Chapter 262 The Succession Question
POV: Alteroni | Crimson Parliament, emergency session
The session has been called with forty-eight hours' notice, which is the minimum Parliamentary procedure allows for emergency sessions and which is the minimum the traditionalist faction was willing to accept, which tells me they have been planning this for longer than forty-eight hours and that the urgency is performed rather than actual, the performance of urgency being a Parliamentary technique for limiting the time available to the opposing faction to organize its response.
I have been managing my response for six months, which is how long I have known this session was coming, because the traditionalist faction's preparation has not been as invisible as they believed it was, and because I have had the past five years to build the specific infrastructure of information that makes their preparations visible to me, which is the infrastructure that Tom's network produced before Tom died and which Jack has been maintaining since.
The chamber is full, which is unusual for a morning session and which reflects the specific quality of a session that the community understands to be significant, the seats occupied by all twelve current Parliament members and the observers from the Covenant embassy in Mayfair and the community representatives from the Rookeries and the packless wolf communities and the fae elder who attends sessions that she considers worth attending, which is a specific assessment that I have learned to weight accordingly.
The argument for the traditionalist position is delivered by Lord Cassel, which is the specific choice that tells me the faction has been strategic about their selection, because Cassel is not Ravenscroft, who carries Mordaunt's association, and is not one of the newer traditionalist members, whose youth makes the argument about ancient tradition difficult to deliver convincingly. Cassel is four hundred years old and his record before the blackmail release was mixed rather than catastrophically corrupt, which means he survived the release with his position intact and which makes him the credible face for a position that requires credibility.
"Traditional law is clear," Cassel says. He says it with the specific quality of a person who believes the thing they are saying rather than performing belief in it, which is what I expected and which makes the argument harder rather than easier to counter. "The firstborn son of a former Alpha holds hereditary claim to the position. Cormac Brennan served as Alpha for six months. His son Finn Brennan is the firstborn son and pureblood heir. The claim is not a political position. It is biological and legal fact under the laws this Parliament has upheld for three centuries."
"Combat victory determines leadership," I say, when Cassel has finished and when the floor is mine. "Callum Brennan defeated the previous Alpha in direct challenge and has led the London pack for five years with outcomes that the community's own records document. The traditional law Cassel cites was written for succession in the absence of challenge, not as a mechanism to reverse the outcome of one." I look at the chamber. "If combat victory can be undone by hereditary claim five years after the fact, then no leadership is stable and no community is secure, because every former Alpha's descendants become potential claimants in perpetuity."
Ravenscroft, from the middle seats: "Unless the wolf who won was turned, not born. Turned wolves adopting Alpha positions is itself the anomaly traditional law was designed to prevent."
"Traditional law was written when turned wolves were rare," I say. "The community it governs has changed significantly since it was written. Law that cannot adapt to the community it governs is not law. It is archaeology."
The argument continues for three hours in the specific way that Parliamentary arguments continue when the positions are fixed and the purpose is not persuasion but the production of a record that the vote can be said to have come from, and at the end of three hours the record has been produced and the vote is called.
Seven to five. Traditionalists winning. The vote to force the legitimacy hearing passes.
Callum Brennan, Alpha of London's largest pack, summoned to Parliament to defend his legitimacy against a seven-year-old child's hereditary claim, which is what the vote produces and which is what the traditionalist faction has been building toward and which is the specific use of Parliament as a tool that I have been watching this faction develop for five years.
I send the message to Callum through Jack's network immediately after the session closes, which is before the official Parliamentary notification would reach him, because the six-hour gap between my message and the official one is six hours he can use to think rather than react.
The message says: Summoned to Parliament. Defend legitimacy or forfeit Alpha position to Cormac's heir. Vote seven to five. I'm sorry.