Page 109 of Legacy Elite

I'm three feet from the end of the serving line when I hear it, because my hearing is what it is now, and because the girl saying it has misjudged how far a voice carries in a room with a stone ceiling.

"—my family lost people in that war. Not recently, obviously. But they did, and we still know it. And she's just here? Eating?"

"She didn't do anything."

"Her family did. They tried to take everything. That's not a rumour, that's the actual history, they teach it—"

"She was born in America."

"So? It's blood. That's the whole point of blood."

And later, on the stairs:

"—apparently she's after the academy. Like, the land. That's why the whole scholarship thing existed in the first place—"

"That doesn't even—"

"No, listen, my cousin says the Council's already reviewing the deeds—"

And later than that, outside the library, three people who go quiet in a very particular way as I pass, and one of them says something with the word Draeven in it, and another one laughs.

That one gets under my skin more than the war stuff.

Because the war stuff is at least about a thing that happened. The other one is just: look at her, look what she's done, she's got one prince and she's working on the rest.

Nobody was saying that in September. In September I was the scholarship latent who couldn't shift.

Natasha finds me at four o'clock.

Coming the other way through the arch with two other girls, and I brace for whatever fresh hell she has ready to dish out.

She stops. She steps aside. And she inclines her head about fifteen degrees.

"Miss Miller," Natasha says.

Perfectly. Beautifully. In exactly the voice she'd use for someone's grandmother at a formal dinner.

"Natasha."

"I hope the Council was productive."

"It was—"

"Of course, one doesn't ask." She's still got her head at that angle. "Do go ahead."

And she waits.

She actually waits, in an archway, with two girls watching and about nine people behind them on the path, until I walk through first.

I get four steps before I understand what she's just done.

She hasn't insulted me. There is nothing I can point at. She has been flawless — and she has made absolutely certain that everybody within thirty feet watched a Faris give way to a Miller, and now every single one of them is going to spend the evening discussing what that meant.

Faris's daughter. God, of course.

I don't even know if she meant it as a knife. That's the genius of it.

By the time I get to dinner I've stopped being able to feel my own face.