Chapter 267 A Child's Testimony
POV: Finn | Parliament chamber, witness position
The Parliament chamber is the largest indoor space I have been in and it has the specific quality of places that were built to make the people inside them feel small, which is a thing I have been reading about in history books and which I now understand not as a description but as a physical experience, the ceiling very far above and the seats arranged in a shape that puts the person at the center of it in the specific position of being looked at from all directions simultaneously.
I am at the center of it.
There are twelve vampires in the elevated arc above me and they are all very old in the way that very old things are old, which is not the way that grandparents are old but the way that the hills behind our house in Scotland are old, the quality of something that has been in its position for so long that it has become part of the landscape rather than a thing moving through it, and the twelve of them looking at me produces a quality in my chest that I am identifying as scared, which is accurate and which I am managing the way I manage things that I am not sure how to manage, which is by continuing to breathe correctly.
Papa and Uncle Callum are in the gallery on my left and I am not looking at them because looking at them produces a different quality in my chest that is adjacent to scared but which is different from it, which is the quality of wanting to be somewhere else and not being able to be somewhere else, and looking at them makes that quality stronger rather than weaker.
The vampire who is speaking to me has introduced herself as Isolde and she has the specific quality of someone who is being careful with me in a way that is genuine rather than performed, the care of a person who has thought about what this experience is like for a seven-year-old and who is trying to reduce the parts of it that are unnecessarily difficult.
"Finn," she says. "I'm going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer them as honestly as you can. There are no wrong answers. The only thing we want from you is what you actually think. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I say.
"Do you want to be Alpha?"
I think about this. I have been thinking about Alpha for the past week in London, thinking about it differently than I thought about it in Scotland, because in Scotland it was a word and in London it is a thing, the specific difference between hearing about something and being in the place where the thing exists.
"I want to be like Papa and Uncle Callum," I say. "They're both strong. But in different ways. Papa's strong because he changed and kept changing and that was hard. Uncle Callum's strong because he kept going when things were hard and didn't stop." I consider this. "I want to be both kinds of strong. I don't know yet which one Alpha means."
The chamber is quiet in the way it was not quiet before I started speaking.
Isolde looks at me with an expression I cannot fully read, which is the expression of someone who received something they were not certain they would receive, and she asks the second question.
"Who should lead the pack?"
I look at Uncle Callum in the gallery and he is looking back at me with the expression that produced the adjacent-to-scared quality and which I understand now, looking at it, is the expression of someone who is very carefully not asking me anything.
I look back at Isolde.
"Uncle Callum," I say. "Papa says he earned it. Papa says earning things matters more than being born to them." I pause because there is something else I want to say and I am working out if it belongs in this room. "Papa earned things too. He earned being a good father and a good Beta and a good husband and he earned being someone Uncle Callum trusts again. Papa says those things are worth more than being Alpha. I believe him."
The chamber is very quiet now in the specific way that large spaces are quiet when the thing that was expected to happen has not happened and the thing that happened instead is still being processed.
The traditionalist elder on the right side of the elevated arc, who has a name I was not told and who has the quality of someone who came to this chamber to receive a particular outcome and who is now receiving a different one, speaks with the specific controlled quality of someone managing fury without performing it.
"The child doesn't understand his birthright," he says. He says it to the chamber rather than to me, which is the specific move of a person who has decided to proceed as if I have not said what I said. "We'll speak for him until he's of age."
I look at him. I am seven years old and I have been carefully managing the adjacent-to-scared quality for twenty minutes and I am very tired of the careful managing, and I look at the elder with the expression that is, apparently, very Cormac, because I see Mama in the gallery put her hand over her mouth when I produce it.
I do not say anything else. I have said what I came to say and the rest of it is not mine to manage.