Chapter 264 Brothers' Discussion
POV: Cormac | Rookeries operational building, private room
The private room at the back of the operational building is the room where conversations happen that the operational building is not the right setting for, which is to say it is the room where things are said that are not operational, and Callum and I have been using it for five years for exactly this purpose, the specific function of a space set aside for the conversations that the work produces and which require a different kind of attention than the work itself.
I have been in London for six hours and I have spent most of those hours being careful, which is what I do now with important things, which is different from what I did with important things for thirty-eight years before the Rookeries, and the carefulness has produced in me a quality that Moira identifies as the Cormac who thinks before he moves rather than the Cormac who moved before he thought, and I consider this an improvement of the specific kind that required significant cost to produce.
Tonight I need both qualities simultaneously, which is the specific difficulty of the situation.
"Moira and I don't want this," I say. I say it first because it is the first thing and because Callum deserves to have it be the first thing. "We have not sought this, we did not authorize this, and when I found out I came directly here. That is the full truth of where we are."
Callum looks at me from the other chair with the expression that is his current version of the expression he uses when he is receiving information and assessing it simultaneously, which is different from the earlier version in that it has more patience in it and which I take as what it is, which is evidence of five years of change on both sides of this relationship.
"The claim," I say. "This is the complication I did not fully account for when I refused Thorne's coup five years ago. The claim is Finn's. Not mine." I let that land because it needs to land before the next part. "Under pack law, a hereditary claim belongs to the heir, not the parents. I can state my opposition. I can refuse to advocate for it. I cannot withdraw it on Finn's behalf because it is not mine to withdraw. Finn is seven years old and he will not have the legal standing to renounce it himself until he reaches majority at sixteen."
Callum's expression moves in the specific way it moves when a calculation has completed and the result is not what was needed. "So Thorne's faction files the claim in Finn's name and you can't stop them regardless of what you want."
"Regardless of what either of us wants," I say.
We sit with that for a moment.
"Finn knows there's a claim," I say. "Moira told me he's been hearing it from the Scottish elders for two years. He understands it the way a seven-year-old understands it, which is that there is something called Alpha and that his grandfather had it and that some people say he should have it, and he has not yet understood that understanding it more completely requires understanding that his being Alpha would mean his uncle is not." I look at Callum. "He loves you. He knows you from the letters I have been writing about you every week since he was born. You are, in his understanding of the world, one of the most important people in it. He does not have the framework yet for what this situation actually contains."
"And the elders bringing him to London gives him that framework," Callum says. "In an environment they control."
"Yes."
The room is quiet with the quality that rooms are quiet when two people are both working on the same problem and neither of them has arrived at a solution and both of them know the other person hasn't either.
"How do we protect him from being used as a political weapon," I say, which is the question I have been working on since this morning, "while also protecting your position? Because those are two things that may not be possible simultaneously."
"I don't know yet," Callum says.
"Neither do I," I say.
There is something clarifying about two people who spent most of their lives either competing or fighting admitting simultaneously that they don't know the answer to a problem, because the admission requires a kind of trust that competition and fighting do not produce, and we are sitting in that kind of trust, which is new enough to still be noticeable when it is present.
The door opens.
The elder who comes through it is not Thorne, which I expected, but MacCorr, who has apparently made the journey from Scotland faster than I did and who has the quality of someone who anticipated that this private conversation would happen and who timed his arrival at the end of it deliberately, the specific competence of an old wolf who has been in these situations before and who knows how they move.
He looks at both of us with the flat authority of someone who has decided the conversation that was happening before he entered is finished.
"The boy must come to London," he says. "Parliament requires his presence at the hearing. It is not a request and it cannot be refused." He pauses, and the pause has the quality of someone delivering the second part of a message that is more important than the first. "Refuse and we declare you both unfit. Callum for defying Parliamentary process. Cormac for failing to produce his heir when formally required."
The room has the specific quality of a trap that has fully closed, the walls in the same positions they were before but the space between them suddenly insufficient.