10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
J essica
The coordinates match.
I've got Renzo's numbers on a torn page under my left hand and a photocopy of an estate survey under my right, and the survey is old enough that the paper's gone the color of weak tea, and I have spent forty minutes getting the two of them onto the same scale.
The line of stones we walked past on Tuesday is a boundary on this map.
Not near a boundary. Not roughly along one. It's the line. Three of the marks Renzo took sit on it within what the archive assistant tells me is normal survey error for something drawn by hand.
So that's confirmed. That stone wasn't a bit of old masonry somebody dropped in a wood. It was doing a job. It was standing there saying this side is ours , with a crest, until somebody came out with a tool and disagreed.
I sit back.
And that's when I actually look at the rest of the map.
Because I've been so busy with the eastern boundary that I haven't followed the line round.
It runs north, and then west, and then it turns and comes down and encloses — everything.
The whole Preserve. The valley the academy sits in.
All of it, one continuous estate, with the ordinary bloodless annotations of a surveyor at every corner.
And near the middle of it, up where the ground goes high, there's a small drawn square with a name beside it.
Lufgard.
And under the name, in a hand that's been copied from something older:
Seat.
I sit and look at that word for a while.
Because here's the thing. I know this. Faris told us. I have repeated it in a Council chamber. I said it out loud to Wren with everybody watching: the academy was built on Fourth House land, and Lufgard was their castle. I got a small correction about the word castle and I made a joke.
Ancestral seat. That's a very expensive way to say castle.
It's a very expensive way to say house.
I slept there.
That's the stupid thing my brain lands on.
Not the politics. Not the estate. I slept there, for a week, in a room on the second floor with a window I enjoyed watching the stars from, and I woke up on the first morning and looked out of it and the whole valley was under fog with the tops of the trees coming through, and I stood there thinking I have never seen anything this beautiful in my life.
And there was the fireplace in the hall where we ate — that ridiculous fireplace, big enough that Declan could have stood up inside it, and the six of us fighting over the seats nearest it every single night because everywhere else in that building was freezing.
And the tour. God, the tour. The six of us wandering around the upper floors after supper with our phone flashlights because half the wing has no working lights, making ghost noises in a stairwell, Renzo announcing at approximately ten-minute intervals that he wasn't scared, he simply didn't like buildings where people had definitely died, which everyone agreed was the same thing.
I laughed until my stomach hurt in a corridor of that house.
I go back to the records. The archive gives me a section on the post-war disposition of the estate, which is four pages long and reads like a shipping manifest.
Lands seized and assigned.
Structures cleared.
House identifiers removed.
Movable property distributed.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Four pages of the tidiest language I've ever read, with dates in the margin and a reference number at the bottom of each entry, and not one single verb that has a person attached to it.
Nothing was destroyed by anybody. Things simply were destroyed.
Property was seized in the way that weather happens.
House identifiers removed.
That's one way to say it. Another is somebody walked into a wood with a chisel and took the afternoon.
I make a note of the reference numbers, and then I sit there with my pencil in my hand, and I know exactly what I want and I know exactly how unreasonable it isn't.
I want to see it.
Not the way I saw it in the fall of last year — confused, worried, twenty-two years old, spending every waking second wondering whether this was all a scam or Professor Matthias was really offering a full scholarship to me.
I want to walk through it now. Knowing.
Falken sees me on Thursday.
His office looks the way it looked in April. He stands up when I come in, which he always does, and asks how I am doing.
"Fine."
"So I read."
Of course he read.
"I want to go back to Lufgard," I say.
Falken doesn't ask why. He doesn't ask what for. He sits down and folds his hands and says, "I expected you would."
"Great. When?"
"You won't."
I sit down without being invited.
"Say that again."
"Not this term. Very possibly not this year." He says it without any softening at all. "I'm not going to authorize it.”
"Last year I was there for a week. "
"Yes."
“And now suddenly the answer is no?"
"Last year," Falken says, "nobody knew who you were."
And that shuts me up, because it's true.
"The Council investigation is open. Your legal position is undetermined. And your presence in that particular building, while both of those things are true, is not a question I'm prepared to answer on my own authority."
"So ask them."
"I intend to. Eventually. And I will tell you what they say, because I gave you my word about that and I've kept it." He puts the pen down. "But not this month, and I won't pretend otherwise to make this conversation easier."
I sit there.
"It's the only intact piece of their home that's still standing," I say.
Falken looks directly into my eyes.
"Yes," he says. "It is."
Luke's suite is on the corner of the corridor with the two big windows and he opens the door before I knock, because of course he does.
"You're furious," he says.
"I'm fine. "
"Jessica."
Right. Yes. The bond.
I come in and put my bag down and I'm already three sentences into it — Falken, his refusal, the council, the whole ridiculous recital — and I get about halfway through before I notice that Luke has gone very quiet.
And down the bond, under everything, there's a thread of him that isn't agreement.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to agree with him."
Luke pauses.
"He isn't wrong," he says.
"Oh, fuck you."
"Would you like me to lie to you? I can do that. I'm extremely good at it."
"I'd like you to be my mate who takes my side."
"I am on your side," Luke says. "That's why I'm not taking it."
I turn around and look at him.
He's leaning against the back of his couch with his arms folded, and he doesn't look smug about it, which is somehow worse, because Luke looking smug I can fight.
"Explain," I say.
"You go to Lufgard," he says. "You take a car up the road with two members of faculty. You walk through the hall, you look at the fireplace, you get cold, you eat a sandwich, and you come home. Four hours. Nothing happens." He tilts his head. "Now tell me what that is."
"It's a visit."
"It's a visit," Luke agrees. "Now tell me what somebody with a photograph of it calls it."
I open my mouth.
And nothing useful comes out, because I can already hear it.
" Fourth House heir returns to ancestral seat ," Luke says.
"That one's the friendly version. That one's written by somebody who likes you.
" He straightens off the couch. " Direwolf claimant enters fallen keep during Council review.
Academy escorts Miller onto disputed land.
Not one of those has to contain a single false sentence. That's what makes them work."
"I'm not claiming anything."
"That doesn't matter."
"It matters to me —"
"It matters to you and to about nine other people," Luke says, "and none of them sit on the Council."
I hate this. I hate every part of this.
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"At the moment? Nothing. Which is unbearable and I understand it's unbearable.
" He comes around the couch. "Jessica, you didn't ask for any of this, and I know exactly how it feels to be told that a thing you want is politically inconvenient, because I have been told it my entire life.
But you have to understand what you became in that clearing.
You didn't just become a direwolf. You became the most politically dangerous person on this campus, and you did it in front of witnesses. "
"That's comforting."
"It wasn't intended to be." He stops a few feet away. "There are people who'll look at you and see something to use. There are people who'll see something to control. And there are people who will look at you and see something that should have stayed extinct."
And down the bond — because it's there, because it's been there since I walked in and I've been too angry to read it properly — I finally feel what's underneath all the smooth reasoning.
He's frightened.
Not concerned. Not politically cautious. Luke Draeven, who has never in his life given a straight answer when he could give a clever one, is standing in his own sitting room and he is scared , and he's been scared the entire time he's been explaining headlines to me.
He’s scared for me and I am still so angry.
"Okay," I say. "Now hear mine."
"I'm listening."
"Every answer I have got, from every single person, for six months, is wait.
" I count them off, because apparently that's what we do now.
"Wait for the Council. Wait for the genealogy.
Wait for the legal review. Wait until we know more.
Wait until it's safe." My voice is getting louder.
"And every time the answer is wait, the reason is that I'm more important than I was the last time I asked.
Do you understand what that means? The more the Fourth House turns out to have to do with me, the less I'm allowed anywhere near it. "
"That's not what this is."
"It looks exactly like that from where I'm standing."
"Jessica—"
"You lot don't even know it's mine, " I say.
"That's the funniest part. That's what Faris says.
That's what Hallam says. Nobody's proved a thing.
My genealogy stops dead in 1856 and everybody's very clear that I'm not officially anything.
" I spread my hands. "So I'm Fourth House enough to need a security assessment, but not Fourth House enough to be allowed in the house. "
Luke doesn't answer.
He doesn't answer for long enough that I know I've got him, and there's absolutely no satisfaction in it whatsoever.
"I'm not asking to wander into the Preserve alone at midnight," I say, quieter.
"I'm asking to go back into a building I already lived in for a week.
I ate dinner there. I got lost on the third floor.
Renzo made us all check a room for ghosts with our phone flashlights.
" My throat closes. "I laughed in that house, Luke.
Before any of this. And now that it might have belonged to my family, it's the one place on the entire estate I'm not allowed to stand in. "
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes," Luke says.
And then, because he can't help it, because it's what he is: "Give me time.
I can work on it. If it's arranged properly — no announcement, no schedule anyone can predict, faculty escort, the academy authorising it rather than the Council permitting it, which is a completely different animal politically—"
"And if they still say no?"
He doesn't answer fast enough.
"Right," I say. "That's what I thought."
He starts to say something else and I put my hand up, because I've just worked out what I actually want, and I want to say it before he manages it for me.
"You're doing it too," I say.
"Doing what?"
"Guiding me."
Luke goes still.
"You've been in here twenty minutes explaining a decision that was already made," I say.
"Not asking me what I want to do about it.
Explaining it. Very well, incidentally — you're extremely good, I nearly agreed with you twice.
" I pick my bag up off his floor. "But every person in my life this year has decided something about me in a room I wasn't in, and then come and told me about it afterwards in a kind voice.
Falken. The Council. Faris. And now you. "
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?"
He doesn't say anything. His mouth opens, but whatever argument he had ready doesn't come out. He looks away.
For once, Luke has nothing to defend himself with.
"No," he says slowly. "It's fair."
"Then here's what I want."
"Tell me."
"When they decide about Lufgard—" I hold his eyes "—get me in the room."
Luke blinks.
"Not lobbying for me. Not reporting back to me afterwards over a nice cup of tea.
In the room, at the table, when it's discussed.
" I shrug the bag onto my shoulder. "You know how those rooms work.
You've been sitting in them since you were nine.
So use it for that instead of using it to build me a nice cage with a view. "
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he shakes his head.
"You are getting better at this. That's a much better ask than the one you came in with," he says.
"I'm aware."
"It's also considerably harder."
"Can you do it?"
"Yes," Luke says. "I think so."
He reaches for me then. Just his hand and I step back — not far, just enough.
Not yet.
His hand stops in the air. And he doesn't push it, and he doesn't make a face about it, and he lets it drop, and I think that might be the single most surprising thing he's done all evening.
"Jessica."
I stop at the door.
"I know why you need to see it," Luke says.
I stand there for a second.
"Then help me see it."
"I will."
The archive is still open and the assistant on the desk has stopped asking me whether I need help and started just nodding at me.
I spread it all back out. The estate survey. The modern Preserve map. Renzo's coordinates. Freya's sketch, which I've been carrying around folded in my notebook for a week.
But I'm not looking at Lufgard.
Falken said no to the castle. He was extremely specific about the castle.? He didn't say one single word about anything else on that estate. And there is a great deal of estate.
I go along the old boundary with my finger.
There are marks all over this thing that meant something to whoever drew it: little squares, a run of hatching, a symbol at a river crossing, the word mill in handwriting so old it’s almost ilegible.
Then I put the modern map next to it and start looking for what's underneath the green.
There's a structure marked here, half a mile off a fire road. There's something at this bend that the modern survey calls a ruin, unclassified .
There's a line of four little squares running east from the beech tree. Four. We found three.
I get the pencil.
The door opens, and Freya comes in with her coat still on and two coffees, and stands over my shoulder for a second looking at what I've got laid out.
"What are you doing?" she says.
I don't look up.
"Finding out what they missed."