Chapter 71

The chamber convenes at ten on the fourth of March, and Veira walks in with no folder, no counsel, and a single sheet of paper.

Twelve Elder representatives. The convener, Solvieg, at the head. Croft at the far end with three advocates and a case file two inches thick. Sunnsdottir in the seat she has held for thirty-six years under an instruction from a man who died in 2004.

Sebastien is in the observer gallery. He does not look at her. He told her he wouldn't, because looking would be a form of intervening, and she had not thought of that and he had.

"The Assembly convenes under emergency compact-security protocol," Solvieg says. "Elder Croft holds the floor."

Croft is good.

That is the thing Veira has to sit with for fifty minutes, hands folded, while he builds it. He does not attack her. He does not once suggest she is dangerous, dishonest, or unfit. He builds, methodically, from documented history and physiological evidence and the Assembly's own records, a case that the conduit function as currently configured is a load-bearing structure resting on a single mortal woman, that it has destroyed every person it has ever rested on, that no mechanism exists to review or share it, and that the compact's failure to address this is not caution but cowardice.

He puts Morna's photograph on the record.

He does it at minute forty-one, without warning, and Veira watches nine Elders look at a woman on a beach at Cruden Bay in 1986 in a bad anorak, laughing, and she watches the room change temperature.

"That is what we are protecting," Croft says. "Not from Ms Ashcroft. For her."

He sits down.

Solvieg says: "The conduit is recognised."

Veira stands.

"I want to begin with the document Elder Croft's case rests on," she says, "because I have spent two weeks with it and he handed it to me himself, including the parts that argue against him, which is not the behaviour of a man building a trap and I would like that noted."

A murmur. Croft does not move.

"The rite is misattributed. It has been misattributed since 1604 by a Vasile archivist who read the marginalia and assigned it Kin provenance." She sets down her single page. "It is a wolf document. Twelfth-century partition contract form. Roman Vasile's decoding is filed with the convener and can be verified by any Elder with the relevant training."

She lets the room absorb it.

"It is not a rite for severing a living conduit," she says. "It is an inheritance instrument. It divides a function among named heirs at the moment of the holder's death. Every one of the five historical cases in Elder Croft's file was performed on a woman who was already dead. There is no documented instance, in four hundred years, of any Folklore body attempting this on a living person, because until three days ago nobody understood that this was a question that could be asked."

Croft's advocates are moving. Croft himself has not moved at all.

"Elder Croft's petition asks this Assembly to authorise a procedure," Veira says, "on the basis of a document that does not describe it. I could stop there. It would be enough. He knows it would be enough."

She looks down the table at him.

"I'm not going to stop there," she says.

Solvieg says, carefully: "The conduit has the floor."

"There's a second finding, made at three o'clock yesterday morning by Emre Yildiz, and I want the Assembly to understand what it means before Elder Croft's petition is dismissed on a technicality and everybody goes home believing the question is closed." She picks up the page. "The receiving clause specifies nine. It also specifies a qualifying condition, rendered of the blood, which is not a lineage marker in wolf contract law. It is a matching marker. It means the receivers must share the characteristic that created the obligation."

She looks up.

"The nine receivers must be hybrids," she says. "All of them. There has never been a period in recorded Folklore history in which nine living hybrids existed simultaneously." She puts the page down. "There are two of us in the world today. There were two in 1987. There were two in 1291."

The chamber has gone entirely silent.

"I would like the Assembly to consider," Veira says, "why that might be."