A Vexing Breeze: The Scholars Study

emond turned the key twice in the lock, then a third time, though the third was habit more than necessity. The bolt slid home with the soft finality of a coffin closing, and he rested his forehead against the oak grain for a single breath.

Beyond the door, the corridor of Cassidar Keep murmured with evening traffic. Servants carrying trays. The distant clatter of the kitchen. His mother's laugh, high and rehearsed, drifting up from the long gallery where she received her ladies. Aemond shut it all out the way he had learned to shut out the rest of the world, by degrees, by deliberate cruelty toward his own attention.

He crossed to the window and pulled the shutters closed. The brass latch clicked. Three candles on the desk, unlit. He lit the first with a long match, then the second, then the third, and watched the room bloom into shadow-edged warmth.

The Scholar's Study was his inheritance and his secret. Not the family's library, that grand mausoleum of gilt spines where his father had once entertained envoys. This was the smaller room behind the western stair, lined in storm-grey leather and older still. His grandfather had commissioned the bindings, then had them commissioned again when the first set mildewed in some coastal damp. Aemond had grown up thinking the books ugly. Now he could not stop touching them.

He pulled the first volume from its shelf and the smell hit him: salt, and something older than salt, the ghost of a fishwife's hands, the memory of vellum scraped clean. The spine read AELWYNS COMPENDIUM OF UNNATURAL GIFTS. He set it on the desk and did not open it. Not yet. He needed to think.

He needed to think because Lady Vire Cassidar had looked at him across the supper table with eyes like green glass held to fire, and he had not recognized her. Not the face, which was the same face he had known since childhood, the same narrow mouth, the same stubborn set of the jaw. Something behind the face. Something that had not been there three months ago.

"Vexed," the physician had murmured, when Aemond cornered him in the herbarium. "Your sister is Vexed, my lord. There is no kinder word for it."

The word sat in Aemond's chest like a swallowed coal. Vexed: the term for those born with the storm-gift, the wind-touched, the ones the old chroniclers called the Daughters of the Vane. Most burned out before their twentieth year. Most went mad first. The few who survived were hollowed into something the churches would not bless and the courts would not name.

But his sister had survived. His sister was not mad. His sister had stood in the great hall that morning with her hands steady at her sides, ordering the household as if nothing had changed, while Aemond watched from the minstrel's gallery and felt the floor tilt beneath him.

He pulled a second volume down. THE BOOK OF WINDS, COMPILED BY THE SISTERS OF HOLLOW FEN. A third. A TREATISE ON THE BOUNDARIES OF BREATH. He piled them on the desk until the candles guttered in the displaced air, and then he stopped, one hand still raised toward the fourth shelf, because he had noticed what he was doing.

He was looking for a cure.

He had been looking for a cure for three days now, ever since the physician's diagnosis, ever since he had stood in the herbarium with his fists shoved into his pockets and his voice very steady and his mind a screaming thing behind his teeth. A cure. As if his sister were a horse with a thrown shoe. As if the storm-gift were a fever that could be sweated out.

Aemond lowered his hand. He sat down in the chair behind the desk, and he looked at the three books as if they had spoken to him.

He had not been searching for a cure all along. He had been searching for precedent. For record. For some other Vexed woman in the long annals of the Stormlands who had received the gift and not been destroyed by it, who had learned to ride the wind rather than be carried off by it, who had lived to be something other than a cautionary tale mothers whispered to frighten their daughters into obedience.

He opened Aelwyn's Compendium first, because it was the oldest, and because Aelwyn had been a Vexed herself.

The pages were dense with marginalia. Aelwyn's own hand, or some later scholar's. He turned past the front matter, past the dedication to the Dowager Queen of the Reaches, past the woodcut of a woman with her arms raised to a great spiral of cloud. He found the index and ran his finger down the entries.

Mastery. Mastery of the Gift. Known Instances of Mastery. He stopped at the third heading and turned to the marked page.

There were eleven names.

Aemond read them slowly, his lips barely moving, committing each to memory with the same discipline his tutors had beaten into him when he was six and learning the order of precedence. Aelwyn herself, of course. Sister Caedmon of the Fen. The Lady of Wyrmskeep, whose given name had been scratched out by some later, more pious hand. A sailor named Osa, who had commanded a trading vessel out of Saltmark for forty years and never lost a man to weather, until a privateer from the Pale Isles burned her ship and her with it.

Eleven women. Eleven lives. He turned the page and found Aelwyn's careful summary of each case, and the word he had been dreading sat at the bottom of every entry in a slightly different form. Burned out. Went mad. Drowned in her own cellar during a storm no one else could feel. Slept one night and did not wake. Married a foreign lord and was never heard from again. Married a foreign lord and returned three years later, a different woman, and would not speak of what had been done.

Eleven women, and not one of them had learned to live with the gift.

Aemond closed the book. He set his palm flat on the cover and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way his sword-master had taught him to breathe before a duel, and he did this for a long time before he trusted himself to speak.

"Soren," he said, to the empty room.

Soren Vane was not there. Soren Vane was across the keep, in the room that had been their father's study before their father's disgrace, surrounded by maps and instruments and the slow patient work of waiting for Vire to break. Soren did not know that Aemond had locked himself in this room. Soren did not know what Aemond was looking for.

Aemond lifted his hand from the cover and opened the book again, this time to the first page of the first chapter. He read.

He read for an hour without moving. The candles burned down. The third guttered and he lit it from the second without looking up. Aelwyn wrote in the plain unadorned hand of a clerk, but her thinking was anything but plain. She catalogued the gifts with a surgeon's precision: the hearing of distant storms, the raising of wind by will alone, the speaking-into of sleeping minds, the slow unmaking of things by breath. She noted the age of onset in each case (between fourteen and nineteen, never earlier, never later), the season of the year in which the gift first manifested (always late autumn, always at the turn of the wheel), the presence or absence of a bloodline already touched by the storm (present in seven of the eleven cases, absent in four, the absence apparently meaning nothing).

She noted, too, the stages of what she called the unmaking. First the sensitivity: a sudden awareness of pressure in the air, of weather yet to come, of the mood of the wind itself. Then the reach: the ability to push back against that awareness, to bend a gust, to still a room. Then the hunger: the gift demanding more, always more, the body unable to refuse, the mind beginning to mistake its own wanting for the wanting of the world. And last, the choosing. Every Vexed, Aelwyn wrote, must choose what to do with the gift. Some chose to spend it freely, and spent themselves. Some chose to hoard it, and were hoarded. Some chose to give it away, and were emptied.

Eleven women. Eleven choices. Eleven endings.

Eleven women. Eleven choices. Eleven endings.

Lady Vire Cassidar closed the journal and sat for a long moment in the quiet of the scholar's study. The candle flames leaned toward her as if listening. Somewhere in the castle below, a door closed. She did not hear it. She was thinking of the eleventh woman, the one Aelwyn had described only in fragments: a healer from the eastern marches who had loved, the chronicler wrote, with a constancy that outran her gift. The healer had spent her storm-power on the man she loved until she had nothing left. She had lived another twelve years in a body that could no longer feel the weather. She had died in her sleep, smiling at a ceiling.

Aelwyn had not approved.

Aelwyn had not disapproved, either. She had simply written, in her clerk's hand, She chose this, and was not chosen by.

Vire opened the journal again, searching for the healer's name. There was none. Only the designation, the eleventh , and the season of her passing, late spring, the year of the long frost . Vire found she wanted to know the healer's name. She wanted to call her something other than a number. She wanted, absurdly, to write it down somewhere Aelwyn might find it, if scholars of the dead ever did find such things.

She did not write anything. She set the journal back into its slipcase and tied the cord with fingers that were steadier than they had been when she began reading.

The third candle was nearly to the pool of wax. She pinched the wick with her thumbnail and let the smoke rise. Then she rose, blew out the remaining two, and stood in the sudden dark until her eyes adjusted.

The study smelled of old vellum and lamp oil and the faintest trace of pine smoke from the hall below. Vire let herself out through the narrow door and into the corridor beyond. The torches here had been allowed to gutter, and the shadows lay in long bars across the flagstones like the shadows of prison gratings. She walked softly. The soles of her slippers were kid leather and made no sound.

She had not gone twenty paces before she saw the light.

It came from beneath the library door, thin as a knife blade, and it moved. Someone was inside. Someone with a candle or a lamp, moving among the stacks. Vire stopped. She considered retreating. She considered, with the part of her that still thought like a girl raised in service, that the prudent thing was to return to her chamber and let whoever it was have their private hour in the library. The rest of her, the part that had crossed a kingdom with a stolen journal and a borrowed name, walked forward.

She eased the door open. The hinge was oiled. It made no sound.

Elara Thornwood stood at the far end of the library with a single candle cupped in her palm, its flame bending toward her breath. She was half-turned, her back to the door, and she was reading something she had pulled from a shelf she must have reached by standing on tiptoe. Her hair was loose. She wore the same grey dress she had worn at supper, but she had unpinned the collar and the lace hung open at her throat, as if she had come here intending to be alone and had not expected to be caught.

She heard the door. She turned. The flame in her palm guttered once, recovered, and threw her shadow long across the floor behind her.

"Lady Vire," Elara said. Her voice was even. She did not startle. She did not apologize. She stood very still, the way a person stands who has already decided what she will say next.

"Elara," Vire said. "I did not know anyone else used the library at this hour."

"No," Elara said. "I imagine you did not."

Vire stepped inside and let the door close. The library settled around them, full of the smell of paper and binding glue and the dust that gathers on things no one has touched in a generation. The shelves rose two stories high, and a gallery ran around three sides, reached by a sliding ladder that was presently parked against the far wall. The ceiling was vaulted and painted with stars that had long since faded to a kind of bruised blue. In the candlelight, the constellations looked like wounds.

"I could not sleep," Vire said. It was true enough.

"Nor I," Elara said. She did not offer an explanation. She looked down at the volume in her other hand, the one not holding the candle, and then she looked up again. There was a question in her face, but she did not ask it.

"You are wondering," Vire said, "whether I am going to ask what you are reading."

Elara considered. The flame bent and recovered. "Yes," she said. "I am wondering that."

"And if I did ask," Vire said, "whether you would tell me."

"Yes," Elara said again. "I would."

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who had both been raised, in their different ways, to weigh words before spending them.

"Then I will not ask," Vire said. "Not yet."

Elara inclined her head. The candlelight caught the line of her jaw. She had the kind of face that looked younger in stillness and older in motion; right now, standing still, she looked exactly her age, which was younger than Vire had expected and older than the world had given her credit for.

"What are you reading?" Elara said.

Vire hesitated. The answer was Aelwyn's journal. The answer was eleven women and eleven endings. The answer was a kind of weather report for the soul.

"A chronicle," Vire said. "Written by a woman named Aelwyn. She lived here, in this castle, a hundred and forty years before the foundation of the Order. She kept a record of Vexed women she had known or heard of. I found it in the scholar's study."

Elara was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I have been told I am not permitted in the scholar's study. Lord Halvern was kind enough to make that clear at supper. He said the study was for the family. He did not say what the family meant by family. I assumed it did not include me."

"It did not include me, either," Vire said. "Until this evening."

"And yet here we both are," Elara said. "In rooms we have been told are not ours."

"Yes," Vire said.

They stood for a moment with that between them. Then Elara lifted the volume she had been holding. It was smaller than Aelwyn's journal, bound in a pale leather that had gone almost the color of old bone, and the clasp that held it shut was tarnished to a deep green.

"This is Yssara," Elara said. "I do not know her other name. I found her in the back of the third gallery, on a shelf marked only with a number. I think she was hidden. I think whoever put her there did not want her found, and did not want her lost."

"Yssara," Vire said. The name had a weight to it, the way names do when they have not been spoken in a long time. "Was she Vexed?"

Elara opened the clasp. The leather cracked softly along the spine. "I think she was something else," she said. "I think she was Vexed, yes. But she was also something the chronicles I have read do not have a word for. She was Vexed and she was in love, and she wrote about the second thing as if it were the first."

Vire stepped closer. The candle threw both their shadows into the same long shape on the floor. Elara opened the journal to a page near the middle and held it so the light fell across the writing. The hand was not Aelwyn's clerk's hand. It was looser, more slanted, the letters running together as if they had been written quickly and revised never.

Vire read. The words were old but legible. They had been written, she guessed, some two centuries before Aelwyn's chronicle, perhaps more. They spoke of Stillness.

The world is full of stillnesses , Yssara had written. There is the stillness of the lake before the wind. There is the stillness of the held breath. There is the stillness of the man who has decided not to speak. These are not stillnesses of the spirit. They are stillnesses of the body, or the mind, or the will. They pass.

I have been taught that the highest stillness is the absence of want. That the storm within us is to be stilled by removing from it every object of desire. That we are to become, in the end, as the lake in the depths of winter, when the ice has thickened and nothing moves beneath it.

I do not believe this.

I believe the highest stillness is love. Not the love that demands. Not the love that bargains. The love that stands in the same room as the storm and is not moved by it. The love that says, I see you. I will not look away. I will not demand that you be less than what you are.

This is the only stillness I have found that does not pass.

Vire read it twice. Then she read it a third time. The library was very quiet. Somewhere far below, a shutter banged against a wall in a wind that had come up while they were not listening.

"The only true Stillness," Elara said. She did not phrase it as a question.

"Yes," Vire said.

Elara turned the page. The next entry was dated three weeks later, in the same slanted hand. It read:

He came to me today and said he did not fear me. He said he had never feared me. He said the storm in me was the thing he had first loved, and would last love, and would love past the ending of either of us. I told him this was a dangerous thing to say to a woman who could unmake his house by breathing. He said, then I will not let you breathe.

He meant it kindly.

He meant it the way a man means when he offers to stand in the doorway of a house on fire.

He does not know that I have, twice now, almost taken him at his word.

The candle guttered. Elara shielded the flame with her cupped palm and looked up. Her eyes were very bright in the unsteady light.

"I think she is dangerous," Elara said. "I think whoever hid her knew she was dangerous."

"Yes," Vire said. The word came out softer than she had meant it to.

"Because if it is true," Elara said, "if love is the stillness that does not pass, then everything the Order has taught is wrong. And everything the houses have feared is not the storm, but the answer to it. And the Vexed are not to be feared or sealed. They are to be loved, if they are to be survived. By someone. By anyone willing to stand in the doorway."

The candle steadied. Their shadows on the floor stopped moving.

"Yes," Vire said again.

Elara held Yssara's journal out to her. The gesture was not a surrender. It was an offering.

"Take her to your room," Elara said. "Read her. Learn her. I will tell Lord Halvern I lost her. I will tell him I did not know what I was looking at. He will believe me. He already thinks me a fool."

"I do not think you a fool," Vire said.

Elara's mouth curved, just barely. It was the first smile Vire had seen from her, and it made her look, for an instant, like a girl who had not yet been broken by anything.

"No," Elara said. "You do not."

The shutter banged again below. The candle flame leaned hard toward the door, then back.

"Go," Elara said. "Before the wind takes the rest of the candles."

Vire took the journal from Elara's hand. The leather was cool against her fingers, and heavier than she had expected, as if the weight of it were measured in something other than parchment and ink. She slid it beneath her cloak, where it pressed against her ribs like a second heart.

Elara said nothing more. She only bent and pinched out the candle between her thumb and forefinger, a quick practiced motion, and the study went dark.

Vire moved by memory down the corridor. Her feet knew the stones of Greycoast well enough by now. The left turn where the flagstones dipped. The place where the draft came up through the floor and stirred the hem of her gown. The narrow staircase at the end of the east wing, the one the servants used because the broad staircase in the hall was for Lord Halvern and his guests and his particular kind of looking.

She did not go to her room. She could not have said why. Perhaps because the room was too large and too cold and too full of the sounds of a house that did not love her. Perhaps because the journal felt like something she ought not to read alone, even if she had to read it alone. Perhaps because the scholar's study on the second floor, her brother Aemond's study, had the one window in Greycoast that faced the inland hills and not the harbor, and she wanted to look at something that was not the sea for once.

She climbed the narrow stairs. She passed the door to her brother's chamber, dark and silent at this hour. She passed the small landing where the tapestries hung so heavy with dust that she could smell them, sour and old, like a wardrobe left shut through a long winter. She came to the study door, which was never locked because no one in Greycoast besides Aemond had any business being there, and she went in.

The study smelled of beeswax and lamp oil and the particular papery dryness of books that had been left too long in one place. Aemond kept it tidy in the way that scholars are tidy, which is to say that every surface was covered but every object had its appointed position. Vire set the candle from her room down upon the reading table and struck a spark from the flint she kept in her pocket.

The flame caught. The wick smoked for a moment, then steadied. Vire drew the journal from beneath her cloak and laid it upon the table, and she sat down in Aemond's chair, which was the only chair in the room, and she opened it.

The handwriting was small and slanted. It was the handwriting of someone who had learned her letters from a careful teacher and then had kept writing past the point where most hands give out. Vire turned the pages slowly. The ink was brown in places, black in others, as if the pen had been dipped in different wells at different times. There were drawings at the margins. A face. A door. A bird with too many wings.

She read until she forgot she was reading. The candle burned down a quarter inch, then half, then three quarters. Outside, the wind that had been battering the shutters all evening finally tired of them and went away. The house settled into the particular hush of a place where most people are pretending to sleep.

The door opened.

Vire did not startle. She had heard him on the stairs, or she had heard someone on the stairs, and she had known, without quite deciding to know, that it was Aemond. He came into the room the way he came into every room, as if he had been expected for an hour and the room had only just now noticed.

He was in his shirtsleeves. His hair was loose at his temples. He looked, for once, like a young man rather than a young lord, which is to say he looked tired and a little cross and a little uncertain what to do with his own face.

He saw her in his chair. He saw the journal. He stopped in the doorway.

"Well," he said. "I had a speech prepared about midnight and candles and the impropriety of it, and now I find I have wasted it."

"Sit on the floor," Vire said. "There is nowhere else."

"There is the windowsill."

"The windowsill is cold and you will complain of it until morning."

He considered this. He came into the room and closed the door behind him and lowered himself, with more grace than the action deserved, to the floor across the table from her. He drew one knee up and rested his arm upon it and looked at her across the candlelight with the kind of look that was halfway between affection and appraisal.

"What are you reading," he said.

It was not a question. It was an invitation to make it one if she wished.

"A journal," Vire said. "I found it tonight."

"Found."

"Elara found it. She gave it to me."

Aemond's mouth did something complicated. "Of course she did," he said. "And Lord Halvern?"

"Does not know. Yet."

"Vire."

"Aemond."

He tilted his head. The candlelight caught the line of his jaw. "You cannot keep secrets in this house. You know that. He has ears in the walls and eyes in the curtains. By morning he will know you have it, and then he will ask you for it, and then we will have to decide what we are willing to pay to keep it."

"I know," Vire said. "I am deciding."

He watched her for a moment. Then he said, "Read me something."

"What?"

"Something from the journal. Anything."

She turned back a page. Her finger found a passage halfway down.

"'The Vexed are not broken,'" she read. "'They are bound. There is a difference, as there is a difference between a bone that has been set wrong and a bone that has been set in the place where it chose to lie. To cure a thing is to return it to what it was. To bind a thing is to teach it to be what it is. The first is mercy. The second is love. The first requires that the thing forgive you. The second requires that you forgive the thing.'"

She stopped. The candle flame leaned toward her as if listening.

Aemond was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "Cure or bind. That is the question the whole coast has been afraid to ask."

"Cure is what Halvern wants," Vire said. "Cure is what the Order preaches. Cure is what every house from here to the capital has been demanding since the first Vexed crawled out of the marshes a hundred years ago."

"Yes," Aemond said. "And bind is what they have been doing, only they have not been honest about it. They bind the Vexed in stone and prayer and iron, and they call it cure because cure is a kinder word, and kinder words make for kinder taxes and kinder songs and kinder sons willing to carry the iron."

His voice had taken on the cadence he used when he was about to make a point he had been saving for some occasion. It was a cadence Vire had grown up with. It meant she ought to pay attention.

"But the question is not what Halvern wants," he went on. "The question is what is true. And the truth, little sister, is that the Vexed cannot be cured. I have read the histories. I have read the letters the scholars will not show to the priests. There is not one recorded instance of a true cure. Not one. There are bindings that hold. There are bindings that fail. There are bindings that turn into something worse than the thing they bound. But there is no cure."

Vire looked at him across the table. The candlelight made his eyes look darker than they were.

"Then why do they keep saying it?" she asked.

"Because hope is a kind of binding too," Aemond said. "If the people believe the Vexed can be cured, they will endure the binding. They will pay the tithe. They will send their sons to the marsh forts. They will not ask why the binding must be renewed every thirty years, or why the Vexed keep coming back stronger. They will not ask. They will hope. And hope, like iron, holds a thing in place."

"You sound like you admire it," Vire said. "The lie."

Aemond laughed, or made the sound he kept in the place where laughter would have been if he had been raised somewhere gentler. "I sound like I understand it. There is a difference."

"Is there?"

"Sometimes. Not often."

The candle guttered. Vire rose and trimmed the wick with her fingernails, and the flame steadied, and the shadows on the walls settled into their places again. When she sat back down, Aemond had not moved. He was watching her with the look he wore when he was about to say something he had been keeping for her alone.

"Vire," he said, and his voice was quieter now. "If what is in that journal is true, then the Order is founded on a falsehood, and every lord who has ever taken the tithe is a party to it, and our good uncle Halvern is the latest in a long line of men who have built their houses upon the bones of people they could have helped."

"Yes," Vire said.

"And if we keep it," Aemond said, "we become parties to it too. We become the family that knew, and said nothing, and let the lie go on."

"Yes," Vire said.

"And if we speak," he said, "we become the family that broke the lie, and the lie is all that holds the coast together, and the coast will break with it."

"Yes," Vire said. "And if we do nothing, we become our father."

Aemond flinched. It was a small flinch, hardly more than a tightening of the muscles around his eyes, but Vire saw it, and he saw that she saw it, and the room went very quiet.

"No," he said, after a moment. "We will not become our father."

"Then what will we become?"

He looked at her. The candle had burned low. The light was small and warm and very near, and in it he did not look like the heir to anything at all. He looked like her brother. He looked like the boy who had taught her to read by the fire when they were small, who had made up stories about the ships in the harbor because he thought the real stories were too sad.

"I do not know," he said. "But I think we ought to read the rest of it together."

Vire nodded. She turned the page. He shifted on the floor to lean his back against the chair leg, so that his shoulder was near her knee, and she read, and he listened, and the candle burned down to its last inch, and neither of them noticed that the wind had come back again, and was rattling the shutters, and was trying to get in.

Neither of them noticed that their voices had gone soft.

Neither of them noticed, because there are some things one only ever notices after they have already happened, and what was happening, in the small warm circle of the last light, was that two children of a fallen house had begun, very quietly, to be something other than what they had been taught to be.