Chapter 261 The Hidden Child
POV: Moira | Scottish Highlands, outside Inverness
Five years is long enough that Scotland has become the shape of my life rather than the place I retreated to, which is a distinction that matters, the distinction between somewhere you are waiting and somewhere you are living, and I have been living here with Finn for five years in the specific way that people live somewhere they chose rather than somewhere they ended up, intentionally, with attention, building the kind of life that requires building rather than the kind that arrives fully formed.
The community here is small and old and has the quality that Scottish wolf communities have, which is the quality of people who have been in the same landscape for generations and who have developed a relationship with that landscape that is not separate from their supernatural nature but integrated with it, the hills and the specific weather and the long winters producing a specific kind of wolf and a specific kind of community that London's Rookeries has never quite resembled and which I have found, over five years, to suit me in ways I did not anticipate when I arrived.
Finn suits it too. This is the thing that has made the five years what they are rather than what I feared they would be, which is a waiting period for a child who wanted to be somewhere else. Finn at seven has the specific quality of a child who has been raised in a landscape and who is therefore of it, who knows the hills and the weather and the community's rhythms in the way that children know places they have grown up in, which is completely and without effort.
He also has Cormac's jaw and my eyes and the specific quality of something else, something that is neither of those things, which is the Alpha quality that I have been watching develop since he was five and which the community elders have been watching with the specific attention of people who recognize something they expected and who are managing their response to it.
He had his first transformation at six.
This is early. I know it is early because I have read everything available on wolf development and because the community healers told me it is early and because the community elders told me it is early in the specific way that they tell me things they consider significant, which is with the gravity of an institution delivering important information rather than a community sharing a fact.
Unusually young, which is what early means in this context, and unusually young means powerful in the way that early manifestation almost always means powerful, the ability arriving before the body that is supposed to contain it has fully developed the systems for containing it, which means it is larger than average and which means that what Finn is going to be when those systems are fully developed is something the community elders have opinions about.
Their opinions arrive in my kitchen on a Tuesday, which is the day Elder MacCorr chooses for these conversations, and they are not unkind opinions and they are not wrong opinions and they are opinions I have been hearing in various forms for two years.
"The boy should be in London," MacCorr says, which is the opening he always uses, the position stated before the case for it because the position is the point and the case is the infrastructure. "He is the rightful heir to the Brennan pack Alpha position. Keeping him here is keeping him from what he is."
Finn is outside, which he always is when MacCorr visits, not because I arrange it that way but because seven-year-olds who have been raised in hills do not spend Tuesday mornings inside when outside is available.
"Finn is seven years old," I say, which is what I always say, the position that is also the point.
"He is a born wolf who transformed at six," MacCorr says. "The blood is speaking. London will listen whether or not we send him there with your blessing."
I look out the window at Finn in the hill behind the house, at the boy who sets his jaw like Cormac and who runs like someone who has always known what his body was for, and I think about London the way I have been thinking about London for five years, which is as a thing that exists and which contains people I love and which I left because Cormac was going to get himself killed and take Finn's father with him.
Cormac did not get killed. He was married to me before a raid that he survived, and he has been writing to Finn every week for five years, and Finn knows his father's handwriting before he knew how to read it, which is the specific detail that produces the quality of ache that parenting at distance produces.
"Papa says Uncle Callum is the best Alpha London's ever had," Finn says that evening, at dinner, in the specific tone of a seven-year-old reporting information he has processed and which he considers settled. He says it while eating, which is the way he does most things, which is simultaneously. "But the elders say I should be Alpha instead."
I look at him across the table. "What do you think about that?"
"I don't know what Alpha means yet," he says. "Not really. I know what the word means. But I don't know what it feels like." He looks at me with the Cormac quality. "Why don't we live with Papa and Uncle Callum?"
The question has the quality it always has, which is the question underneath all the other questions, the one that does not have a clean answer and which deserves an honest one, and I am working out which version of the honest answer is the right version for a seven-year-old when the letter arrives.
It is from Cormac, which the handwriting tells me before I open it, and its contents tell me what the Tuesday visits from MacCorr have been building toward, the specific formal machinery of pack politics producing the outcome I have been managing around for five years.
Parliament's demanding Finn's presence. Traditionalists filed a formal claim. He must come to London for a legitimacy hearing.
I fold the letter and I look at Finn across the table, who is watching me with the seven-year-old version of the expression that is fully Cormac, which is the expression of someone who has noticed that something has shifted and who is waiting for the adult to explain what the shift means.
I do not yet know how to explain it.