She listened, caught between amazement and horror. She had wanted someone to recognize her studies as more than an amusement, but now that he did, she felt humiliated that he knew how serious she was about them. It suddenly seemed a foolish, no, an almost insane fixation rather than a legitimate study. Was it any better than letting oneself obsess about clamshells? What had she to do with dragons, what were they to her, really, other than an excuse not to engage with the life fate had given her? She felt first hot, then faint. How could she have ever imagined that anyone would consider her an expert on dragons? How foolish she must appear to him.

She had not turned to him nor made any reply. She heard him sigh again. “I should have known that you were not an idle dilettante, waiting for someone else to come give shape and purpose to your life. Alise, I apologize. I’ve treated you badly in this regard. My intentions were good, or so I thought them. Now I perceive that I have been only serving my own ends, and trying to fit you into a space in my life where I thought you best should go. I’ve experienced the same sort of treatment from my own family, so I know what it is to have one’s dreams trampled.”

There was so much emotion in his voice that she felt shamed by it. “Please,” she said in a small voice. “Please, don’t let it concern you. It was an idle fancy, a cobweb dream that I have built too large. I shall be fine.”

He seemed not to hear her. “I came here with a gift today, thinking that perhaps I might persuade you to think better of me. But now I fear you can only see it as a mockery of your true dreams. Still, I pray you will accept it, as small reparation for what you have lost.”

A gift. The last thing she wanted from him was a gift. He’d brought her gifts before, the expensive lacy handkerchief, a tiny glass vial of fine perfume, fancy candies from the market, and a bracelet of seed pearls. Gifts that were all the dearer, procured as they were in a time of war. Gifts fit for a young maiden, gifts that had seemed to mock her, a woman on the verge of spinsterhood. She found her tongue and made it move to say the right things. “You are too kind to me.” If only he could understand that she meant the words with her whole heart.

“Please, come back and sit down. And let me give it to you. I fear you will find it more bitter than sweet.”

Alise turned away from the window. After staring out at the bright day, the room seemed dim and uninviting. Until her eyes adjusted, Hest was just a darker silhouette in the gloomy room. She didn’t want to sit down near him, didn’t want to take the chance of his reading on her face what she truly felt. She could make her voice obey her; it was harder to keep the truth from her eyes. She took a deep breath. She hadn’t cried, not a single tear. There was that to be proud of. And the man in the chair might represent the only other path fate was now offering her. She didn’t, she couldn’t believe in him.

But for now, the dictates of society directed that she must feign that she did. She would not make herself any more of a fool before him than she already had. She fixed her mind on the thought that whatever she might do or say to him now might become the humorous little tale that he told at a dinner years from now, when he had a true and appropriate wife at his side to laugh sweetly at his story of a foolish courtship before he’d met her. She schooled her face to a calm expression; she knew she could not manage to smile pleasantly yet, and she walked with a measured step back to her chair. She sat down and took up her cooling cup of tea. “Are you certain that you would not like me to freshen your tea for you?”

“Absolutely certain,” he replied brusquely. The beast. He wasn’t going to let her find refuge in polite small talk. She took a sip from her own cup to cover the flash of anger she felt toward him.

He twisted in his seat, retrieving a leather satchel from behind it. “I have a contact in the Rain Wilds. He’s a liveship captain who sails up there frequently. You know about the excavations at Cassarick. When they first found the buried city there, they were quite elated. They thought it would be like Trehaug was, with miles of tunnels to excavate and treasures to be found in chamber after chamber. But whatever disaster buried the Elderling cities was far harsher to Cassarick. The chambers had collapsed rather than merely filling with sand or mud. As of yet, little of anything has been found intact. But a few items were.”

He opened the satchel. His brief introduction had focused all her attention on the satchel. Trehaug was the major city of the Rain Wilds, built high in the trees in the swampland. But below it the Rain Wild Traders had found and plundered an ancient buried Elderling city. Similar mound formations at Cassarick near the serpents’ cocooning beach had seemed to promise a similar buried treasure city. Little had been heard since the trumpeting of the discovery, but that was not unexpected or unusual. The Rain Wild Traders were a short-spoken lot, keeping their secrets close even from their Bingtown kin. Her heart sank at Hest’s news. She had dreamed of them uncovering a library or at least a trove of scrolls and art. In her dreams, she had been there, lingering after the dragon hatch, and she had imagined herself saying, “Well, I’ve studied everything I could lay my hands on from Trehaug. I can’t translate all of this, but there are words I can pick out. Give me six months, and perhaps I’ll have something for you.” They would have been dazzled by her knowledge and grateful to her. The Rain Wild Traders would have recognized her worth; a translated scroll was worth hundreds of times the value of an undeciphered one, not just in terms of knowledge but in trade appraisal. She would have stayed on in the Rain Wilds, and been valued there. So she had imagined it a hundred times in her darkened room at night. On a summer afternoon, here in the parlor, her dream faded to a child’s self-indulgent imagining. It had, she thought again, all been a dream built of vanity and cobwebs.