Page 22 of Legacy Found

I don't get is why everyone's standing and now looking at the floor.

"Who are they?" I ask my table.

Nobody answers that one either.

Their path takes them right past us. And because they're passing, and because I was raised to be polite, I glance up as they draw level, give them a friendly little smile, and say, "Morning."

Then I take another bite of my breakfast.

The room goes wrong.

I feel it before I understand it — the silence of a held breath multiplied by three hundred. The three of them stop walking. All at once, like they hit the same invisible wall. And three pairs of eyes — blue, ice, green — turn and land on me.

The entire dining hall is watching. I can feel it on my skin, hundreds of stares converging on our table, on me, and I have absolutely no idea why.

I blink, fork halfway to my mouth.

Did I say something wrong? Morning seems safe. Do I have food on my face? I resist the urge to check. Have I broken some rule already, on day one, before I've even finished breakfast? I run back through the last ten seconds and find nothing, nothing, a girl said good morning to some classmates.

The moment stretches. And stretches. The green-eyed one tilts his head very slightly, like I'm a math problem that isn't resolving. The huge one just looks, flat and unreadable and somehow more unnerving than a glare. The blond one's jaw has actually tightened.

Then, without a word, the three of them start walking again.

And as they pass — each of them, one after another — glances back at me.

They cross to a table near the head of the hall and sit, and only then, only once they're seated, does the rest of the room slowly lower itself back down, chair by chair, like the tide going back out. Conversation resumes. But it's different now—hushed, uneasy, and spreading. Whispers, table to table, heads bending together, and more than a few of them are turned toward us. Toward me.

I set my fork down and look around at my friends, who are all studiously not meeting my eyes.

"...Seriously," I say. "What did I do?"

Nobody knows. Freya opens her mouth, closes it. Torres just shakes his head because a bell somewhere deep in the castle rings and it's time for freshman orientation.

The Great Hall makes the dining hall look modest.

It's cavernous — vaulted stone rising into dark, tiered seating filling as the entire student body files in, easily a couple hundred of us. I try to focus on the room, on the sheer weight of history in it, but I can't quite, because the whispers followed us here. I catch students two rows over glancing at our little cluster and looking quickly away. Whatever happened at breakfast, it's traveling faster than we are.

"Stop looking," Sophia mutters out of the side of her mouth.

"I'm not looking, they're looking at me."

At the front, the faculty file onto a raised stone dais, and my stomach does a small glad flip when I spot Jon among them — except it's not orientation Jon, warm and rumpled by a fire with my lizard tucked under his arm. This is Professor Jon Matthias, in a proper coat, standing straight, completely at home in front of hundreds of people. He doesn't look for me. But I feel steadier just knowing he’s up there.

Then a man steps forward to the front of the dais, and the whole hall goes quiet without being asked. He's older, silver-haired, immaculately dressed, with sharp grey eyes that seem to take in the entire room in one unhurried sweep, and he doesn't rush a single second of the silence before he speaks.

"Welcome," he says, "to Luftis Academy. I am Chancellor Falken."

His voice isn't loud. It doesn't need to be. It fills the space anyway.

"For over two hundred years, this academy has educated the leaders of our world. The men and women who have sat where you sit have gone on to become military officers. Members of the Council. Diplomats. Researchers. Physicians. Professors. The people who hold our society together and carry it forward." He lets that land. "We do not apologize for our standards. The world expects excellence of a Luftis graduate, because excellence is exactly what a Luftis graduate has delivered."

I find myself sitting up a little straighter. It's a good speech. It's the kind of speech that makes you want to be worth it.

"Some of you," Falken continues, "arrived here carrying names that mean a great deal in the outside world. Old families. Powerful packs. Reputations built over generations." His gaze moves, slow, across the tiers, and I'd swear it pauses — just for a breath — on that table near the front where three particular young men are sitting. "Understand me clearly. Your family name may have opened the gate."

A pause.

"It will not earn you a single Merit Mark."