Chapter 244 The Fight - The Ruined Gamester
POV: Cormac | Rookeries, war preparation
The silver weapons are laid out on the table in the specific order that preparation requires, which is the order of access, the things you reach for first at the front and the things you reach for when the first options are gone at the back, and I have been laying them out with the attention of someone who has done this before and who knows that the quality of preparation is the quality of what comes after it.
I am thinking about what I have gambled and what I have lost.
This is not new thinking. It is the thinking I have been doing since the Rookeries in the first year, since the specific moment when the accumulated cost of the choices I had been making became visible in a way I could not manage my way around, and it is the thinking that produced the past two years of different choices, but it has a quality tonight that it does not always have, which is the quality of arriving at an accounting, the final addition of a long column of numbers that produces a single result.
I gambled power and lost it. The Alpha position, the Brennan estate's authority, the political standing that my father built and that I inherited and that I spent on the specific project of maintaining it against my brother, who was not trying to take it from me but whom I had decided was a threat to it because deciding he was a threat was easier than understanding why I needed it so badly. I bet everything I had on keeping the thing that was supposed to make me someone, and I lost it in a trial that I engineered and which came apart because the thing I was trying to suppress was true.
I gambled my family and lost it. Moira left with Finn in the car twenty minutes ago and the version of that separation that I built through three years of being the wrong person is different from the version that is happening now, but the earlier version is the reason the later version had to happen, the reason Finn spent the first year of his life without me present in it, the reason Moira had to rebuild her trust in me from nothing across two years of different choices before she was willing to marry me in an eleven-minute ceremony two days before an invasion.
I gambled my brother and nearly lost him. This is the one that sits heaviest because Callum did not do anything to earn it and because what I did to him was specific and premeditated and because he rebuilt the relationship anyway, which is not something he owed me and which he did regardless, and the weight of that is not one I will finish processing in this lifetime.
I am a ruined gamester in the specific sense that the things I bet on were wrong and I lost them completely, and I am also a ruined gamester in the other sense, the Reynolds sense, which is that the losing produced something that the winning would not have produced, which is the understanding of what the right bets are and the willingness to make them.
The right bets are Finn and Moira and Callum and the hybrid children in the shelter and Lucia in her chamber and the fifteen children who came out of Fell's facility last night and the fifty-nine supernatural prisoners who arrived at the Rookeries from the detention center and who are being absorbed into the community with the specific efficiency of a community that has been absorbing people for three years and which has gotten good at it.
The right bet is London not being governed by foreign powers.
I pick up the primary silver weapon, which is a blade rather than a gun because I fight better with a blade and because fighting the way you fight best is the first rule of surviving, and I hold it with the specific quality of someone who has been in enough fights to know what holding a weapon before a fight feels like, and I think about Finn's jaw and Moira through the rear window and the eleven-minute ceremony.
Callum is at the other end of the preparation table and he looks up at me with the expression he uses when he is assessing how I am rather than what I am doing, which is a distinction he has always made and which I have always been aware of him making and which means more now than it did before because I understand now what it means to have someone who makes it.
"Whatever happens today," I say, and I say it to the table and to the weapons and to the three years and to everything that should have been different and which produced this, "know I'm sorry. For everything." I look at him. "You were always the better man."
Callum looks at me for a moment with the expression that has several things in it and which settles on the one that means he is receiving something and placing it where it belongs.
"You became a good man," he says. "That matters more than which one of us was better."
I pick up the blade. The invasion is at the borders. We have four hours until dawn.