Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page B

there like lizards on hot glass, not knowing what to go after first; the two clergy were nervously holding the hems of their robes up off the floor. Kyra remembered getting a mouse up her skirts when she was twelve. Though she didn't have the disproportionate, morbid horror about it that so many women did, the brouhaha of having two friends lift, shake, and fumble through her four petticoats, hoops, overskirt, underskirt, and train in quest of the errant rodent was an experience she didn't care to repeat.
    There was absolutely going to be no wedding taking place in that church tomorrow morning.
    Kyra breathed a shaky prayer of relief. Another day. She was starting to fold her hand around the crystal to obliterate the image when glowing indigo darkness clouded the stone's depths. A moment later she saw in it, as if reflected from some great distance away, the face of Lady Rosamund Kentacre.
    “Kyra?” the wizard said, and Kyra felt a sudden wash of relief sweep over her, as if she had stepped from the chill of a stone room out into a windless, sun-flooded summer garden. After less than twenty-four hours of her mother's twittering, of bustle and servants and petticoats and worrying about what her father was going to say to her, the sight of her teacher's face was like silence after the nagging whine of a crying child.
    “Rosamund!” she cried. “Oh, Rosamund…”
    “Are you all right?”
    “God, yes… that is…”
    “We've been worried about you here,” the mage said. “Worried about how you're faring in Angelshand and what you may have learned about your sister. Is she well? Have you found aught amiss there?”
    “No!” Kyra cupped the crystal in her hands. “That is—well, as unamiss as one can get, in my father's house, with a wedding going on that neither the bride nor the groom seems to want and my father looking at me like he's waiting for me to leave so he can fumigate the furniture.”
    “I see,” Rosamund said quietly. Kyra, remembering Rosamund's family, knew that she did in fact see. “But no sign yet of a death-spell? Remember, Nandiharrow did say that the… the things that happened might have been the effect of exhaustion, of too much study.”
    “Or they might have been a premonition.” Kyra shivered, remembering the dream, remembering the cold evil she had felt, the image of Alix lying with shut eyes in her crimson wedding gown, the saffron veils sheathing her like flame among the white asphodels that mourners scattered over the dead. “Rosamund, could there be any chance that I would have a premonition over—over a death that wasn't being caused by magic? That Alix might be in danger from someone, or something, natural?”
    “Such as?”
    “Could I have had premonitions like that if she was in danger from a disappointed suitor, for instance?”
    Rosamund was quiet for a moment, deep in thought. Behind her, Kyra could see the wide arches of her balcony and, beyond them, the overgrown wilderness of the Citadel's garden, with its peach trees, its dry rock walls, its myriad cats dozing in the afternoon sun.
    “A crime of passion, you mean? Or jealousy?”
    Kyra nodded. Spenson's angry face flashed across her mind, furious with embarrassment that he had been duped. Like a counterpoint melody she recalled the desperate love that warmed the very paper of the poems.
    “Maybe,” the older woman said slowly. “Maybe. You were very close to her, and we don't really understand much about premonitions. But it's far likelier that an Eye of Evil, a mark of ill, has been written somewhere in the house. It could have been placed weeks ago—months ago—to be activated by the marriage. And it could be anywhere.” Rosamund leaned forward earnestly, the sunlight through the lattices of her distant windows flashing on the antique work of the pins that held her hair. “Will the wedding be soon? Will you have time to make a thorough search?”
    “The first of May,” Kyra lied, not wanting to mention