5. Chapter 5 #2
"Maybe." Wren holds my eyes. "But finding a Fourth House descendant and finding someone with a legal claim are not necessarily the same thing."
"But they could be."
"Yes."
She talks like somebody who's been misquoted before. I look around the benches. Draeven. Soren. Ardent. Three sections and a gap where a fourth would go.
Two hundred years. Land moved. Seats filled. An academy built.
Nobody in this room stole anything from the Fourth House.
They just grew up with this three house structure.
"So," I say slowly. "If I'm who you think I might be—somebody loses something."
"That's a simplification," Wren says.
"Is it wrong?"
"It's incomplete."
"But it's not wrong."
Wren doesn't answer me.
And Councillor Soren stands up.
"No," he says. "It isn't wrong. Can we please stop pretending."
"Councillor—"
My face is burning. I can hear my own pulse.
"Two hundred years without a fourth chair," he says, "and the only reason that held is they were all dead. And we are going to unmake it because a latent turned up with a bear story and some of you find her interesting."
"Councillor Soren," Wren says.
"There is nothing in her paperwork. There is nothing in her family. There is nothing in her."
He turns away from me. Finished with me. Says the rest to the benches like an aside on his way back up the steps.
"Adjourn it. Go home, mutt."
And the room does nothing.
For two entire seconds the governing body of wolf society sits in a round room and does absolutely nothing.
Somebody up on the left goes mmm . Not agreement exactly. The noise you make when a person says the thing you were thinking and you're glad it wasn't you.
I've heard that word twice before. Both times from students. Both times behind a hand.
Nobody has ever said it to my face, and the first person who does is a Great House councillor in a recorded session.
The staff keep typing.
Falken's hand comes down on the back of my chair. That's all he does. He isn't a member. He doesn't have the floor and everybody in here knows it, including him.
And I sit there, but there's a thing under my ribs that wants to stand up.
I reach for it and it slips away. Same as the mat during the fight. Same as every field all summer.
"Councillor Soren." Dr. Werrow, from the back.
The whole room turns, because Werrow hasn't spoken since the doors closed.
"Sit down."
"I don't take instruction from—"
"Sit down."
He sits down.
Wren doesn't reclaim anything. Neither does anybody else. On the Ardent bench a man says, "Chair—" and stops, because that isn't who she is any more and evidently nobody has told his mouth.
Werrow doesn't look at Soren again. She looks at the clerk.
"The last four words go in the minutes."
The clerk's hands stop.
"Verbatim," Werrow says. "Attributed. Including the term."
Then she folds her hands on the rail, and that's the end of it.
Nobody moves for a moment. Soren's face has gone a color I'll be thinking about for a while.
"So minuted," Wren says. "Miss Miller. I apologize. It will not happen twice in a room I'm chairing."
"Okay."
"Are you able to continue?"
My mouth is dry. My hands aren't right.
"Yeah," I say. "Keep going."
Wren takes the rest fast, and I think she does it on purpose.
How they'll look. Backward, generation by generation. Birth, marriage, burial. Census. Land and probate. Immigration, if they ever establish a crossing. Surname variants, because names move and clerks were creative. Living relatives, however distant.
"How long?"
"It could break in a month. It could take years."
"Why is this so difficult?"
"Two centuries. People move. Names change. Women marry and vanish out of the record entirely. Parish books burn." A pause. "And if anyone in that line was hiding on purpose, they were good at it. They had every reason to be."
I don’t like any of this. Can I just quit? Say, forget I shifted and go back the outdoor store?
"Fine," I say finally. “But I have one request.”
Hallam's eyebrows go up. "Miss Miller, this isn't a negotiation—"
"Which is why I said request." I look at Wren. "Tell me what you find. As you find it. Not at the end. Not once it's tidy. Not after a room like this one decides which parts I can handle."
"Miss Miller—"
"I've spent a year wondering about myself and this last summer being the last person to find things out." My voice cracks on the end of that. "I'd like to be in the loop."
Wren looks at me for a long moment.
"That's reasonable," she says. "Chancellor Falken is the channel. You'll be informed."
Then it's over, and everyone stands up, and it turns out the governing body of wolf society breaks up exactly like a staff meeting. Bags. Coats. Two men arguing about a train.
Caspian Ardent comes down the steps while I'm getting my coat on with hands that still aren't right.
"You held up well," he says.
"I basically bit my tongue."
"That was correct today." He puts his hands in his pockets and doesn't smile. "It won't be correct forever, and nobody is going to tell you when that changes."
"Is he the only one who thinks that?"
Caspian looks up at the emptying benches.
"No," he says.
He doesn't elaborate. Then he tells me to give his nephew hell, and goes.
Werrow is at the doors with her coat already on, waiting for somebody.
"Thank you," I say.
She nods, "They'll find something eventually."
"And then what?"
Dr. Werrow glances back at the chamber.
"Then this gets worse."
Torres is outside on the steps with his hands jammed in his jacket, and he's been there the whole time, and I know that because his ears are red.
Sophia's on the wall beside him, swinging her legs. Declan's a step down with his arms folded. Freya's against the railing, not saying anything, which is Freya's whole personality.
"Are you a princess?" Sophia says.
"Still pending."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
I sit down on the wall. Torres puts his shoulder against mine and doesn't ask me anything.
"So what happened?"
"They don't know."
"Know what?"
"Anything." I push my hair back. "They know I turned into a direwolf. They know what the books say that means. That's the end of the list."
"They've had all summer," Declan says.
"They've had all summer to confirm I'm me.
That's what they've got. My birth certificate is real.
" I laugh and it comes out wrong. "They don't know which side.
They don't know when anybody left Europe or where they went or when they reached America.
They don't know how a family that was killed to the last person managed not to be.
Nobody can explain why mine never knew."
Nobody says anything.
Because we all assumed. Every one of us has spent four months assuming there was a room full of adults somewhere who had this handled.
"One of them told me to go home," I say.
Torres goes very still against my shoulder.
"He used a word."
"What word," Torres says, and his voice has dropped about an octave.
"He called me a mutt."
"It's in the minutes. Somebody made them write it down." I look at my hands. They've mostly stopped shaking. "I didn't say anything back. I just sat there."
"Bastard," Freya says.
I turn my head.
"You're a second-year. He's a Great House." She hasn't moved off the railing. "He just showed everyone his inner asshole.”