Page 82 of Legacy Elite

Two minutes, which she will dispute.

I use them. The ground's still wet from the rain and the north end doesn't drain, so we'll work the near half. Voss has left the mats out and I stack them, because leaving them out in this is how you replace mats.

Then I stand and wait and watch her come across the field.

She's carrying a coffee, a notebook with about four things folded into it that don't belong in a notebook, and a jacket she has not managed to zip. One glove. I don't know where the other one is. I doubt she does.

Twenty yards out, a first-year drops a folder and half of it goes across the path.

Miller stops. Puts her coffee down. Crouches and helps him gather it, and says something that makes him laugh, and hands it back squared, and picks her coffee up again.

The whole thing costs her about forty seconds. Which is part of why she's late.

That is the entire problem with her, in one crossing of a field. Her life is chaos. Her principles are not.

She comes up to me and says, "I'm not late."

"You are."

"By how much?"

"Two minutes."

"That's not late, that's European punctuality rounding."

I look at her.

She takes a mouthful of coffee and looks back and doesn't blink, and there's color up in her face from the cold and her hair's coming out of whatever she did to it this morning, and I have spent thirteen months making sure that I do not stand here and catalogue any of that.

I'm not doing especially well at it today.

She's beautiful. This is not new information. It's simply information I usually have the discipline not to examine.

I take the coffee out of her hand and set it on the equipment box.

"Hey—"

"You'll be shifting."

"I've barely—"

"You'll be shifting," I say, "and then it'll get cold."

I was raised to understand that control is not a mood. It's a practice.

You control your body first, because a wolf who can't govern his own weight is a danger to everyone standing near him. Then your shift, because a shift you don't own, owns you. Then your face, because in the world my family lives in, an expression is information, and information is currency, and you do not hand people currency.

Then your obligations, which you meet whether or not you feel like it.

Then everything else.

My father says a Soren is measured by what he does not do. He says it approvingly. He's not wrong, exactly. It's simply not the whole sentence, and I've been standing in the missing half of it since Jessica Miller arrived at this academy and started dismantling my life.

I knew what she was within a month.

Not the direwolf. Nobody knew that. I mean the other thing — the pull, the low warm drag under the ribs when she came within a certain distance, which I recognized on the second occasion, because I was raised in a House that teaches its heirs mate lore before it teaches them to ride.

Most wolves never find one. That's the number. My grandmother used to say it the way other people say lightning.