he had stayed. Even though he’d hated it.
The way Hest now jabbed him with tiny insults reminded him of how he had helped torment the pig. Hest’s face then had had that same dispassionate but calculating look that it did now. Going for the tenderest flesh with tiny, sharp words. His sculpted mouth was a flat line, his green eyes were narrowed and cold, catlike as they watched him.
‘I wasn’t friendless,’ he said quietly. ‘Because Alise was my friend. She came to visit my sisters, but she always took time to speak with me. We exchanged favourite books, and played cards and walked in the garden.’ He thought of himself as he had been then, shunned by most of the young men at his school, a source of bafflement to his father, a target for teasing by his sisters. ‘I had no one else,’ he said softly, and then hated himself for how much those words betrayed about him. ‘We helped each other.’
But the whispered comment seemed to have touched and softened something in his friend. ‘I’m sure you did,’ Hest agreed smoothly. ‘And the little girl that she was then was probably flattered by the attention of an “older man”. Perhaps she was even infatuated with you.’ He smiled at Sedric and said quietly, ‘How could I blame her? Who wouldn’t have been?’
Sedric stared at him, breathing quietly. Hest returned his gaze, unflinching. And now his eyes were the deep green of moss under shade trees. Sedric turned away from him, his heart tight in his chest. Damn him. What gave him such power? How could Hest hurt him so, and a moment later melt his heart?
He looked down at his hands, still holding Hest’s blue shirt. ‘Do you ever wish it were different?’ he asked quietly. ‘I am so tired of the deceptions and trickery. So tired of holding up my end of the pretence.’
‘What pretence?’ Hest asked him.
Sedric looked up at him, startled. Hest returned his gaze blandly. ‘If I had your wealth,’ Sedric ventured, ‘I’d go somewhere else, away from everyone who knows us. And start a new life. On my own terms. Without apologies.’
Hest spat out a laugh. ‘And very quickly there would be no wealth. Sedric, I’ve told you this before. There is an immense difference between having money and true wealth. My family has wealth. Wealth takes generations. Wealth has roots that stretch far and wide, and branches that reach out and twine through a city. You can take money and run away with it, but when the money is gone, you are poor. And all you have before you is the prospect of long years of very hard work so you can build a foundation for wealth for the next generation.
‘And that’s something I have absolutely no interest in doing. I like my life, Sedric. I like it the way it is. Very much. And that is why I do not like it when Alise proposes to upset it. I dislike it even more when you seem to think that’s acceptable behaviour on her part. If I fell, what do you think would become of you?’
Sedric found himself looking down at his feet as if shamed as he mustered the last of his courage to take Alise’s side. ‘She needs to go to the Rain Wilds, Hest. Give her that, and I think it will be enough to last her the rest of her life. One chance to be out in the world, doing things, seeing things for herself instead of reading about them in tattered old scrolls. That’s all. Let her go to the Rain Wilds. You owe her that. I owe her that, for wasn’t I instrumental in bringing her to marriage with you! Give her this small, simple thing. What can it hurt?’
Hest snorted, and when Sedric lifted his eyes to look at him, his face was set in mockery and his eyes were green ice. Sedric reviewed his own words and saw his mistake. Hest never liked to hear that he owed anyone anything. Hest rose from his desk and paced a turn around the room. ‘What can it hurt?’ He asked, in a voice that mimicked Sedric’s. ‘What can it hurt? Only my wallet. And my reputation! My pride, too, but I suppose that is nothing to you. I should let my wife go traipsing off to the Rain Wilds, unaccompanied, on some crackpot mission to find an Elderling hiding under a rock or save the poor crippled dragons? It’s bad enough that she spends every spare hour of her day immersed in such idiocy; should I let her make her obsession public?’
Sedric kept his voice reasonable. ‘It’s not an obsession, Hest. It’s her scholarly interest …’
‘Scholarly interest! She’s a woman, Sedric! And not a particularly well-educated one! Look at the schooling she received, sharing a governess with her sisters! A cheap governess, probably couldn’t teach them much more than how to read and do arithmetic and embroider little flowers on scarves. Just enough education to get her into trouble, if you ask me! Just enough to make her give herself airs about being a “scholar” and think she can buy a passage on a ship and go off on her own, with no thought at all about propriety or her duties to her husband and family. And never a pause, I’m sure, to wonder how much such a frivolous trip will cost her husband!’
‘You can well afford it, Hest! Just the other day, I was listening to Braddock talking about how much his wife spends on dresses, and little parties for her friends and her constant refurbishing of their home. Alise costs you none of that; she lives as simply as can be, except for the materials she requires for her scholarly pursuits. Really, Hest, don’t you feel you owe her that outlet, after all the years she has waited? So let her make her journey. You’ve plenty of connections up the Rain Wild River. A word from you would probably win her free passage on the Goldendown or any other liveship. And I can think of half a dozen Rain Wild Traders who would be delighted to offer her hospitality, no matter how eccentric she might be. They’d do it to gain favour with you and—’
‘Favour I’d later have to pay back. And you said it just now, yourself. “No matter how eccentric she might seem!” There’s a fine recommendation for me. I can hear it now. “Oh, yes, we had Hest Finbok’s mad wife come stay with us. Spent all her time nosing about in the ruins and chatting up the dragons. Delightful woman. Her brain is riddled as a tree full of beetles.”’
Hest was adept at voices and mannerisms. Upset as he was with him, still Sedric had to stifle the impulse to smile as his friend suddenly became a gossipy old woman with a swampy Rain Wilds accent. He held his tongue and shook his head at him rebukingly.
Hest spoke decisively. ‘I don’t care what she says or what she has arranged. She can’t go. Certainly not alone.’
Sedric found a voice. ‘Then don’t send her off alone. See this as the opportunity it is! Go to the Rain Wilds with her. Freshen up your trade contracts there; it must be six years since you last visited—’
‘And for very good reasons. Sedric, you cannot imagine how that river smells. Nor the endless gloom of that forest. People living in houses made of paper and sticks, eating lizards and bugs. And half of them are touched by the Rain Wilds in ways that make me shudder just to look at them. I can’t help myself. No. Going face to face with the Rain Wild Traders would only damage my contacts there, not strengthen them.’
Sedric folded his lips for a moment and then ventured a topic that had been at the back of his mind for some time. ‘Do you remember what Begasti Cored said to us on our last visit to Chalced? That a merchant who could provide the Duke of Chalced with even the smallest part of a dragon could be a rich man to the end of his days?’
‘Begasti Cored. The bald merchant with the horrible breath?’
‘The bald, extremely rich merchant with the horrible breath,’ Sedric corrected him, grinning. ‘The one who has founded his fortune not on trading vast amounts of anything, but, as he told us, in delivering a small amount of something very rare to the right man at the right time.’
Hest gave a martyred sigh. ‘Sedric, those tales have been circulating for the last year and a half. All know the Duke of Chalced is aging, and perhaps dying. He thrashes
