Page 8 of Legacy Ascended

“My people brought you here. Not all the hired men came back with them.”

That catches.

“How many did?”

“Two.”

“And where are they now?”

“Secured.”

That could mean anything in a place where a locked bedroom apparently qualifies as home.

“Then answer something else. Weeks before you took me, somebody cut a footbridge in the Preserve, so that my class would take the other track. There were men waiting on the other track. The officer who had my detail before Cassel is still on crutches.”

“That was not us.”

“You just told me you hired strangers with guns and nets. You don’t know what those men did before you paid them.”

Frances is quiet for longer than he’s been about anything else this morning.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“Would you have hired them if you’d known?”

“If somebody had already tried to take you, I would have waited, and I would have found out who, and what for, before I put my own people on a road.” He looks at his hands. “I’ll ask the two we have. I’ll tell you what they say.”

“Five people died,” I say.

Pain moves across his face before he can stop it.

“Four of the hired men and one of ours. I knew him from childhood. I sent him onto that road, and they came at you with a net and darts. Their deaths belong to the order I gave, not to you.”

“I’m sorry they’re dead.” I mean it, which only makes me angrier. “That doesn’t make me sorry I fought back.”

“I’m not asking you to be.”

Frances reaches inside his coat and removes a small bundle wrapped in faded cloth. He opens it on the table.

A heavy gold ring rests in the center. The band has worn smooth and thin along one edge, and a piece of dark amber is set into each shoulder. The face bears the same crest carved above the courtyard arch: a broad-headed wolf standing over four mountains.

Frances pushes it toward me.

“It belonged to your family. We kept it for you.”

I pick it up and turn it between my fingers. It’s heavier than it looks, old and beautiful and carefully preserved.

None of that makes it mine.

“This proves you have an old ring.”

“It carries the Luftemilen crest.” Frances gathers the empty cloth in his hands. “The records will have to establish the rest.”

“What records?”

“Every family in this valley descends from a household that served Luftemilen. Guards, stewards, healers, cooks. They preserved letters, ledgers, family names, and testimony from the people who survived.”

“Then bring them to me.”