Page 87 of Legacy Ascended

He sits in the chair by the window.

"Read me the notification."

"You've read it."

"Read it to me."

So I read him the four lines. He listens with his hands on his knees.

"It's well drafted," he says.

"Thank you."

"That's not a compliment. It's well drafted because you knew exactly what you were doing when you drafted it, which removes every argument I might have made about you being young and in love."

"Yes."

"Do you know what the record says?"

"I know what it says better than the man who wrote it did. He was a clerk keeping a ledger of where paper came from. He didn't know he was establishing anything."

"Say it out loud."

"It establishes that the assessment against House Luftemilen reached House Soren through an Ardent office." I keep my voice level, because this is the part where precision matters most. "It does not establish that House Ardent produced it. It does not establish that anybody at that office knew what they were forwarding. It establishes a route and nothing else."

"And you believe she'll present it that way."

"I've watched her do it for a year. She corrects people who overstate things in her favor. It irritates them."

"It won't irritate them this time," my father says. "It will be in a chamber with the Ardent bench two seats from ours, and the first person to read that paper aloud will not put your careful sentence after it. They'll read the route and they'll stop."

That is true and I don't answer it, because he hasn't finished, and because he is right about that.

He tells what I already know.

He doesn't raise his voice and he doesn't make a speech. He goes through it methodically.

Somebody cut a footbridge in the Preserve from underneath so that a class would take a different track, and on that track Corvin was shot in the leg. Cassel took two rounds in a road and is learning to breathe again in a hospital. Kavek is dead.

"Every person on that list," he says, "was standing near her."

"I'm aware."

I don't tell him about the drawer.

"House Soren has people under its protection who are not paid to be," he says. "Cooks. Two archivists. A woman who has kept my correspondence for thirty years and who has a daughter at this academy." He turns his hand over once. "When a House takes a position, those people are inside the position with it. They don't get to be personally supportive and institutionally neutral. They're simply in it."

"I'm not asking the House to take a position. That's the whole purpose of the notification."

"Evren." For the first time there's something under it. "You are the heir of this House, you are publicly bonded to her, and you are handing her a document with our ledger stamp on it. There is no version of that which is personal. You could sign it in your own blood and add a paragraph explaining that you act alone. It will be reported as House Soren produces evidence against House Ardent, and it will be reported that way by people who are not lying."

"Then the House should say otherwise. Loudly. I'll help draft it."

"You are not listening."

"I am listening. I've listened to all of it and none of it is about whether the record is accurate."

"No," my father says. "It isn't."