17. Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Jessica
Renzo has stolen my second pastry, which is fine, because I stole it from Sophia in the first place.
“That's the thing about a food chain,” he says with his mouth full. “Somebody has to be at the top.”
“The only thing you're at the top of is this table,” I tell him.
“I am at the top of this table,” he agrees. “It's a small kingdom. I rule it kindly.”
Sophia doesn't look up from the pages she's got fanned across two placemats and a bowl. “Somebody explain the weighting to me before I lose my mind. Voss says the practical is nearly half the unit. The handbook says less.”
“It's Voss's number,” Freya says. “I asked him. He looked delighted to be asked, which was unsettling.”
Sophia says something unrepeatable and starts rearranging her entire week.
Ander comes in, spots us, and heads straight over. He takes the chair beside mine without pausing to decide whether he's allowed to. His hand finds my thigh under the table and stays there, warm through the fabric, and he leans over and drinks from my coffee.
“That's mine.”
“You weren't drinking it.”
“I was building toward it.”
“You were building toward it slowly.” He hands it back, and I drink from the same side of the cup.
Luke comes through with Soren behind him. Luke stops at my chair, bends to kiss me on his way past, then takes the chair Declan was about to put his bag on.
“You people are a weather system,” Declan says.
“You've got room.”
“I had room.”
By the time we get to Faris's lecture, Sophia has rearranged her entire week twice.
We come in as a clump — Sophia, Freya, Declan, me — and I notice people looking. A couple of them look at my wrist. Someone else watches Torres head for the back row.
I sit down and get my notes out.
Natasha waits until Faris is setting her materials on the lectern.
“So,” she says. “Did you prove it?”
I look over. “Prove what?”
“That your family didn't do it. I assume that's what yesterday was for.”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“That's not what I said.”
Natasha turns around in her seat. “Then what did you find?”
“A couple of things that don't make sense yet.”
“Of course you did.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“You went in there looking for proof your family didn't do it. I'm shocked that's what you found.”
“That's not what I found.”
“No? Because I'm pretty sure by lunch everyone will hear how the Fourth House was framed.”
“I spent half the day reading evidence that makes my family look guilty.”
Natasha gives me a look. “And the other half looking for reasons it doesn't count?”
“Fuck you.”
“There she is.”
Faris looks up. “Enough.”
Natasha turns toward her mother. “What? I'm wrong?”
“You're not discussing the reading.”
“I'm asking whether Jessica went into that archive looking for answers or looking for the answer she wanted.”
That one lands, because it's a fair question buried inside a shitty one.
“I don't know what happened,” I say. “That's why I'm looking.”
Faris lets the silence sit for a second, then picks up her chalk.
“Page forty. Since you have this much energy before nine in the morning, Natasha, you can start.”
A couple of people laugh.
Natasha turns around.
“The settlement,” Faris says. “Why so many safeguards? These Houses were allies. They'd just won. Why spend the next four years designing ways to stop each other?”
Natasha doesn't even have to look at the page. “Because a settlement is a legal instrument, not a friendship. You draft for what happens when the other party behaves badly. That isn't suspicion. It's competence.”
“Jessica?”
“Because winning together isn't the same as trusting each other. And you can tell from where the drafting gets fussy. The clause about seats is narrow. It only matters if a House is removed and its seats get redistributed, which is a very specific thing to write down about something that had happened exactly once.”
“Support it.”
“You write a rule that narrow when somebody in the room has just watched it happen and worked out what it was worth.”
“Natasha?”
“She's got it backwards,” Natasha says. The edge is gone from her voice now. “The seats clause is narrow. The property clause isn't. It's general, and it has no trigger in it at all. If they were really aiming at one House, why is the money the general one?”
I open my mouth and close it again.
That's a good question.
“Say it again.”
“The property clause is general. The seats clause isn't.”
I look down at my notes. “Then the seats clause is the safe one,” I say slowly.
“Everybody signs that because, in principle, the House being limited is somebody else's.
The property clause had to stay general, because you can't make the money specific without naming the House you're actually worried about.”
Faris taps the chalk once against the board. “That's an inference.”
“Yes.”
“A reasonable one. Still an inference. What would make it a claim?”
“The drafting record for the property clause.”
“Then that's your essay.”
Faris writes property clause — drafting record on the board and moves on.
“Declan. The enforcement clause. And don't tell me it's a formality.”
Declan sits up. “I wasn't going to.”
“You were absolutely going to.”
Sophia laughs.
“Why isn't it a formality?”
He gets there eventually. Sophia interrupts him twice to argue, Faris lets her, and by the end of the hour I have four pages of notes and haven't thought about the archive once.
Natasha catches me in the corridor outside, where her mother can't hear her.
“Three Great Houses and a professor at the academy,” she says pleasantly. “That's not a love life. That's a committee. You really think nobody's noticed?”
“You'll have to ask them. I don't answer for them.”
“That's convenient.”
“It's true.” I keep walking and get halfway down the corridor before I realize my jaw hurts.
Sophia catches up with me halfway down the corridor.
“She's such a bitch.”
“Yep.”
“Three Great Houses and a professor?”
“Apparently I'm very organized.”
Sophia snorts. “You should put it on your résumé.”
“Right under kidnap victim.”
“Definitely. Shows commitment.”
I laugh despite myself.
“Come on,” Sophia says. “We're going to be late for Voss.”
Voss's practical is in the lower hall, which smells like chalk dust. He has painted a long center line on the floor with a second line on either side of it.
“Nobody touches anybody,” he says. “This isn't a fighting exercise. This is the thing that makes fighting possible, which is knowing where your own weight is. Miller, you're within your clearance on everything I'm about to ask. If that changes, you'll tell me, and we'll stop.”
“Yes, Instructor.”
“Good. Pairs. Mirror work.”
You stand on your side of the center line facing your partner on theirs. They move along their line — left, right, a stutter, a long slide — and you match it on yours, staying square to them and the same distance apart. You don't cross the center, and at every moment, one foot stays on the floor.
I am terrible at it.
I'm terrible at it because I keep trying to beat it. I read the shoulder, I decide, I go — and I'm fast, really fast now, and I get there first. Voss stops me every single time.
“You were airborne. Again.”
“I matched her.”
“You jumped to match her. If she'd changed direction, you'd have been in the air with no vote in the matter.” He crouches and taps the line twice. “Your weight's going up. That's your wolf. Send it sideways.”
Torres is working at the far end of the hall on the same exercise as everybody else. When he passes behind me, he says, not quietly enough to be secret and not loudly enough to be a lesson, “Lower. It's not a jump, it's a lean that got away from you.”
“I know what a lean is.”
“Then do one.”
I do one. I shift my hip instead of my shoulder, stop pushing off, let my weight fall in the direction I want to go and then catch it. I arrive a fraction later than I would have, with my trailing foot flat on the boards the whole way.
“That,” Voss says. “Now do it until I believe it wasn't luck.”
I do it until he believes it. One of them is bad. The rest are fine.
At the end of the hour, Voss calls us in.
“If you're still trying to move faster, stop. Miller spent the first part of the session using a very large wolf to solve a problem that had nothing to do with size.”
“It seemed reasonable at the time.”
“It wasn't.”
A couple of people laugh.
“Your feet matter more than your wolf in this exercise. Remember that. Dismissed.”
Luke is waiting in the covered walk behind the hall, out of the wind, sitting on the low wall with his ankles crossed.
"Voss kept you," he says.
"I hate Voss."
He looks at me a moment longer than the answer needed. "Something's sitting wrong with you. It was there this morning too."
"It's nothing."
"Mmhmm."
I sit down next to him. The stone's cold through my clothes, and he's warm on my left side.
"Natasha says three Great Houses and a professor is a committee," I say. "That I'm gathering influence and calling it a love life."
Luke considers this with apparent seriousness. "Am I the influential one or the decorative one?"
"You're the one whose House would rather you weren't there at all."
"So decorative." He tips his head back against the post. "Jessica, my family would be thrilled if I stopped being seen with you."
"That's not funny."
"I'm not joking." His hand finds mine on the stone between us, and his thumb moves once across my knuckles, and my whole arm knows about it. "And you're giving her considerably more attention than she deserves."
I sigh, and then I turn and kiss him.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb under my jaw, and he kisses me back hard enough that I shift closer. When I make a sound against his mouth, his fingers tighten at my nape and he pulls me halfway into his lap.
The stone wall is cold and I stop noticing that quickly.
Somebody walks past the end of the covered walk, sees us, and reverses out with commendable speed.
Luke breaks off, forehead against mine, breathing like he's been running. "That," he says, "was very nearly a scandal."
"That was barely a kiss."
"Jessica." His hand is still at the back of my neck. "That was not barely a kiss, and you know exactly what you did."
"I've got nowhere to be tonight."
He makes a sound that is mostly agony. "I have a seminar at seven and it runs until it runs, and the man takes attendance twice — once at the start, and once when he suspects people of leaving."
"Then tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," Luke says, with feeling. "All of it. No archive, no Faris, no Council, nobody. My room, and I'm locking the door."
"That's a low bar."
"You'd be amazed."
By evening, everyone is in the suite. Sophia and Renzo are fighting over space at the table, Torres is working at the desk, and Ander is making dinner.
I look into the pan.
“What is that?”
“It's a sauce.”
Sophia looks over. “It's the color of a bruise.”
“It's a reduction,” Ander says.
“Of what?” Renzo asks.
Ander looks down at the pan. “Ingredients.”
Renzo starts laughing.
“Fuck you.” Ander holds out the spoon. “Taste it.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Coward.”
I take the spoon from Ander and taste it.
He watches my face. “Well?”
I swallow.
“We should order pizza.”
“Traitor.”
“I'm saving lives.”
Ander takes the spoon back. “More for me.”
“That's not the threat you think it is.”