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 wind-burned 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 facade 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 jewellery. 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 one another. 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 any more. 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 rise and cross the room. She took her candle with her, and when she left, the light diminished by half. The door shut firmly.

He sank down onto 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 theatre and wine, would he forgive him and forget? 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 made 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 theatres 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 honoured 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 that 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 towards him.