Page 12 of Legacy Elite

"Is it?"

"It tells us the knowledge didn't reach you."

"That's a long time for something to get lost."

"It is." He turns his pen over once. "Or someone in your line knew exactly what they were, and took considerable trouble to make certain nobody after them did."

I sit with that.

There's a cup of tea in front of me.

I didn't notice it arrive. Jon must have moved it across at some point in the last minute, from wherever it was to directly in front of my hands, and he isn't looking at me and he hasn't said anything about it.

I wrap my fingers around it. It's hot.

"Okay," I say. "So say you're right. Say you dig up whatever you dig up and it says what you think it says. What does that actually mean? Practically. To my life."

"Today, very little."

"That's reassuring."

"It shouldn't be." Falken turns the pen over once. "The Fourth House has been extinct for more than two centuries. Every political and legal structure in our world was built around that fact. If that fact is no longer true, there will be issues."

"What kind of issues?"

"Issues I won't speculate about until we know exactly who you are."

"You already know what I am."

"What you are and who you descend from are not necessarily the same question."

I hate that this makes sense.

"And none of you know the answers."

"None of us know the answers. Anyone who tells you otherwise this week is guessing."

Jon says, "The short version is that nothing changes today. Nothing changes this week. What changes is that a great many people are about to become extremely interested in a question nobody has had to think about in over two hundred years, and you'll be standing in the middle of it while they work it out."

"That's the short version?"

"You asked for practical."

"I did." I drink some of the tea. "I regret it."

"The Council will be informed today," Falken says.

The room reorients around that sentence.

Because until this second, this has been professors. Professors staring at me on a mountain, professors in a room, professors making notes about my shoulder. Annoying. Survivable.

The Council isn't the academy. The Council is what the academy answers to.

"Do they have to know?"

"Miss Miller, members of faculty and an unknown number of students saw you." Falken's voice doesn't harden, exactly. It just stops leaving any room. "The word direwolf was said aloud in a clearing full of nineteen-year-olds. It is in every dormitory on this campus by now. Within the week it will be outside it." He sets the pen down. "And even if not one person had seen it — I would still be required to report it. There is no version of this I keep quiet, and there is no version where trying would help you."

"So a room full of people I've never met are about to have a conversation about what I am."