The first drops struck the courtyard flagstones like thrown coins, fat and cold, and Lady Vire Cassidar heard them before she saw the carriage. She stood at the narrow window of the west gallery, fingers laced at her waist, and counted the rhythm of the downpour the way her late mother had taught her to count the beats of a haggling merchant. Slow at first. Patient. Then building toward something inevitable.
The rain came sideways across the inner ward, driven by a wind that smelled of brine and burning oak. Aemond, her son, had suggested closing the lower shutters an hour past. She had refused. A woman who had traveled through such weather deserved to be received in light, even if the light itself was the color of old pewter.
Below, the household arranged itself along the covered arcade with the practiced choreography of people who had been warned and were pretending otherwise. Maids in Cassidar grey clustered near the kitchen door. The steward, old Merrick, positioned himself three paces from the gate as though the precise distance might protect him from whatever was coming. Two of the stable boys lingered at the far colonnade, close enough to watch, far enough to run.
Vire did not move from the window. She watched the iron gates swing inward on their rusted hinges, watched the four horses come through with their heads low and their manes plastered flat against their necks, watched the carriage follow, its lacquered black shell sheeted in rain until it looked less like a conveyance and more like a piece of the storm given wheels and harness. The coachman had the look of a man who had driven through something worse than weather and come out the other side diminished. His shoulders were drawn up near his ears. His hands, visible in brief flashes beneath the brim of his hat, were white at the knuckles.
The carriage halted. The horses stood. The rain hammered the roof.
And then, as if the clouds had only been gathering breath, the sky answered.
A low sound moved through the courtyard, felt more than heard, a vibration in the stones beneath Vire's slippers, in the bones of the old wall, in the silver pins that held her hair. The servants nearest the gate stepped back without seeming to know they were doing it. Merrick's hand rose to his chest. The stable boys vanished entirely into the colonnade, and Vire did not blame them, for the rain had begun to fall differently. It fell inward now, drawn toward the carriage in long silver threads, curling around the wheels and the horses' flanks as though it wished to press itself through the seams of the door and find the passenger within.
The whispering started at the far end of the arcade and traveled toward her like a slow tide.
The Vexed.
Vexed, they were calling her. The word had come up from the villages in the lowlands, carried on the tongues of merchants and ferrymen and the odd wandering brother who paused at Cassidar's gates for bread and news. Vexed. A word for a thing touched by something older than blessing. Vire turned it over in her mind and found it imprecise. She preferred the older term her grandmother had used for such children. Stormkin. But that word had fallen out of fashion three generations ago, along with the rituals that might have contained the thing it described.
She did not step back from the window.
The carriage door opened.
The girl who descended was not what Vire had expected. She had prepared herself for something harder, something more like the woodcut portraits in the regional council's files, those narrow faces with their hard eyes and their mouths pressed into lines of inherited grievance. This girl was young, younger perhaps than the reports suggested, and she moved with the careful economy of someone who had learned early that wasting motion was a luxury. Her cloak was travel-stained. Her boots were sound but mud-heavy. A leather satchel hung across her chest, and her hand rested on it the way a soldier's hand rests on a sword hilt, not from fear but from long habit.
Her hair was the color of wheat after rain, and it had come loose from its pins. She did not fix it.
She stood in the courtyard with the rain moving around her in that slow, curious spiral, and she looked up.
Not at the sky. At the gallery window. At Vire.
Their eyes met across the full breadth of the inner ward, across the flagstones and the arcade and the twenty-eight years between them, and Vire felt something she had not felt in a very long time. Not fear. She was too old for fear, and too well practiced in the management of her own pulse. It was recognition. The girl had looked for her, the way a traveler looks for a particular tower on a particular hill, and had found her on the first try, and had not looked away.
Then the girl's gaze dropped, deliberately, to the steps that led up to the main entrance, and she gathered her cloak around her and walked forward into the shelter of the arcade. The rain followed her to the threshold and stopped, as if unwilling to cross the line of stone.
A maid stepped forward with a towel. The girl took it, murmured something Vire could not hear, and began to dry her hands with the methodical attention of someone performing a small ritual.
Vire turned from the window.
Aemond was waiting for her in the corridor behind, leaning against the wall with one ankle crossed over the other and his hands tucked into the embroidered pockets of his coat. He was dressed for receiving, dark velvet with the Cassidar silver at his throat, and his dark hair had been pomaded back from his forehead in the style of the coastal courts. He had not been at the window. He did not need to be. He had heard the servants' murmurings and understood them well enough.
Mother, he said, his voice carrying the particular warmth he reserved for her, a warmth she had taught him to deploy like any other tool. She is here.
Vire smoothed the front of her gown. Grey silk, high-collared, fastened with hooks of worked silver from wrist to throat. She had chosen it an hour ago with the same precision she brought to treaty drafts and household accounts.
I have eyes, Aemond.
Of course. His smile did not quite reach his eyes. He straightened from the wall. Shall I go down?
You will remain here. Her voice came out clipped, the consonants bitten short. You will be useful in the hall after I have spoken with her. You understand what that means.
A pause. Then, with a slight inclination of his head, he said, I understand.
She studied him for a moment. He was her son in every particular that mattered: the set of his shoulders, the way he held his silence, the way his mind moved behind his face like a thing kept behind glass. But there were pieces of him that belonged to his father, and to his father's father, and she had never been entirely certain whether those pieces were a comfort or a warning.
Go to the green parlor, she said. See that it is warm. Have the second-best wine brought up, not the first. The first is for when we know what she is worth.
He raised an eyebrow at that but did not argue. He turned and walked down the corridor, his boots making no sound on the carpet, and Vire listened to the silence he left behind.
She stood alone for a moment with her hand on the doorframe of the gallery, and she thought of the girl in the courtyard and the rain that had bent around her like a dog that loved its master. She thought of the file in the study, the thin sheaf of papers with their careful notations and their careful silences. Elara Thornwood. Daughter of the disgraced cartographer of Greycoast. Raised in the household of Lord Halvern after her father's fall, educated at his expense, trained in his service, and now sent back to claim lands that had been held in trust by Cassidar for fourteen years. Lands that Vire had administered. Lands that Vire had improved. Lands that were, in every practical sense, already hers.
The girl had been a child when the files were opened. She would not remember the details. She would not remember the long nights when Vire had sat at the desk in the east wing and gone through the Thornwood accounts line by line, deciding what could be salvaged and what must be let go. She would not remember the letters Vire had written to the minor houses, the quiet bargains, the thousand small acts of preservation that had kept the name Thornwood from being swallowed entirely.
Or perhaps she would. Perhaps that was the shape of the storm she carried with her.
Vire drew a breath, held it for the space of three heartbeats, and let it go.
She descended the stairs with her hand on the banister and her back straight, and by the time she reached the entrance hall the girl had been shown to a chair near the fire and was sitting with her hands folded and her satchel still across her chest. The towel lay folded on the arm of the chair. Her boots had left two small pools of water on the slate, and a maid was already moving toward them with a cloth.
Vire stopped at the foot of the stairs. She let the moment breathe.
So, she said, and her voice carried the length of the hall without effort, you are the cartographer's daughter.
The girl rose. It was a proper rise, formal, unhurried, the rise of someone who had been taught to greet her betters properly even when her betters had kept her waiting in the rain. Her eyes were pale, the grey-green of sea glass, and they held steady on Vire's face.
Lady Vire Cassidar, the girl said. Her voice was warm where Vire's was cold, low where Vire's was clipped, and there was a trace of something northern in the way she rounded her vowels, the residue of the countryside estates where she had been raised. I am Elara Thornwood. I believe you have been expecting me.
Vire crossed the hall toward her. Her slippers made no sound on the slate. The fire popped and settled behind them, and somewhere in the kitchens a pot lid clattered against its rim.
Expecting you, she repeated, and let the words sit between them. We have been keeping your house for you, Lady Thornwood. Fourteen years is a long time to hold a thing in trust.
It is, the girl agreed, and her mouth moved at one corner, not quite a smile, not quite a challenge. I am grateful for the care you have taken.
The word grateful was placed very precisely. Vire heard the edge in it, and respected it.
You are cold, she said. Come to the fire. There is wine. And there are questions I would ask you, if you are willing to answer them.
The girl's gaze moved past her, briefly, toward the corridor that led to the green parlor, and Vire saw the calculation in it, the quick weighing of rooms and what they contained.
I am willing, Elara Thornwood said. And I have questions of my own.
The fire crackled. The rain had not stopped, but it had quieted, drawn back to the edges of the roof as though listening.
Vire inclined her head a fraction of an inch.
Then we shall begin.
Vire led the girl into the green parlor rather than the great hall. The fire was banked but breathing, and the room smelled of cedar and old lavender. She gestured Elara to a chair and poured two cups of wine from a carafe that had been standing on the sideboard since midday.
She had just asked the first question about the roads and the state of the northern houses when the knock came at the corridor door. Three soft taps, a pause, three more. Brother Maris's signature.
Vire set down her cup. I had forgotten he was expected tonight.
Elara Thornwood's eyes moved to the door, then back to Vire. You receive monks at this hour?
We receive whoever arrives, Vire said. It is not always a matter of choosing.
She crossed to the door and opened it. Brother Maris stood in the corridor with rain still gleaming on the shoulders of his rough brown robe. His sandals were mud-caked to the ankle. In his hands he held a leather case, polished and ancient, the color of dark honey.
Lady Vire, he said, and his voice was warm, unhurried, the kind of voice that seemed to move at its own pace through the world. Forgive the hour. I have ridden from Highspire since first light. Lord Cassidar expects me in his study, I am told.
He does, Vire said. And he is not a man who appreciates being kept waiting. Come.
She led him down the corridor. Elara followed at a distance, her cup still in hand, watching everything.
In Lord Cassidar's study the fire was built high. The old lord sat behind his desk with Aemond standing at his shoulder. Aemond was in evening clothes, dark blue velvet, his beard trimmed close, his expression arranged in that careful courtly mask that revealed nothing of what he thought.
Father, Vire said from the threshold, Brother Maris of Highspire. And Lady Thornwood, who has arrived this evening, as we discussed.
Lord Cassidar did not rise. His chair creaked beneath him as he shifted his weight. His eyes, pale and faded in the lamplight, moved first to the monk, then to the girl, then back to the monk.
You have it, he said. It was not a question.
I have it, Brother Maris agreed. He set the leather case on the desk with a care that suggested it weighed more than its size implied. The seal is intact. I broke none of the fastenings on the road, though I will not say the same for my patience when the third ford rose to my saddle.
Aemond's mouth moved at one corner. Father, he said, in that smooth, deliberate way of his, shall we have wine sent in? The lady has traveled far, and the brother has traveled farther.
Later, Lord Cassidar said. The word cut clean.
Brother Maris undid the brass clasps of the case. Inside, nested in linen that smelled of monastery stores, cedar and dust and time, lay a single sheet of vellum. It was heavy, weighted at the corners with small squares of lead that had gone gray with age. The ink had faded to the color of dried blood, but the hand was still legible, the letters formed with the painstaking precision of a scribe who understood that what he wrote could outlast the stone of the building he wrote it in.
This, Brother Maris said, and laid his palm flat upon the vellum, is the binding contract drawn in the year of the Salted Crown, in the third age of the Compact, between the houses of Thornwood and the Stiller named therein. It is witnessed by the abbots of Highspire and by the regional council as it then stood.
He looked up. His eyes were kind, but there was something steady in them too, something that did not bend.
The terms are these. I will read them as they are written, that there be no argument later of what was said.
The room went very still. Even the fire seemed to draw its breath in.
Brother Maris bent over the vellum and began.
Let it be known between the parties, he read, his voice soft but carrying, that the Vexed-born of the line of Thornwood, being possessed of a weather within her that shall not be stilled by prayer or poultice or the interventions of common art, is bound by this contract to a Stiller of the coastal order, to be named by the monks of Highspire in council, that the Stiller may walk with her, abide with her, and by the ancient offices quiet the storm that moves in her blood and bone, until such hour as the storm is stilled, and the Vexed-born is made whole, or the line of Thornwood fails, which shall first occur.
He paused. The rain had begun again outside, a slow persistent drumming on the eaves.
The Stiller shall not harm the Vexed-born, nor suffer harm to come to her by his silence or his absence. The Vexed-born shall not dismiss the Stiller before the term is served, nor shall the Stiller depart before the storm is ended, except by mutual release, witnessed and recorded.
Lord Cassidar's hand, resting on the desk, had curled into a loose fist. Aemond's face had not changed, but Vire saw the muscle jump along his jaw.
The term of the binding shall be one and twenty years from the date of sealing, or until the storm is proven stilled by the testimony of three witnesses of standing. Should the Stiller perish in the term, the binding passes to the Stiller's order, and a successor shall be named within the span of six moons.
Brother Maris straightened. His reading had taken perhaps two minutes, but the silence that followed it seemed to stretch longer.
There is more, he said. There is the matter of inheritance, and of the lands of Thornwood, which were placed under ward by this contract, and of the Stiller's maintenance, which is to be drawn from the Thornwood coffers so long as the binding holds. But these are matters of substance and sum, and may be read when there is need to count coins.
Lord Cassidar spoke first. His voice was rough, graveled with age and use. The girl is Vexed, then. We have heard the rumors. We did not credit them.
Brother Maris looked at Elara Thornwood. She had not moved from the doorway. Her cup was still in her hand. The wine in it had not been touched.
The rumors, he said gently, are seldom wrong. I have seen her sigil in the records of the weather-born, and I have spoken with the abbot of Highspire on the matter. She carries the storm. Whether it will break, or whether it will sleep, we cannot yet know.
Aemond stepped forward. And if we refuse the contract? If we declare it void by the lapse of time?
Then, Brother Maris said, and his voice did not change, but his eyes did, sharpening for a moment as a blade sharpens against a stone, the lands of Thornwood revert to the regional council, which will dispose of them as it sees fit. The girl will be remanded to the coastal order for assessment. And the Vexed within her, unbound, will do what Vexed storms have done since the first of them. It will seek higher ground. It will drown what is low. It will not care who has signed what.
The room was very quiet.
Elara Thornwood set her cup down on the sideboard. The click of porcelain against wood was sharp in the silence.
I did not come, she said, and her voice was steady, warmer than Vire had expected after the reading, threaded with that quiet northern steadiness, to ask for your protection. I came to claim what is mine by the terms my ancestors agreed to. If you wish to refuse, refuse. I will not beg. I will go with the brother to Highspire, and I will abide whatever comes.
Lord Cassidar stared at her. Aemond was smiling, that thin measuring smile of his, the one that meant he was already five moves ahead in a game no one else could see.
Vire, Lord Cassidar said, without looking at her. What is your counsel?
She felt the weight of the question settle upon her. She had counseled him through wars and weddings, through the death of his first wife and the scandals that followed, through the slow withdrawal of the coastal trade and the rise of the new powers in the east. She knew how he thought. She knew how he listened.
She looked at the girl. She looked at the vellum. She looked at her son.
I counsel, she said, that we read the remainder of the contract, and that we hear what the brother has not yet said about the Stiller himself. For the contract names a Stiller, and a Stiller must be found, and I think that is the question the girl came here to ask, though she is too proud to ask it plainly.
Elara's gaze met hers. There was no gratitude in it. There was acknowledgment, which was worth more.
Lord Cassidar grunted. Then read it, Brother, he said. All of it.
Brother Maris inclined his head and turned back the linen. Beneath the first sheet lay a second, finer, the ink upon it darker and more recent. Names of the Stiller-order were entered in a column, and at the bottom, in a fresher hand, a single name had been added, in the ink of the present year.
The Stiller, he said, is to be named Soren Vane, of the coastal novitiate, son of a Stiller who served the previous generation, trained at Highspire, bound by his own oath to the office.
He paused.
The young man himself, Brother Maris added, and there was something almost apologetic in the way he lifted his gaze to the doorway, is, by my arrangement, to be presented tonight, that the contract may be witnessed in full council and the binding may be sealed before the girl departs these walls again.
Vire heard the door behind her open a second time. Footsteps in the corridor, quiet but deliberate. A young man came to the threshold, rain-dark and grave, with the bearing of someone who had been riding hard since dawn.
Vire did not turn at once. She had heard doors all evening, and she had learned which ones mattered.
This one mattered.
The young man in the threshold was tall in the way of boys who had grown faster than their frames could manage, long in the limb and thin at the shoulder. His cloak was rain-heavy, the wool sagging against his back, and where it had parted she could see the plain grey of a novice's robe beneath, girded with a knotted cord rather than any belt of office. He had the look of one who had not slept in two nights. There was mud on his boots and a bruise, fading toward green, along the line of his jaw.
But his eyes were steady. That, she noted, was either training or obstinacy, and with the Stillers it was never entirely one without the other.
Soren Vane. She tested the name in her mind as one might test a key before putting it to a lock.
Lord Cassidar had half risen from his seat upon seeing the brother at the linen. Now he lowered himself again, and the sound he made was not quite a sigh.
"So," he said. "The Stiller himself."
"He is young," Vire said.
"He is bound," Brother Maris replied, and his voice carried the mildness of one who had said this kind of thing before and would say it again. "The oath does not wait for the beard."
The young man stepped forward then, into the light of the braziers, and the hall seemed to contract around him. He did not look at Elara first. He looked at the contract, still spread upon the table between Brother Maris's careful hands, and Vire saw him read it from the threshold as though the words had been written large enough for that distance.
Then he looked up, and his gaze found Elara, and stayed.
Elara had not moved from where she stood between the pillars. Rain still ran from the hem of her cloak and pooled at her feet in a slow darkening of the stone. Her hands hung at her sides, and one of them was trembling, though whether from cold or something else Vire could not at once determine. The girl's mouth was a thin line.
She had not knelt when Lord Cassidar entered the hall, and she had not knelt when he took his seat, and she had not knelt when Brother Maris read the first lines of the contract aloud in his careful monastic cadence. Vire had watched for it. She had half expected it, and she had not been wrong.
Now, with the Stiller standing in the same room, the girl still did not kneel.
"Elara of Thornwood," Lord Cassidar said from his chair, and his voice was not unkind but it was not soft either. "You are within my hall, and the contract is open, and the Stiller is named. Will you do honor to this house, or will you stand there until the stones forget your name?"
Vire watched her daughter-in-law in the shape of the girl's silence. It was, she recognized, the kind of silence that was not emptiness but a held thing, a thing deliberately not let go. She had seen it in her own mirror, in the years after her first husband died and before the second came to her with his seal and his calculations.
"I will not kneel," Elara said.
Her voice was quiet, and the northern edge of it was in the vowels, in the way she let the will sit almost flat upon her tongue. She did not look at Lord Cassidar as she said it. She looked, instead, at the contract.
"I will not kneel," she said again, "because I did not come here to ask. I came to be heard."
Aemond moved at the edge of Vire's vision. He had been standing near the cold hearth, one shoulder against the stone, and she had almost forgotten he was there, the way one forgets a piece of furniture that has always stood in a particular corner. Now he turned, and the firelight caught him only briefly, but it was enough to show her the way he was looking at the girl.
It was not the look he had given her when she first entered, which had been the look one gives a curiosity or an interruption. It was not the look he had given her when she had refused to kneel the first time, which had been the amused, faintly incredulous look of a young man who had never been refused anything. It was something else. It was the look he gave problems he had not yet solved, and it sat upon his features with a stillness she recognized from his childhood, from the long afternoons he had spent over chess with his tutors, from the hour before he took his first kill at the hunt.
He was studying her. Coldly, carefully, and with the first reluctant flicker of something she had not yet seen in him directed at anyone outside their own house.
Curiosity.
Vire felt her own breath catch, very slightly, and she was not certain whether it was satisfaction or warning.
"You came to be heard," Lord Cassidar
"You came to be heard," Lord Cassidar said, and his voice had not risen, but it had grown quieter, which Vire recognized as a far more dangerous thing. Her husband had never needed volume. He had only ever needed patience and the willingness to wait, and he had both in inexhaustible supply.
She watched the firelight shift across his face. The deep lines carved at the corners of his mouth, the iron-grey of his beard, the way his hands rested on the table without gripping it. He was seventy, and he looked every one of those years, and yet she had seen men half his age fold under the weight of that quiet.
Elara Thornwood did not fold.
She stood with her chin lifted, her hands clasped before her, and the only sign that she had heard him was a slight tightening at the corner of her mouth, as though she had bitten down on something and was holding it there deliberately.
"Very well," Lord Cassidar said, and he inclined his head, the barest fraction, in a motion that was not quite a nod and not quite a bow. It was the gesture he gave to visiting lords whose rank he acknowledged without quite accepting. "You shall be heard."
Vire let her breath out through her nose, very slowly, and she did not look at Aemond, because she did not need to. She could feel him at the edge of the hearth, still as a held breath, still studying the girl with that cold, careful attention. She had seen him study contracts before signing them. She had seen him study potential allies across a crowded hall. She had never seen him study a girl from a fallen house in a borrowed dress as though she were a lock he intended to pick.
She found that she did not mind it. She found, in fact, that a part of her was pleased.
"State your claim," Lord Cassidar said, and he gestured to the chair opposite his own, the one she had refused. "In full. Leave nothing out, for I will have no opportunity to ask twice."
It was not generosity. Vire recognized the gambit. He was giving the girl rope, and he was doing it in front of Aemond, who would learn from watching, and in front of the household guards at the door, who would carry whatever they heard to the kitchens, to the stables, to the village below. Lord Cassidar had always believed that the telling of a story, in the right setting, could do more damage than a sword. He was inviting Elara to damn herself with her own tongue.
Elara did not take the chair. She remained standing, which Vire marked as either foolishness or principle, and began to speak.
"My father was Edric Thornwood. He held Thornwood Keep, and the lands adjacent, by grant from the old king's regent. He served faithfully for twenty years, and he raised his children to serve after him. When the regent fell and the new line came to the throne, my father was one of seven lords stripped of his holding for what the crown called treasonous correspondence."
She paused. The fire crackled. Vire smelled the resin of the pine logs, and beneath it the stale tallow of the candles that had not been trimmed that morning, because the steward was ill and no one had thought to do it.
"My father did not write treasonous correspondence," Elara said. "He wrote letters to his sister in the north. They were seized by a man named Soren Vane, who was then in the service of the new crown, and who altered them before presenting them as evidence. I have the originals."
Now Vire did look at Aemond. He had not moved, but his eyes had changed. She knew that change. It was the change that came over him when a piece on the board shifted into an unexpected square.
"Originals," Lord Cassidar repeated. His voice was very dry. "And where, child, do you keep such dangerous documents?"
"In a chest at the bottom of my trunk," Elara said, "wrapped in oilcloth, sealed with my father's signet. I have carried them for six years. I am willing to present them to this house, under whatever terms you will set, in exchange for the restoration of my family's holding and a public acknowledgement that the charge against my father was false."
Vire felt the stillness in the room shift. Lord Cassidar had been expecting a supplication. He had been expecting, perhaps, a clever appeal to sentiment, a young woman's plea, the sort of thing one dismissed with a pat on the head and a purse of coins. He had not been expecting a transaction. He had not been expecting documents.
"Soren Vane," Lord Cassidar said, and the name fell into the room like a stone into a well. "That name I know."
"Many do," Elara said. "He serves Lord Halvern of Greycoast now, as a trade envoy. He will be at the autumn council in this very hall, if the invitations I have seen are accurate."
Vire watched her husband's hands on the table. They had not moved, but the knuckles had whitened, just slightly, and she knew that meant he was thinking. He was thinking about Lord Halvern of Greycoast, who had been his rival for thirty years, who had outmaneuvered him twice on the council, who had never missed an opportunity to twist a knife. He was thinking about a man named Soren Vane, who served that rival, and who might be bought, or broken, or exposed.
He was thinking, Vire realized, that this girl had walked into his hall with a knife she did not even know she was holding, and had offered it to him handle-first.
"That is a grave accusation," Lord Cassidar said, and his voice had gone very soft again. "To name a man a forger in his new master's hearing would be to invite war."
"It would," Elara agreed. "I am not inviting war. I am inviting alliance."
Vire watched Aemond move, then. He straightened from the hearth, and crossed the room in three measured strides, and stopped beside his father's chair, and he did not look at Elara at all. He looked at his father.
"Father," he said, and his voice was smooth and low and perfectly controlled. "I think we should hear the rest."
It was not a request. Vire heard the thread of steel inside it, and she understood, with a small cold shock, that Aemond was not asking his father to hear her. He was telling his father that they were going to hear her, and that the decision had been made, and that Lord Cassidar could either claim it or be carried along by it.
She looked at Elara Thornwood, and Elara looked back, and for one breath, across the width of the great hall, between the firelight and the cold stone, the two women regarded each other. Vire saw, in the girl's eyes, the same quick flicker she had seen in Aemond's. Not curiosity. Recognition.
Then Elara inclined her head, just slightly, in the gesture that was not quite a bow, and Vire inclined hers in return.
"Sit," Lord Cassidar said, and the word came out rough, as though it had been dragged from him. "All of you. Sit. We have much to discuss, and little enough time before the autumn council."
He lifted his cup, and Vire crossed the room to refill it, and the wine was bitter on her tongue, and the fire crackled, and somewhere in the hall a clock struck the hour, and the girl from Thornwood sat down at last in the chair she had refused, and Aemond Cassidar took the seat beside her, and the game, Vire understood, had only just begun.