2. Chapter 2
Chapter two
J essica
A tray hits the floor in the dining hall as I walk past the open doors.
Not because of me. Probably not because of me. But the noise makes everyone look up at once, and then forty people are looking at me, and the conversation dies so fast I can hear a fork clatter onto a plate.
I keep walking.
"They're staring," I say.
"They are," Jon agrees.
"You're supposed to say they're not staring."
"You'd know I was lying."
Three girls on the path ahead of us stop talking. One of them steps off the gravel into the wet grass to give me room. I have never in my life been given room and now a girl in expensive boots is standing in mud so I don't have to go around her.
Yesterday I was one of the scholarship six. Today I'm apparently a campus cryptid.
"Are you going to tell me what’s going on," I say, "or is that still above your pay grade?"
"The Chancellor's assembled the people who can give you the most accurate answer."
"So that's a committee."
"It's four people."
"It's a committee meeting about my body." I hitch the borrowed sweatshirt sleeve up my good arm. "Every woman's dream."
The administration building is old stone and quiet, and Falken's office is up one flight and down a hall where the carpet swallows every sound. Jon opens the door for me.
Chancellor Falken stands when I come in. Professor Voss is next to him with his forearms on the table, looking like a man who has already been in this room too long.
And on the end, spine straight, hands folded, not a hair out of place at eight in the morning, is Professor Faris.
Of course.
Of course the woman who spent a year removing Merit Marks from me in front of the entire class is here for whatever this is.
"Miss Miller." Falken gestures. "Please. Sit."
I sit. Jon takes the chair beside me rather than the one across, and I notice that.
"Before anything else," Falken says. "How do you feel?"
"Sore."
"Anything beyond soreness? Pain that doesn't fit the injuries. Disorientation. Gaps in memory."
"No."
"Any sense of the shift wanting to happen again?"
And that’s what he really wants to know.
"You're asking if I can control it."
"I'm asking whether yesterday felt like a normal first shift. Whether you chose it, or whether something else triggered it."
I think about the bear. The blood. That instant when everything changed.
"The bear triggered it."
"But once you shifted?"
"I think I was in control, but give me a break. It was my first shift."
Falken nods. "Good, yes. It was."
"That's it?"
"For that question, yes."
Voss speaks for the first time. "She was in control on the mountain."
Falken looks at him.
"She stood over a dead animal with six shifted wolves coming out of the trees at her and she didn't growl." Voss shrugs one enormous shoulder. "She took a step toward us, and half the faculty flinched, and she stopped. That's not an unstable wolf. That's a frightened student."
I don't know what to do with the fact that the man who has spent a year telling me I'm too slow just defended me faster than anyone else in the room.
"Thank you," I say.
"It's an assessment," Voss says. "Not a compliment."
"Still taking it."
Falken folds his hands. "Then let's proceed to why you're here."
"Great." I sit forward. "What is a direwolf?"
Falken turns his head and says, "Professor Faris. It's your field."
Wonderful.
Faris takes a moment before she speaks, the way she always does, the pause that makes a lecture hall of two hundred people shut up.
"How many Great Houses founded wolf society, Miss Miller?"
"Are you seriously—"
"Answer. The question," Faris says.
"Four," I say. "There were four. Three of them are Draeven, Soren and Ardent.
The fourth one committed the Great Betrayal over two hundred years ago, tried to take everything, lost the war, and got wiped out.
Name struck from the record. Crest struck from the record.
Nobody says it, nobody writes it, nobody knows it.
" I spread my hands. "Evil mystery family.
Betrayal. War. Everybody died. You covered this.
I took notes. You gave me a seventy-one. "
Faris's expression does not change.
"You gave yourself a seventy-one," she says. "Your essay was combative."
"It was correct."
"It was both."
Jon says, mildly, "Celeste."
Faris inclines her head half an inch and moves on.
"What you were not taught," she says, "is that the royal line of the Fourth House was distinguishable. Not by blood tests. Not by records. By what they became."
Everything in the room gets very still.
"Their shifted form was larger. Substantially.
Heavier through the chest and shoulder, longer in the leg, broader in the skull.
" She says it the way Freya said it, standing by a fireplace at midnight, and my stomach drops through the floor.
"Contemporary accounts describe them as a different animal.
The word used for them, then and since, is direwolf. "
I hear myself say, "Only them?"
"The form occurred only in the ruling bloodline.
" Faris doesn't soften it. "Not the House's retainers.
Not its soldiers. Not its lesser branches, its cousins, its allies.
Only the royal line. There is no recorded exception in centuries of documentation, and believe me, Miss Miller, people have looked.
" A pause. "When the Fourth House fell, the form fell with it.
There has not been a confirmed direwolf since. "
Nobody says anything.
The radiator ticks. Below us a door closes.
"Until yesterday," I say.
Not one of them answers me. They don't have to.
I sit back in the chair and stare at the ceiling, because my brain has decided to make this funny before it makes it real.
"Okay," I say. "So let me check I've followed.
I spent twenty-some years thinking I was a person.
Then I found out I was a wolf. Then I spent an entire year unable to be a wolf while every trainer in this place looked at me like a broken appliance.
And now you're telling me that when I finally managed it—"
"Miss Miller—"
"—I'm a princess because I'm really fucking big?"
Voss makes a sound. It's not quite a laugh. He turns it into a cough, badly.
Jon looks down at the table and stays there.
Faris looks at me the way you'd look at a dog that had gotten onto the furniture.
"No," Falken says. Calm. Precise. "That is not what anyone is saying."
"Then what?"
"What we are saying is that your shifted form constitutes compelling evidence that you carry the blood of the Fourth House royal line.
" He lets that sit. "Evidence is not a declaration.
This academy cannot look at one shift, however extraordinary, and pronounce you the heir of an erased House.
That isn't ours to do, and it isn't established fact simply because it's likely. "
"That doesn’t sound as cool."
"Most of my job isn’t."
Faris moves her folded hands a quarter inch, which for her is slamming the table.
"With respect, Chancellor, 'likely' is doing a great deal of work." She turns to me. "I am not disputing what I saw. I was thirty feet from you and I will state in any forum that what stood over that bear was a direwolf. I would prefer not to have seen it, but I did."
"Wow. Thanks."
"What I dispute is the leap." Her voice stays level.
"A form absent from the world for over two centuries reappears in a first-year student with no known lineage.
That is either the most significant event in modern wolf history or it is something we do not yet understand.
Both are possible. Only one of them is being assumed in this room, and it is being assumed because it is the more exciting option. "
And here's the thing that makes me want to put my head through the window.
She's not wrong.
"So what do you want," I say.
"Genealogy. Birth records. Civil registration.
Whatever documentation exists for your family going back as far as it goes, and then whatever archival work is required past that point.
" She finally unfolds her hands. "I want the boring answer, Miss Miller, because the boring answer is the only kind that proves anything. "
"Fine," I say.
Faris blinks. Just once. She was expecting a fight.
Falken takes it. "Then let's begin with what we can. Your biological family. What do you know?"
"Not much that helps."
"Anything."
"Names. Where people lived." I turn my hands over.
"That's genuinely it. Nobody in my family was a wolf.
Nobody knew about wolves. There was no — there wasn't a moment where somebody sat me down and said, by the way, we're descended from extinct European wolf royalty.
If it was there, it was buried so far back that nobody left alive had any idea. "
"You're certain of that?"
"I'm certain I was twenty-two years old and human as far as I knew until a professor turned up and invited me here." I glance at Jon. "No offense."
"None taken."
"You have to understand," I say to Falken, "you're asking me to help you research a family that had a perfectly ordinary life. Nobody was hiding anything. There was nothing to hide."
Faris makes a note. I can't see what it says and I'd very much like to.
"That itself is useful," Falken says.
"Is it?"
"It tells us the knowledge didn't reach you."
"That's a long time for something to get lost."
"It is." He turns his pen over once. "Or someone in your line knew exactly what they were, and took considerable trouble to make certain nobody after them did."
I sit with that.
There's a cup of tea in front of me.
I didn't notice it arrive. Jon must have moved it across at some point in the last minute, from wherever it was to directly in front of my hands, and he isn't looking at me and he hasn't said anything about it.
I wrap my fingers around it. It's hot.
"Okay," I say. "So say you're right. Say you dig up whatever you dig up and it says what you think it says. What does that actually mean? Practically. To my life."
"Today, very little."
"That's reassuring."