14. Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
J essica
"—cannot simply be extinct," somebody is saying, "when the descendant is sitting in the room."
"That is precisely the confusion I'm trying to prevent," Hallam says. "The House was not extinguished because the family died. The family dying was the occasion. The extinguishment was an instrument. There is a document. It has a date on it."
"She isn't a document, she's—"
"She is a person," Hallam says, "and the House is a thing, and I would be grateful if this chamber could hold the two apart for ninety consecutive seconds."
I've been here forty minutes.
Yesterday I was Jessica Miller. Today, apparently, I'm a constitutional loophole.
They've got the room set up differently — a long table instead of the benches, twelve people instead of thirty, and me in a chair at the end rather than one in the middle, which somebody has decided is an improvement and which I'm choosing to accept as one.
Wren chairs. Falken's beside me. Faris is three seats down with a folder she keeps closing and reopening. And halfway along on the far side, in a coat that costs more than my education, is Caspian Ardent, who has said almost nothing for half an hour and has been listening to every word.
"Let's take them separately," Wren says. "Descent."
"Established," Faris says. "I'll say that once and then I'd like it left alone. The evidence meets the historical standard. I was the last person in this process to accept it and I accept it."
"Thank you. Institution."
And they're off again.
The argument, as far as I can follow it, comes down to whether the instrument recorded something or created it.
One side says the House was ended in fact — everyone died, the lands went, the name went — and the paperwork was only writing that down.
Reality's changed; the paperwork no longer describes anything true; the House is dormant, not dead.
The other side says that isn't how law works, that a thing formally ended does not un-end itself because a descendant turns up two centuries later with an unusual medical history.
Nobody has said medical history out loud. That's my contribution.
Then standing, which is worse, because the Fourth House held representation and that representation is simply gone — and not one person at this table can tell me whether it was abolished, or lapsed, or was just never re-allocated because there was nobody left to allocate it to.
"There is no procedure," Wren says at one point, "because there was never a circumstance."
Then property.
That's the one that changes the temperature.
Somebody uses the phrase the estate . Somebody else says the Luftis charter . Somebody else says something about instruments of transfer being examined and I watch Falken's jaw go tight, because that's his academy, and the deeds under it are apparently now a question rather than a fact.
"Nobody is proposing," Falken says, "that a student is about to take possession of an academy."
"I'm not proposing anything," a woman from the legal office says. "I'm telling you the review will have to look at the chain, and I'd rather say that here than have it discovered in a newspaper."
And then somebody halfway down the table says:
"Given the historical circumstances, I'd suggest Miss Miller's access to certain academy holdings be restricted until the review—"
"No," Caspian says.
It's the first thing he's said in twenty minutes and it lands like a book on a desk.
"Councillor Ardent—"
"Miss Miller's ancestry is under consideration," he says.
"Miss Miller is not. She's a second-year student.
She goes to class. If we begin restricting her access to buildings on the basis of a legal review she didn't request and hasn't benefited from, we are not being cautious, we are punishing a young woman for the content of a records office.
" He turns his hand over. "And we'll look ridiculous doing it. "
"There is a historical dimension—"
"There's a historical dimension to all four Houses and I would strongly advise against opening that competition," Caspian says.
Somebody laughs. The rest do not.
"There is also," a man near Wren says carefully, "the question of the Betrayal. If the Fourth House is to be restored in any form, this Council will have to address the fact that it was destroyed for—"
"For something that happened before every person at this table was born," Caspian says.
"Miss Miller wasn't consulted. Whatever her ancestors did or didn't do, she has spent her entire life in another country believing she was human.
If we're going to hold her to account for a war, we should at least have the decency to do it after lunch. "
"Councillor—"
"I'm not arguing for restoration," Caspian says, and now he does turn slightly toward me, and there's nothing performative in it at all.
"I want that on the record too, Miss Miller, because you should know exactly where I am.
I think this Council should move extremely slowly.
I think two centuries of settled arrangements deserve more than a fortnight's thought, and I think anyone who tells you they know how this ends is selling you something.
" He sits back. "I simply don't think slowly means unkindly. "
Faris shuts her folder.
"May I."
"Please."
"The politics is currently running about forty years ahead of the evidence," Faris says.
"We have established descent. We have not reconstructed two centuries of law, and half the assertions made in this room in the last hour have been historical claims delivered with the confidence of settled fact.
" She looks around the table without hurrying.
"I have spent three months in an archive.
I can tell you what a clerk wrote in a ledger.
I cannot tell you what the Council of that period intended, because that is not written down anywhere, and I would be obliged if people would stop telling me that it is. "
And I hate this. I genuinely hate this.
Because Celeste Faris is now the most sensible person in the room, and I would like that entered into the historical record and then sealed for two hundred years.
"If Miss Miller intends to pursue—"
"I haven't said I intend to pursue anything."
Everyone looks at me.
It's the first thing I've said since I sat down.
"Sorry," I say. "Go on. You were about to decide what I intend to do."
Wren's mouth tips up.
"Then let's ask," she says. "What do you want, Miss Miller?"
Twelve people, a legal officer and a chancellor, all waiting for me to announce my political program.
"I don't know," I say.
"That's not an answer we can work with."
"It's the true one." I put my hands flat on the table.
"Two days ago I found out there was a six-year-old girl who got carried out of a burning house and hidden under a fake name for eleven years, and that I'm here because somebody bothered.
I haven't finished having feelings about that.
" I look down the table. "I'm not going to invent a position on constitutional restoration this week because it would be convenient for your minutes. "
Nobody says anything.
"I want the review to happen," I say. "I want to be told what it finds. Beyond that, I'll tell you when I know, and I'd like it noted that nobody in this room can tell me what any of it means either."
Wren writes something.
"Noted," she says.
The academy has completely lost its mind.
I know this within about ninety seconds of getting back, because an entire group of third-years step off the path into the grass to let me past.
Into the grass. It's wet.
"Miss Miller," he says.
"You don't have to—"
But he's already gone, and Sophia is making a sound beside me like a kettle boiling in another room.
"Don't," I say.
"I have said nothing."
"You're about to."
"I'm about to ask a procedural question," Sophia says. "Which is: what do we call you now?"
"Jessica."
"Princess Jessica?"
"I'll kill you."
"Lady Jessica."
"Sophia."
"Your Royal Hugeness."
"I will end you—"
"Direwolf Duchess," Sophia says, and then has to stop walking because she's laughing too hard to continue, and Renzo, who has caught us up, says, "Countess of Really Very Large," without breaking stride, and I have to stand in the middle of the quad for thirty seconds while both of them recover.
That's the good version.
The other version starts at lunch.
I'm three feet from the end of the serving line when I hear it, because my hearing is what it is now, and because the girl saying it has misjudged how far a voice carries in a room with a stone ceiling.
"—my family lost people in that war. Not recently, obviously. But they did, and we still know it. And she's just here ? Eating?"
"She didn't do anything."
"Her family did. They tried to take everything. That's not a rumour, that's the actual history, they teach it—"
"She was born in America."
"So? It's blood. That's the whole point of blood."
And later, on the stairs:
"—apparently she's after the academy. Like, the land. That's why the whole scholarship thing existed in the first place—"
"That doesn't even—"
"No, listen, my cousin says the Council's already reviewing the deeds—"
And later than that, outside the library, three people who go quiet in a very particular way as I pass, and one of them says something with the word Draeven in it, and another one laughs.
That one gets under my skin more than the war stuff.
Because the war stuff is at least about a thing that happened. The other one is just: look at her, look what she's done, she's got one prince and she's working on the rest.
Nobody was saying that in September. In September I was the scholarship latent who couldn't shift.
Natasha finds me at four o'clock.
Coming the other way through the arch with two other girls, and I brace for whatever fresh hell she has ready to dish out.
She stops. She steps aside. And she inclines her head about fifteen degrees.
"Miss Miller," Natasha says.
Perfectly. Beautifully. In exactly the voice she'd use for someone's grandmother at a formal dinner.