Page 35 of Legacy Ascended

“Please don’t tell me the new one belongs to another prince.”

I stare at her.

“I was kidnapped, shot, and dragged up a mountain, and you’re worried I’ve taken another prince off the market?”

Someone behind her laughs. Natasha’s face tightens.

“I was only asking.”

“No. You were counting.”

“Enough,” Faris says from the front of the room. “Miss Miller, page two-forty.”

We're on the years after the war — the Council's formation, the treaty structure, the settlement of who sat where. It's the least contested part of the period, but I now know the settlement rests on an account of the war that may have been altered.

Then she asks why the arrangement needed so many written safeguards between Houses that had just fought on the same side. The room goes silent. Nobody wants to answer first.

I put my right hand up.

"Because winning together isn't the same as trusting each other. They'd just watched what a coalition could do to a House. Every one of them knew it could be done again, and there were only three of them left."

Faris considers this.

"Correct. Support it," she says. "Find me two provisions in your reading that only make sense if the parties expected each other to cheat, and be ready to name them next time."

My notebook slides when I try to write.

Declan reaches over and holds the corner flat with two fingers, and goes back to his own page.

"I'll copy mine out for you after," he says, when I look at him.

"Thank you Declan."

"I’ve got the notes from yesterday too." He doesn't look up. "I didn't know if you'd want them."

At the end Faris says, "Miss Miller," and I brace for it and wait while everyone files out of class.

"Your essay was due while you were away. We'll agree on a new deadline once you've had some rest." She snaps her folder shut. "Don't tell the others. I'm not renegotiating twenty deadlines."

Sophia is waiting at the door and marches me back to the suite after class. I sleep until late afternoon.

When I wake, my shoulder is throbbing. I lie there for a while, remembering the net dropping over me and how slowly my body responded in the van. Four darts took me down. A zip tie nearly kept me there.

I want to know how to make myself harder to take next time.

Bergström said no training and no shifting. She didn’t say I couldn’t watch.

I hear the arena before I reach the double doors—shoes striking the mats, Voss calling corrections, and someone hitting the floor hard enough to make the others laugh.

Torres is sparring with Declan near the center. Most of our class waits along the edge of the floor for their turn.

For the first time since I woke up, I’m thinking about footwork and not darts and a net.

"You can watch from the gallery," Voss says, arriving beside me. "You may not go on the floor, you may not demonstrate anything."

"Can I take notes?"

"You can take notes."