Page 88 of Legacy Ascended

He's quiet for a moment, and then he changes direction, and I understand that everything before this was the courtesy and this is the conversation.

"Geneva isn't gone."

I don't move.

"The House withdrew its support, which is not the same as the post being taken, and you know that, because you've read the same procedures I have." He watches me. "Withdraw the notification before the office opens at eight and I will make the call myself tomorrow. Not the office. Me. It will be restored inside the week and no one will ever be told why it lapsed."

There's a form on my desk from the academy adviser about a placement in Bern that I told Jessica I wasn't taking, seven hours ago.

I have wanted Geneva since I was sixteen years old. It is where House treaties are actually written, and there are perhaps four places in Europe where the specific and unglamorous thing I am good at is any use at all, and I have spent years becoming useful for it on the assumption that I would get it.

My father knows all of that. He isn't being cruel. He is doing the arithmetic out loud so that I can see it, which he considers a kindness.

"No," I say.

"Think about it for a night."

"I've thought about it for the length of time it took you to say it. If I withdraw the notification, the document stays in that box, and nobody outside this room ever knows where our copy came from."

"That is the intention, yes."

"There's a plate in the hall of this academy with four crests on it, and the fourth one has its name scraped off. Somebody decided there was a reason nobody should see that name anymore."

"That is not what I'm doing."

"You're asking me to leave an accurate record in a box because showing it is dangerous."

My father looks at me for a long moment and doesn't answer that.

Then he tells me what it costs, and he tells me before I do it rather than after, because that is how he was raised and how he raised me.

"You won't have access to House records after this."

I had worked out two of the possibilities on the walk back from the arena. This was one of them.

"Permanently."

"Yes."

"Then those boxes are all I'll ever have."

"Not only political records," he says. "Your grandmother's letters are in that collection. Your mother's marriage papers. The record of your own naming."

He waits.

He's waiting to be certain I've understood what I'm agreeing to.

"Yes," I say.

"All right," my father says.

And that is the entire ruling, delivered from the middle of a student's room in a coat that is still wet.

At the door he stops.

"For the record," he says, "I don't think she's a liar and I've never said she was. I think she's a young woman who has been handed a very sharp thing and told it's an inheritance, and I think she is going to use it correctly, and I think a number of people standing close to her are going to be cut anyway." A pause. "Being right about a document has never once protected anybody."

"You may be right."