by Robin Hobb
Hungry, thirsty, and bleak of spirit, he emerged onto the deck as the sun was going down. He found the barge nosed up in a creek bed, one of numerous tributaries that fed the Rain Wild River. Sometimes the water they offered was clear and almost free of acid. It seemed to be the case with this one, for most of the keepers and crew had gone ashore, leaving the ship almost deserted. When he paused at the railing to look, most of the boys were engaged in a water fight. The stream was shallow and wide, the water running swiftly over a sculpted sandy bed. The shirtless keeper boys were stooping to splash one another, laughing and shouting. The last light of the summer’s end sun glinted on their scaled backs. Green, blue, and scarlet glints ran over them, and for one brief instant, he saw beauty in their transformations.
Beyond the youths, he saw Bellin kneeling by the stream as Skelly poured a stream of water over her soapy hair. Good. At least now there would be plenty of fresh water to replenish their supplies.
The dragons, too, were enjoying the water. Their gleaming hides showed that their young tenders had given them a good grooming. Relpda was among them, shiny as a copper coin. He wondered who had groomed her, and he felt guilty. He should take better care of Relpda. He didn’t know how. He scarcely knew how to take care of himself, let alone anyone else.
The beach near the stream mouth was not large, but there was enough room for the dragons to be comfortable for the evening and for the keepers to have a bonfire. The fire was small now, but as he watched, two of the keepers approached with a branchy evergreen log and tossed it onto the flames. For a moment he thought they’d smothered the fire; then the darker smoke of burning needles rose, followed by a sudden leap of tongues of flame. The sweet smell of burning resin perfumed the evening air. The wave had left plenty of firewood scattered along the banks of the river. So. They would build a large fire for the night, and the keepers would be sleeping ashore.
He sniffed the air and realized that the smell of baking fish rode on the bonfire smoke. His stomach rolled over with an audible gurgle. He was suddenly horribly hungry and thirsty as well. He wondered where Alise and Leftrin were. They were the last people he wished to encounter right now, Alise because of what she knew about him and Leftrin because of what he knew about the man. It troubled him that he had not found a way to tell Alise yet. He didn’t want to talk to her at all, let alone dash her dreams. But he would not betray her again. He would not stand by and watch her deceived.
He crossed the deck quietly, almost surreptitiously. At the door of the deckhouse he paused and listened. All was quiet within. Almost everyone had gone ashore, he imagined, to take advantage of the opportunity to bathe, to enjoy themselves at the bonfire, and to share hot fresh food. He opened the door and entered as silently as a scavenging rat. As he had hoped, a large pot of coffee was on the back of the small iron stove in the galley. The only light in the room came from the fire gleaming through the door crack of the stove. A covered pot was muttering; probably the eternal fish soup that was always kept simmering for the crew. He’d seen water and fish and vegetables added to the pot; he could not recall that he’d ever seen it emptied and washed. No matter. He felt as if he were still hungry from his days of isolation. Hungry enough to eat anything.
He did not know his way around the small galley. Moving carefully in the dimness, he found mugs hanging on hooks and plates stored vertically in a rack. He filled a mug with some dubious coffee, and finally found a stack of bowls on a shelf with a railing. He took one down, ladled soup into it, and got a round of ship’s bread from the sack. He could not find spoons or forks. He sat down at the small galley table alone and took a sip of the coffee.
Weak and bitter but coffee all the same. He lifted the bowl of soup with both hands and sipped from the edge. The flavor was strongly fishy with overtones of garlic. He swallowed and felt warmth and strength funneling down his throat. It was good. Not delicious or even tasty but good. He suddenly understood the copper eating the rotted elk. On a basic level, when a man or a dragon was hungry enough, any food was good.
He was eating the soft chunks of fish and vegetable from the bottom of the bowl, scooping them up with his fingers, when the door of the deckhouse opened. He froze, hoping that whoever it was would walk past to the bunk room. Instead, she came into the galley.
Alise looked at him, hunched over his food, and without a word, opened a cupboard and reached into a bin. She took out a spoon and set it on the table for him.
Still silent, she poured herself a mug of the horrid coffee and stood, holding it in her hands. In the gloom, he was not sure if she was staring at him or not. Then she sighed, came to the table, and sat down opposite him. “I hated and despised you for several hours today,” she said conversationally.
He nodded, accepting the judgment. He wondered if she could see his face in the dark.
“I’m over it now.” Her voice was not gentle but resigned. “I don’t hate you, Sedric. I don’t even blame you.”
He found his voice. “I wish I could say the same.”
“I’ve grown so accustomed to your witty remarks over the years.” Dead. That was how her voice sounded. Dead. “Somehow they are not as amusing as they once were.”
“I mean it, Alise. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Only now.”
“You sound as if you are still angry.”
“Yes. I’m still angry. I don’t hate you; I’ve decided that. But I’m angry in a way I’ve never been angry before. I think that if I hated you, I’d just hate you. But once I realized that only someone I loved could hurt me this badly, I realized I didn’t hate you. And that is why I’m so angry.”
“I’m sorry, Alise.”
“I know. It doesn’t really help, but I know you’re sorry. Now.”
“I’ve been sorry about it for a long time, actually. Almost from the beginning.”
She flapped a hand at him, as if to shoo his excuses away. She sipped her coffee and seemed to debate something with herself. He waited. Finally, she spoke, in an almost normal voice. “I have to know this. Before I can go on with anything, before I can make any decisions, I have to know. Did you and Hest, did you make fun of me? Laugh at how gullible I was, how sheltered that I never even suspected? Did Hest’s other friends know? Were there people I knew, people I thought were my friends, who knew how stupid I was? How deceived I was?”
He was silent. He thought of small dinner parties, held late in the evening, in the private upper rooms of inns in Bingtown. Brandy after dinner in Hest’s den with some of their circle, and merriment that went on long after Alise had tapped on the door to wish them good night and retired to her bed.
“I have to know, Sedric.” Her words called him back to the cramped and grubby galley. She was watching him, her face pale in the dimness. Waiting for the truth.
In her position, he would have felt the same way. The need to know how foolish he had appeared, how many people had known. “Yes,” he said. The word cut his mouth. “But I didn’t laugh, Alise. Sometimes I spoke out for you.”
“And sometimes you didn’t,” she added ruthlessly. She sighed and set her mug down on the table. It was a small sound in the quiet room. She lifted her hands and hid her face in them. He feared she was crying. If she was, he knew he should comfort her, but he would have felt like a fraud doing it. He had been a party to creating this humiliation for her. How could he offer the comfort of a friend? He sat still, not speaking, waiting for her to make a sound.
But when she lowered her hands from her face, she only sighed heavily. She picked up her mug and took a sip of her coffee. “How many?” she asked conversationally. “How many people in Bingtown knew what a fool I was?”
“You weren’t a fool, Alise.”
“How many, Sedric?”
“I don’t know.”
“More than ten?” She was relentless.
“Yes.”
“More than twenty?”
“I think so.”
“More than thirty?”
> “Possibly.” He took a breath. “Probably.”
She laughed bitterly. “So you were not very discreet in your indiscretion, were you? Was I the only one who didn’t know?”
“Alise…you don’t understand. Men like us, we have our own society, one that is mostly invisible to Bingtown society at large. We create our own world. We have to, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be allowed…You are not the only wife who has no idea of her husband’s preferences. There are other wives in Bingtown who do know, and just accept it. My sister believes you are one of them, from something she once said to me. Some of those husbands are fathers, some of them do love their wives, in their own ways. It’s just that…well…”
She had clenched her hands into fists. “Sophie knew?”
“Yes. Sophie knows. The way she spoke, she believes you knew and agreed to it. For a time I hoped you did. Then I mentioned it to Hest one day, and he laughed at me.”
Her brows were knit as she puzzled over this. Then she asked abruptly, “How did Sophie know? Did you tell her?”
“I didn’t have to. She’s my sister. She just knew.” He paused to think about that. “She always knew,” he added quietly.
Alise drew a small breath, sighed it out. “I don’t know which would be more humiliating, really. To have your sister think I was a deceived fool, or to think I was a party to your arrangement.” She looked aside from him. “At least Hest didn’t pretend he cared for me. Looking back, I suppose that he did offer me a strange sort of honesty. I knew he didn’t want me, that he came to my bed only because he must, to make a child. I supposed he had another woman or women somewhere; I could never understand why he hadn’t married someone he actually liked. But now I know. He couldn’t.”
He bowed his head to her cold reasoning.
“When I try to imagine you and him together, when I think of you embracing him, kissing his mouth, and him holding you tight…in the very house where we lived. Both of you coming down to breakfast with me after a night together, both of you planning…”
He was appalled. “Please don’t, Alise. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Was he tender to you, Sedric? Did he say he loved you, bring you small gifts? Remember what scents you liked, what sort of sweets?”
She wasn’t going to let it go. Did he owe this to her? Did he have to endure this? He took a breath and admitted it. “No. That was how I was to him. He was never that way to me.”
“Then how was he?” There was an edge of tears in her voice. “What did he do to make you love him?”
He stopped to think about it. It hurt. “He was Hest. You’ve seen him. It was easy to fall in love with him. He’s handsome and well dressed. Graceful on the dance floor. Charming. When he wants to, he can put his attention on you and make you the most important person in the world. He was strong. I felt…protected. Lifted up by him. I couldn’t believe he wanted me, that he’d chosen me. He was so beautiful that just to have him notice me was all the gift I could imagine. I was dazzled. He did buy me gifts. Clothing. Pipes. A horse. I look back and I think now, those things were not really for me. They were things he gave me so that I would look how he wanted me to look. So I would not shame him with my shabby clothing or my poor taste in horseflesh. I was like…like cloth. Like something he had cut and sewn into a garment that suited him.”
He had been staring at the table, at the almost-empty bowl, the cheap earthenware mug, the unused spoon. Now he lifted his eyes to look at her. In the dimness, her face could have been a paper mask with holes cut for the eyes. She was full of stillness, he thought. But no. All the stillness was on the surface. Beneath that quiet, she seethed.
“I’m not going back.”
He stared at her, unable to make the connection between what he had said and what she had replied.
“I’m never going back to Bingtown,” she clarified. “I’m never going back to where anyone knows me, knows how I was deceived, how I was shamed. That was something Hest did to me, using me that way. But I won’t let him make that be who I am. I won’t be cut and sewn into something that suits him.”
“Alise—”
“He broke his vows to me. He voided our contract. I’m no longer bound to him, Sedric, and I’ve no reason to return to him. I’m staying here. On the Tarman with Leftrin. I know he’ll have me. I don’t care if he wants to marry me or not. I’m staying with him.”
“You can’t. You shouldn’t.” Now was not the time to be telling her this. He did not want to mix the two things together in her mind. But he couldn’t let her get up from the table and walk away without knowing. He couldn’t let her do something irrevocable, something that would allow yet another man to deceive her.
“Alise. You shouldn’t trust him.” His words stopped her. Her hand was on the door.
“I know that’s what you think, Sedric.” She didn’t even turn to look back at him. “I know you think he is uneducated and socially beneath me, crude and unmannered. And you know something? He is those things. But he loves me, and I love him, and I’ve discovered that that matters more than all the things you think are important.” She opened the door.
“Alise, he is deceiving you.”
For a moment she stood in the doorway. Then she closed the door again, softly. He could not see her face, but he could imagine how the insecurity would flicker through her eyes. A man had made a fool of her before. A man she had trusted as a friend had deceived her for years. Could she trust her own judgment? Was it happening again?
“I don’t enjoy telling you this.”
“Yes, you do,” she said harshly. “But say it anyway. How could he be deceiving me? How? Does he have a wife I don’t know about? Immense debts somewhere? Is he a murderer, a liar, a thief? What?”
He ground his teeth, wondering how he could tell her without revealing his part in Jess’s death. He wanted to keep that private. It was bad enough that both the dragon and Carson knew. He was surprised to realize that it was his dragon he was shielding as much as himself. He didn’t want the other keepers to know that she had killed and eaten a human. Just tell her about Leftrin. He wouldn’t say how he knew. “You must know that the Duke of Chalced is ill. He has made it plain that there will be rich rewards for anyone who brings him the dragon parts that he thinks will cure him. For that matter, any part of a dragon that ends up in any market will command a high price.”
“Of course I know that. How could I study dragons and be unaware of all the traditions about the medicinal values of dragon scale or blood or liver or tooth? I don’t doubt that some of that tradition is true. So?”
Out with it. “Leftrin is in league with people who intend to make the duke happy. He plans to gather or may already be collecting specimens from the dragons to sell in Chalced.”
“He wouldn’t.” A hitch in her words as she thought. She was asking herself if it was possible. “He has no time, no opportunity!” she objected. “Running the ship takes up every bit of his time.”
“He has been out around the dragons, helping get the rasp snakes off them, helping tar their injuries. He could do it, Alise. A scale or two here, some blood there. Waiting for the chance to plunder more from a dying or dead dragon. That would be the big payoff for this expedition. If a dragon dies or is injured, and he could collect parts from it, he could abandon the keepers and dragons and leave immediately for Chalced and rake in a rich reward.”
“This is insanity! I won’t, I can’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Oh.” She put a world of disgust into that one word. “Innuendos and rumors. Well, Sedric, I’ll put an end to it. I’ll simply ask him.”
“You shouldn’t do that, Alise. I truly believe you don’t know him, don’t know what he is capable of doing. Jess, Jess the hunter, he told me things. There. Now you know. Jess told me that he was in partnership with Leftrin to get the dragon parts. He told me there was
a plan to meet a Chalcedean ship at the mouth of the Rain Wild River as soon as they had what they needed. But they had a falling-out over it, and it came to fists.”
“Why would Jess even talk to you, let alone confide such things in you?” He heard the small doubts piling up in her mind. Detail might convince her.
“Believe it or not, he thought I might help him get close to the dragons. Because of how I go among them with you. He knew you had given me that red scale to draw. He actually stole it from my cabin while I was sick. He said it alone was worth a small fortune. He thought that if we could get a scale from a dragon, perhaps we could get more things. Enough to make us all rich.”
She stared at him through the gloom. He could hear her breathing. “Leftrin would not be a party to such a low scheme.”
“He was. I fear he is. And I fear that if you bring it up to him, he may become violent. Or find a way to get rid of both of us. Alise, I’m telling you the truth. And you have to ask yourself, if you don’t know this about him, what else do you not know?”
“I think I do know him. I think I know him better than you might suspect.”
She flung those words at him and he knew. The depth of the lurch he felt surprised him. She’d slept with the man. Slept with that smelly, ignorant riverman. Alise, the sweet little girl he had known since her childhood, the respected Bingtown lady, had gone to the bed of that man. For a moment, he was wordless with dismay. Then he knew he had to do it. Deploy his final weapon against her blind infatuation.
“Alise, you think you know him. You thought you knew me, and Hest. But we deceived you for years and you never suspected us. I’m sorry for that, truly sorry. And that’s why I’m trying to keep you from falling prey to that type of trickery again. Leftrin isn’t worthy of you, Alise. You need to stay away from him.”
