Free Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly

schoolfellows on expeditions through the mazes of court and lane east of Baynorth Square, and they'd invariably pass down Little Potticary Lane on the opposite side from the house of painted bricks, with its round turret above the blue-painted door. “A witch lives there,” Dann Brecksnift had said.
    Kyra did remember the first time she'd gone inside.
    Alix had come down with a fever—as a child Alix had been susceptible to chills and colds—and their father had gone to Respin Phylgard's shop in Potticary Court one rainy afternoon to get some of Phylgard's tisanes for her. Phylgard was the premier apothecary in the city, head of the Apothecaries' Guild and consultant to innumerable members of the Court. Thus, a visit to his shop, with its lines of shining glass bottles, its mysterious cabinets of tiny drawers, its smooth marble counter and mosaic marble floor, was always an adventure. Even at ten Kyra was already her father's pet and was beginning to grow into her role as his secretary, her sharpness with mathematics and her shrewd observations of the business of corn factoring winning not only his approval but confidences he never gave to his largely uncomprehending wife. As a result, she was much indulged and was given the books she demanded and the extra tutoring she asked for when she discovered the mathematics master at her school couldn't tell a sine from a tangent and was allowed to dress in richer colors and more dramatic styles than were considered proper for little girls.
    She couldn't recall why she'd grown bored in Phylgard's shop. Most likely, she thought, looking back, her father had been involved in some interguild politics and had gotten into a close discussion of the matter with the great apothecary, something she was not able to follow without explanations the men had no time to give. She'd gone out into the court, which was dark and nearly deserted under the pregnant, charcoal-colored sky of autumn, and had stood for a few moments with her hands deep in the silk-soft squirrel fur of her muff. The chair menders, the hurdy-gurdy man, the vendors of steamed buns, flowers, and scarves who usually inhabited the flagways had all been driven indoors by an earlier rain squall. A few streets away a woman was singing, “Oranges and limes! Golden sunshine from the south!” but Kyra wasn't sure in which direction the vendor lay, and she knew the streets were so tangled around here that she would probably have trouble locating her.
    So she'd tucked up her brilliant red and purple skirts and picked her way among the puddles of Little Potticary Lane to visit the shop of the witch.
    She'd seen Tibbeth outside his shop on enough occasions, tending the flowers that grew in pots on his tiny doorstep or bringing back pails of water from the fountain in the square, to know him by sight, and so she felt no fear of the tall, plump, handsome man with his lined face and deep-set eyes. He wore a long and very old-fashioned gown or robe, like an apothecary or a physician, but without those dignitaries' stiff, ruffled collars. On the day she first came into his shop, he was wearing a fraying velvet cap with ear flaps such as her father sometimes wore when it was cold, and from beneath it, fine, silky sandy-gray hair hung to his shoulders.
    He was reading in the kitchen behind the shop, where the light came in through the wide window's score of tiny panes, but there was a bell above the shop door that rang when Kyra opened it. She saw him put his book aside and rise—tall, taller than any man she had known up to that time—and come into the shop to bow.
    “Mistress Kyra Peldyrin, I believe.”
    She looked around the shop. Dann Brecksnift and she used to dare each other to go up and touch the iron door handle of the “witch's house” or look through the front window into the shop, but inside it wasn't so formidable, just gloomy, with the light cut off by the buildings across the street, and filled with strange jars and