20. Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
L uke
The message arrives at four minutes past six.
Visitors' wing, eight o'clock. House business. — A.D.
Not his rooms in town. Not a call. And he's signed it himself rather than having it sent, which he does when he doesn't want anyone else touching it.
House business is what my father says when it's family business and he doesn't want to call it that.
I put the phone face down.
Then I go and find a decent shirt, because whatever else this is, it's a meeting.
They've put my father in the corner set on the second floor. He'll have asked for it.
My aunt opens the door.
"Isolde."
"Lucian."
She stands back to let me in, and that answers most of what I came here to find out.
Isolde is not here as my aunt. Isolde has sat on the Draeven bench through every session of this Council year, including the one where a twenty-two-year-old was told she was the surviving heir of a House that stopped existing before either of us was born.
She's here because somebody may need to say something my father would rather not say himself.
"Sit down," my father says.
He's by the window with a glass he isn't drinking from.
"Father."
"You look well."
"I look like a man who hasn't slept since Thursday."
"Yes," he says. "That's what I meant."
I sit.
He starts somewhere I don't expect.
"How is the officer?"
"Corvin. He'll be fine in six weeks."
"Is that the academy's estimate or the hospital's?"
"The hospital's."
"Good." He turns the glass a quarter. "I've had a security team standing by since Thursday afternoon.
Four people. Falken hasn't asked and I haven't pushed, because if Draeven puts its own people around that girl it'll be in three newspapers by Friday and it will not be described as generosity.
" He looks up. "But they're there. I want you to know that. "
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I'd have done it for anyone."
He wouldn't. But he'd like to be a man who would, which is one of the reasons I love him.
"Now," he says. "What did she ask for?"
"You've got the minutes."
"I've got a summary from a liaison. I'd like it from you."
"Why?"
"Because you were in the room and Isolde wasn't."
So I give him the words she used.
Access to every sealed Fourth House record the Council still holds. Formally. However they want it worded. She'll sign whatever's put in front of her.
"And?"
"That's all."
"That's all?"
"That's all. No land. No seat. No title. She hasn't asked anyone to restore anything and she said so in front of everyone."
Isolde says, "Does she intend to?"
"She hasn't said."
"That isn't what I asked."
"It's the only answer I have."
My aunt looks at me for a moment. She listens with her head slightly tipped, which I've been told more than once I do as well.
"You're her mate, Lucian."
"I'm aware."
"You've had eight months of private conversations with the one person in this whole business whose intentions nobody can establish. And you don't know what she wants."
"She doesn't know yet."
"You expect me to believe that."
"Yes." I sit back. "Eighteen months ago she didn't know wolves existed. Everyone in this room has had a lifetime to work out what the Fourth House means. She's had months, and most of them she's spent in meetings about herself."
"Until yesterday," my father says.
"Until yesterday."
"So what changed?"
"Six doses and a net," I say.
Nobody answers that.
Then Isolde says, "She made a claim."
"She asked to read her family's papers."
"Those aren't different things in Council law, Lucian, and you know that better than most people in the chamber.
" She isn't being cruel. She's being exact, which is worse.
"She has invoked her status as the Fourth House heir to demand access to sealed Fourth House material.
It's an affirmative act. It's the first one she's taken.
And it will be recorded as one, because there's no other way to record it. "
"I told her that."
They both look at me.
“Before she said it,” I say. “I told her that once she asked, she'd have asked, and she wouldn't be able to make it small afterwards.”
“And?”
“She asked anyway.”
Isolde leans back. “If they open the records, somebody will raise restoration.”
“Of course they will.”
“And the seat.”
“Probably before the records are even open.”
“Property will take longer.”
That one I don't answer. Property means two hundred years of land changing hands under the assumption that the Fourth House was dead. Nobody wants to be the first person to touch that.
“None of which she wants,” I say.
“None of which she has to want,” Isolde says. “That's the difficulty. Whether she claims anything or not, other people will act on what she might.”
Which is what I told Jessica in my rooms in October, and she told me I was managing her, and she was right about that too.
"So what does Draeven want?"
"Time," my father says. "That's all. Argue the seal properly and slowly. I don't want decisions made in a fortnight that we'll be living with in eighty years."
"That's not unreasonable."
"No," he says. "It isn't."
Then he sets the glass down, and I know we've finished the part of the evening that was about Jessica.
"Now," he says. "You."
"Me."
"You're her mate."
"Yes."
"Publicly."
"Everyone at that academy can count to three."
"Then you understand the problem."
I've understood it since about the second week of April, and I've been not-saying it for eight months in the hope that nobody else would notice.
"Say it anyway."
"You're a prince of House Draeven bound permanently to the person whose status this Council is deciding.
" No heat in it at all. "Every time you sit in a room where the Fourth House comes up, half the people in it are asking whether they're hearing our view or hers.
Some will assume you're influencing her.
Some will assume the reverse. Almost nobody will assume nothing's happening. "
"I know."
"And on Friday," Isolde says, "you argued she should accept relocation."
"I did."
"Against her wishes."
"Vigorously."
"That's useful," she says. "It's the most useful thing you've done this year, politically. It demonstrates you're capable of disagreeing with her."
"That's not why I did it."
"No. But it's what it demonstrates, and I've already used it twice."
I look at her.
She doesn't apologize. She wouldn't. She was in a room defending her nephew and she reached for the true thing nearest to hand.
It still turns my stomach slightly, and I notice that, because it's new.
"There's a difference," my father says, "between disagreeing with her and being willing to act against her if the House needs you to."
"Say the rest."
"Can you still assess this objectively?"
I could give the easy answer. I've given the easy answer to harder questions. I've been giving people easy answers since I was nine.
"No," I say.
They both go still.
"Of course it affects my judgment. I'm bonded to her. I can feel her from three buildings away." I hold my father's eyes. "When they described what those men brought for her, I stopped hearing the meeting. Anyone who tells you a bond like that doesn't affect them is lying to you or hasn't got one."
"Then you accept—"
"I accept that I'm not neutral," I say. "I don't accept that I ought to be."
Nobody speaks for a moment.
"That's a considerable statement," Isolde says.
"I'd rather you had it here than found it out in a chamber."
My father exhales.
"Then here's the practical version," he says.
"While this is unresolved, step back. Not from her personally.
Publicly." He turns his hand over. "You don't attend sessions on the Fourth House question.
You don't advise her on House matters. You spend part of the term at home.
You're not photographed walking into buildings beside her.
It costs you nothing you can't have back in a year, and it removes the most obvious line of attack anyone has on you or on us. "
I sit with it properly, because he deserves that.
And it's good advice. That's the trouble. If a friend came to me in this position I'd have sketched it out for him in a minute and he'd have thanked me for it.
"No," I say.
"Lucian—"
"You asked me to consider it. I've considered it."
"On what grounds?"
"She's under lockdown with a man on the stairs. Somebody at the academy told a stranger where she'd be at that morning." I keep my voice where it is. "And the proposal is that I go home for a term so we look tidy."
"That is not what I said."
"It's what it is." I lean forward. "You taught me this. When you step back from somebody at the exact moment they're being attacked, nobody reads it as procedure. They read it as Draeven looking at the odds."
My father doesn't answer.
From him, that's as close to a concession as I'll get.
"There's another matter," Isolde says.
Her tone has changed and I go alert without moving.
"If you're staying beside her, you're better placed than anyone we have. You'll know what she's thinking before the chamber does. You'll know what she means to do about the records if the seal opens. Whether she intends to go further."
I wait.
"We'd want to know," she says.
The room is very quiet.
And what strikes me is that she doesn't think she's asked for anything unusual.
She's a Draeven. I'm a Draeven. Information comes home. That isn't a betrayal in this family, it's a courtesy — it's what I've done since I was fourteen, at a hundred dinners, and I've been praised for it, and I've been good at it, and I have never once thought of it as anything but useful.
I think about Jessica in my sitting room in October, white with anger, telling me that everyone in her life decides something about her in a room she isn't in and then explains it to her afterwards.
I said it was fair. I meant it.
"No," I say.
"Lucian—"
"No."
"It isn't spying," my father says. "Nobody's asking you to—"
"It is spying." I look at Isolde. "You want me to tell you things she says to me privately. What else would you call it?"
"That's a hard way to put it."
"She talks to me because she's decided she can. That isn't intelligence. It isn't Draeven's and I'm not bringing it home."
"And if what she tells you affects this House?"
"Then I'll tell her it affects this House, and I'll tell her before I do anything about it. If there's a real conflict I'll declare it out loud, in front of both of you, in a chamber if I have to." I sit forward. "What I won't do is sit in her rooms making notes."
Isolde looks at me for a long moment.
"You've thought about this."
"Since April."
"And it took you until tonight to say it."
"It took until somebody asked."
They let it sit.
I look at the window, and at my father's coat over the back of the chair, and I let myself think about what this house actually is to me, which I've been avoiding all evening.
Because it isn't an institution. That's the part nobody outside it understands.
When other people say House Draeven they mean the seat and the votes and the money.
When I say it I mean my father at a desk at five in the morning because he genuinely believes he's responsible for people he will never meet.
I mean being taken into rooms at nine and told to listen. I mean the way my aunt tips her head.
I mean being handed, very early, a set of things I was expected to be, and discovering somewhere around seventeen that I actually wanted to be them.
I'm not giving any of that up.
And then I think about Jessica, which is a different exercise entirely.
Not the direwolf. I think about a girl on her first day, saying good morning and then ignoring me. Moving the roast potatoes around her plate every night since September while Renzo eats them.
Standing in my sitting room telling me to stop managing her, and being right, and my having nothing to say.
And on Friday, when I told her she should leave and meant every word of it, and she looked at me and said it stopped being small yesterday , and I understood she was going to do the thing that frightened me for reasons I couldn't argue with.
It would be easy to say this is the bond, and it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to say.
The bond is real. I'm not going to pretend it hasn't changed me.
But it didn't make her funny. It didn't make her right about me in October. It didn't stop me arguing with her in front of the Chancellor on Friday, and it didn't make me like her any less afterwards.
Whatever fate did at the start of this, I'm still here because I want to be.
"You're a Draeven prince," my father says.
I come back into the room.
"I know exactly what I am."
"Then you understand what I'm asking."
"I do. And you'll get most of it." I take them one at a time, because if I'm going to refuse the man I should be precise about what I'm not refusing. "I won't claim to speak for her. Not in a chamber, not at a dinner, not to a journalist. If anyone assumes I do, I'll correct them publicly.
"I won't promise her Draeven's support on anything. Not the seal, not restoration, not a vote. She'll never hear from me that this House is behind her, because I don't know that it is.
"I won't pass her anything of ours. Nothing confidential. Nothing from a briefing. Nothing said in this room tonight.
"And if a real conflict comes, I'll say so. Out loud. To all three of you on the same day."
"But," my father says.
"But I'm not stepping away from her to improve how this looks.
I'm not going home for a term." I make myself say the last part properly, because he has never once accepted a sentence I softened.
"And if somebody eventually stands in front of me and says Draeven or her , it won't be a long conversation. "
Nobody says anything.
My father looks at me for what is probably ten seconds.
"Well," he says.
"Yes."
"You understand this may cost you."
"I know."
"Do you?" And there's something under it that isn't anger.
"I don't think you do, Lucian. You've never lost anything.
That isn't a criticism, it's a description.
You've been extremely fortunate and extremely capable and those two have never once pulled against each other, so you've never had to find out what you'd actually pay. "
I think about a woman at the end of a table saying they brought six.
"Yes," I say.
He looks at me a moment longer.
"All right," he says.
And that's it. Nobody disowns anybody. Isolde starts putting papers into a case and my father finally drinks from his glass, and the whole thing dissolves back into a family in a room, which is harder than the alternative.
At the door, Isolde touches my arm.
"For what it's worth, I like her."
"I know."
"No," she says. "You assumed. I'm telling you."
I'm halfway into the corridor when my father says my name.
I stop.
"I hope nobody makes you choose," he says.
I look back at him standing in the middle of a borrowed room.
"So do I," I say.