Chapter 189 The Battle of Piacere
POV: Callum | London, receiving reports
The battle is in Scotland and I am watching it through Tom's network, which means I am watching it through a sequence of messages arriving at twenty-minute intervals from contacts positioned at enough remove from the actual fighting to be safe and close enough to it to be useful.
The first message says: American forces moving south from Aberdeen. Covenant legion engaged at border. Ironhide leading from the front.
The second says: Vittoria's forces holding the pass. Exchange of casualties on both sides. Neither advancing.
The third says: This has been going on for six hours. Neither side is winning. Both sides are bleeding.
I am sitting at a table in the Feral Den with Cormac and Tom and three representatives of the British supernatural community, specifically the ones who are not currently fighting each other over dragon scrip, and we are all reading the same messages and arriving at the same conclusion at different speeds.
The American packs want a foothold on this side of the water. The European Covenant wants authority over British supernatural governance. Both of them want London to stop being a problem they have to manage from a distance. The battle in Scotland is not about Scotland, it is about which foreign power arrives in London in a position of authority and which one has to negotiate from second place.
We are the reason they are fighting. We are not at the table.
"They're using Scottish neutral territory as a proxy field," Tom says. "Scottish supernatural community is watching two foreign armies fight on their land over an issue that is technically ours."
"The Scottish community has sent three formal objections to both parties," says one of the representatives, a man named Fletcher who coordinates between the highland packs and the London networks and who has been more agitated over the past week than I have ever seen him, which is saying something because Fletcher runs at a permanent low-grade agitation. "Both parties acknowledged receipt and continued fighting."
Cormac has been reading the messages with the expression he has when he is building a strategy, which is quiet and focused and slightly distant. "They're fighting over us like we're property," he says. It comes out flat, not angry exactly, but with the specific quality of anger that has been processed into clarity.
The fourth message arrives at the six-hour mark: Stalemate. Both sides withdrawing to defensive positions. No territory taken. Significant casualties. Diplomatic representatives from both sides reaching out to London contacts.
The fifth message, thirty minutes later: Ironhide requesting meeting. Vittoria requesting meeting. Both insisting on response before dawn.
I put the messages down and look at the room.
Both sides are asking us to choose. Both sides have been fighting over the right to make that choice for us. And both sides have now reached the point where the fighting has not resolved it, and the thing that was supposed to force our hand has instead produced a stalemate that returns the actual decision back to us.
"Both sides are turning to London," Tom says. "Join us or be conquered. That's the message."
I look at Cormac. Cormac looks at me.
"Neither," I say.