Page 148 of Legacy Elite

They both go still.

"Of course it affects my judgment. I'm bonded to her. I can feel her from three buildings away." I hold my father's eyes. "When they described what those men brought for her, I stopped hearing the meeting. Anyone who tells you a bond like that doesn't affect them is lying to you or hasn't got one."

"Then you accept—"

"I accept that I'm not neutral," I say. "I don't accept that I ought to be."

Nobody speaks for a moment.

"That's a considerable statement," Isolde says.

"I'd rather you had it here than found it out in a chamber."

My father exhales.

"Then here's the practical version," he says. "While this is unresolved, step back. Not from her personally. Publicly." He turns his hand over. "You don't attend sessions on the Fourth House question. You don't advise her on House matters. You spend part of the term at home. You're not photographed walking into buildings beside her. It costs you nothing you can't have back in a year, and it removes the most obvious line of attack anyone has on you or on us."

I sit with it properly, because he deserves that.

And it's good advice. That's the trouble. If a friend came to me in this position I'd have sketched it out for him in a minute and he'd have thanked me for it.

"No," I say.

"Lucian—"

"You asked me to consider it. I've considered it."

"On what grounds?"

"She's under lockdown with a man on the stairs. Somebody at the academy told a stranger where she'd be at that morning." I keep my voice where it is. "And the proposal is that I go home for a term so we look tidy."

"That is not what I said."

"It's what it is." I lean forward. "You taught me this. When you step back from somebody at the exact moment they're being attacked, nobody reads it as procedure. They read it as Draeven looking at the odds."

My father doesn't answer.

From him, that's as close to a concession as I'll get.

"There's another matter," Isolde says.

Her tone has changed and I go alert without moving.

"If you're staying beside her, you're better placed than anyone we have. You'll know what she's thinking before the chamber does. You'll know what she means to do about the records if the seal opens. Whether she intends to go further."

I wait.

"We'd want to know," she says.

The room is very quiet.

And what strikes me is that she doesn't think she's asked for anything unusual.

She's a Draeven. I'm a Draeven. Information comes home. That isn't a betrayal in this family, it's a courtesy — it's what I've done since I was fourteen, at a hundred dinners, and I've been praised for it, and I've been good at it, and I have never once thought of it as anything but useful.

I think about Jessica in my sitting room in October, white with anger, telling me that everyone in her life decides something about her in a room she isn't in and then explains it to her afterwards.

I said it was fair. I meant it.