The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection. Robin Hobb
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water over Sedric. ‘You’re so naïve. No. No, that’s not it. You’re not naïve, 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. ‘I 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.’
‘What pretence?’ Hest asked him.
Sedric looked up at him, startled. Hest returned his gaze blandly. ‘If I had your wealth,’ Sedric ventured, ‘I’d go somewhere else, away from everyone who knows us. And start a new life. On my own terms. Without apologies.’
Hest spat out a laugh. ‘And very quickly there would be no wealth. Sedric, I’ve told you this before. There is an immense difference between having money and true wealth. My family has wealth. Wealth takes generations. Wealth has roots that stretch far and wide, and branches that reach out and twine through a city. You can take money and run away with it, but when the money is gone, you are poor. And all you have before you is the prospect of long years of very hard work so you can build a foundation for wealth for the next generation.
‘And that’s something I have absolutely no interest in doing. I like my life, Sedric. I like it the way it is. Very much. And that is why I do not like it when Alise proposes to upset it. I dislike it even more when you seem to think that’s acceptable behaviour on her part. If I fell, what do you think would become of you?’
Sedric found himself looking down at his feet as if shamed as he mustered the last of his courage to take Alise’s side. ‘She needs to go to the Rain Wilds, Hest. Give her that, and I think it will be enough to last her the rest of her life. One chance to be out in the world, doing things, seeing things for herself instead of reading about them in tattered old scrolls. That’s all. Let her go to the Rain Wilds. You owe her that. I owe her that, for wasn’t I instrumental in bringing her to marriage with you! Give her this small, simple thing. What can it hurt?’
Hest snorted, and when Sedric lifted his eyes to look at him, his face was set in mockery and his eyes were green ice. Sedric reviewed his own words and saw his mistake. Hest never liked to hear that he owed anyone anything. Hest rose from his desk and paced a turn around the room. ‘What can it hurt?’ He asked, in a voice that mimicked Sedric’s. ‘What can it hurt? Only my wallet. And my reputation! My pride, too, but I suppose that is nothing to you. I should let my wife go traipsing off to the Rain Wilds, unaccompanied, on some crackpot mission to find an Elderling hiding under a rock or save the poor crippled dragons? It’s bad enough that she spends every spare hour of her day immersed in such idiocy; should I let her make her obsession public?’
Sedric