Page 10 of Legacy Elite

I don't know what to do with the fact that the man who has spent a year telling me I'm too slow just defended me faster than anyone else in the room.

"Thank you," I say.

"It's an assessment," Voss says. "Not a compliment."

"Still taking it."

Falken folds his hands. "Then let's proceed to why you're here."

"Great." I sit forward. "What is a direwolf?"

Falken turns his head and says, "Professor Faris. It's your field."

Wonderful.

Faris takes a moment before she speaks, the way she always does, the pause that makes a lecture hall of two hundred people shut up.

"How many Great Houses founded wolf society, Miss Miller?"

"Are you seriously—"

"Answer. The question," Faris says.

"Four," I say. "There were four. Three of them are Draeven, Soren and Ardent. The fourth one committed the Great Betrayal over two hundred years ago, tried to take everything, lost the war, and got wiped out. Name struck from the record. Crest struck from the record. Nobody says it, nobody writes it, nobody knows it." I spread my hands. "Evil mystery family. Betrayal. War. Everybody died. You covered this. I took notes. You gave me a seventy-one."

Faris's expression does not change.

"You gave yourself a seventy-one," she says. "Your essay was combative."

"It was correct."

"It was both."

Jon says, mildly, "Celeste."

Faris inclines her head half an inch and moves on.

"What you were not taught," she says, "is that the royal line of the Fourth House was distinguishable. Not by blood tests. Not by records. By what they became."

Everything in the room gets very still.

"Their shifted form was larger. Substantially. Heavier through the chest and shoulder, longer in the leg, broader in the skull." She says it the way Freya said it, standing by a fireplace at midnight, and my stomach drops through the floor. "Contemporary accounts describe them as a different animal. The word used for them, then and since, is direwolf."

I hear myself say, "Only them?"

"The form occurred only in the ruling bloodline." Faris doesn't soften it. "Not the House's retainers. Not its soldiers. Not its lesser branches, its cousins, its allies. Only the royal line. There is no recorded exception in centuries of documentation, and believe me, Miss Miller, people have looked." A pause. "When the Fourth House fell, the form fell with it. There has not been a confirmed direwolf since."

Nobody says anything.

The radiator ticks. Below us a door closes.

"Until yesterday," I say.

Not one of them answers me. They don't have to.

I sit back in the chair and stare at the ceiling, because my brain has decided to make this funny before it makes it real.

"Okay," I say. "So let me check I've followed. I spent twenty-some years thinking I was a person. Then I found out I was a wolf. Then I spent an entire year unable to be a wolf while every trainer in this place looked at me like a broken appliance. And now you're telling me that when I finally managed it—"