Page 36 of Legacy Found

Then he sobers. "For now — don't worry about it. Truly. Go to your classes, earn your marks, live your life. But observe. Pay attention to what you feel and what you don't." He holds my eyes, and his voice drops. "And if you notice anything unusual — anything you can't explain, anything strange happening to you — I want you to tell me. Immediately. Not a friend, not a classmate. Me."

There's a weight to it that I don't fully understand, and I almost ask — almost push, because that's who I am — but Pickles chooses that exact moment to make a break for freedom off my lap, and I lunge to catch him, and the moment breaks.

"I promise," I say, wrestling my escaping lizard back into two hands. "Anything weird, you're the first to know. You're clearly the person for weird — you built a reptile a palace."

"I maintain that was self-defense," Jon says, standing to help me corral the tiny fugitive back toward his enclosure. "He looked at me. You've seen how he looks at people."

"Judgmentally."

"Devastatingly."

And I'm laughing again, both of us bent over an escaped lizard in the firelight, and I think — right up until I catch him going still and careful again the second our hands nearly touch on the enclosure latch, and stepping back just a fraction too fast — that I could get used to a professor who takes my questions seriously and spoils my lizard rotten.

I file that one away too. There's a lot to file, lately.

Chapter fifteen

Jessica

On the first morning of the new semester, we all file into History of the Wolf Kingdoms. It is held in the coldest room at Luftis, and I don't think it's an accident.

Everything about it is severe — high windows that let in light but no warmth, chairs lined up in rows so straight they look measured, a slate board wiped so clean it gleams. There's none of the worn, lived-in comfort of Jon's lecture hall. This room wants you sitting up straight before you've even sat down.

"I have a bad feeling about this one," I murmur to Renzo as we file in.

"You have a bad feeling about anywhere without snacks," he whispers back, but he's sitting up straighter too.

Professor Faris enters exactly on the hour, and the whole room stills without being told to. She's elegant — dark hair swept back without a strand out of place, a tailored coat, posture like she's never once slouched in her life. She doesn't smile. She doesn't say good morning. She sets a single folder on the desk, squares it precisely to the edge, and looks out at us like she's assessing livestock.

"In this classroom," she says, and her voice is quiet, cool, and carries to every corner without effort, "you will speak only when called upon. You will hold your questions until the end of the session. You will not interrupt me, one another, or the material." A pause. "Order is not a preference here. It is the point. The wolves who built the kingdoms we will study did not do so through enthusiasm. They did it through discipline."

Oh, I think, this is going to be a delight.

And then someone slips in behind her, a beat late, and settles into the front row with the ease of someone who's allowed to be late, and my stomach drops.

It's the blonde. From the dining hall. The one who blocked my path and told me to keep my eyes down and my mouth shut — and she turns, catches me looking, and her mouth curls into a slow, satisfied smirk.

"...You have got to be kidding me," I mutter, before I can stop myself.

The room is quiet enough that it carries.

"Is there something amusing, Miss Miller?" Professor Faris doesn't even look up from her folder.

"No, Professor," I say, pleasantly.

The blonde's smile widens like she's just been handed a gift.

It doesn't take long to understand why she's so at home here. Twenty minutes in, Faris calls on her — "Natasha" — and Natasha answers a question about the Third Accord smoothly, confidently, clearly having read ahead, and Professor Faris does something I haven't seen her do once: she almost smiles. Just a flicker of warmth, there and gone, aimed at the front row.

"Correct," Faris says, and moves on.

A boy near me leans to his friend and whispers, "Of course she knows it. Professor Faris is her mother."

And everything clicks into place at once — the dining hall, the hostility, the you don't deserve to look at them, the way Natasha carries herself, like rules don’t apply to her.

Well, I think. That explains a lot.

It explains more than a lot, actually, because a few minutes later Faris makes a point of it. She's talking about how the kingdoms declined — "not through invasion, but through dilution, through the slow erosion of standards, through the fatal belief that everyone deserves a seat at a table they did not earn" — and her cool gaze drifts, just for a moment, across the scholarship students clustered in our row. It lands on me last.