A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “Your home, I take it,” a voice came.

  Napoleone turned sharply. Only then did he see the man standing beside the door. A tall man, slim, his face half in shadow. His light, clear voice must have spoken in Corsican, for Napoleone had no need to translate it in his head, but there was something odd about it. The sounds altered before they reached Napoleone’s ears, or perhaps they never touched his ears at all.

  “It’s very pleasant,” the man added. His eyes flickered over the room. “I had a home like this once. From my room I could always hear the sea.”

  Napoleone gathered every ounce of his fourteen-year-old self-possession. “Where are we?” he demanded. “I’m not at home, I know. And who are you?”

  “You’re quite right, you’re not at home,” the man said. “You’re still in France, safe in your bed. This is just the inside of your head, with a little of mine thrown in for makeweight. As to who I am—well. Let’s just say I’m a friend of yours. Perhaps.”

  “I don’t have friends in France.”

  “No.” It might have been a question, or a statement. “Why not?”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders and squared his chin. His eyes were suspiciously hot, as they never were in daylight. His childhood home was too close about him; it tugged the homesickness buried like a shard of glass deep in his heart. “I’m Corsican. I’m smaller than some of them. I don’t speak French well enough. My parents aren’t wealthy and they opposed French control. I’m barely an Aristocrat. One of those, or all of them, I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m not afraid of them.”

  “Do you want them to be afraid of you?”

  “I don’t care what they think of me.” It wasn’t true, and he suspected the man knew that. He wanted them to respect him. “I’m in France to learn.”

  “To learn what?”

  “Anything I can to become a soldier. History. Mathematics. Tactics. Magic.”

  “You’re good at tactics,” the man said. “I’ve watched you at your games in the schoolyard. Your fellow students respect you then, if that comforts you. You’re not terribly strong in magic, though. I can feel mesmerism flickering in your blood, but only weakly. There’s very little you can do with it.”

  “I don’t need to do anything with it. The theory is interesting enough. And besides, other people’s magic is stronger. I want to learn about it before I command men in battle. There are ways it can be used, even with the Concord.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to use your own?”

  “For what?” He considered his own question without giving the stranger a chance to answer. His eyes were dry again. “It’s a good pitch for animals. I suppose I could calm a frightened horse, or summon a dog with a message across a field. Tiny things like that can turn a battle at times.”

  “What about on your men?”

  He laughed. “I won’t need mesmerism to command my men. That’s what being a commander means.”

  The stranger smiled too. For just an instant, his face came out of the shadows.

  “How would you like to command more than men?” he asked. “Not today, of course. But someday.”

  “It would depend.” Napoleone knew better than to put any faith in words. People said all kinds of things, all the time. Besides, he wasn’t convinced this wasn’t all a dream. But somehow, perhaps because the dream was so strange, he felt a cautious thrill. “It would depend on whom I would command, and at what cost.”

  “It’s early days yet,” the stranger said. “It might come to nothing. But there’s a threat brewing over the ocean, and I might need someone to become the leader of France.”

  “I’m a Corsican,” Napoleone said. “I hate France.”

  His new friend nodded. “Excellent. I think you might do very nicely.”

  When Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined eleven years later, Napoleone di Buonaparte was serving with the Revolutionary Army on a fact-finding mission to Genoa. He returned to Nice, only to be immediately seized as a Robespierrist sympathizer. It was his younger brother Lucien who had the strongest connections to the Robespierres, in fact—and not to Maximilien, but to his brother Augustin. His captors didn’t care. France had been a nest of informers and mutual suspicion for years; the events of 9 Thermidor had cracked it open once again, and anyone could be devoured. Napoleone was imprisoned in Fort Carré, in a room that was cold despite the sunshine outside and bare. They clamped a bracelet around his wrist that burned white-hot at the slightest flicker of magic. His mesmerism, indeed, was capable of no more than a slight flicker and could never have been used for escape. They didn’t care about that either.

  Napoleone understood the Revolution’s machinations clearly, and he knew that he would certainly die. It should have frightened him, but between the royalists and his fellow revolutionaries he had been living on the point of death for a long time. He was only filled with frustrated rage that he was to die in such a stupid, passive way, before he had ever had a chance to shine in the world. He paced the cell, bringing his boots down on the hard floor with a satisfying yet impotent stamp. The cold reminded him of the dormitory at Brienne-le-Château, something that he had not thought about for many years, and that annoyed him too. At last he fell into a thin, discontented sleep, sitting on the camp bed with his back against the wall.

  He was standing in his childhood home. The sun was high in the sky, and the light spilled across the floor. It hit the back of the man standing in the doorway and threw his face into silhouette.

  “Napoleone di Buonaparte,” the man said. “Do you remember me?”

  “Yes,” Napoleone said. He kept his voice controlled, but his face was alight with wonder. “Yes, I do. You visited me once as a child. You told me you were my friend. I thought you were a dream.”

  “I am a dream,” his friend conceded. “So are you, at the moment. But we’re not only that.”

  “I never thought you’d come back.”

  “I wondered myself. I’ve visited others like you, you know. Many others, over the centuries, but the time has never quite been right. It seems this is the time, and you are the one.” He straightened, and the shadows altered on his face. “Come, then. We have great work to do, and great destinies to unfold.”

  “I’ve been arrested as a Robespierrist,” Napoleone said. “The order’s been given for my execution.”

  “Never mind that,” his friend said. “It’s time.”

  PART ONE

  SHADOWS

  London

  In the winter of 1779, two children were born on the banks of the Thames, in the shadow of the Tower of London. Their names were Catherine and Christopher Dove, and they were of no importance at all, except to each other.

  The twins shared the same dirty-blond hair, the same round pink faces. When they were little, nobody could tell them apart, except that Kate was a little stockier, and their eyes were different colors. Christopher’s were dark, and grew darker still with every passing year, while Kate’s were the bright, hard blue of the waves under a blazing sun.

  There were many waves where they grew up, but not a lot of sun. They lived by the docks, in a small shack in the mud, and their father worked on one of the small boats that ferried goods to and from the big ships in the Great Pool. It was precarious work—at the busiest times, the ships were packed so tightly it was possible to cross the Thames from one deck to another. Their mother and their grandmother took in mending, and when the tide went out, Christopher and Kate would scour the banks for trinkets and bits of scrap metal to sell to bring in extra money. They were usually cold, and often hungry, but that was true of most people they knew. The other sort of people, the people they watched from the gutters as their carriages swept by on their way to shops and gentlemen’s clubs and Parliament, didn’t matter. They passed within yards of their shack at times, and yet they seemed so far away as to be practically imaginary. Kate and Christopher, if they bothered to look at the ladies and gentlemen at all, looked at them for only one reason—to see if they could
spot the glint of a silver bracelet beneath their sleeves. If they didn’t see one, it could mean one of two things: that they were wealthy Commoners with no magical Inheritances at all, or that they were Aristocrats, and they were allowed to use their magic. Then they stopped and nudged each other to look. When they escaped to their hidden space beneath the old wharves, with its smell of old weed and rust, it was the only time the privileged ever entered their conversation.

  “I think that one with the eyeglass was a shadowmancer,” Christopher would say. He picked up a stone and threw it into the brown water. “I felt something stir when he looked at me. I bet he has a staff of shadow-servants. I wouldn’t, if I was in his place. I’d only call shadows, not bind them. I’d only want to see them.”

  Kate said nothing, only twisted the metal round and round on her own wrist where it glowed faintly warm. The waves were calling her own magic, and it had heated in response.

  That was the other difference between Christopher and Kate, the one that nobody could see. They had both been identified as magicians at birth; they both wore the bracelets that would heat if their magic stirred and scream to the Knights Templar if it broke its bonds. But the magic in their veins was very different. Christopher was a shadowmancer, or would have been. Even without the use of his gifts, he was attuned to things beyond the world, to shifts and stories and dark dreams. It didn’t make him grim or solemn—he was light and playful and mercurial, laughing often, more like a sunbeam than a shadow himself. But he was sensitive, for all that, as though missing a layer of skin between himself and the world.

  Kate was a weather-mage. She loved the seas and the storms, the blazing sun and the burning stars. As soon as she could walk, she wanted to be outside helping at the docks through frost and rain and wind, climbing onto the roof of their shack to watch the sunsets, wading into the Thames at low tide just for the excuse to feel the lap of the waves. It all wore her hard and tough, like tanned leather. She could work long and hard and sensibly, but her heart and her magic were as wild as the winds off the water.

  She didn’t like to talk about what she would do with her magic if she were an Aristocrat and not a Commoner. It hurt too much to think about things that would never happen.

  They were nine when the king went mad for the first time. It would have mattered very little to them, except that the day the Prince of Wales first called for a regency was the day that Christopher collapsed screaming on the bare-earth floor of their house. Kate was chopping carrots for her mother to put in the stew for supper; she dropped the knife at once and ran to catch her brother. His dark eyes had glazed, and the bracelet burned hot at his wrist. Around him, insubstantial shadow-forms twisted like smoke.

  He wasn’t the only one. Across the country, shadowmancers had lost control of their minds or their magic. Some were taken at once to Bethlem Hospital, or arrested for illegal magic by the Knights Templar. Although no newspaper would confirm it, the whispers were that a man in Manchester had died.

  It seemed for a long time as though Christopher might die as well, or worse. It was a cold black winter, the kind that Kate loved, but she barely went outside. As much as she could, she stayed by the fire at Christopher’s side. Their parents, hoping against hope not to lose their son, left her alone. He never spoke or seemed to know she was there. It was no matter. She held his hand as tight as the bracelet that encircled his wrist, and didn’t let go. She laid her free hand to his bracelet as often as she laid it to his forehead, to check for the rising heat of both. The metal burned as he poured sweat, and his pale skin flushed pink beneath it, but it stayed silent. The darkness about his bed remained unformed, a whisper and not a shadow.

  “Come on, Christopher,” she urged. “Keep it back. You have to keep it back or they’ll take you away.”

  Commoner magicians who unleashed their magic were sent to the Tower, even children, even if they didn’t mean it. She would never see Christopher again.

  She thought that in the grip of his darkness, he heard her and knew that. Because he fought his magic, with all his strength. And one day, four long months after he had first fallen ill, his eyes opened and fixed on her for the first time.

  “Christopher?” she whispered, and her heart, which had been suspended between beats for so long, leaped as he gave her a weak smile.

  “I think so,” he said huskily. His eyes flickered closed then, and she stayed with him as he finally slept.

  After France executed their own mage-king, the year Kate and Christopher turned twelve, and England went to war, everyone at the docks said the king’s affliction had been to do with dark magic in France. When Robespierre began to raise an army of the dead at the guillotine, they were sure of it. They said the first undead had in fact been awakened even then, and the king had not been mad at all, but reacting to an attack on England itself. The creation of the undead had stopped with Robespierre’s death, and no new necromancer had appeared to take his place. Perhaps he truly had been the last. But the army still roamed Europe under French command, and as long as England remained under attack from dark magic, the king’s sanity remained under threat.

  Kate knew it wasn’t as simple as that. England was under threat, everyone knew that, but it wasn’t that alone that troubled the king’s magic. Christopher was not tied to England’s borders, and yet his magic, too, was poisoned. During the day he would stop still for no reason, as though catching sight or sound of someone in a crowd, and his hands would curl into fists. When she touched him, he would come back to himself and laugh off her concern. But at night he would wake crying out, and she would hold him tightly as he curled into her, shivering, as though still a child. He couldn’t explain what was happening, but they both knew.

  It was the shadows. Something was wrong with the shadows.

  “It isn’t that they’re damaged,” Christopher said one night after dark. Their parents were asleep in the next bed, and Christopher was tired enough to be willing to speak of bad things. “It’s more like they know something. They’re waiting for something to happen. A chance for revenge.”

  “Revenge?” Kate asked. “What have we done?”

  “Not against us.” He took her hand in the dark and gave it a squeeze, though his fingers were too cold to be comforting. “Not me, and definitely not you. They want revenge against the magicians that have bound them. The ones that summon them and make them into servants and daemon-stones and possessed teapots. They think they’re going to be able to avenge themselves against them.”

  Neither of them said anything beyond that. But a few years later, when the news came down to the docks that the king and Parliament had broken the Concord that forbade magic from being practiced on the battlefield, the Concord that had kept Europe safe from dark magic and chaos for centuries, Kate somehow wasn’t surprised. And looking across at Christopher, she knew that he wasn’t either.

  In the spring of 1796, the House of Commoners felt cold and unfriendly as William Wilberforce crossed the floor. Perhaps it was the magic of the walls, already vibrating faintly in anticipation; perhaps it was his own anticipation of the bill under discussion; perhaps it was simply that the war had turned politics to poison so often lately and this looked to be no exception. It was a dark, windswept afternoon, and the voices of the spectators in the gallery above mingled with the whistle of the gusts outside. It gave the House the breathless, excited air of a Roman arena.

  “Have you talked to Pitt about this bill?” Thornton said to Wilberforce as the two of them took their seats together.

  “No,” Wilberforce said. It came out a little more shortly than he had intended. “I haven’t had opportunity to mention it.”

  “Are you and Pitt still not speaking to each other?” Thornton asked, somewhere between amusement and concern. Thornton’s support had been Wilberforce’s greatest comfort when it had come to opposing the war three years ago, although he knew his comfort should come from his own conscience. He thought, however, that Thornton did not quite understand how m
uch Pitt had been hurt by it. It was not his cousin’s fault: even people who knew Pitt quite well tended to think he was invulnerable.

  “We speak,” Wilberforce said, with a faint sigh. “We spoke last month at Eliot’s dinner, actually: Eliot is doing his utmost to ensure we’re forced to do so as often as possible. We just don’t talk in the way we used to. I think we’re each trying very hard to be kind.”

  “In Pitt’s case, kindness can be a very hard surface to find yourself rebounding against.”

  “I’ve seen it in action against other people. I’ve never come up against it myself before. I don’t suppose you know how to break it?”

  “Nobody does,” Thornton said. “Least of all Pitt. You might just have to wait until time dissolves it for you.”

  “That could be a long wait.” Wilberforce looked across the House to where Pitt was taking his seat next to Rose and Dundas, and felt a flash of irritation mingled with pain. It wasn’t, after all, as though they had become bitter enemies. The breaking of the Concord had been a disagreement over a political point—a bitter and public disagreement, admittedly, and their first in many long years of friendship, but a difference of opinion, not of principle. They both wanted the country safe and at peace. There was no anger on Wilberforce’s side, and he was almost certain there was none on Pitt’s either, though many of Pitt’s government were delighting in the opportunity to refuse to speak to Wilberforce. There was only distance, cold and painful, and nothing seemed able to bridge it.