'If you've something to say to me, say it. Don't moon about in here, sighing like a love-sick maiden in a bad Jamaillian play.' Whatever calculations he had been making had gone badly; Hest thrust the pages away from him, sending several wafting to the floor. 'You remind me too much of Alise, with her reproachful glances and secret sighs. The woman is intolerable. I've given her everything, everything! But all she does is mope or suddenly announce she is taking more.'

'She mopes only when you mistreat her.' The words were out of Sedric's mouth almost before he knew he was going to say them. He met Hest's flinty gaze. There was a quarrel foretold in the lines at the corners of his eyes and the flat disapproval of his thinned lips. Too late for apologies or explanations. Once Hest wore that look the quarrel was inevitable. Might as well have his full say while he had a chance, before Hest riposted with his icy sharp logic and cut his opinion to shreds. 'You did promise Alise that she might go to see the dragons. It was in your marriage vows. You spoke it aloud and then you signed your name to it. I was there, Hest. You do remember it, and you do know what it means to her. It's not some girlish whim; it's her life's interest. Her study of the creatures and her scholarly pursuit of knowledge about them are really all she has to take pleasure in, Hest. It's wrong of you to deny that to her. It's not fair to her. And it's dishonourable of you to pretend that you don't recall your promise to her. Dishonourable and unworthy of you.'

He paused to take a breath. That was his mistake.

'Dishonourable?' Hest's voice was chill, disbelieving. 'Dishonourable?' he repeated, and Sedric felt his breathing grow shallower.

Then Hest laughed, the sound like a burst of cold water over Sedric. 'You're so naive. No. No, that's not it. You're not naive, you're childishly obsessed with your idea of "fair". "Fair" to her, you say. Well, what about "fair" to me? We made our bargain, Alise and I. She was to wed me and bear me an heir, and in return, I let her make free with my fortune and my home to follow her obsessive studies. You're privy to my finances, Sedric. Has she deprived herself at all in her pursuit of rare manuscripts and scrolls? I think not. But where is the child I was promised? Where is the heir that will end my mother's carping and my father's rebuking glances?'

'A woman cannot force her body to conceive,' he dared to point out quietly. Coward that he was, he did not add, 'nor can she conceive a child alone'. He knew better than to bring that up to Hest.

But even if he didn't utter the words, Hest seemed to hear them. 'Perhaps she cannot force herself to conceive, but all know that there are ways a woman can prevent conception. Or be rid of a child that doesn't suit her fancy.'

'I don't think Alise would do that,' Sedric asserted quietly. 'She seems very lonely to me. I think she would welcome a child into her life. Moreover, she spoke a vow to do all she could to give you an heir. She wouldn't go back on her word. I know Alise.'

'Do you?' Hest fairly spat the words. 'Then how surprised you would have been had you heard our conversation earlier! She all but refused to do her wifely duties until she had made her trip to the Rain Wilds and returned. She blathered some nonsense about not wishing to travel while she was pregnant. And then put all the blame on me that she is not already pregnant! And threatened to shame me, publicly, for what she deems my failures!' He picked up an ivory pen stand from his desk and slammed it down. Sedric heard the ornament crack and silently flinched. Hest's temper was roused now, and on the morrow, when he recalled how he'd broken the expensive stand, he'd be angry all over again. Hest hissed out a furious sigh. 'I will not tolerate that. If my father offers me one more lecture, one more suggestion, about how to get that red cow with calf, I will. . .' He strangled wordlessly on humiliation. Hest's clashes with his father had become more frequent of late, and every one of them put him in a foul temper for days.

'That does not sound like the Alise I know,' Sedric tried to divert the conversation. Sedric knew he ventured onto dangerous ground when he did so. Hest was very capable of exaggerating, or slanting a story to put himself in the right, but he seldom lied outright. If he said that Alise had threatened him, then she had. Yet that seemed at odds with all Sedric knew of her. The Alise he knew was gentle and retiring; yet he had known her to be very obstinate on occasion. Would her obstinacy extend to threatening her husband to force him to live up to his word? He wasn't sure. Hest read his uncertainty in his face. He shook his head at Sedric.

'You persist in thinking of her as some angelic girl-child who befriended you when no one else would. Perhaps she was, at one time, though I doubt it myself. I suspect she was just being kind to someone as friendless and awkward as she was herself. A sort of alliance of misfits. Or kindred spirits, if you would prefer. But she is not that now, my friend, and you should not let those old memories sway you. She is out to get whatever she can from our relationship and at as little cost to herself as she can manage.'

Sedric was silent. Friendless and awkward. Misfits. The words rattled inside him like sharp little stones. Yes, he had been so.

As always, Hest had told the truth. But he had a knack for studding it with tiny, painful but undeniably true insults. A memory rose, unbidden. A hot summer day in Chalced. He and Hest had been invited to an afternoon's relaxation at a merchant's home. The entertainment had consisted of a wild boar confined in a circular pit. The guests had been given darts and tubes to blow them from. The others had found great amusement in maddening the trapped creature, vying to stick the darts in its most tender places. The culmination of the diversion had been when three large dogs were set on the creature to finish it off. Sedric had tried to rise from his bench and move away. Hest had unobtrusively gripped his wrist and hissed at him, 'Stay. Or we'll both be seen as not only weak but rude.'

And 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. T 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.'