Page 6 of Legacy Elite

Nobody answers right away.

"We didn't see much," Declan says carefully. "They pushed us back down the slope."

"We heard things, though," Sophia says.

"Fragments," Freya says.

"Somebody said direwolf." Renzo counts them off on his fingers. "Three times, before anyone said anything else. Somebody said it wasn't possible."

"Somebody said they were extinct," Declan says, and he looks uncomfortable saying it, like the word doesn't fit in his mouth. "That they've been gone a long time."

"And then the Chancellor cleared the ridge," Renzo says. "Everybody off it. Fast."

"That's not what I noticed," Freya says.

We all look at her.

"The older faculty knew before anybody said the word." She says it calmly. "The younger ones were confused. They were looking around to see how to react. But the old ones stopped the second they saw you. They already knew what they were looking at."

Silence.

"Do any of you actually know what a direwolf is?" I ask.

"No," Torres says.

"I've heard the word," Renzo says. "Not enough to tell you why a man twice my age would go white over it."

"Nobody tells us anything," Sophia says. "That's the whole problem with this school. Which, by the way—" and she stops, and her head comes up, "—we passed."

Nobody says anything.

"No, I mean it," she says. "Are we all being idiots? All six of us passed. All six of us got a hundred merit marks, all six of us qualified, all six of us finished the Trial. All six."

I look around the room.

Torres, filthy to the elbows and still in his Trial gear. Declan with a split lip nobody's mentioned. Renzo with his boots on a professor's coffee table. Freya, who has been standing since she came in, and who now, slowly, smiles.

"Oh my god," I say. "We did."

The room comes apart. Sophia shrieks. Declan hauls Renzo off the couch by the front of his shirt. Renzo did not consent to this. Torres walks straight into Jon's kitchen without asking anyone, and I hear cupboards, and Torres saying "Professor, do you want this jar or can I open it," and then food starts coming out by the armful — apples, half a loaf, a wheel of something, an entire tin of biscuits that I'm fairly sure was a gift.

Pickles stands under his lamp with his eyes shut, radiating disapproval at all six of us.

"Don't give him—" Jon starts.

Sophia is already in the cricket tub.

I sit there with my shoulder throbbing and my mouth full and five people arguing about how long I was, and for about ninety seconds I don't care what a direwolf is at all.

Then there's a knock on the door frame, and one of the graduate assistants leans in and says, "Professor. The Chancellor's asking for you."

The room’s energy drops.

Jon nods, reaches for his coat. "Jessica. You're here tonight. They can stay a while."

"And after tonight?"

"I don't know yet."