Page 151 of Legacy Elite

The hearing room is the one with the long table and I count the people on the way in.

Wren chairs. Hallam's three seats down with a folder full of tabs. Falken. Faris. A woman from the legal office who has read three hundred pages about my family and has never once looked me in the eye.

And the delegations, along both sides.

Caspian Ardent near the end, who nods at me as I come past.

Luke, at the Draeven end.

And House Soren.

Two of them. A woman with a case, and a man I recognize from a round chamber — enormous, silver at the temples, sitting so still that your eye slides off him.

Halvor Soren.

His son is beside him with his hands flat on the table, and he hasn't looked at me once since I came in.

Which is not how Soren has behaved in a room with me for months.

"Miss Miller." Wren doesn't waste time. "This is a preliminary. We're not deciding today. We're establishing whether your request goes to the full Council in a form that can be voted on."

"Understood."

"Councillor Hallam has the objections."

Hallam opens his folder.

"I want to be clear at the outset that I don't object to Miss Miller's standing," he says. "I've been the most sceptical person in this process from the beginning and I'll say plainly that she has standing. Descent is established. She may ask."

"But," I say.

"But standing to ask is not the same as entitlement to everything." He turns a tab. "That collection isn't a box of one family's letters. It's the material of a war. It involves all four Houses. It contains instruments that are still legally live, and third parties who spoke on the understanding that nobody would read it."

"They're dead."

"Their descendants aren't. And — this cuts your way as much as mine — if this Council hands you that collection without limit, every future claimant to anything inside it cites the precedent, and you'll have opened a door for a great many people who are not you."

Which is annoying, because it's a good point.

"So what do you want?"

"Structured access. Supervised. Everything touching the Fourth House and the war released to you in full. Everything touching live third-party interests reviewed first."

"Reviewed by who?"

Hallam pauses.

"That," he says, "is the correct question, and I haven't got a satisfactory answer to it."

I like him, which is inconvenient.

It goes on for about half an hour.

Faris argues that the collection should be opened to scholarship regardless of what happens with me, which is a completely different argument to mine and which she makes with roughly ninety percent more force than she has ever made anything on my behalf. Falken argues for supervised access at the academy. The legal office says things about instruments.

Then a man about halfway down the far side — grey suit, no House I can place, one of the Council's own — says, "I'd like to raise a different concern."

Wren nods.