“Mercor wants us to leave the brown alone,” he told her.

“But, but, the poor thing may need our help. Has anyone found out what is wrong with him? Or her, perhaps?” She wondered if Sintara had been mistaken or was mocking her.

The gold dragon spoke directly to her then, the first time he had done so. His deep bell-like voice resonated in her lungs as his thoughts filled her head. “Relpda has parasites eating her from the inside, and a predator has attacked her. I stand watch over her, to be sure that all remember that dragons are dragons’ business.”

“A predator?” Alise was horrified.

“Go away,” Mercor told her, ungently. “It is not your concern.”

“Walk with me,” Leftrin suggested strongly. The captain started to take her arm, and then abruptly withdrew his hand. Her heart sank. Sedric’s words had worked their mischief. Doubtless Sedric had thought it his duty to remind Captain Leftrin that Alise was a married woman. Well, his rebuke had done its damage. Nothing would ever be easy and relaxed between them again. Both of them would always be thinking of propriety. If her husband, Hest, himself had suddenly appeared and stood between them, she could not have felt his presence more strongly.

Nor hated him more.

That shocked her. She hated her husband?

She had known that he hurt her feelings, that he neglected her and humiliated her, that she disliked his manner with her. But she hated him? She’d never allowed herself to think of him in such a way, she realized.

Hest was handsome and educated, charming and well mannered. To others. She was allowed to spend his wealth as she pleased, as long as she did not bother him. Her parents thought she had married well, and most of the women of her acquaintance envied her.

And she hated him. That was that. She had walked some way in silence at Leftrin’s side before he cleared his throat, breaking in on her thoughts. “I’m sorry,” she apologized reflexively. “I was preoccupied.”

“I don’t think there’s much we can do to change things,” he said sadly, and she nodded, attaching his words to her inner turmoil before he changed their significance by adding, “I don’t think anyone can help the brown dragon. She will live or she’ll die. And we’ll be stuck here until she decides she’s doing one or the other.”

“It’s so hard to think of her as female. It makes me doubly sad that she is so ill. There are so few female dragons left. So I don’t mind. I don’t mind being stuck here, I mean.” She wished he would offer her his arm. She’d decided she’d take it.

There was no clear dividing line between the shore and the river’s flow. The mud got sloppier and wetter and then it was the river. They both stopped well short of the moving water. She could feel her boots sinking. “Nowhere for us to go, is there?” Leftrin offered.

She glanced behind them. There was the low riverbank of trampled grasses and beyond that a snaggled forest edge of old driftwood and brush before the real forest began. From where she stood, it looked impenetrable and forbidding. “We could try the forest,” she began.

Leftrin gave a low laugh. There was no humor in it. “That wasn’t what I meant. I was talking about you and me.”

Her eyes locked with his. She was startled that he had spoken so bluntly, and then decided that honesty might be the only good thing that could come from Sedric’s meddling. There was no reason now for either of them to deny the attraction they felt. She wished she had the courage to take his hand. Instead, she just looked up at him and hoped he could read her eyes. He could. He sighed heavily.

“Alise. What are we going to do?” The question was rhetorical, but she decided she would answer it anyway.

They walked a score of paces before she found the words she truly wanted to say. He was watching the ground as he walked;she spoke to his profile, surrendering all control of her world as she did so. “I want to do whatever you want to do.”

She saw those words settle on him. She had thought they would be like a blessing, but he received them as a burden. His face grew very still. He lifted his eyes. His barge rested on the bank before them and he seemed to meet its sympathetic stare. When he spoke, perhaps he spoke to his ship as much as to her. “I have to do what is right,” he said regretfully. “For both of us,” he added, and there was finality in his words.

“I won’t be packed off back to Bingtown!”

A smile twisted half his mouth. “Oh, I’m well aware of that, my dear. No one will be packing you off to anywhere. Where you go, you’ll go of your free will or not at all.”