Chapter 268 The Split
POV: Callum | Rookeries and East End
The hearing adjourns without a decision, which is the Parliamentary version of a decision, the specific outcome of a proceeding that has produced information the institution needs time to process before it can render a verdict it can defend, and the adjournment gives everyone three weeks and the three weeks give the traditionalist faction time to do what traditionalist factions do when the formal process is not moving at the speed they require, which is to move outside it.
I knew the split was coming. This is not hindsight. I have been tracking the numbers for six months and the eighty wolves who identify with the traditionalist position have been organizing in ways that the Rookeries community network makes visible if you know how to read it, and I have been reading it, and the reading told me this was coming regardless of what happened in the chamber.
What I did not know is how fast it would come, which is within forty-eight hours of the hearing's adjournment, Old Gray making the declaration in the East End market square with thirty witnesses and the specific quality of someone who has been prepared for this moment for much longer than forty-eight hours.
Old Gray is a wolf of two hundred years whose actual name is Gregor MacAulay and who acquired the descriptor he goes by through the quality of his fur in the shift, which is entirely grey, an unusual coloring that in the traditional community carries specific significance that I have never fully subscribed to but which his followers read as confirmation of the wisdom he claims. He has been in the Rookeries community for four years and in that four years he has been the specific kind of member who participates in everything and who is building something in the participation that is not visible until it is complete.
What he has built is a coalition of eighty wolves who believe what he believes, which is that born wolves should lead and that the past five years of the Rookeries under my leadership have been an anomaly that the community should correct before it calcifies into precedent.
His declaration is formal and it is public and it is delivered with the specific architecture of a pack founding declaration, the old language and the old forms, which tells me he has been preparing the specific legal language for longer than the hearing has been a thing.
"True Pack," he says, in the East End market square, to the thirty witnesses and the eighty wolves who have assembled around him with the quality of people who have been waiting for this announcement. "London's True Pack, with Finn Brennan as Alpha-in-waiting, to be formally installed when he reaches majority. Until that day, the elders of True Pack govern and protect his claim."
Finn is not there. Finn is in the Rookeries, which is where Moira has kept him, and Finn's response when Cormac tells him what happened that evening has the quality that Finn's responses have had since he arrived in London, which is honest and direct and slightly outside what the adults expected.
"I don't want two packs," Finn says, to Cormac, with the seven-year-old quality of someone who has identified the problem clearly and who is baffled that the adults have not. "I want one family."
Cormac brings me this statement at nine in the evening and delivers it with the expression of a father who has heard something from his son that is both simple and exactly correct and which the situation does not currently accommodate.
The split is real. Two hundred and twenty wolves remaining in my coalition, which is a number that is functional and which is not the number that the Rookeries has operated at for the past two years and which produces specific gaps in the community infrastructure that eighty people leaving produces, the coverage for certain neighborhoods reduced, the network thinner at certain points, the specific vulnerability of a community that was the right size and is now smaller.
Old Gray's coalition has claimed East End territory, which is the territory that the traditional pack position has always been strongest in and which has therefore been the territory where the Rookeries community's presence has always been thinnest, and the claiming is not violent, it is simply the declaration of presence and the specific infrastructure of a new community beginning to establish itself in a space where the existing community did not have full coverage.
"When Finn turns sixteen," Old Gray says, in the report that Jack's network delivers to me the following morning, quoted from a private communication that his network somehow has access to, which is the specific value of forty-four years of records, "he'll formally challenge Callum. Until then, we protect his claim."
Nine years. I am being told that the split is not the crisis, the split is the nine-year preparation for the crisis, and the crisis is a sixteen-year-old boy's formal challenge and the nine years between now and it are the years in which Old Gray builds the coalition large enough to win that challenge.
I look at the numbers and I look at the territory and I look at the nine years, and I think about what the Rookeries is and what it has been and what it needs to be for nine more years in order to still be standing when Old Gray's deadline arrives.