Free Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page A

cabinets, like Phylgard's, only more varied and shabbier. A mummified crocodile hung from the low rafters overhead; a skull stared lugubriously from a niche; on a shelf behind the counter were stacked innumerable paper boxes, each tied up with string.
    She asked, “If you're a witch, why do you need the bell to tell you someone's in the shop?”
    Tibbeth smiled. “If you're in the back garden and feel thirsty, do you call a maid and ask her to get you some lemonade from the kitchen?”
    Kyra shook her head. “I go get it myself. It's easier.”
    “Even so. I'd rather give my full attention to the book I'm reading than put part of it into a spell to let me know something a bell could let me know just as easily.”
    Kyra had thought about that, looking around at the shop, at the dark, intricate shapes of orreries and celestial globes that stood on the sideboard, at the big sphere of flawless crystal and the strange mirrors of gold and mercury that flashed duskily from the walls, smelling for the first time the thick, characteristic odor compounded of dust, ancient paper, herbs, candle wax, and incense. Strings of dried henbane and borage dangled everywhere from the rafters, their desiccated scents frail yet pungent; one section of shelf held soft pieces of leather of various kinds; another, bottles of what appeared to be water and honey.
    “Papa says that you aren't a witch at all, that there's really no such thing as witches. That it's all done by conjuring tricks to make people believe you have power.”
    “Your papa's a very wise man, Kyra,” Tibbeth said gently. “Making people believe things is power, and it's one power wizards use. If people truly didn't believe that I have some kind of power—that I could be dangerous to them because of this power—they wouldn't be afraid of me, you know.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have power?”
    “Not very much. Your father has far more, because he's a rich man, and people respect him and want to please him. You have power because your father loves you and trusts you—and because you're a rich man's daughter. I'm just a poor apothecary that some people think is a wizard.”
    “Are you a wizard?”
    He shook his head. “The real wizards live in the Citadel of Wizards in the north,” he said. “They don't use their power at all, and they only teach those who promise to obey them and be like them. The rest of us are just dogs to them—dog wizards, they call us.” And for a moment something glinted in the back of those deep, sky-blue eyes.
    Kyra looked around again, at the shop, at the herbs, at the line of blown-out eggshells on the windowsill, the myriad of crystals ranged along the edge of the sideboard, the prisms, star charts, miniature crocks of seeds. The surge of curiosity and delight she had always felt in Phylgard's shop, in the moldy library downtown where half the books were so old, they weren't even printed but handwritten—in the naturalist's shop near the river where her father had gone to buy her Aunt Sethwit a stuffed toucan when such things were a fad—returned to her with a painful insistence, a terrible sense of seeing things pass her by.
    “All this isn't for casting spells, then?”
    “No, my child,” Tibbeth said. “It is for learning. Because that's what wizards do.”
     
     
    That's what wizards do
    
     . Kyra remembered the words as she pushed open the heavy gates of the kitchen yard and stepped into Baynorth Square.
    By daylight, with the white mists thinning to nothing, the square stood revealed as a broad expanse of wet gray cobblestones in whose center a fountain gurgled softly within its thick-pillared house. A bronze statue of Lord Baynorth surmounted the little building's arched roof, the lord whose private city palace had been torn down to provide his heirs with thousands of royals a year in ground rent for the merchants who built their houses on the sprawling site of its gardens. Most of the noble families had moved out to