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sleeping in the same bed.
    Unhappiness at seeing how Spenson kept glancing over at Esmin Earthwygg? Kyra wondered. Or unhappiness with the idea of marriage at all? Particularly, she thought, to a blocky merchant nearly twice her age whose red suit and lace neck cloth made him look like a bull in hair ribbons.
    “And now I've gotten wine on my dress.” Kyra straightened up. “No, I'll be all right,” she added as Alix showed signs of getting up to help her.
    Their father, suspicion gleaming in his eye, added gruffly, “Keep your seat, miss; your sister will do well enough. That's why we've servants.”
    Kyra's curtsy took in the entire table. “If you will excuse me, Mother, Father, Master Spenson…”
    The elder Spenson and the Bishop were too deep in their increasingly heated discussion of the cost of the strict-form wedding ceremony and the possible dark dealings between the Prophets and traders in silk and gems to take note of her departure. Spenson, who in her opinion hardly resembled the fearless adventurer his father fondly painted, bowed to her as she left.
    Once out of the dining room, Kyra did not ascend the stairs to the bedrooms. Instead, and with the silent swiftness they all learned in the Citadel of Wizards, she gathered her black and primrose skirts in her hands and hurried down the long flight into the lamplit well of the hall.
    As she passed through the hall toward the inconspicuous archway beneath the gallery at its rear, she deepened her concentration, probing with the hyperacute senses of wizardry at the voices beyond the closed door of the kitchen wing. She heard Imper Joblin, the cook, shouting instructions to the scullions about preparing the delicate creams and fruit tarts to be served at tomorrow's feast: “Algeron, I've told you a dozen times the sugar roses on top of the cake are to be pink!” The voices of the footmen came dimly from the drying room, where they and the housemaids had all been pressed into service frenziedly weaving festal garlands, waiting for the last guests to leave so they could bring in the gardenias for the night and hang the new banners on the walls and galleries to impress tomorrow's guests. She heard Merrivale the housekeeper's soft Mellidane drawl and the muted thump-thump as a laundry maid ironed one of Alix's fine linen chemises.
    Tomorrow
    
     , she thought again, and the dread she had felt earlier congealed once more behind her breastbone. The wedding would be tomorrow.
    From her newly gilt shrine on the wall, the Holy Widow Wortle seemed to frown disapprovingly at her, as if that virtuous champion of the status quo knew exactly what she was up to. Kyra breathed the words that would wrap about herself a gauze of illusion, words that would cause a chance maidservant, if encountered in the rear hall, to mistake her for another maid, or to have her mind on something else, or simply to assume that whatever movement she saw out of the corner of her eye must be one of the kitchen cats. Earlier that evening, up in the yellow guest room, Kyra had wrought the necessary weather-spells while waiting for the maid to come in and lace her. Now, when she opened the door at the end of the passage that led out to her mother's garden, she smiled to see that an unseasonably thick fog, like a spilled basketful of dirty wool, had risen from the River Glidden to shroud the city.
    The narrow garden passage was where the footmen hung visitors' cloaks. Kyra caught one at random from its peg, throwing it around her shoulders as she stepped outside.
    Though her years in the Sykerst had inured her to cold, the damp rawness of the fog took her by the throat, the smell of turned earth in the garden mingling with the ghastly harshness of the coal smoke that hung forever over the city. She had forgotten, in her years in the Citadel's isolation, the stench of Angelshand: the sewery stink of its river and streets, the smells of wet stone, of cooking, of all the humanity packed cheek by jowl in