Page 122 of Legacy Ascended

The conservator sets up on the evidence table with a lamp, a plate of glass, and a lens on a jointed arm, and explains what she did as though everyone in the room has eyes.

"This is the disputed order. It was produced to me on this Council's instruction, in the archive, with the custodian present, and it hasn't left her sight or mine. I was asked to examine the sheet and not to form any view about what it says."

"And?"

"There is a rectangle of disturbance here." She brings the lens down and the room leans in without meaning to. "Under raking light and again in the infrared, the surface is abraded — original ink has been physically removed. The replacement text sits inside the abraded area. Its ink behaves differently under examination from the ink of the surrounding lines, and the letterforms compress at the end of the third line where whoever wrote it ran out of room."

"In plain terms," Falken says.

"Somebody scraped words off this document and wrote different words in the gap. That is not an opinion about history. It is a physical condition of the object and it is measurable."

"Can you recover what was removed?"

"No," she says. "The abrasion is thorough. I can tell you an alteration happened, where, and roughly how much text was taken out. I cannot read it."

"Then how do we know what it said?" someone asks.

"Because somebody else copied it first," Faris says. "A contemporary registry, held separately, never disputed, quotes the operative clause of this order verbatim — ordinary practice, so the office had the words. The registry was located by Professor Matthias in the follow-up work, and it was written before anyone touched the sheet."

She sets the registry beside the order, so the two of them are on the table together, and reads the registry version out.

"To secure passage for the household, with provision and escort by the western road, and safe conduct for all persons therein."

Then she reads what is on the order now.

"To secure the western road against the officers of the commission, and to suffer no person of theirs to pass."

Nobody says anything for a moment.

"The conservator establishes that the clause was removed and rewritten," Faris says. "The registry establishes what it was. Together they establish that the sentence which makes this order an act of war is the sentence that was put there afterward — and that the sentence taken out was an instruction to get a household out alive."

I have both hands on the arms of the chair and I'm looking at my own knees, because if I look up I'll do something I'd rather not do in this room.

Somebody sat down with a blade and took the words safe conduct off a page and wrote something else in the hole, and people died because of what they wrote.

Marla got out. The steward got out — they were both alive months later in a register office in another country, signing their names for a seven-year-old. My eyes sting.

It's everyone else I'm thinking about. Whoever was on the western road expecting provision and escort. Whoever stayed. Whoever was still at the house when the order that was supposed to be their passage out became evidence that they were coming for somebody.

The bonds go quiet and then all four come in at once — Luke steady, Soren cold and precise the way he goes when he's angry, Torres warm and close, Ander a wordless pressure like a hand at the back of my neck. None of them moves. None of them speaks. Four people telling me they're in the room.

"Miss Miller," Wren says. "Do you wish to address the Council?"

I stand up.

"Briefly."

"Go on."

"I'm not going to tell you my family was innocent. I don't know that, and nobody in this room does, and if I stood here and claimed it you'd be right to stop listening." My voice holds, which I hadn't been certain of. "I'm also not going to tell you the war had no other causes. People did terrible things in it and some of them shared my name.

"Here's what I'm saying instead. A clause was scraped off a document and replaced, and the replacement is the part that made my family traitors, and the part that was taken out was about getting them out alive. Somebody did that on purpose. We don't know who and we don't know when.

"So the ruling against House Luftemilen rests on a sentence somebody forged. I'm not asking you to say my family was wronged. I'm asking you to admit this Council doesn't know what it thought it knew." I put my hand on the back of the chair. "For two hundred and seventy-five years the answer to my family has been it's settled. It isn't. That's the one thing I want written down."

I sit.

There's a modern item on the agenda, and it takes less time than I expect.