13. Chapter 13 #2
"The first is at the top," Faris says. "That registration proves a seven-year-old girl was moved, hidden and raised under a false name by someone attached to the household.
It does not prove she is the missing daughter from the inventory.
The age fits. The timing fits. The circumstances fit.
That is not the same thing as a document naming her. "
"Okay."
"The second is Emil. Professor Hess has built an excellent argument that the young man who disappears from that household is the same man who appears in the passenger record and ultimately becomes part of the Miller line. But there is no single document connecting those identities."
"So we've got a hole at each end."
"Not holes." Hess sounds offended.
Faris glances at her. "Soft joints."
"I'll accept soft joints."
"Everything between them," Faris continues, "is remarkably well documented.
More importantly, Professor Hess has not simply established a path from the child to you.
She has accounted for the other branches created along the way.
None produces a surviving line that we can identify beyond the nineteenth century. "
"Meaning I'm the only one."
"The only living descendant we've found," Hess says. "I will not tell you there is no undocumented child, no missing marriage, no person who crossed a border and changed a name two hundred years ago. Records do not permit that kind of certainty."
Of course they don't.
"But," she says, "we followed every documented branch. Yours is the only one that survives."
"Right."
Faris takes her glasses off.
"I said essentially the same thing in this office the day you shifted. I've been saying it ever since, and I've been correct every time. It has not made me popular, and I did not expect it to."
She sets her glasses on the table.
"So I want to be extremely clear about what changes my position."
"Which is what?"
"You."
I don't understand for a second.
"On its own, that chain is a strong genealogical argument with two soft joints," Faris says. "On its own, a direwolf is an impossible animal with no explanation. Neither gives us everything we would like."
She looks at me.
"But they are not two separate problems, Miss Miller. They are one problem, and they answer each other."
Falken picks it up.
"The historical record says the direwolf form occurred only in the royal bloodline of the Fourth House.
No documented exception." He counts it on the table with one finger.
"The record says a child of that line was never recovered.
Months later, a girl of the correct age connected to that household appears under another name.
Her descendants can be followed for more than a century, through multiple surname changes, into the family of a man who crosses an ocean and eventually becomes part of the Miller line. "
Another finger.
"And then his documented descendant shifts into a direwolf in front of witnesses."
He stops.
"Each piece has an alternative explanation. Taken together, those explanations become exceedingly difficult to sustain."
Faris nods.
"The evidence meets the historical standard."
And that's the moment I actually believe it.
Not the inventory. Not the names and dates covering half the table. It's Celeste Faris—who gave me a seventy-one, who docked me in front of two hundred people, who stood in this office and told a room full of excited adults to slow down—putting her glasses on the table and saying it out loud.
"So we're done," I say, "with maybe I'm a princess because I'm really fucking big ."
Faris closes her eyes briefly.
"That is not how I would phrase it," Falken says.
"It's been working for me."
"Miss Miller." Falken puts both hands flat on the table. "I'd like to say this properly, once, and then we can go back to how you'd prefer to say it."
I go quiet.
"There is no longer a reasonable historical basis to dispute your descent," he says. "You are a surviving descendant of the royal line of the Fourth Great House, and the only living descendant our investigation has identified."
Nobody says anything.
I look down at the table. There's a water ring on it. There's a pen somebody's left with the lid chewed.
I put my hands flat on the wood, either side of the enlargement, and look at them.
Bitten nails. Callus across the base of the fingers from a rope harness. A scar on the left thumb from a tin of beans when I was nineteen.
I don't look royal. I look like me.
"How old was she?" I say.
The room seems to take a second to change gear.
"Sorry?" Falken says.
"The child." I don't look up. "Seven on the form."
"Seven when the woman registered her," Hess says.
"But the form's five months after the house fell."
"Five months after."
"So she was six when it happened."
"Yes," Hess says. "Six when it happened, seven by the time anybody wrote her down."
"And everyone in that house died."
"Everyone on that page," Hess says, "except her."
"And somebody put her in a cart or a boat or on a road, and took her four hundred miles, and wrote a fake name on a form, and then lived quietly with her in one town for years so nobody would look twice."
Hess doesn't answer that, because there isn't an answer.
"Do we know her name?" I ask.
"Not from these," Faris says. "The inventory gives her position in the family. Not a name."
"Why not?"
"Because," Faris says carefully, "the man writing that page had already been instructed what the House was going to be called from that point forward, which was nothing."
Right. Of course. Even the paperwork.
They start on consequences before I've finished looking at the list.
That's the part I'll remember. I'm sitting there with my hands either side of the words about a six-year-old girl, and around me the meeting simply changes subject.
Recognition. Whether descent confirmed by historical standard triggers any obligation on the Council. Whether House status can be dormant and then not-dormant. Precedent, of which there is none. Hess saying something about a legal office. Falken saying something about a session.
And then, "There will have to be a property review."
I come back into the room.
"Lufgard," I say.
Falken doesn't flinch. "Among a great many other things."
"And Luftis."
"Miss Miller—"
"It's built on the estate. You've all said it. Faris said it in a lecture." I gesture at the enlargements. "That's her family's land. And now you've got a piece of paper saying I'm what's left of her."
"Descent is not ownership," Falken says.
"I need you to hold those apart in your head, because a great many people will deliberately collapse them in front of you.
" He's not unkind about it. "There are two centuries of transfers, statutes, charters and Council instruments between that inventory and this building.
Some may be sound and some may not. Working that out is a task for lawyers and it will take years, not weeks.
What changed this morning is only that the question is real instead of hypothetical. "
Then Jon speaks for the first time.
"Chancellor."
Everyone looks down the table.
"Before this goes any further," Jon says, "somebody should say on the record that four days ago a person entered Jessica's bedroom."
The temperature in the room drops.
"That was under investigation as an intimidation attempt against a student under review," Jon says, quiet and even. "It is now something else. It happened while this—" he indicates the table "—was being assembled."
And my stomach goes.
Because I've been so busy with a six-year-old that I hadn't done the sum.
LEAVE IT BURIED.
Somebody sent me that while Hess was in an archive turning pages. Not after. While.
"Who knew you were close?" I ask.
Hess and Falken look at each other.
"That's a great question," Falken says.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he says. "It isn't. I'll have one."
I get one more thing out of that room, and I have to fight for it.
"Who gets told?"
"The Council, formally, today. The legal office. Academy security." Falken is already writing. "And the three Great Houses."
"Why them?"
"Because they are constitutionally entitled to notice, and because if they hear it from a rumour instead of from me, we lose control of it entirely."
"Students?"
"No announcement. Not yet."
"It'll leak."
"It will absolutely leak," Falken says. "Probably within the week."
"Then I'm telling my people first." I say it before he can get to the next line on his pad. "Not summoned into an office. Not read a notice. My friends, and—the others. They hear it from me, today, before anything goes out."
Falken looks up.
For a second I think he's going to explain to me why that's not possible.