Chapter 288 Finn's Training
POV: Finn | East End, True Pack training grounds, then private
My schedule has a structure I understand better now than when it started. It's the structure of someone being prepared for something rather than just being educated like regular kids are. The understanding came gradually, from the inside, not because anyone told me directly. That's how most important understandings arrive.
Mornings are school—the ordinary kind that Papa and Moira insisted on. It's at a school in the East End with human children who don't know what I am. It's the specific ordinary part of a schedule that's not otherwise ordinary. School is my favorite part because there, I'm just a seven-year-old who's good at reading and has strong opinions about lunch. My supernatural nature isn't something I have to manage there.
Afternoons are combat training, which started three months ago at my request. It has exactly the quality I expected it to have—the quality of something my body understands more than my mind does. The training movements feel correct before I can explain why they feel correct. I've been told this is the specific quality born wolves have in combat training, and I understand it means something about what I am rather than what I've learned.
Evenings are political lessons—the ones I understand least but know are the most important. There's this gap between knowing the words and knowing what they mean in practice, and the evening lessons are trying to close that gap. It's closing more slowly than Papa's patience with it requires.
Papa teaches the political lessons himself. That choice tells me he considers them more important than combat training, which he delegates to the trainer. The political lessons have a different quality from the other parts of the schedule—the quality of someone teaching something they know the full weight of and managing how much of that weight to transfer to a seven-year-old.
Today's lesson is about pack law, which led to the question I've been holding for a week. I've decided I'm going to ask today because holding it for another week gives me this feeling of carrying something that needs to be put down.
"Do I have to challenge Uncle Callum?" I ask. I say it when the formal lesson part is done, when we're in that transition between lesson and dinner—the time when the most honest conversations happen because the lesson's structure has ended but dinner's hasn't started yet. "Can't we both be Alphas?"
Papa looks at me with that expression he has when I've asked a question he doesn't have a clean answer to, when he's working out how to answer honestly.
"Pack law says one Alpha," he says. "When you're sixteen, you choose. That's what the treaty says."
"I choose not to fight him," I say. I've been thinking about this for the full week I've been holding the question, and the thinking has produced clarity rather than uncertainty—the specific quality of a decision that's made rather than one being approached. "He's my family. I don't want to fight family."
Papa is quiet in that way he is when he's deciding how to be honest about something complicated. The quality of someone who has learned that the honest version is better than the managed version and is finding the right words for the honest version of this.
"You might change your mind," he says. "When you're sixteen, you'll understand things you don't understand now. About pack, about leadership, about what it means to be what you are. We'll see."
"You said that in Parliament," I say. "When people asked you things. You said we'll see."
"I say it when I mean it," he says. "I mean it now."
I think about this. I think about the seven years between now and the challenge and what seven years contains and whether seven years is enough time to change a mind that's currently clear. I think the thinking itself is the answer—it might be, and I don't know yet, and that's what "we'll see" means.
Old Gray finds me after dinner in the courtyard, which is where I go when the day has been full enough that I need the specific quality of being outside. Old Gray has the specific quality of someone who's been waiting for the right moment and has identified this moment as the right one.
He sits beside me on the courtyard wall with that two-hundred-year quality I've come to recognize in him—the weight of someone who's been in the world for a very long time and has formed very specific views about what the world requires.
"Your uncle is a good wolf," he says, with the flat quality of someone acknowledging something they consider accurate but incomplete. "There's no argument to be made about his character or his leadership in the specific sense of his daily management of his community."
He pauses in that way he does when the second part of something is more important than the first and he wants the first to have settled before the second arrives.
"But born wolves are meant to lead," he says. "Remember that."
I look at the East End sky above the courtyard and think about Uncle Callum and the treaty and Lucia in the shelter and the Manchester children and the lesson on pack law and what "born wolves are meant to lead" means when you're seven years old and the person you'd be leading against is your family.
I don't say anything to Old Gray.
I'm seven. I have nine years.