That sounded dangerous. ‘Alise, my dear, there is little you can do about it. Except to make the best of it. Go home. Live respectably. Continue your studies, and add to them what you’ve learned from this expedition. Have a child, or children. They will love you as you deserve.’

‘And loving them, I could condemn them to having a father like Hest?’

He could not find a response to that. He tried to imagine Hest as a father and could not. Children and sardonic wit would not blend. Elegance and wailing babies? A supercilious smile and a five-year-old offering a flower. He cringed at each thought. She was right, he slowly conceded. A child might be what Hest wanted and needed, for the sake of providing his line with an heir. But Hest as a father was the last thing that any child needed. Or deserved.

Alise wiped tears from her reddened cheeks. ‘Well. I have no solution to my dilemma. I promised to be his wife, to lie with him, to give him a child if I could. I gave my word. It was a bad bargain to be sure, but what am I to do? Just sail up the river and disappear forever?’

Her query sounded almost hopeful, as if he might accede to such a wild idea.

‘You can’t.’ He spoke the words bluntly. She couldn’t know he was answering his own question as well. He wanted to run away almost as much as she did. But the Rain Wilds was no place for either of them. Difficult as things were at home, they didn’t belong here. As often as he told himself that he could not go back, he knew even more clearly that he could not stay here.

She hung her head, looking at the floor, almost as if she had lost something there. When she brought her eyes up to meet his, a blush reddened her wind-burned cheeks to an even darker shade. ‘I came into your room while you were gone. When I thought you might be drowned and forever lost to me. I felt terrible at how I had neglected you. I imagined a hundred terrible things had befallen you, that you were dead, or lying injured somewhere, stranded and alone.’ Her eyes wandered over his face, lingering on his bruises. ‘So I tidied your room, and took your clothing to wash, thinking that if you did return, you’d know how badly I’d felt. And in the course of doing that, of straightening your bedding and so on, I— what’s that?’

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 aggravated 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 towards 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 him that if he knew what was good for him, he’d keep the matter of both the sitting and the portrait secret.’