Page 77 of Legacy Elite

Lufgard.

And under the name, in a hand that's been copied from something older:

Seat.

I sit and look at that word for a while.

Because here's the thing. I know this. Faris told us. I have repeated it in a Council chamber. I said it out loud to Wren with everybody watching: the academy was built on Fourth House land, and Lufgard was their castle. I got a small correction about the word castle and I made a joke.

Ancestral seat. That's a very expensive way to say castle.

It's a very expensive way to say house.

I slept there.

That's the stupid thing my brain lands on. Not the politics. Not the estate. I slept there, for a week, in a room on the second floor with a window I enjoyed watching the stars from, and I woke up on the first morning and looked out of it and the whole valley was under fog with the tops of the trees coming through, and I stood there thinking I have never seen anything this beautiful in my life.

And there was the fireplace in the hall where we ate — that ridiculous fireplace, big enough that Declan could have stood up inside it, and the six of us fighting over the seats nearest it every single night because everywhere else in that building was freezing.

And the tour. God, the tour. The six of us wandering around the upper floors after supper with our phone flashlights because half the wing has no working lights, making ghost noises in a stairwell, Renzo announcing at approximately ten-minute intervals that he wasn't scared, he simply didn't like buildings where people had definitely died, which everyone agreed was the same thing.

I laughed until my stomach hurt in a corridor of that house.

I go back to the records. The archive gives me a section on the post-war disposition of the estate, which is four pages long and reads like a shipping manifest.

Lands seized and assigned.

Structures cleared.

House identifiers removed.

Movable property distributed.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Four pages of the tidiest language I've ever read, with dates in the margin and a reference number at the bottom of each entry, and not one single verb that has a person attached to it. Nothing was destroyed by anybody. Things simply were destroyed. Property was seized in the way that weather happens.

House identifiers removed.

That's one way to say it. Another is somebody walked into a wood with a chisel and took the afternoon.

I make a note of the reference numbers, and then I sit there with my pencil in my hand, and I know exactly what I want and I know exactly how unreasonable it isn't.

I want to see it.

Not the way I saw it in the fall of last year — confused, worried, twenty-two years old, spending every waking second wondering whether this was all a scam or Professor Matthias was really offering a full scholarship to me.

I want to walk through it now. Knowing.

Falken sees me on Thursday.

His office looks the way it looked in April. He stands up when I come in, which he always does, and asks how I am doing.

"Fine."

"So I read."

Of course he read.

"I want to go back to Lufgard," I say.