Stranger At The Wedding Read Online Free PDF

have invited Mole Prouvet—Tellie Wishrom's intended, you know, and a very dear boy even though the Prouvets do own that factory—or your cousin Wyrdlees or somebody to balance it.”
    Entering the dining room, Kyra could see her mother's point. In six years of quiet in the remote Citadel she'd forgotten about the intricacies of properly balancing a dining table.
    She ended up seated between Master Spenson and Esmin Earthwygg, since that was virtually the only place they could put her. Certainly her father would not have risked seating her next to Bishop Woolmat, who had regarded her with a kind of startled outrage the moment he'd entered the downstairs hall and thereafter had refused to speak to or go near her. Nor could she have been seated next to either Lord Mayor Spenson or Lord Earthwygg, which would have placed her opposite the indignant prelate. As it was, she had Esmin between her and his grace, which was just fine with them both, though Esmin didn't look particularly pleased about the arrangement.
    “It should be the finest wedding this city has seen for years,” Gordam Peldyrin predicted proudly from the head of the table, nodding and reaching over to pat his younger daughter's hand. “And a great credit to this little minx of mine.”
    “I believe it's the first wedding in your family to be performed in the strict form,” Lady Earthwygg purred, glancing along the table at him with eyes as black as—but far more intelligent than—her daughter's.
    “Well…” Binnie Peldyrin began deprecatingly, and her husband said, “Oh, no, far from it, far from it,” which Kyra knew was a lie. As a rule, strict-form weddings were performed only among the nobility and the very rich. There was a kind of social cachet to them, but the complications of getting an episcopal dispensation, coupled with the sheer expense of the materials prescribed by the ancient Texts, discouraged even the wealthy merchant classes from going to the trouble when marriage by signature would serve just as well. “Why, my parents were married in the strict form down in Parchasten…”
    The two footmen, very stiff in their purple and yellow livery, bore in the fish course; at the far end of the long dining room the musicians played some airy piece of nonsense, like a fill of starlight that softened the clinking of tableware and the small slurps and crunches of eating. The musicians, Kyra had been informed by the maid who'd laced her, had been hired by her father to play for the wedding procession, the wedding itself, and the feast afterward, and were among the best in the city. The flute player was currently making sheeps' eyes at Tellie Wishrom, Alix's closest friend and, with Esmin Earthwygg, her maiden of honor for tomorrow's ceremony. On the other side of the Bishop, Kyra could see Lady Earthwygg eyeing the young man, too.
    “Personally, I can't imagine why any woman would want to be married in the strict form,” Kyra drawled, just barely stopping herself from spearing one of the honeyed quails. She let the footman—she knew he'd been with the family before her departure, but she never could remember servants' names—put it on her plate for her. Even before she'd spent six years waiting on herself in the Citadel, her family had not had the servants put the food on the plates for them. This, like the musicians and the tale of strict-form weddings in Parchasten, had been rehearsed to show the Spensons and the Earthwyggs how grandly the Peldyrins lived.
    “Oh, but it's tradition,” Alix said a little too quickly, and Tellie sighed, her large blue eyes brimming with sentiment. The Wishrom grandparents, Kyra suspected, had gotten married by jumping over a broom, and in that household signature marriage was undoubtedly considered the apex of respectability.
    “Tradition to get up at the crack of dawn for a ritual bath and spend hours in the church breathing incense that smells like carrion… ? Whyever did the prophets choose civet as the