Page 46 of Legacy Found

And I start laughing — really laughing, the kind I can't stop — and Sophia joins me, and across the room I can feel half the academy still staring at our table.

I don't turn around to check who.

Chapter eighteen

Jessica

Professor Faris opens class the way she opens everything — without warmth, without preamble.

"Today," she says. "The founding of the Great Houses."

There's a map at the front of the room. There's always been a map; I just haven't really looked at it until now. It takes up most of the wall — enormous, old, the coastlines of Europe hand-inked on paper gone amber with age, the mountains drawn in fine hatched relief, ancient wolf territories marked in colors faded soft by a couple of centuries. Faris crosses to stand beside it with a slim wooden pointer, and she begins to talk.

And that's all it takes, honestly. She doesn't need theatrics. Celeste Faris could read a supply inventory aloud and make the whole room lean in.

"Centuries ago," she says, tapping a cluster of territories, "wolf society did not exist. There were only packs. Hundreds of them — scattered, warring endlessly over territory and blood. Our kind was tearing itself apart." The pointer moves. "And then four Alpha families did what none had managed before. They united the fractured packs. They ended the wars. They wrote the first laws, convened the first courts, and founded the Council that governs us to this day. The Four Great Houses." She lets the pointer rest. "Everything you know — this academy, the Council, the order you were born into — began with them."

I'm leaning forward despite myself. It's the first history lesson here that's felt less like a lecture and more like a myth told by someone who believes every word of it.

Faris turns toward the front wall, and I notice, for the first time, what's mounted there. Three crests, carved in dark old wood, spaced above the board. Intricate. Ancient.

"Open your texts to the founding plates," Faris says.

I do — and there they are, the original four crests, reproduced in an old illustration. Three I'm beginning to recognize. And the fourth is rendered in a deep, warm burnt amber, the color of banked embers. Where its name should be printed beneath it, there's nothing. A blank. Scraped clean.

Something tugs at the back of my mind — a fitting room, a stylist saying nobody wears that shade anymore.

"Roughly three hundred years ago," Faris continues, "wolf civilization nearly destroyed itself. The Great War." She doesn't animate anything; her voice does the work, and I can see the darkness she describes. "Entire packs erased. Ancient keeps burned. Thousands dead. And at the heart of it, one of the Four Great Houses committed what history remembers only as the Great Betrayal."

Nobody moves. Nobody writes.

"The Fourth Great House fell. Only three survived." Her gaze lifts to the three carved crests, then travels, deliberately, to the empty space beside them. "Their crest was struck from history. Their name erased from these texts."

She gestures toward the tall windows, toward the mountains beyond.

"This academy," she says, "stands upon the former lands of that fallen House."

I blink. "Our academy?"

"The original keep still stands." Her eyes find me. "You know it. It is now called Lufgard Castle."

My stomach drops. The castle from orientation.

"It was the ancestral seat of the Fourth Great House. After the Great War — roughly a century later — the three surviving Houses built Luftis on the surrounding estate, some two hundred years ago, as a monument to their unity." A thin pause. "We stand, in a sense, on a grave. And on a promise never to repeat it."

And I do the quiet arithmetic nobody else in the room seems to be doing, because it's automatic for me — three surviving Houses, three crests still carved on that wall. Draeven. Soren. Ardent.

The princes' families. Luke's, and the other two. They're not just popular, not just rich. They are the living heirs of the three families that built wolf society. No wonder the whole room stands up when they walk in.

I raise my hand.

Faris acknowledges me with the smallest nod.

"What was the name of the Fourth Great House?"

The room stops.

I feel it — every pen going still, a couple of heads turning toward me like I've said something dangerous. Faris studies me for a long moment.