Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page B

Blore Spenson and Miss Alixenia Peldyrin would take place on the following day. No garlands had been woven on the porch pillars yet. As she'd come downstairs that morning, Kyra had overheard the footmen complaining—as they moved the tubbed gardenias back out onto the steps—that they'd have to do so this afternoon.
    Quietly she made her way around the church, through a tiny garden—only the older churches down near the river had churchyards anymore, tradition being satisfied with minute handkerchiefs of grass and flowers in the expensive urban properties. The side door was also bolted. A hand pressed to the carved oak panels, a murmured word of power. The sliding whisper of steel against steel, the vibration of the moving latch.
    She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
    The smell of smilax, roses, and lilac here was overwhelming, drowning the mustiness of the last sabbath's incense and the faint, fusty amalgam of dust and altar cloths. The golden sun canopy over the altar of the Sole God had been garlanded already, probably yesterday; the blossoms were drooping a little but still looked in fairly good shape. Along the wall by the door through which she had just come, Kyra saw the poles of the bridal canopy: cedar, cypress, oak, and ash, as the rite demanded, with their fittings and finials of silver. In ancient houses the fittings were handed down from generation to generation. Her father had purchased these new. The poles themselves would be burned on the wedding night, after the banquet, when the bride and groom had been put to bed.
    The bride and groom.
    Alix and Blore Spenson, who, in spite of the awful neck cloth and red suit, now seemed a bit more like the pirate fighter and commander of men her father had described.
    If Alix lived that long.
    She shook away the thought of Blore Spenson, her anxiety flooding back. With hands that trembled slightly, Kyra bolted the door behind her, threw back her cloak, and dug in her pocket for the few things she had brought with her: chalk, a vial of mixed staghorn and powdered silver, and, wrapped in greased kitchen paper, a few bits of cheese.
     
     
    “I can understand swearing not to use one's magic for ill,” she'd said that first night in the Citadel of Wizards, sitting before the fire in the Junior Parlor with the woman who would be her teacher, her mentor, her sponsor during the long and tedious days to come. “And it isn't fair, of course, to use it for one's own amusement on the innocent, though I suspect that a touch of magic would liven up their days, poor things… But not to use it for good? What is magic for, then?”
    “What magic is for is a question that no one has ever succeeded in answering.” The Lady Rosamund Kentacre leaned back against the chimney breast, folding her beautiful hands in her lap. There was nothing about the Lady that was not beautiful: her alabaster skin, her absinthe-colored eyes, her low, clear voice. Like Alix, she was just tall enough to be striking, without Kyra's height; her hair so black that it was almost purple, massed in springy, sensuous curls. She was, at the time of Kyra's arrival, in her midthirties, the daughter, they said, of the Earl Maritime, ejected by him from the household when she had refused to use her powers for the betterment of the family. Perhaps this was the source of the sympathy and kindness Kyra had detected in the older woman's aloof green eyes.
    “I suppose,” the Lady went on after a moment, “one could ask, 'What is good?' What is the good that you would use your magic for?”
    “To heal the sick,” Kyra said.
    “Then why did you not become a doctor? Many who are mageborn do. What else?”
    “Well,” Kyra said diffidently, “there are a lot of extremely poor people in the cities, people who can't feed their children, people who struggle, and die, just to put wood in the stoves through the winter. Surely one could lay words of good fortune on them, words of luck that would bring them