A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “And what does the stranger want? What does he want in Jamaica?”

  “I watch him every night, and I still don’t know,” she said. “But whatever it is, it involves the spellbinding. He whispers to them every night, and every night he pushes himself a little deeper into their minds—always through the spellbinding.”

  “On Saint-Domingue he broke the spellbinding entirely—or at least he helped to.”

  “I think he won’t make that mistake again.” She wasn’t even quite sure what she meant by that, except that the strength and scale of the rebellion that had followed had not been the stranger’s goal. He had wanted chaos for one night, for whatever reason. He hadn’t wanted their freedom. He hadn’t thought them capable of achieving it. Everything that had happened since had been outside his control, and though he had found a way to work with Toussaint, Fina could feel that he didn’t like it.

  “Is there a way you can help me have words with the stranger?” Toussaint asked abruptly.

  Since Toussaint had knocked on the door, she had been waiting for a request. He never came just to talk. But this was very different from anything she’d expected. Her heart froze, and a chill ran down her back. She contemplated it, mostly to give herself time to absorb her own feelings.

  “He doesn’t even know I’m there,” she said at last. “I tried speaking to him a long time ago, but he never heard.”

  “Could you try again?”

  “It would be very dangerous for both of us. He’ll know I exist. He might start to look for me—at the very least, he’ll be far more careful about what I can see. And you—he underestimates you now. Saint-Domingue is an important colony to France, but he’s more interested in the conflict in Europe. If you push him too far, then you’ll be a threat to him.”

  “I know that very well. It’s why, so far, I haven’t. But if it came to it?”

  “Perhaps.” She had spoken once before and not been heard, but that was a long time ago. She was older now, and stronger. It was only, quite simply, that it scared her. Not only for herself—she had grown used to being in danger a long time ago. She was scared for Jamaica, and for Saint-Domingue, whose freedom by now meant as much to her as her own. It had come so far, and yet it had so much further to go. “If it comes to it, I could talk to him.”

  He nodded, very slowly. Even for Fina, it was impossible to tell what was working behind his eyes. In that moment, she was scared for him as well.

  Across the ocean, under the drizzly night sky at the seaport of Trieste, a young French officer stood on the deck of a frigate. He was a small man, though not as small as his enemies would come to pretend later, and his face at this stage of his life had a lean, hungry quality that made him look smaller still. And yet he stood as though he took up all the space in the world. His shoulders were relaxed, his feet firmly planted on the deck. His eyes, the same dark blue-gray of the nighttime sea, were fixed on the horizon. They would have been mesmerizing even had there been no real mesmerism involved, but in fact there was, of a sort. He hummed with low-level magic, like a divining rod in the presence of water; it trickled from him gentle but persistent as the rain. His name had once been Napoleone di Buonaparte, but lately he had become known by the more French-sounding Napoléon Bonaparte.

  In truth, Napoléon was less confident at that exact moment than he had been since leaving France. He had felt awkward and out of place in Paris. In many ways, it had been like being back in school: he spoke French fluently now, but still the city’s inhabitants seemed to have a language that he didn’t understand, a language of flirtation and magic and manners. The only power and position he had came from the patronage of others, who saw his military skill and thought they could manipulate his ambition, and those patrons were the only reason he had been tolerated at all. His recent marriage to brilliant, beautiful Joséphine de Beauharnais had been his only triumph, and he still couldn’t quite understand why she had agreed to it. Perhaps she had seen a potential in him that the rest of Paris hadn’t. Perhaps she had thought he would be easy to manipulate as well.

  In Italy things had changed, as he had known they would. He had grown into respect as soon as his feet had touched Italian soil. Here were the languages he spoke fluently: not only Italian, though that certainly didn’t hurt, but tactics, strategy, invasion. France’s victory was in no small part down to him, and everyone of any importance knew it.

  This was different. This, if he succeeded, would be a victory of magic, not of military prowess. And just as he knew he was no socialite, he knew he was no magician.

  Under the British registration system, Napoléon would have been classified a weak mesmer. As it happened, the Templar Order in France had a more specific term for the precise pitch of his mesmeric abilities, which was magicien animale. (The English, when they bothered to translate this term at all, usually did so slightly derisively, as “animancer.”) This did not mean that his magic was confined exclusively to influence over animal minds: many with his ability had trained to become quite adept at manipulating the thoughts of human beings. Mesmerizing animals, however, was a very delicate business: too much and they would be useless, too little and they would defy it. It required a very delicate application of magic, and one that fit an animancer’s level of power perfectly.

  Napoléon had little interest in breaking in horses or taming dogs, though he was fond enough of both creatures, and none at all in the weak amount of power his magic would grant him over human beings. He rarely used his Inheritance at all, even these days, when magic was rife on the battlefield. He wasn’t at all convinced he should be doing so now. He was at a crucial point in his career. He had been both brilliant and successful. All eyes were on him, waiting for him to make a mistake, gauging his use to them. This was not the time to rely on the weakest of his considerable skills.

  It was his friend who had persuaded him, as Napoléon had slept last night on his camp bed in the hills. It had been the first time Napoléon had closed his eyes to his childhood home since arriving in Italy, but his mysterious ally was never far away. He felt the whisper of him in his head at odd moments, on a rain-soaked battlefield or a war-torn night. Once or twice that whisper had crystallized into words—a soft look out or three miles west—that directed his attention to things he couldn’t have otherwise seen. The voice was always right, and always helpful, and he had learned to trust its information. (Not its intent, of course. Napoléon knew better than to trust anyone who wanted too eagerly to help him.) And so he was trusting it now, against all his other instincts.

  It was a calm night. The wind barely stirred the limp sails overhead. The sailors and troops alike stood on deck, feet shifting nervously on the wooden planks. They hadn’t been told why they were there, but rumors had spread like mage-fire throughout the fleet that the young general Napoléon Bonaparte meant to summon a kraken from the depths. These rumors were, for once, completely accurate.

  It’s here, the voice whispered in his head. It sounded strained, as it often did when his friend spoke outside his dreams. Most wouldn’t notice, perhaps, but Napoléon was used to seeing men push their magic to the brink of where it was supposed to go. He recognized the sound and noted it for another time.

  Napoléon couldn’t question his friend without speaking aloud, so he didn’t. He simply stretched out his own magic, as far and wide and deep as it would go, and called, the way he would to a dog or a horse. He thought he felt, just for a moment, the quiver of the mind that his friend had felt. It was cold and alien and strange, and his blood unexpectedly thrilled at the touch.

  “Come here,” he said aloud. He might have said it in French, or in Corsican. At that moment, he was beyond language.

  The kraken came.

  At their largest, kraken could reach the approximate size and mass of Westminster Abbey; this one, a younger one from the warm Italian shallows, was closer to the size of their own frigate. But that was, after all, still the size of a frigate. The enormous expanse of green knobbled hide sp
lit the water like a great wall. Waves surged under the ship, and the men cried out as the deck heaved and the masts creaked. Napoléon made no sound, even as the water sluiced over the railings and doused his head and coat. He looked straight at the giant head of the monster, unblinking, his eyes burning with mesmeric fire. Its own eye, black under a ridge of brow, looked back. He recognized the thrill now. He had felt it before. It was the thrill of power.

  “From now on,” Napoléon said, “you are ours.”

  He spoke in French this time. The statement was for the benefit of his men, not for the kraken. It already knew.

  In the gray light of early morning, four British ships rounded the coast of Spain. They were armed for war, but primarily they were intended to carry men and supplies to the beleaguered forces on the coast. Since the British fleet had defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent two months before, Britain held sway over the seas. The captain of the Domitian was expecting an easy voyage, with calm seas and the enemy firmly tucked away at home.

  Which was why, when he was shaken awake shortly after the first bell of the morning watch by an apologetic midshipman, he was less than pleased.

  There was already a small crowd growing on deck by the time the captain emerged. He did so ungraciously, stamping his cold feet in his boots and yawning pointedly.

  “Well?” he grumbled.

  “Sorry, Captain,” the first lieutenant said. He was old for his position, with a sun-browned, bony face and a perpetual worried knot between his eyes. “But there’s something you should see.”

  “Something,” the captain repeated, not without sarcasm. “A French something? A Spanish something?”

  “Something very odd, Captain,” the first lieutenant said, and the note in his voice was enough to wake the captain the rest of the way. It was almost fear, and though the captain did not always agree with his first lieutenant and his perpetual worry, he knew he was not given to fear.

  The captain looked over the starboard side, where those of the crew awake and alert were gathering. The sea lapped against the hull below, black in the darkness. At first, the captain could see nothing amiss, and was about to say so. But he looked again, and this time he saw.

  Bubbles. They broke the surface—one by one at first, delicate, like the froth of a glass of champagne, but even as he watched they came faster and faster. The ocean began to swirl, to cloud, to dot the black surface with white foam. The captain stared. So far, he was more puzzled than alarmed, but the fear that had been in his lieutenant’s eyes ran a chill finger down his back.

  On a calm night, in cold, quiet waters, the seas were boiling.

  It was never clear what order he could have given. There were no magicians assigned to his vessel, though there were a few, perhaps, among the soldiers still sound asleep in the ship’s hold. And certainly nothing other than magic could shift the seas. But as it happened, he never had the chance to give any order at all.

  One moment, the sea was boiling. The next, it was writhing with what his eyes took at first to be giant vines but were in fact tentacles, green tentacles, impossibly strong and corded like knotted rope. They enfolded the ship in a terrible embrace. The first lieutenant was struck and killed instantly by a mass of flesh the size of a tree trunk; the captain was crushed as the mizzenmast shattered under the impact and fell to the deck. He survived just long enough to watch in horror as a giant scaled head rose from the depths. Teeth glistened like wet bone. An enormous eye glinted black.

  A kraken. They had taken ships before, but never at anyone’s command, not in living memory. And this one was all too clearly under French control. Its long limbs entwined the British ship, pulling them beneath the waves in a splintering of wood, its teeth cracking through mast and prow.

  The next ship was already turning about, the alarms sounding the beat to quarters and men pouring up on deck. It would not be enough.

  England

  Spring 1797

  It was a cool, rainy night in London, and the enemy was visiting the dreams of William Pitt the Younger.

  This wasn’t unusual over the last few years. Perhaps the flood of new magic in the world had broken down some barrier between them; perhaps the enemy no longer felt the need to conceal his presence. Perhaps, without Robespierre, the enemy was simply lonely. Either way, the visits were nothing so defined as their parley on the night of Toussaint’s storm. It was often difficult for Pitt to detect the moment when his dreams shifted into something darker and his memories stirred to the surface like silt from the bottom of a riverbed. The memories were never recent, and they were never fully formed: just glimpses from the eternal summer of his childhood, before his magic had awakened. He and his brothers and sisters explored fields at the family estate or read endless books by flickering firelight. Friendly, generous little James, who had died at sea; Harriot and Hester, lively and clever and kind, who had each died bringing their children into the world; John, whom he had so recently had to dismiss as Lord of the Admiralty as the country headed into a war of magic but who here was young and full of potential. Their ghosts might even have been comforting, if it hadn’t been for the shadow-presence hanging over them. Sometimes he forced it back; too often his past was laid open for the other to read.

  That night, the figure who explored his dreams was more solid. He peeked through slivers of light as Pitt’s brothers and sisters climbed trees to look for birds’ nests on a summer evening. Once or twice he was real enough to speak, and be spoken to in turn.

  “What do you want?” Pitt asked.

  “The same thing as you,” the enemy said. “Always.” He looked around the woods with something between scorn and interest. “You had such a gentle childhood, didn’t you? The occasional grief, the odd touch of fear. But no cruelty, no malice, no terror. I don’t think in all your life anybody has ever done anything to you. No wonder you don’t understand anger.”

  “I do understand it.”

  “You think you do. And perhaps you will, someday. But not yet.”

  He woke with a start in the early hours of the morning. The predawn light filtered through the windows and colored the walls the dark sepia of burnt parchment. At first he assumed the dreams had stirred him awake. Then he heard the low, familiar buzz that heralded a message from the daemon-stone.

  The jet-black stone was set on his bedside table now. As long as he was within the walls of Downing Street, it moved with him from room to room—he had grown so used to the cold touch of its magic that he could almost imagine it was just part of the house. When he took it up, though, there was no mistaking the presence of the shadow within it. He knew it well enough to recognize not only its chill but also its shiver of malicious pleasure as it spilled into his mind, and he knew before the words took shape that it carried very bad news.

  It did.

  The message came from the new First Lord of the Admiralty in Portsmouth. Three British ships had been lost off the coast of Spain, and the fourth had escaped to bear terrible reports of flashing teeth and writhing tentacles. For the first time in hundreds of years, a kraken had been summoned and bound.

  This was bad enough. Worse was the reaction of the sailors currently anchored off Spithead. News of the kraken had reached them before it had reached the officers. Immediately, a young man had jumped onto the rigging of his ship and proclaimed, in loud and colorful terms, what he felt about the politicians and admirals who would put them against such a thing with no pay and appalling conditions. His crew responded. So did others. One by one, almost every ship in port agreed that they would not set sail until their demands had been met.

  The Royal Navy had mutinied.

  The mutiny, Pitt discovered when Spencer arrived at Downing Street late that night, was a well-behaved yet very stubborn one. Nobody had been shot; nobody had been thrown overboard; the ships were safe at Spithead. And yet they were not going to set sail.

  The new Lord of the Admiralty, George Spencer, was no more a sailor than John Pitt had been,
but he was a strong water-mage, which among most sailors was accepted as almost as good—the mutineers would be likely to trust him to negotiate their terms. More important, he was a clever, clearheaded man with an extensive book collection and a reputation for fair dealing, all of which Pitt respected and approved. Dundas and Grenville, the Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, respectively, were welcome as well, both as friends and as voices of reason. Pitt was less pleased, and unpleasantly surprised, when Master Templar Anton Forester arrived.

  “The king asked that I be present,” Forester said. As usual, his eyes were sharp and alert. Given the lateness of the hour, it seemed impolite at best. “As King’s Magician, he thought my perspective would be valuable. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “No, of course not,” Pitt said, because he could say nothing else. It didn’t matter if he minded or not, and Forester knew it.

  He knew why Forester was there. The fact that Britain was without a navy was no real business of the Knights Templar; Forester didn’t really care about the possibility of a French invasion. He cared about the threat of revolt. It was always there these days, lurking beneath the surface, occasionally breaking through. It was the reason habeas corpus had been suspended for the last four years; it was the reason government censorship ran rife and arrests for illegal magic were higher than they had been in recorded history. Pitt didn’t consider himself inclined to paranoia—if anything, he was usually considered too slow to believe the worst. But the French Revolution had given magical revolt a nightmare face, and now it was too easy to see glimpses of it everywhere, and increasingly hard to quiet the voice that whispered that this, this time, really might be it.

  Spencer did his best to allay those fears, with one eye on Forester—he might have been more candid without the court magician in the room. But even Spencer had to admit that there was more at stake than the fact that the navy had not had a pay increase in a hundred years.