Chapter 190 The Battle of Montoni
POV: Callum | Parliament steps, then the Feral Den
I do not write the speech in advance because I have learned, over three years of standing in front of crowds, that prepared speeches have the quality of prepared speeches, which is to say they land with the specific hollowness of words that were written somewhere else and carried to this place, and the crowds I have been speaking to have very good instincts about hollowness because they have been on the receiving end of it from Parliament and the Order and every institution that has claimed to speak on their behalf for decades.
So I stand on the Parliament steps at noon, with two hundred people below me and another hundred filtering in from the surrounding streets and the city behind all of them doing the city thing of continuing regardless, and I say it the way it actually is.
"Two foreign powers are fighting in Scotland over who gets to manage us," I say. "The American Confederation wants territory. The European Covenant wants authority. Both of them have decided that the chaos in London means London cannot govern itself and therefore someone else should do it." I let that land for a moment. "We fought for three years for the right to govern ourselves. We are not giving that away because two outside forces have decided our difficulty is an opportunity."
The crowd below me is not uniformly on my side and I know this. There are people in it who are afraid of the joint invasion that both sides have threatened and who would rather accept a foreign protectorate than experience another war. There are people who think the American offer is genuinely preferable to the Covenant. There are people who think the Covenant at least has historical standing in this conversation.
"I am not telling you the choice is easy," I say, because I am not. "I am telling you the choice is ours. London's supernatural community, British vampires and wolves and fae and every other community that has been inside this fight, decides who governs London. Not a military force from Montana. Not a vampire court from Geneva. Us."
What I am doing in the space behind the speech is also working on the actual plan, which is that rejecting both offers requires having something to put in their place, specifically a united British coalition of sufficient size and credibility that both sides have to negotiate rather than dictate.
I have been making calls for forty-eight hours. I have agreements from Alteroni's faction in Parliament, from three fae community leaders, from two dragon intermediaries who are operating without Vermithrax's direct authorization but who have their own interests in keeping foreign powers out of the London property market, from Fletcher's highland packs, from packless communities across six cities, and from, in the most unexpected development, four senior British vampires who are not Mordaunt's allies and who have been watching the Covenant's observer mission with the specific displeasure of people who did not want foreigners running their governance even when they disagreed with everything else.
It is not a government. It is not even an alliance in any formal sense. It is a coalition of people who have decided that the thing they do not want is the same thing, which is sometimes enough.
The crowd below me when I finish is not cheering. It is something more useful, which is the sound of people who have made a decision, the specific quality of a group that has been given a frame for something they already felt and which has become real by being said out loud.
I step back from the steps.
Jax Ironhide's message arrives that evening, direct and without intermediary: If you won't choose, we'll make the choice for you.
Vittoria's arrives twenty minutes later, in more elaborate language that arrives at the same position: London must have a protector. If London will not name one, we will name one for it.
Joint invasion. Both sides. The two forces that have been fighting each other in Scotland have managed to agree on the one thing that required them to agree, which is what to do about us.
Cormac reads both messages over my shoulder and is quiet for a long moment.
"Good," he says. "Now we know exactly what we're fighting."