Angelshand one of the wealthiest cities of the Empire wanted, and were willing to pay for, something equally grand.
    Like nearly everything else in Angelshand, the church was constructed of granite, so darkened with factory soot that even its handsome proportions and pillared portico couldn't make it appear light; it loomed above its small forecourt like an iron ox, head bowed, ready to charge. Kyra approached it casually through the colonnade that ran around its court, where shopkeepers had just begun to open the boutiques of fashionable lingerie, perfumes, and chocolate; she wove about herself again the spells of disvisibility, slipping the eyes of passersby away from her like quicksilver.
    On the great bronze doors of the church a notice was affixed, informing all and sundry that the marriage between Master