25. Chapter 25 #2
"Miss Rask has declined to discuss her documents with me," Falken says, sitting. "She's been consistent about it."
"I asked him for you and he got me a sandwich instead, which I did appreciate." She sets the cup down. "Can I put things on the table?"
"Please."
She opens the canvas bag.
Not nervously. Carefully — the way you open a bag that is important to you.
A folder first, brown, soft at the corners. Then a second folder, newer, with a printed label on it. Then a flat parcel about the size of a book, wrapped in a piece of cloth and tied with a cord, which she sets down on top of both and does not untie.
Then, last, a narrow wooden box.
It's dark with age and there's a hinge on one end and no lock, and when she puts it down she keeps two fingers on the lid.
Jon stops breathing properly beside me.
I turn my head. He hasn't moved at all.
"What?" I say.
He doesn't answer.
The woman looks at him for the first time since I came in.
"You know what it is."
"I know what it looks like," Jon says.
"Good." She takes her hand off the lid. "Then you'll understand why I haven't let anybody open it."
Falken's chair creaks. "For my own clarity — what are we saying it looks like?"
“A matrix case,” Jon says. “Or it could be. There are four similar cases in the academy collection.” He puts his hands in his coat pockets, which I have learned is what he does instead of reaching.
“I want to be extremely clear, Chancellor.
The box is consistent with a seal-matrix case. That doesn't tell us what's inside it.”
"Understood."
"There is no circumstance in which I open it," Jon adds, "and there is no circumstance in which she should, either. It goes to a conservator, with two signatures, and witnesses."
"That's what I want," the woman says.
I look at her.
"You do?"
"I've carried that box on three trains and I'd like somebody with proper equipment to tell me whether my family has been right about it for generations, because I genuinely don't know." She says it flatly, without drama. "I'd also like it done by somebody who doesn't work for a Great House."
Falken and I look at each other.
"You told me you wanted to speak to Miss Miller before anybody examined these," he says.
"I did."
"Why?"
She looks at me.
"Because they've already made this mistake once without asking us."
There's a silence in which the radiator knocks twice.
"Okay," I say.
Her eyebrows move about a millimeter.
"Okay?"
"You came a long way and you brought evidence and you've been sitting in an office since half past eight." I pull out the chair across from her and sit down in it. "So show me."
"The evidence isn't why I came."
"Then why did you?"
"To stop you from filing for restoration."
I don't say anything. Neither does Jon. Falken sets his pen down very quietly on the table, the way you put a glass down when you don't want to interrupt something.
"I haven't filed anything," I say.
"You're going to. The Council put the name back in the record, and then you walked into their hall in our colors in front of two hundred people.
Of course your next step is Great House restoration.
" She isn't sneering when she says it. If anything she says our colors the way you'd say a street you grew up on.
"I got here as fast as three buses and a train would take me. "
"Why does it matter to you whether I file?"
"Because if House Luftemilen is restored," she says, "it can't be restored to you."
Falken says, "Miss Rask—"
"Miss Miller's descent is established. I'm not here to argue with a Council." She doesn't raise her voice at all. "I know what she is. I watched the footage of the clearing the same as everyone else, and I'm not going to stand in a room and pretend a direwolf isn't a direwolf."
"Then—"
"The form ran in the ruling line." Kari Rask puts her hand flat on the folders she has carried across however many countries to put in front of me.
"It doesn't decide the succession. It never did.
Our law was written down, and it wasn't written down by anybody in this building, and the child everybody's been tracing for two hundred and seventy-five years was not the senior claim. "
The room has gone quiet.
"Your Council asked Professor Hess whether I existed.
She said she'd established one line. She was careful — she didn't say there was only one, because she couldn't, and she wouldn't." A pause.
"My family isn't in any record she could have found, because we came off the western road, and officially there was no western road. "
"She never claimed to have counted them," I say.
"She didn't."
"And nobody in that room asked her to."
"No." Kari Rask looks at me steadily across the table. "I read the minutes the morning they went out. I've been on buses since."
She takes her hand off the folders and puts it back on the wooden box.
"You are not the heir to House Luftemilen," she says.
"I am."