Page 11 of Legacy Elite

"Miss Miller—"

"—I'm a princess because I'm really fucking big?"

Voss makes a sound. It's not quite a laugh. He turns it into a cough, badly.

Jon looks down at the table and stays there.

Faris looks at me the way you'd look at a dog that had gotten onto the furniture.

"No," Falken says. Calm. Precise. "That is not what anyone is saying."

"Then what?"

"What we are saying is that your shifted form constitutes compelling evidence that you carry the blood of the Fourth House royal line." He lets that sit. "Evidence is not a declaration. This academy cannot look at one shift, however extraordinary, and pronounce you the heir of an erased House. That isn't ours to do, and it isn't established fact simply because it's likely."

"That doesn’t sound as cool."

"Most of my job isn’t."

Faris moves her folded hands a quarter inch, which for her is slamming the table.

"With respect, Chancellor, 'likely' is doing a great deal of work." She turns to me. "I am not disputing what I saw. I was thirty feet from you and I will state in any forum that what stood over that bear was a direwolf. I would prefer not to have seen it, but I did."

"Wow. Thanks."

"What I dispute is the leap." Her voice stays level. "A form absent from the world for over two centuries reappears in a first-year student with no known lineage. That is either the most significant event in modern wolf history or it is something we do not yet understand. Both are possible. Only one of them is being assumed in this room, and it is being assumed because it is the more exciting option."

And here's the thing that makes me want to put my head through the window.

She's not wrong.

"So what do you want," I say.

"Genealogy. Birth records. Civil registration. Whatever documentation exists for your family going back as far as it goes, and then whatever archival work is required past that point." She finally unfolds her hands. "I want the boring answer, Miss Miller, because the boring answer is the only kind that proves anything."

"Fine," I say.

Faris blinks. Just once. She was expecting a fight.

Falken takes it. "Then let's begin with what we can. Your biological family. What do you know?"

"Not much that helps."

"Anything."

"Names. Where people lived." I turn my hands over. "That's genuinely it. Nobody in my family was a wolf. Nobody knew about wolves. There was no — there wasn't a moment where somebody sat me down and said, by the way, we're descended from extinct European wolf royalty. If it was there, it was buried so far back that nobody left alive had any idea."

"You're certain of that?"

"I'm certain I was twenty-two years old and human as far as I knew until a professor turned up and invited me here." I glance at Jon. "No offense."

"None taken."

"You have to understand," I say to Falken, "you're asking me to help you research a family that had a perfectly ordinary life. Nobody was hiding anything. There was nothing to hide."

Faris makes a note. I can't see what it says and I'd very much like to.

"That itself is useful," Falken says.