“What I accused Leftrin of planning, I actually did. I used you to get close to the dragons. I took scales and blood, even small pieces of flesh from when Thymara cleaned the wound on the copper dragon. I hid them in my room.” As he spoke, he reached into the canvas bag. One at a time, he took out several small glass bottles and set them on the table. One had a tinge of red stain down it. “I intended to take them back to Bingtown, to meet up with the Chalcedean merchant, and make a fortune.”

He stopped there.

After a moment, she realized he was waiting for her. She took up one of the empty bottles and turned it in her hands. “What did you do with them?”

“Greft stole them from me. When he fled with the boat. They’re gone forever, now.” He gestured at the glass vials. She suppressed a shudder and set the one in her hand back on the table with a small clink.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

He paused, then said unwillingly, “Carson. He said I needed to finish old things before I could start something new. This is part of that.”

“You’re finishing with me.”

“No. No, that’s not it at all. I don’t want to lose you, Alise. I know that it’s probably not possible, but somehow I’d like to go back to being the sort of friend I once was to you. Being that person from my side, if you see what I mean, even if you can’t feel about me as you once did. Somehow I went from being your friend to someone who could participate in deceiving you, could even exploit you just to get close to the dragons. I don’t want to be that person anymore. Telling you is a way of destroying him. Telling you about someone like him is something the old Sedric would have done, back when he was really your friend.”

“You mean before Hest got to him. Before Hest got to either of us.” She lifted a hand and rubbed her brow. It gave her a moment to cover her eyes, a brief time of being alone with her own thoughts. It wasn’t really fair to blame it all on Hest. Was it? She and Sedric had gone their own ways before he came along and joined their lives again in such a bizarre fashion. She tried to remember how she had once thought of Sedric. In those years when their lives had taken separate paths, she’d recalled him fondly and smiled over her girlhood infatuation with him. Whenever she chanced to see him, in the market or visiting mutual friends, she’d always felt a leap of pleasure at the sight of him and always greeted him warmly.