Page 129 of Legacy Elite

Neither of us moves.

Soren says something to him and doesn't get an answer.

Ander looks at me across the courtyard for four seconds, five, with absolutely nothing on his face at all —

and then he looks away first.

Chapter seventeen

Jessica

Hess puts a photograph of a page down in front of me.

"That's where they went."

It's a list. Somebody's ruled column, somebody's slanting hand, a village name at the top I can't pronounce and thirty-one households underneath it.

"Tithe roll. One parish. Second name down."

"They're in this one. And this one. And this—twenty-two years on, that's the son." Hess sits back. "Same parish, generation after generation, same borrowed surname. Children baptized under it. Marriages recorded under it."

"So that's where they hid."

"That's where they lived," Faris says from across the table.

I look up.

"Hiding is temporary. This is a century in one village under a name that isn't theirs."

"Somebody built them a life," Hess says.

"So somebody was helping them."

"At the beginning, almost certainly," Hess says. "A servant with a frightened child doesn't simply arrive in a parish with a new surname and a history."

"But forty years later?" Faris says. "You have no evidence anyone outside the family was still involved."

"One person couldn't keep it going for a hundred years."

"No," Faris says. "A family could."

But what family would do that for the Fourth House after the Great Betrayal.

Hess lays out three more photographs.

"Here's the part that matters. For the first stretch after the war, somebody in that household is still being counted in the regional pack registry. Badly kept, incomplete, but they're in it." Her hand moves along. "The next generation they appear once. Then nothing."

"Nothing."

"They're in the tithe roll. They're in the parish register. They're in a probate inventory that lists three cows and a bed." She squares the photographs. "As far as every surviving document is concerned, from about that point on, they are human."

I sit there looking at three pictures of pieces of paper.

"When did they stop knowing?"

"We can't tell you. The parish records keep going and the wolf records don't, and that's all we've got." Hess shrugs.

Somewhere generations back is a person who decided not to shift or couldn’t shift and quit talking about it. Or told a child that's only a story and changed the subject.