Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page A

then you are the harpist's strings,
    Were I a purling brook, they would find you at the
    springs.
    If your name be the south wind, I am but the clouds
    which run,
     As one flower in the meadow, I turn but to your sun…
     
    They were tear-spotted, and the scent of passion, of yearning, of heart-tearing joy rose off them like the musky benison of perfume.
    Her fingers brushed forth the face of the sender from the dry crinkle of the page.
    Lamplight on fair hair, a white sleeve seen through fog. The whispered sigh of a child who knew she could never have that which she truly wanted.
    Kyra whispered, “Oh, dear… beautiful as daylight and a poet to boot.”
    The rest of the dresser drawers yielded nothing. The pomanders, sweetgrass and lily of the valley, were simply pomanders, innocent of the spells she had read of in the books of ill, and she found no talismans of darkness concealed in the headboard of the bed, the favored place for such magics. She passed her hands with light swiftness over the paneled walls, the frames and thresholds of the doors, finding nothing. She was just beginning a systematic search of the floor for loose tiles of the parquetry when her mageborn hearing picked up footsteps in the hall.
    Catching up her skirts, she took temporary refuge in the armoire, listening with her wizard's skills through the wall to the quick clip of a woman's feet in the parlor next door, then, a moment later, that of a man.
    A whispered giggle, a little squeak: “What if Miss Alix should come back?” The red-haired maid again.
    A man's voice—the harpsichord player, Kyra thought—slurred as if he were speaking around some soft obstruction. “I just saw her down the drawin' room with old Moneybritches.”
    Kyra seriously considered thumping on the wall and demanding, Can't you two do that in the attic like everybody else did last night? But her own position was as chancy as theirs. In disgust, she wrapped about her more closely the spells of diverted attention, of Look-over-There and Who-Me?, and with great care stepped out of the wardrobe, holding her skirts to keep them from rustling as she glided out the bedroom door—not, she guessed by the sound of it, that I need trouble myself much over being heard.
     
     
    Back in her room again, Kyra dug in her satchel for the chunk of smoky white quartz she had brought from the Citadel, as long as two knuckles of her fingers and twice as thick. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she angled the crystal's central facet so that it caught the light of the window, gazing down into the light and through it into the lattices of the crystal's heart. For a brief time she was more acutely conscious than ever of the room around her, the smells of patchouli and candle wax and the cedar in the folds of her gown, conscious of the voices of the laundrymaid and Merrivale in the drying room far below, of Alix's light, airy chatter in the drawing room, of the tune Sam the coachman was whistling as he swept the cobbled yard far beneath her window…
    Then colors swam in the crystal, spiraling down to gray…
    The blur of a very old scry-ward, eroded to nothing with long neglect, momentarily darkened the stone, then crumbled away.
    And she was in the Church of St. Farinox.
    She almost laughed out loud with triumph and delight.
    Her Summoning not only had taken effect quickly, it had succeeded with a wild thoroughness beyond her hopes.
    The golden canopy over the Sole God's altar scuttered and threshed with tiny scramblings; small, nervous shapes darted wildly across the steps of the altar, up and down the canopy's garlanded golden pillars, around and over the edges of the waist-high carven pew rails. There were three men in laborers' clothes beside a harried-looking priest and some black-clothed member of the minor clergy—a young woman with red hair, probably the one who'd brought the message here—and half a dozen terriers such as professional rat catchers owned. The dogs were pelting here and