Page 138 of Legacy Ascended

She looks at me.

"Because they've already made this mistake once without asking us."

There's a silence in which the radiator knocks twice.

"Okay," I say.

Her eyebrows move about a millimeter.

"Okay?"

"You came a long way and you brought evidence and you've been sitting in an office since half past eight." I pull out the chair across from her and sit down in it. "So show me."

"The evidence isn't why I came."

"Then why did you?"

"To stop you from filing for restoration."

I don't say anything. Neither does Jon. Falken sets his pen down very quietly on the table, the way you put a glass down when you don't want to interrupt something.

"I haven't filed anything," I say.

"You're going to. The Council put the name back in the record, and then you walked into their hall in our colors in front of two hundred people. Of course your next step is Great House restoration." She isn't sneering when she says it. If anything she says our colors the way you'd say a street you grew up on. "I got here as fast as three buses and a train would take me."

"Why does it matter to you whether I file?"

"Because if House Luftemilen is restored," she says, "it can't be restored to you."

Falken says, "Miss Rask—"

"Miss Miller's descent is established. I'm not here to argue with a Council." She doesn't raise her voice at all. "I know what she is. I watched the footage of the clearing the same as everyone else, and I'm not going to stand in a room and pretend a direwolf isn't a direwolf."

"Then—"

"The form ran in the ruling line." Kari Rask puts her hand flat on the folders she has carried across however many countries to put in front of me. "It doesn't decide the succession. It never did. Our law was written down, and it wasn't written down by anybody in this building, and the child everybody's been tracing for two hundred and seventy-five years was not the senior claim."

The room has gone quiet.

"Your Council asked Professor Hess whether I existed. She said she'd established one line. She was careful — she didn't say there was only one, because she couldn't, and she wouldn't." A pause. "My family isn't in any record she could have found, because we came off the western road, and officially there was no western road."

"She never claimed to have counted them," I say.

"She didn't."

"And nobody in that room asked her to."

"No." Kari Rask looks at me steadily across the table. "I read the minutes the morning they went out. I've been on buses since."

She takes her hand off the folders and puts it back on the wooden box.

"You are not the heir to House Luftemilen," she says.

"I am."