Chapter 174 The Adieux
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, then Rookeries dockside
I watch Moira pack from the doorway of the small room she has been using since the raid, and I do not go inside because she has not invited me and she is the kind of person who means things she does not say out loud.
Finn is on the floor behind her, sitting upright the way he has recently learned to do without toppling sideways, which he is enormously proud of, and he is examining a wooden spoon with the focused intensity of someone who has decided the spoon is the most important object in the world. He is eighteen months old. He has Cormac's jaw and Moira's eyes and he will not remember any of this, which is either a mercy or a different kind of cruelty depending on how you think about it.
Cormac is not here yet. He knows Moira is leaving. He has known since last night and he has spent the intervening hours being very deliberately busy, which is what Cormac does when something is happening that he cannot fix by fighting it.
"He'll be here," I say.
Moira folds a small jacket and places it in the bag without looking up. "I know he will."
"You don't have to go."
She stops then and looks at me with the expression she has always had, the one that means she has already had this argument with herself and finished it before I started. "He went into that facility alone," she says. "Without telling anyone. Without a plan. He nearly died, Callum. Finn nearly grew up without a father because Cormac decided to handle something himself."
"He was trying to protect people."
"He was trying to protect people the way he always does, which is by making himself the person who takes the damage." She closes the bag. "I'm not angry at him. I understand him. But Finn is not going to watch his father die and I'm not going to watch Finn watch it."
I don't have anything to say to that, because she is not wrong.
Cormac arrives twenty minutes later. He is clean and has made the specific effort that means he understood this moment was coming and wanted to meet it without looking like he had been awake all night, which he clearly has been. He goes straight to Finn and picks him up and holds him in the way he holds him when he thinks no one is watching, which is differently from any other way I have ever seen Cormac hold anything.
Finn grabs his ear. Cormac laughs, short and real.
The three of them exist in the room together for a few minutes and I move back into the corridor because this is not mine to witness.
I hear Cormac's voice, low and steady, telling Finn something. I cannot make out the words and I do not try to.
When Cormac comes out he is carrying himself the way he carries himself after bad raids, the careful controlled posture of someone managing something large by keeping very still around it.
"She's right," he says.
"I know."
"I'm not going to argue with her."
"I know that too."
He looks at the wall across from us for a moment. "If something happens to me," he says, "Finn is yours. You and Isla. Promise me."
The weight of it lands squarely and I don't try to deflect it. "I promise. He'll know he's loved. Both sides of where he comes from."
Cormac nods once, the nod of someone who needed to hear it said out loud even if he already believed it.
Moira comes out with the bag and Finn on her hip. She stops in front of Cormac and the two of them look at each other with the specific quality of people who have already said everything important and are now just standing in the aftermath of it.
"Prove you've changed," she says. It is not harsh. It is the most honest thing she could offer him, laid out plainly without softening. "Survive this war. Then I'll bring him back."
Cormac reaches out and touches Finn's hair once, very briefly, then steps back.
We walk them to the dock. The morning is grey and cold and the river smells of industry and old things and the boat that will take them north is already waiting.
I watch my brother watch his son leave on a boat, and I do not say anything, because there is nothing to say that the situation has not already said for itself.