Page 127 of Legacy Ascended

Somebody has had to decide where to put me. Three House tables at the front, the faculty along the side, everyone else arranged in a hierarchy I can now read fluently. And an acknowledged heir of a House with no table, no seat, no colors on the wall and no precedent in two hundred and seventy-five years.

What they've done is move a table. Not to the front — that would be a statement — and not into the general seating, which would be an insult. It's been set at an angle at the near end of the House tables, close enough to be among them and separate enough to be nothing in particular, and it seats eight, and my friends are all on it.

"They've invented a table for you," Declan says, deeply impressed.

"They've invented a table for us."

"Even better."

Sophia sits down, looks at her place setting, and says, "There are five forks."

"There were four last year."

"There are five, Jessica."

"Start from the outside."

"You said that last year and I have never verified it."

"It's still true."

"You don't know that it's true."

Renzo picks up the outermost fork and eats a piece of bread with it purely to establish dominance.

Declan leans past Sophia. "Casualty scenario was in the wrong place."

"I knew it."

"Two hundred meters below where the map has it, on a slope you can't get a stretcher off. Renzo said so out loud to the instructor."

"Renzo said it," Renzo says, "in a respectful tone."

"He did not."

"I said it in the tone of a man who had been awake for nineteen hours."

"You were awake for nineteen hours because you talked all night."

"To keep morale up."

"Nobody's morale was up."

"There'll be a report," Declan says. "I'm writing a report."

"Nobody asked you for a report," Sophia says.

"Jessica asked me for a report."

"I did," I say.

I get through three courses and one long conversation with a woman from the Soren delegation who asks me four questions about the recopying schedule and listens to all four answers, which is more than anyone at that end of the room did for me a year ago. Across the hall Faris eats with the total concentration of a woman who intends to leave at the first legal opportunity. Falken does a circuit. Caspian Ardent lifts his glass to me from two tables away, once, and doesn't make a production of it.

And Jon is at the faculty tables in a dark suit with his hair behaving for the first time in living memory, and he does not look at me for the entire meal.

He's very, very careful about it.

Then the tables clear from the center and the music starts.