Dragon Haven (38 page)

He’d been dreading what she was obviously about to tell him. She’d found the secret compartment and the vials of scales and blood. But the look of shock on her face now startled him. She leaned closer to him, lifting a hand. He leaned away from it, but she touched the side of his face anyway. Her fingers slid down his cheek and trailed along his jawline. She’d never touched him in such a way, let alone looked at him with such horror.

“Sweet Sa have mercy,” she said breathlessly. “Sedric. You’ve begun to scale.”

“No!” He denied it fiercely. He jerked his face from her touch, replaced her hands with his own, and ran his fingers over his face. What did he feel? What was this? “No, it’s only roughness, Alise. The river water scalded me, and then I was out in the wind and the sun. It’s not scaling! I’m not a Rain Wilder, why would I grow scales? Don’t be foolish, Alise! Don’t be foolish!”

She just looked at him, her face locked between horror and pity. He rose abruptly from his bed, went to his wardrobe, and took out the little mirror he used for shaving. He hadn’t shaved since his return to the ship—that was all she was seeing. He looked into the mirror intently, bringing his candle close as he felt along his jawline. His skin was rough there. Just rough. “I need to shave. That’s all. Alise, you gave me a turn! What a wild notion. I’m tired now, but I’ll shave in the morning and put a bit of lotion on my face. You’ll see. Scaling. What an idea!”

She continued to stare at him. He met her eyes, daring her to disagree with him. She folded her lips in and bit them and then shook her head to herself.

“I’m very tired, Alise. I’m sure you understand.”
Just leave. Please
. He wanted to look more closely at his face but not while she was here watching him.

“I know you must be tired. I’m sorry. Well. I’ve spoken about everything except the one thing that brings me here. And I
don’t know how to approach that except bluntly. Sedric. Before we left Bingtown, when we were planning this journey…did Hest ever entrust to you a token for me? A keepsake? Something that, perhaps, you were to give me during our journey?”

He stared at her, honestly baffled. A keepsake from Hest for her? What could she be thinking? Hest was not the type to give keepsakes to anyone, let alone someone who had so seriously and recently irritated him. He didn’t say that. He merely shook his head, silently at first and then, as she narrowed her eyes and looked at him suspiciously, more vehemently. “No, Alise, he gave me nothing to pass on to you. I swear.”

“Sedric.” Her tone told him to stop pretending. “Perhaps he told you not to tell me of it or give it to me unless I, oh, I don’t know, unless I lived up to some standard he expected or…I don’t know. Sedric, speak bluntly to me. I know about the locket. I found it when I made up your bed. The locket with Hest’s portrait in it. The locket that says
Always
on the back.”

At her first mention of it, he felt his heart give a hitch and then beat wildly. He felt dizzy and black spots danced before his eyes. The locket. How could he have been so foolish as to leave it where anyone might see it? When first he’d had it made, he’d promised himself to wear it always, to remind him every moment of the person who had so changed his life.
Always.
He’d had it engraved on the case. The little gold case that he’d paid for himself. The birthday gift that he had given himself. What a stupid, thoughtless, wretchedly apt gesture that had been!

And now his silence had lasted too long. She stared at him, a sick and reluctant triumph in her eyes. “Sedric,” she said.

“Oh. That locket.” A lie, he needed a lie. Some sort of excuse, some reason he would have such a thing. “It’s mine, actually. It’s mine.”

The words came out so easily. Then they hung, irrevocable and unmistakable, in the silent air of the room. All turned to stillness. He didn’t look at Alise. If she continued to breathe, he couldn’t hear it. He was breathing, wasn’t he? Slow and shallow. Can one unmake a moment? He willed it not to be, tried to make it unhappen with his stillness.

But she spoke, nailing the reality to what he had just said with the most damning words of all. “Sedric, I don’t understand.”

“No,” he replied lightly, glibly, as if the admission meant nothing at all to him. “Most people don’t. And lately, I’ll admit I scarcely understand it myself. Hest? Hest and
Always
on the same locket? What an unlikely combination.” He laughed, but the sound fell in brittle pieces all around him. Moved by what, he could not say, he reached into the bundle he used for a pillow and pulled out the locket. “Here. You can have it, if you wish. A gift from me rather than Hest.”

“So you…I don’t understand, Sedric. You had it made? You had it made to give to me? But Hest must have known of it. He sat for the portrait, didn’t he? It’s so like him that he must have!”

Boldly he pressed the catch on the locket and opened it. Hest looked out at both of them, sardonically pleased at the mess he had made of their lives, at the friendship of years that was now crumbling away at his touch. He looked into Hest’s eyes as he spoke. “Oh, yes, he sat for it. I commissioned Rolleigh to paint it. It was very expensive and Rolleigh was justifiably insulted by Hest’s cavalier attitude toward the sittings and the finished portrait. He was supposed to come six times, in the evenings after dark, to a very private place for the sittings. He only came twice. And Rolleigh wanted to show him the miniature before it was put into the locket. Hest did not even come to see it and thank the painter for the likeness. That fell to me. And if Rolleigh was ungracious, well, I can scarcely blame him. Hest was unpleasant and condescending about the whole thing. And he told Rolleigh that if he knew what was good for him, he’d keep the matter of both the sitting and the portrait secret.”

From time to time as he spoke, he glanced over at her. She sat there, freckled and unlovely, her wild red hair abandoned to its own inclinations. It had danced free of the pins she had put in it, to curl loosely around her windburned brow and cheeks. Her clothing was clean, but worn. Her blouse was just beginning to fray at the seam. She looked like what she had been when Hest married her; a member of Bingtown’s genteel but down-at-the
heel middle class. And in her eyes there was only confusion, with not even the slightest flicker of suspicion of what he was actually telling her.

“I don’t understand why you paid to have him sit for a portrait, Sedric, let alone a miniature to put in a locket. If you wished to give—”

“Alise, can you be so unaware, even at your age? Let me speak plainly. I love your husband. I loved him for years, even before he thought to marry someone to put a respectable façade on his household. Now do you understand?”

She was beginning to. Pink had started to suffuse her face, and her eyes were widening in shock and horror. He didn’t wait for her inevitable questions.

“Yes. He is my lover. When we travel by sea, when we are abroad, even after you are asleep at night in your own home, we share a bed. For me, there has never been anyone else. Only Hest. Forever, I thought, when I so foolishly had this damned locket created for myself. Here. Have it, if you wish,
Always
and all. I wish I could give you Hest along with it. But somehow I doubt that he was ever mine, to keep or to give away.”

She stared at the locket as if he held a tiny coiled snake in his hand rather than a piece of jewelry. He tipped his hand and let it slither onto the bed between them. He was trembling slightly. Over the years, he’d imagined this moment of revelation in so many ways, but never like this, with them sitting side by side on a bed in a dim room, both frozen in agony. He had thought Hest would be present, that they might tell Alise together before he stole her husband out of her life. He had thought there would be shrieking, hurled threats and thrown objects, slaps and hysteria. But as she sat there, absorbing the betrayal and deception of years, reordering her perception of him and her life, she was silent. She swayed a tiny bit, like a tree in a high wind, and he feared for an instant that she would faint.

“You and Hest,” she said awkwardly, at last. “You love each other. He holds you, kisses you, touches you. That’s what this means?” She touched the coiled chain of the locket and then
drew her finger back as if the cold metal had burned her. Her question had burned him.

He’d been so strangely calm up to now. He’d been able to tell her his life’s largest secret, without any display of emotion. But now the tears seeped up, flooding his eyes, and his throat closed as if distant hands were choking him. “I’ve loved him. I don’t think he loves me anymore. If he ever truly did.” He bowed his face into his hands and the tears came. Had he thought he’d told Alise his most private secret? He’d been wrong. The deepest secret in his life was the one he had just uttered aloud for the first time, the deception he had hidden from himself.

He felt her stand. She would hit him now, she’d call him the names he had feared ever since he was a boy. He waited.

Instead, he felt one of her hands hesitantly touch his head and then smooth his hair, just as his mother had stroked him when he was a small boy. “I’m so sorry for you, Sedric. I’m angry and I’m hurt; I never thought you capable of such deception and betrayal of our friendship. But mostly I’m so sorry for both of us. Especially you. How could you love such a man? What a worthless waste of your heart. Look how it has destroyed both our lives. With Hest, there is no chance of happiness for either of us. But I don’t think he’d care about that at all.”

He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t lift his face from his hands, could not even mutter an apology to her. He felt her cross the room. She took her candle with her, and when she left, the light diminished by half. The door shut firmly.

He sank into his bedding. There. It was done.

He’d just destroyed the last good thing in his life. His friendship with Alise was gone, shattered by what he and Hest had done to her. It shamed him now to think that he’d ever suggested such a marriage to Hest, even when he was in his cups. It shamed him more that he’d allowed Hest to follow through on it. What would it have taken to stop it? One call on Alise to inform her quietly of Hest’s true intentions? Of course, that would have betrayed what he was to her. And possibly brought misery crashing down on him then and there. Hest would have
cast him aside. No doubt of that. And found a way to discredit him completely.

Why was it only now that he could admit how ruthless the man could be? If he were back in Hest’s presence for an hour, if Hest threw a casual arm across his shoulder, or made Sedric his evening’s companion for food and theater and wine, would he forget and forgive him? When Hest focused on him, when Hest was in full howl as he rampaged through any city in search of entertainment and mischief, then he could make Sedric feel as if he owned the world. To be Hest’s chosen companion for a night of raucous play was the most invigorating, heady rush of exhilaration that Sedric could imagine. Even now, in the depths of his despair, a sour smile came to his mouth as he recalled such evenings.

Arm in arm with Hest, surrounded by cohorts of well-dressed friends, they had stormed public houses and theaters from Chalced to Jamaillia. When Hest wished to, he could charm the most recalcitrant tavern owner into keeping his doors open and paying his minstrels for an extra hour. With that suave smile and a scattering of coin, he could procure the best tables, the finest seats in the playhouse, the best cuts of meat, and the finest wine. And people always smiled as they gave it to him. People who only knew his public face found him charming and gracious and witty. To be his companion at such a time, to be his chosen, preferred companion was to be toasted and honored right alongside Hest.

The smile slowly faded from his face, leaving only the bitterness. Never again. Never again would he be publicly lauded alongside Hest.

Never again would he be privately belittled and humiliated as the price of those hours.

That thought should have cheered him. Instead, he tried to imagine a life without Hest. He tried to imagine returning to Bingtown to find himself turned out of Hest’s home, reviled by Alise. Would she tell others? Dread gaped wide to consume him, but then a cruel comfort came. She would not. She could
not tell anyone without revealing how she had been deceived and that her marriage had been a lie from the start. If she told, she would lose everything: her library, her studies, her social standing. She’d have to return to her father’s house, to live at the edge of poverty, a woman who would be either pitied or mocked by all who had known her.

The same fate would await him, if she told.

But even if she did not, he feared it would be little better. He was virtually certain now that Hest was preparing to cast him off. He suspected he would return to find himself replaced. He, too, would have to return in humility to his father’s home and hope to be taken in and given work. The well-funded society of Hest’s friends who had welcomed him would not snub him, not at first. But he would not be able to afford such company, and once they found that he had lost Hest’s regard, few would wish to be seen as his friend. Hest’s displeasure had frozen out more than one friend or acquaintance over the years that Sedric had known him. It had been but one more of the uglier facets of Hest’s character that he had once been able to ignore. Now it would be the sole facet turned toward him.

No. There was nothing to go back to. Nothing at all.

His spirits sank and gloom closed in all around him. Even the room seemed to become darker. He closed his eyes and wondered how much courage it would take for him to end it. Once he had imagined he could throw himself into the water and drown, that once that decision had been undertaken, it would be irrevocable. Well, he knew better now. Once in the water he would struggle. Whether he willed it or not, he would shout for help.

And I would come to save you. Again.

As the thought entered his mind, a warm feeling suffused him. Comfort and contentment, without reason, rose up and permeated him as if he were an earthenware mug filling up with hot tea. He struggled briefly, trying to find his way back to his misery. And then, like a flame claiming a wick and sending forth life, he suddenly wondered why he was holding so tightly to that
misery. He let go again. His dragon’s affection filled him and warmed him and crowded out the pain that had been there.