Page 40 of Legacy Elite

And I realize it.

All summer I've assumed they knew. That somewhere there was a room with the answers in it and a queue of people deciding how much I was allowed to have.

There isn't.

There's a folder with my birth certificate in it and thirty people who have no idea.

"Okay," I say. "Then tell me what happens if you find it."

The room changes.

It doesn't get louder. It goes attentive, in a way it absolutely was not when we were discussing my grandmother's opinions about Ireland.

"That depends on what's found."

"Give me the list."

"Whether the House still legally exists. Whether its standing ended or was only suspended." She pauses. "And property."

Property.

Cold comes down the back of my neck.

"Luftis," I say.

Somebody in the staff rows stops typing.

Behind me, Falken's coat stops moving.

"Faris taught us this last year. Whole lecture, I took notes." My heart is banging and I keep my voice flat on top of it. "Luftis was built on Fourth House land, after the war, by the three Houses that were left. And Lufgard was their castle."

"Ancestral seat," somebody says.

"That's a very expensive way to say castle."

Nobody corrects me twice.

Up in the benches the Draeven woman looks across the aisle at the Soren bench. It takes half a second and nobody says a word, and it tells me more than the last two hours have.

Oh. That's the one. That's the part every person in this room was hoping I'd take another few months to reach.

"Yes," Wren says. "Luftis stands on land held by the Fourth House before the war. It was redistributed afterward, along with a great deal else, under instruments nobody has ever challenged."

"Because nobody could."

"Correct."

"And now somebody might."

"Maybe." Wren holds my eyes. "But finding a Fourth House descendant and finding someone with a legal claim are not necessarily the same thing."

"But they could be."

"Yes."

She talks like somebody who's been misquoted before. I look around the benches. Draeven. Soren. Ardent. Three sections and a gap where a fourth would go.

Two hundred years. Land moved. Seats filled. An academy built.