5. Chapter 5
Chapter five
J essica
The room is round, and I hate that immediately.
Square rooms have a back. You can put yourself against a wall in a square room. This is a ring of tiered benches in dark wood going most of the way up, a gap at the front where the doors are, and one chair on the floor in the middle of it.
Guess whose chair.
"Breathe," Falken says beside me.
"I'm breathing."
"You're holding it."
I let it out. It shakes on the way. I would appreciate it if nobody noticed.
Maybe thirty people up in the benches. About a third are staff — laptops, and the faces of people who have sat through nine hundred of these and would like a sandwich. The rest are older, better dressed, and looking at me the way you look at a delivery you didn't order.
Three sections. Three Houses. Nobody has to tell me which is which.
There's a woman on the Draeven bench who listens with her head tipped exactly the way Luke does, and it takes about four seconds off my life.
The Soren bench has a man on it built like a mountain.
The Ardent bench all looks way too serious.
"Miss Miller." A woman near the front stands. Sixties, grey suit, a folder she doesn't open. "I'm Councillor Wren. I chair. Please sit."
I sit. Falken sits behind me.
"Before we start. You're not here to prove anything. Nothing said in this room creates a legal fact. We're clarifying the record." She looks at me over the folder. "Questions?"
"About forty."
Somebody laughs. Wren doesn't, but she looks close.
"Hold them," she says.
Then they start on my grandparents.
It takes about an hour.
A man with a laptop reads questions off a list. I answer. Somebody types. Every so often Wren says for the record and repeats what I've already said in better grammar.
Where was I born. Which hospital. My parents' full names. Where they grew up. Where their parents grew up.
What do I know about my great-grandparents.
Almost nothing. Two names and a photograph.
Did either of my parents show unusual strength. Unusual healing. Unusual senses.
No. My dad couldn't find his own glasses on his own head.
"Did anyone in your family ever shift?"
"I'm sorry. Did anyone in my family ever shift ?"
"It's on the list, Miss Miller."
"No. Nobody in my family ever turned into an animal. I feel like that would have come up."
Did anyone ever discuss European ancestry.
"My grandmother thought we might be Irish. She thought that because she liked Ireland."
Any family traditions that seemed unusual. Anything nobody could explain.
"We put marshmallows on a vegetable once a year. I've never been able to explain that."
Type, type, type.
Any relatives who left. Anyone who disappeared out of the record. Anyone nobody talks about.
And somewhere in the middle of it I hear how ridiculous I sound. These people are asking a serious question about a House that fell before anyone in this room was born, and I'm giving them cul-de-sacs and the Fourth of July my dad set the fence on fire.
Nobody told me anything.
Nobody had anything to tell me.
That's not me being cagey. That's the entire content of my family.
"Chair."
The Soren bench. His head moves. Nothing else does.
"I move we adjourn."
Wren doesn't look up. "On what grounds, Councillor Soren."
"That we have spent an hour on a girl's grandmother." He isn't shouting, which is what turns my stomach cold. "A scholarship student. No lineage, no documents, no claim, and no business in this chamber. We're a governing body. This is a curiosity."
Nobody argues with him.
I sit in a chair in the middle of a round room and count the seconds while nobody argues with him.
"Noted," Wren says. "Denied. Sit down."
He sits, but he doesn’t stop glaring at me.
"Miss Miller."
Halfway up. Thin, precise, no House section, so he's Council rather than blood.
"I'm Councillor Hallam. You spent twenty-two years not knowing you were a wolf."
"Correct."
"Found through the academy's new latent program."
"Yes."
"Doesn't that strike you as convenient?"
"Does it strike me as—"
"An experimental program. A year of not being able to shift at all." He leans forward. "Then a shifted form nobody's documented in two centuries."
"You think I made it up."
"I think everything we know about direwolves was written after a war, by the winners, about a House whose records they burned." One shoulder goes up. "I wouldn't hang a man on that paperwork. I'm not redrawing wolf society with it either."
And—damn it, that's fair.
"I don't have an answer for you," I say. "I'm not a historian. I got cornered by a bear and shifted. My life has been weird ever since."
"Which is why I'm questioning why this requires the Council."
"Councillor." Ardent bench. Fifties, dark coat that cost more than my education, elbows on the rail like a man at a match he's mildly invested in. "What are you suggesting?"
"That we're getting ahead of ourselves." Hallam looks at him rather than me. "Even if Miss Miller proves to be descended from the Fourth House, we don't know what that means. If it means anything."
"Which would seem an excellent reason to establish who she is before debating what it means."
"We can establish her ancestry without treating it as a matter of governance."
"Can we?"
Hallam looks at him.
The man on the Ardent bench lifts one shoulder. "A direwolf appears for the first time in two centuries, possibly descended from a royal House everyone in this room believed was extinct. I'd rather not wait until we've proved it to start asking what happens if we have."
A murmur goes through the benches. Not agreement exactly. More like everyone just got reminded why they're here.
Hallam considers that for a second.
"Fair," he says.
Oh, thank God. Apparently people in this room can disagree without declaring war.
"Councillor Caspian Ardent," Wren says. "House Ardent."
Ardent.
I look at him properly and it's there. The way he sits with his shoulders squared, like sitting is a formal activity.
Ander does that.
"You're Ander's—"
"His father's brother." He smiles. "You have my sympathy."
I laugh before I can stop it.
Oh, thank God. One normal person.
Probably.
"And for the record," Wren says, "I would like to welcome Dr. Werrow attending as liaison. Thank you for coming."
Back row. No House color. She came in after everybody else and didn't sit near anyone.
Falken is already on his feet behind me.
So are four other people, none of them in a House section, and they're up before Wren finishes the sentence, and they sit down again like it never happened.
Nobody explains the Dr .
I file all of it.
They summarize the shift evidence for the record without making me sit through it again. Faculty statements. Voss's assessment, which apparently includes the phrase no observed instability , and I would like that framed.
Nobody argues that I wasn't a direwolf.
That question closed in a clearing in April with too many qualified people standing in it.
"Then here's the difficulty," Wren says, and sets the folder down. "Our history says the royal line of the Fourth House was destroyed. Our history also says the direwolf form only ever occurred in that line. Both have been settled fact for over two hundred years."
She looks at me.
"They can't both be true. You're sitting in the chair."
Nobody moves.
"So either somebody survived and we missed it. Or what we believe about direwolves is wrong."
"Okay." My hands are flat on my knees. "What have you got?"
"You. Verified. You're who you say you are, born where you say, to your parents, and every document we've pulled is consistent."
"That's it?"
"Yes."
I wait.
Nobody fills it in. Fine.
"Which side is it? Mom's or Dad's?"
"We don't know."
"When did the line leave Europe?"
"We don't know."
"Do you know how they got to America? Ship, port, year, anything?"
"No."
"Do you know how a family that was killed to the last person managed not to be?"
"No."
"Do you know why nobody in mine ever knew a single thing about it?"
"No."
I sit back.
"Jesus Christ," I say. "What did you do all summer?"
Somebody in the staff rows makes a noise and turns it into a cough.
"Confirmed you exist," Wren says. "Which took four months and a great many separate authorities." She doesn't soften it. "Nobody has gone looking for a survivor of that House in centuries, Miss Miller. There was no reason to. Everyone was certain."
And I realize it.
All summer I've assumed they knew. That somewhere there was a room with the answers in it and a queue of people deciding how much I was allowed to have.
There isn't.
There's a folder with my birth certificate in it and thirty people who have no idea.
"Okay," I say. "Then tell me what happens if you find it."
The room changes.
It doesn't get louder. It goes attentive , in a way it absolutely was not when we were discussing my grandmother's opinions about Ireland.
"That depends on what's found."
"Give me the list."
"Whether the House still legally exists. Whether its standing ended or was only suspended." She pauses. "And property."
Property.
Cold comes down the back of my neck.
"Luftis," I say.
Somebody in the staff rows stops typing.
Behind me, Falken's coat stops moving.
"Faris taught us this last year. Whole lecture, I took notes." My heart is banging and I keep my voice flat on top of it. "Luftis was built on Fourth House land, after the war, by the three Houses that were left. And Lufgard was their castle."
"Ancestral seat," somebody says.
"That's a very expensive way to say castle."
Nobody corrects me twice.
Up in the benches the Draeven woman looks across the aisle at the Soren bench. It takes half a second and nobody says a word, and it tells me more than the last two hours have.
Oh. That's the one. That's the part every person in this room was hoping I'd take another few months to reach.
"Yes," Wren says. "Luftis stands on land held by the Fourth House before the war. It was redistributed afterward, along with a great deal else, under instruments nobody has ever challenged."
"Because nobody could."
"Correct."
"And now somebody might."