Free Stranger At The Wedding by Barbara Hambly Page B

the Watermeadow precinct of the city between the Imperial Gate and the walls of the Emperor's palace, pretending they would rather live there than in the still more exclusive neighborhoods around Imperial Square and Queen's Square.
    Even through the urgency of her dread, Kyra slowed her hurrying steps as she passed the fountain house and smiled a little. There was an Earthwygg Square somewhere in the packed, cabbage-scented streets just this side of Prince Dittony Circle; she wasn't sure how much of that land the Earthwyggs still owned, but in any case, in that district they wouldn't be getting much from it. Then she pulled her dark cloak closer around the plain servant's dress she'd pilfered from Merrivale's mending basket and hastened on.
    Shadow still lay over Baynorth Square, the morning cold penetrating her shabby clothes. On the western side of the square, the gate in the old city wall had been opened; sunlight sparkled on the gilded bronze luck gods of its turrets above the line of the eastern houses' shadows, and through it she could glimpse the sparkle of glass, the gaudy unrepentant reds and greens of the saints and birds and flowers painted on lower-class houses, the stir of movement as the merchants of Salt Hill unshuttered their windows and prepared for the day. From the streets on all sides came the jangle of bells, the tooth-jarring rattle of clappers, and the voices of the street vendors: “Hot pies! Hot pies! Meat-apple-pear-mince—hot pies!” “Clams and mussels! Clams and mussels!” “Fresh lovely violets! New from the country!” “Buy my milk! Who'll buy my milk?” As she approached the corner where Upper Tollam Street ran out of the square, amidst the ammonia of horse droppings and the pungency of garbage in the gutters, Kyra walked through a cloud of steamed sweetness where an old woman was selling buns from a cart. Hunger flicked at her like an elf's whip, but her sense of haste, of time running out, kept her moving. Alix's life was at stake, and besides, it would not do to let anyone recall that a tall woman wrapped in a cloak had passed that way.
    The time was past when the first crowds had come into the street in the misty darkness of predawn: clerks on their way to the countinghouses; men, women, and children trudging down the dripping lanes to the factories and mills along the river. Now and then a shop girl hurried past her, or a bleary-eyed student headed for the university quarter, or servants on their way to do early marketing. Merchants like her father, if they had any pretensions to gentility—though they might have been awake since before daylight working on their accounts—did not reach their countinghouses until nine.
    She started to step off the high stone curb to cross to Fennel Street but paused to let a cab rattle past. Only, to her annoyance, it didn't. It drew up directly in her path, the door opening to let out a couple of stocky men in the kind of rough clothes laborers wore. Her mind still worrying at the problem of Alix, of this morning's secret errand, she started to circle around the back of the cab when it occurred to her to wonder how a couple of laborers had been able to afford a hack's prices. By then it was too late.
    Rough hands grabbed her from behind. Someone threw a shawl or blanket over her head; someone else flung a loop of something that felt like braided rope around her arms, though she knew an instant later that it was spell-cord. Cold sickness quenched the magic within her at its touch. She was so startled—so shocked—that she didn't even begin to react until the man behind her started to lift her off her feet.
    But at five foot ten, Kyra was not all that easy to lift. Lashing behind herself with one foot, she entangled her assailant's leg and jerked it forward, at the same time throwing her weight back into him. Her impact with the flagstones was considerably softened by the shielding of his body—his, she supposed, was much less so, to judge by