Page 91 of Legacy Ascended

I stare at it longer than I need to.

"Right hand," Jon says quietly.

"I know." I'd reached across with the left without thinking. My shoulder is better, but raising that arm still pulls in all the wrong places. I switch hands.

The Great Betrayal records come out after that. They take up two trays.

This is the part I thought would be easy. For months I've been finding reasons not to trust the history I was handed when I entered this world. The Fourth House wasn't gone. The line didn't die. Records survived that weren't supposed to exist. Every answer I've found has made the official story a little less certain.

So some part of me expected this to be the same. That once I got close enough to the actual records, they wouldn't show Luftemilen moving against the other Great Houses. That the official story would start to fall apart here, too.

But that's not what I'm finding.

There are records of men being moved between holdings, out of season, in numbers that don't match the work the holdings had. Provisions are going the same direction. There are routes drawn between the northern properties with the passes marked and the timing noted, and the same handwriting appears on a signed supply schedule.

And there are two sealed messages, both short, both about something the writer calls the arrangement. Neither says what the arrangement is.

At the front is the official summary, laying all of it out in order. Men moved. Provisions moved. Routes surveyed. Messages exchanged. The conclusion: Luftemilen was preparing to take by force what it couldn't obtain by vote.

I read it again.

"This doesn't look made up," I say.

"No," Jon says.

"So it might have happened."

"The men were moved. The supplies were moved. The maps are real. None of that tells us why."

"The summary does."

"The summary tells us what someone thought it meant."

I look back at the two messages. "They could have been right."

"They could have," Jon says.

At the other end of the table, Freya has been putting the ordinary Luftemilen documents in date order — receipts, appointments, land records.

"Jessica. Come look at this."

I get up. "What?"

Freya points to the seals. "Look at these. Their seal changes." She pulls the magnifier closer. "Look at the early ones. The outer ring goes all the way around."

It does. A clean circle around the direwolf and the peaks.

"Now this one. Thirty-odd years later." She moves the magnifier over. "There's a break in the ring. Up and to the right."

I have to look twice before I see it. A gap in the circle, no wider than a thread.

“The matrix was damaged at some point,” Freya says.

“The what?”

“The metal stamp they pressed into the wax. That's the matrix. See the break in the outer ring? Once that damage was there, every seal made with that matrix should have the same break.”

“How do you know it's the same one?”