Chapter eighteen
Jessica
Professor Faris opens class the way she opens everything — without warmth, without preamble.
"Today," she says. "The founding of the Great Houses."
There's a map at the front of the room. There's always been a map; I just haven't really looked at it until now.
It takes up most of the wall — enormous, old, the coastlines of Europe hand-inked on paper gone amber with age, the mountains drawn in fine hatched relief, ancient wolf territories marked in colors faded soft by a couple of centuries.
Faris crosses to stand beside it with a slim wooden pointer, and she begins to talk.
And that's all it takes, honestly. She doesn't need theatrics. Celeste Faris could read a supply inventory aloud and make the whole room lean in.
"Centuries ago," she says, tapping a cluster of territories, "wolf society did not exist. There were only packs.
Hundreds of them — scattered, warring endlessly over territory and blood.
Our kind was tearing itself apart." The pointer moves.
"And then four Alpha families did what none had managed before.
They united the fractured packs. They ended the wars.
They wrote the first laws, convened the first courts, and founded the Council that governs us to this day.
The Four Great Houses." She lets the pointer rest. "Everything you know — this academy, the Council, the order you were born into — began with them. "
I'm leaning forward despite myself. It's the first history lesson here that's felt less like a lecture and more like a myth told by someone who believes every word of it.
Faris turns toward the front wall, and I notice, for the first time, what's mounted there. Three crests, carved in dark old wood, spaced above the board. Intricate. Ancient.
"Open your texts to the founding plates," Faris says.
I do — and there they are, the original four crests, reproduced in an old illustration. Three I'm beginning to recognize. And the fourth is rendered in a deep, warm burnt amber, the color of banked embers. Where its name should be printed beneath it, there's nothing. A blank. Scraped clean.
Something tugs at the back of my mind — a fitting room, a stylist saying nobody wears that shade anymore.
"Roughly three hundred years ago," Faris continues, "wolf civilization nearly destroyed itself.
The Great War." She doesn't animate anything; her voice does the work, and I can see the darkness she describes.
"Entire packs erased. Ancient keeps burned.
Thousands dead. And at the heart of it, one of the Four Great Houses committed what history remembers only as the Great Betrayal. "
Nobody moves. Nobody writes.
"The Fourth Great House fell. Only three survived." Her gaze lifts to the three carved crests, then travels, deliberately, to the empty space beside them. "Their crest was struck from history. Their name erased from these texts."
She gestures toward the tall windows, toward the mountains beyond.
"This academy," she says, "stands upon the former lands of that fallen House."
I blink. "Our academy?"
"The original keep still stands." Her eyes find me. "You know it. It is now called Lufgard Castle."
My stomach drops. The castle from orientation.
"It was the ancestral seat of the Fourth Great House.
After the Great War — roughly a century later — the three surviving Houses built Luftis on the surrounding estate, some two hundred years ago, as a monument to their unity.
" A thin pause. "We stand, in a sense, on a grave. And on a promise never to repeat it."
And I do the quiet arithmetic nobody else in the room seems to be doing, because it's automatic for me — three surviving Houses, three crests still carved on that wall. Draeven. Soren. Ardent.
The princes' families. Luke's, and the other two. They're not just popular, not just rich. They are the living heirs of the three families that built wolf society. No wonder the whole room stands up when they walk in.
I raise my hand.
Faris acknowledges me with the smallest nod.
"What was the name of the Fourth Great House?"
The room stops.
I feel it — every pen going still, a couple of heads turning toward me like I've said something dangerous. Faris studies me for a long moment.
"We do not teach their name," she says.
I frown. "Why not?"
"They are remembered only for the Great Betrayal. Their legacy is not one we honor." She holds my gaze, cool and final. "There is nothing in that name worth carrying forward."
I wait for more. There isn't any more. And I glance around the room, and here's the part that actually unsettles me — nobody else is curious.
Nobody follows up. Nobody even looks like the question occurred to them.
Two hundred years of erasing one of the four families that built an entire civilization, and a room full of the smartest young wolves in Europe just… accepts it. Writes it down. Moves on.
How do you make an entire people incurious about a hole that size?
Faris resumes as if I never spoke. She explains that the three surviving Houses continue to lead because their bloodlines have produced strong, stable leadership for generations — that leadership is inherited because history has proven those families worthy of it.
And I raise my hand again, because I can't help it, because I never can.
She gives me a small nod, and there's a wariness in it now.
"I understand honoring history," I say, and I mean it.
I keep my voice sincere because I'm genuinely asking, not attacking.
"But why should blood matter more than character?
If someone's born into a Great House and grows up selfish and cruel — and someone else, born nobody, becomes a genuinely good leader — shouldn't the better person lead?
Isn't that the whole point of a leader?"
This time, the room doesn't go silent.
A murmur moves through it.
A chair shifts behind me. Someone a few rows over whispers something I can't catch, and another voice answers before both of them abruptly stop.
Interesting. I glance around. Nobody's exactly waving a revolutionary flag, but for the first time since I got here, not everyone looks horrified that I asked the question.
Then, somewhere behind me, very quietly—
"She's not wrong."
I don't turn fast enough to see who said it.
Professor Faris does.
The room settles immediately. Well.
That's new.
Faris looks back at me, perfectly composed.
"Bloodlines represent generations of proven leadership," she says. "Stability. Continuity. The knowledge that those who lead were shaped for it from birth. Character is unpredictable. Blood is not."
"I think respect should be earned," I say quietly. "Not inherited."
There's another tiny ripple through the room. Professor Faris doesn't raise her voice. She never does.
"Two Merit Marks deducted."
She makes a small note. This time, the reaction around me isn't shock.
It's discomfort. And somehow that's more interesting.
I sigh. "I wasn't trying to be disrespectful, Professor. I really wasn't."
“No,” she agrees, cool and even, and there’s almost interest under the ice now, which is worse than anger. “You simply continue to question the foundations of wolf society.”
Her gaze flicks briefly past me, toward the room. Then back.
"That is a far more expensive habit than rudeness. You would do well to learn the difference."
Students file out when class ends, quieter than usual, but not in quite the same way.
A few avoid my eyes.
A few don't.
One guy I barely know catches my gaze for half a second and gives me the tiniest shrug, like you weren't wrong, before disappearing into the crowd.
Huh.
Sophia catches up to me in the corridor, wide-eyed.
"What was that?"
"I asked a question."
"No." She laughs, a little nervous. "You questioned the entire ruling system of an entire species. To the face of the professor whose whole personality is the ruling system." She shakes her head. "Jessica. You keep doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you say something completely reasonable and everybody acts like you set off a bomb."
Torres falls into step on my other side.
"For what it's worth," he says, "I wonder the same thing. Why does everybody bow to a last name?"
Sophia groans. "Oh, great. Now there are two of you. We're all going to get expelled because you two can't stop asking things."
I laugh. "I'm starting to think curiosity is the single most expensive thing at this academy."
"It really is," Torres says. And he doesn't say it like a joke.
I glance back toward the classroom. Neither did the person who said I wasn't wrong.
After my last class I head down to the arena, and Luke's already there — but today he's not alone. Soren and Ander are up in the bleachers, watching.
I wave. "Hi."
Soren gives me a polite nod. Ander offers the smallest possible acknowledgment a person can offer while still technically moving his head.
I smile to myself as I drop my bag. Honestly. It should be illegal for three men to be that ridiculously good-looking. Shame only one of them ever seems willing to smile about it.
We train. And the thing is — I'm better.
Weeks of this, every afternoon, and my body's finally learning what Luke promised it would.
When he throws a strike toward my head now, I don't freeze.
Most of the time. I slip it, or I block it, or at least I move, and the flinch that used to cost me everything is shrinking down to almost nothing.
Luke notices. He pushes me harder, faster, stacking combinations, and I keep up — sweating, breathing hard, but keeping up.
At the end of a run that would've flattened me a month ago, Luke steps back and nods once.
"Better."
I grin, wiping my forehead. "I know."
We break for water, and I'm still buzzing from the good round, and history class is still turning over in my head, so I just — ask him.
"Can I ask you something?"
Luke tips his head. "You're going to anyway."
"Do you actually think bloodlines matter more than character?"
"That's how our society works," he says, immediate, automatic. Like reciting.
"I know it's how it works." I look at him. "But do you think it's right?"
And he opens his mouth to answer—the same easy, automatic answer—and then he stops.
Actually stops. I watch it happen. I watch the reflex arrive and then not fire, watch his certainty falter, like a gear that's always turned freely suddenly hitting a tooth it's never hit before.
He doesn't say anything. He's thinking—really thinking, maybe for the first time, about a system he's never once had reason to question.
I can't help it. I smile. "I broke your brain."
Luke almost smiles back. "For a second."
"I just don't get it," I say, quieter. "Why someone should get respect handed to them because of who their great-great-grandparents were. That's not the person's doing. They didn't earn it." I shrug. "I'd rather earn mine. I think it means more when you do."
And Luke — Prince Lucian Draeven, heir to one of the three families that built this entire world — doesn't have an answer for me.
"He doesn't know."
The voice comes from the bleachers.
I look up.
Soren hasn't moved. He's still sitting with his forearms braced on his knees, huge enough that the bench looks undersized beneath him, pale eyes on me.
Luke glances over. "Thank you, Soren."
"You're welcome."
I bite back a smile.
Soren's gaze stays on mine.
"You're asking the wrong question," he says.
"Am I?"
"You keep asking whether blood makes someone worthy to lead." He pauses. "It doesn't."
That gets my attention. Apparently Luke's too, because he turns fully toward him.
Soren continues, calm as ever. "Blood determines who is expected to lead. Whether they're worthy of it is another matter."
For a second, I just stare at him.
"That's..." I point at him. "That's exactly what I'm saying."
"No." The faintest shift touches his mouth. Not quite a smile. "You're saying the system is wrong."
"And you're not?"
"I'm saying a title is an obligation. Not evidence of character."
The way he says it makes me wonder how long he's been thinking about that. I look at him differently. Until now, Soren has mostly been the enormous silent one. Polite and impossible to read.
But that stillness is hiding more than I thought. And suddenly I really want to know what it is.
"So if you met someone without a title who'd make a better leader than you?"
Soren doesn't even hesitate.
"I'd follow them."
Oh.
I don't know why those three words land where they do. Maybe because he's a prince. Maybe because he says them without ego or embarrassment, like the answer is obvious. Or maybe because his pale eyes haven't left mine. For one strange second, neither of us looks away.
Then one corner of his mouth lifts.
Barely.
"But they'd have to prove it first."
And there he is.
I smile. "Obviously."
"Water's over," Luke says.
I glance at him. He looks mildly annoyed.
I grin. "Are you jealous because Soren answered my question better than you?"
"No."
From the bleachers, Soren says, completely deadpan, "He is."
Luke points toward the mat. "Again."
I'm still laughing when I take my stance.
When we finish, I gather my things, sore and satisfied, and wave up at the bleachers on my way out.
"See you tomorrow."
Soren nods — and it's fractionally more than the polite nothing from before, a real acknowledgment this time. Even Ander's chin dips a degree lower than usual. Progress, maybe. Or maybe I'm imagining it.
I head for the door, and at the top of the path I glance back, the way I do.
The three of them are still down in the arena. Not training. Not talking. Just standing there in the fading light, all three of them, watching me go — Luke with that unsettled, thinking look still on his face, Soren unreadable, Ander frowning.
They don't look away when they see me catch them.
I lift my hand in a last little wave, because what else do you do, and let the door swing shut behind me — and I walk back toward the dorms wondering, not for the first time, what exactly it is about a scholarship girl asking simple questions that keeps stopping a room full of wolves cold.
Somebody, eventually, is going to have to tell me.