Page 123 of Legacy Ascended

The investigator is a woman with a flat delivery and no interest in being interesting. She reports on what was recovered from the operative taken alive at the refuge: a handset, and on it a single channel used for instructions.

"The party holding him has provided its own record of three questionings," she says. "His accounts don't reconcile with each other, and he has never said who supplied his weapon. I'm entering that as unresolved rather than as refusal, because I haven't interviewed him and I don't characterize men I haven't met.

"Separately, and on the same instruction, I've looked at the Council storage. An item of property recovered at the convoy attack was taken out of a sealed box and left in Miss Miller's room at the academy. The property tag was removed. The store's log records nothing. I can't establish who moved it, when, or how it travelled, and I'd ask the Council to note that I am not able to exclude a person with authorized access.”

"The channel resolves to an account associated with an Ardent office. That's the finding. I want to be precise about its limits, because I've already been asked to overstate it once today. It tells us where the channel terminates. It does not tell us who was using it, who set it up, or whether the office it's associated with knew it existed."

"Is that not sufficient to name a party?" someone on the upper benches asks.

"No," she says.

"Miss Miller?" Wren says. "You were the subject of that operation. The Council will hear you if you wish to name anyone."

Every bench in the room is very still. I know exactly what's being offered to me and exactly how much I'd enjoy taking it.

I made this rule at one in the morning in my own kitchen, with her watch already in a bag and a number in my head. It was easier to say to Ander than it is to say here.

"No," I say. "A channel isn't a person. If I stand up in here and turn an association into an accusation, I've done the same thing that was done to my family." I look at the investigator. "Find out who held it. When you know, tell me, and I'll have plenty to say."

Caspian Ardent asks to speak.

"Given what the Council has just heard," he says, "I'd like to support a preservation order, and I'd like to be unhelpful about its scope."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it should cover all relevant House records without exception, and that must include Ardent's." He spreads his hands. “Two of today's findings touch my House. An assessment from one office bearing our name, and a communication channel associated with another.”

"So I'd rather the order came from this Council than from my own goodwill. If Ardent's records are sealed by our own choice, then anything found in them later is suspect and anything missing from them is my fault. If they're sealed by an order of this body, with an inventory taken by somebody who doesn't work for me, then whatever they contain is worth something to everyone here, including to me."

“Seconded,” Soren says from the Soren bench, without waiting to be asked, and two seats away his father, Halvor Soren, turns his head very slowly to look at him.

The Council votes on three things and takes about as long over it as a committee takes over anything.

The physical alteration of the disputed order is formally acknowledged as an established finding. All relevant House records, Ardent's included, come under a preservation order, with destruction or unauthorized transfer of disputed material suspended pending examination. And the historical judgment goes to independent reconsideration, on a timetable, with a first report due before the winter session.

What they do not do: restore anything, return anything, say the word innocent, or name a House.

"So minuted," Wren says. "And the Council notes that questions of standing, succession, and any restoration of status are not before it today and are not decided by anything recorded here."

"Understood," I say.

"I doubt you find that satisfying."

"I find it accurate," I say. "That's new enough to be going on with."

But standing. Succession. Restoration.

I heard those words.

None of them were before the Council today. None of them were decided.

House Luftemilen was something that ended hundreds of years before I was born. Then it became something I belonged to.

Now, apparently, there's a third possibility.

It could become something again.

I don't know what that would make me.