A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  The Speaker nodded his thanks at the fire-mage. “Can we have calm, please?” he said, and the few remaining voices died to a mutter. “Mr. Larrington has been taken ill. It is regrettable, but not the first time such a thing has happened in the House of Commoners. Until the walls resolve, I think we’d best adjourn for the night.”

  There was scattered applause from the gallery, though it was difficult to see whom it was for. Maybe it was for poor Larrington, who had provided a very good evening’s entertainment.

  The vote to include abolition in the peace treaty was taken at the beginning of the next session, but it was a lost battle. All their carefully made arguments had been forgotten; all anybody remembered about the debate was Larrington’s white face, his rolling eyes, and the unearthly scream of the walls. It was said that abolition was cursed. Larrington still lay in a waking dream.

  “If that was the enemy—” Wilberforce had the chance to say to Pitt, in an undertone, as the two of them left the chambers.

  “It may not be,” Pitt replied, a little too quickly.

  “But if it is,” Wilberforce pressed, “and Larrington was attacked by him in some way, then his influence is far more widespread than we thought. Your fears that the enemy was gaining his information from you might be unfounded.”

  “I hope not,” Pitt said grimly. “I far preferred them to the idea that he can read the minds of others across Britain. Though Larrington’s influence wouldn’t explain the breaches at government level, of course.” He paused. “I doubt Larrington would agree to talk to me. But you tend to gain access to places you shouldn’t.”

  “I’m friendly to people, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Do you think you could talk to him, just in case?”

  “He might not be lucid for a while. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  The scream of the walls lingered in Wilberforce’s mind. It wakened the parts of him that shivered at the presence of a shadow, and it cast a pall over the Treaty of Amiens. When peace was celebrated in the streets, he couldn’t bring himself to do the same.

  The peace celebrations were loud and joyous at the wharves and in the mud-strewn side streets of the Thames. Kate watched them and tried to be joyous too.

  She was joyous, in some ways—she couldn’t not be. Her ship had docked at Spithead a week earlier, and she had been relieved of her emergency commission and sent on her way. The war was over. She, more than most there, knew what that meant. No more fighting. No more fear. No more soldiers coming back dead or broken or not at all. But there was a cold kernel of dread in her stomach she couldn’t dissolve.

  “Cheer up,” Dorothea said to Kate from her side. She nodded at Kate’s still-bare wrist, which Kate had been rubbing without being aware of it. “If it’s your magic that worries you, I doubt they’ll lock you into another bracelet. The Forester bracelets were only meant to last the war, and now it’s over there’s talk of doing away with bracelets altogether.”

  “They’ll never make magic free here,” Kate said bitterly. “They’re too afraid.”

  “I never said they would. But they’re talking about doing away with bracelets, all the same. There was someone doing a speech at the market yesterday. Saying the bracelets were barbaric and the Knights Templar had too much power. The Templars brought it on themselves, if you ask me.” There was a clear note of satisfaction in her voice. “Once they put the new bracelets on, there was nobody for them to arrest. They’ve been useless these past few years except for testing and braceleting, and the testing misses people anyway. So now people are saying, if we don’t test, and just arrest people for illegal magic as the need comes up, we won’t need them at all.”

  Kate absorbed this quietly. “But magic would still be illegal for Commoners?”

  “Well, of course,” Dorothea said. “You didn’t expect that to change, did you?”

  She shook her head and managed a smile as Dorothea gave her a reassuring hug and rushed off to speak to somebody else. She hadn’t expected it to change in England. But it had changed on ships and on the battlefields. She had stood on swaying decks and stirred the wind; she had guided ships through salt spray and storm surges and the thick of battle thousands of miles from home. And now she was back at home—sunbrowned and weathered, with a lifetime of stories inside her, but powerless once again. The war of magic was over, and magicians were no longer needed. That was what she couldn’t forget. The end of the war was the end of all her hopes.

  “Great, isn’t it?” she heard, and Danny Foster came bounding over and spun her around to face him. His face, flushed pink with ale and celebration, crumpled in concern when he saw hers. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  Kate hadn’t realized she was crying until he mentioned it; she shook her head, irritable, and wiped her eyes with her scratchy sleeve. “Nothing. Leave me be, Danny. I’m happy.”

  “You are,” he agreed. “But you’re not just that. You’ve got that look Christopher used to get when he was in a mood. I know your looks because I used to see them on him.”

  She could barely remember the looks on Christopher’s face, and she didn’t know which one Danny meant now. It squeezed her heart painfully. She would never face the kraken for him now.

  “What’re you going to do now?” Danny asked. “Are you staying on here?”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go, do I?” She heard her own words and tried to soften them. “I suppose I’ll go back to work with Dorothea. Now there’s no more war.”

  “Are you sorry for that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, in a burst of frustration that wasn’t directed at him. She fished her handkerchief out of her sleeve. “I’m glad the war’s over, and I’m sorry because now things are going back to how they were, and I’m sad for Christopher all over again. It’s all mixed up. I’m feeling something strong, but I can’t tell you what it is.”

  “Like when you take a bite of something too hot,” he said knowingly, or thoughtfully. “And you can feel the heat, but you can’t tell the flavor.”

  She laughed through her tears. “More like when you know a storm’s building,” she said. “And then you wake up and it’s just flat skies and calm seas, and you’re relieved about that, but you’re disappointed too.”

  “I like calm seas,” he said. “But I think I know what you mean. Like you were braced against something, and now it’s gone you’re just going to fall over.”

  She smiled and blew her nose. He didn’t understand at all, but that was oddly comforting. Christopher would have understood too well, and they would have made each other miserable.

  Danny grinned back. Perhaps he saw something soften in her face, or perhaps he was just carried away on the wave of the moment. Either way, slow, plodding Danny Foster, who had never done anything impulsive in his life, suddenly grabbed her hands in his own.

  “Marry me now,” he said. “Go on. You’re not going to be a battle-mage anymore. It’s over. That’s not a bad thing, is it? We can be happy.”

  She shook her head, but in confusion and not refusal. The rush of feelings, her own and Danny’s and the crowd’s, had washed all her defenses away. “I don’t know.”

  “If it’s about our children, if they’re born magicians, I don’t mind,” he said. His dark eyes were steady, and she realized, as if from a distance, that his face wasn’t unformed anymore. The last few years had hardened and sculpted it, and if it was still a little soft, it was terribly kind. Kind, and filled with hope. “I’d like it. Who knows, maybe you’re right about what you used to say. Maybe things will change now, and they’ll get to use magic one day. And if things go the other way, like some people are saying, I’d never let anyone hurt them. Or you either. You wouldn’t get half the rubbish you get now if you were married to a boring old Commoner like me.”

  “It isn’t that,” she said weakly.

  “Then what?” His face fell a little. “It’s just me, then. You can’t feel that way abou
t me.”

  It wasn’t that. She didn’t feel that way about him, it was true, but many of her married friends didn’t feel that way about their husbands. He was a good man who cared for her, and that was enough. She’d never been romantic, not about men or about women. She had never expected anything more from marriage than partnership. And she didn’t want to be an unmarried washerwoman all her life.

  It was just that somehow, in all the rage and upheavals of the last few years, she’d come to expect something more than marriage. She’d been out in the storm, wild and free, and she found that not only was she disappointed in calm seas; she didn’t trust the thought of them. There were all kinds of storms, after all.

  In the end, it was the hope that broke her. His face was so filled with it, so glowing, when she had nothing left to hope for at all.

  “All right,” she said, and found his smile was so delighted it was easy to answer with her own. “I’ll marry you, Danny.”

  She wasn’t expecting him to draw her close and kiss her, and she wasn’t expecting the tiny flutter her stomach gave in response. She kissed him back, trying to give him all the fury and the flight that she felt when storms stirred the magic in her blood, and willed herself to be content with calm seas as long as they could last.

  Saint-Domingue

  January 1802

  By the New Year, their plans were all in place.

  Fina and Dessalines were to lead a division of Toussaint’s army to Jamaica and rendezvous with the maroons by darkness. There would be weather-mages among them to cover their arrival with fog and to cloud the skies to ensure no moonlight betrayed them. They would attack the nearest plantations and hold them for a day and a night until their slaves were freed of their enchantment. Then they could move to take the next batch of plantations, and the next. Their forces would grow with every soul freed. With any luck, the Jamaican rebellion would soon be large enough to need no support at all. It would be a living thing, as the French Revolution had been, and it would be too strong to kill.

  Fina’s plantation would be one of the first freed. When she visited it at night now, the whispers of the stranger playing through the air, her eyes searching the sleeping bodies for the faces she knew, she told herself this.

  You’ll be free soon. She didn’t dare tell them out loud, now that the stranger had heard her once. But she promised, silently, the way she once would have told herself a story in the dark to get her through to the dawn. I see you. I’m coming back for you.

  It was why she had left them to start with—the promise that one day she would come back. At the end of winter, Toussaint had told her, she would keep that promise. Every day she watched the skies, impatient for the first signs of spring. With every humid day or unfurling leaf, she thrilled with hope.

  I’m coming, she said in her mind, in her heart. I’m coming with the warmer sun. Wait for me.

  And then, as the year turned, a French fleet was sighted off the coast of Saint-Domingue.

  From what they could ascertain, the fleet was upwards of fifty great ships—half of France’s navy. Fina rode to the point where the ships had been glimpsed a few miles off the shore, and cast her magic out to see what she could ascertain about their intentions, but she found the soldiers aboard hard to read.

  “Their commander is nervous about something,” she told Toussaint. “Something he’s carrying, perhaps. But whatever it is, he won’t look at it or think of it. It’s almost as though he knows I’m here. And the men—there’s something wrong with them. Those ships are built to hold tens of thousands. I can glimpse at least twenty thousand sailors. But I can find only a few thousand fighting men.”

  “Perhaps they don’t mean to fight us.” Toussaint shook his head, as though in disagreement with himself. “They mean something. It looks as though half of France is coming here.”

  “Toussaint…” Fina paused until Toussaint turned to look at her. “Your sons are on board.”

  It was rare for Toussaint to show surprise. Now his eyes widened and his face stilled. “Are they hostages?” he asked at last.

  “They don’t think so. They feel safe in their own heads. Nobody was guarding them or restricting them. Perhaps Bonaparte has sent them to negotiate on his behalf.”

  “Perhaps he has.” Toussaint smiled very slightly. “You know, there was a time when you wouldn’t have bothered to lie to me.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” she said. “I was just—”

  “Oh, I know. I understand perfectly. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered to lie to myself either. We both had less to lose.”

  He never said anything more than that; neither of them mentioned the stranger. When the rumors began to spread like wildfire across the country—the French had come to destroy them, they were holding Toussaint’s sons captive—he quashed them firmly. Why would the French want to do any such thing? he demanded. When the colony was flourishing in France’s name, when its people had shown them nothing but loyalty, when Bonaparte, on taking the throne, had assured them that he had no intention of reinstating slavery in Saint-Domingue? When Bonaparte himself had agreed to Toussaint holding control of the colony he had won, as long as he did it in France’s name?

  Fina knew better. Toussaint did too, she was certain. He was pretending otherwise only because he had no choice in the matter. With his magic gone, he could no longer muster the winds to keep the French fleet from their shores. He allowed them to come in peace, because otherwise they would come in war, and expose his own weakness at a stroke. And in the meantime, quietly and discreetly, he began to increase his forces. The Jamaican campaign was put on hold. His most loyal commanders were deployed about the country, and those in coastal towns were ordered not to allow any warships to enter the ports.

  “I am a soldier,” he said. “If I must die, I will die as an honorable soldier who has nothing to fear.”

  Fina hated it when he said things like that. It sounded as though he was already preparing his own epitaph.

  Some said afterward that Toussaint was there when the first ships arrived at Le Cap. In fact he wasn’t, not quite. Fina was at the Ennery plantation when the word came from an advance runner that she was to choose five of the soldiers stationed there she could trust and ride out immediately to meet him on the road. He had been on the far side of the island, in what had until recently been Spanish San Domingo. It was a slow, hazy day, the kind when the sunbaked air was a tangible thing that anchored her to her body, and if she kept her attention fixed on the sky and the rustling fields, it was almost possible to believe there had never been any war. And yet when the summons came, she knew she had been waiting for it. It had been a stolen afternoon, that was all. Now the evening had come.

  Toussaint rode at the head of his forces. She couldn’t count them in the dusk, but she recognized a number of his strongest battle-mages at their head.

  “The French are making their first landing,” he said. “I had word from Christophe that Leclerc is at Le Cap. They promised to hold him at bay, but that message was sent three days ago. I’m going there now. I’d like you to be there at my side.”

  “I’ll come,” she said at once. It made sense that he would want her there. If this was indeed France’s attempt to take back what they felt they owned, then the stranger lay behind it. Perhaps, though, he wanted her for more than that. She had stood by his side in person only once before, the day he had sent the English ships from their shores. It seemed right that she should be there again for this invasion.

  And she wanted to be there. Whatever it had been once, Saint-Domingue was her home now. Toussaint was her family. She wanted to stand by him at the end, if this was indeed the beginning of the end.

  None of this was spoken, but Toussaint nodded as if he had heard. “Dessalines and his troops are with us,” he said. “If we ride fast and don’t stop, we should reach Le Cap before morning.”

  They rode all night. This was nothing for Toussaint—he often did. It had been part of the terror o
f him to the British. They couldn’t understand how he crossed such unpredictable, mountainous swaths of country so quickly, upwards of sixty miles at a push, and they had never known where he would appear next. Fina was not so used to it. She forgot sometimes just how many of the experiences she took for granted were had through the bodies of other people. Her mind knew how to ride well. Her body did not, and before long her legs ached from the unfamiliar use. The soft warmth of the night made her sleepy, but there would have been no opportunity to doze even if she had been more certain of her seat. The paths were rough, and it took her full concentration to guide her horse through them. Perhaps this was why the journey mostly passed in silence. Perhaps not. She yawned, rubbed her eyes, and focused on the horse in front of her.

  At first she thought the glimmer on the horizon was dawn. It had the same red-gold glow, the same startling peek of bright light in the dark, like an eyelid opening. It took her sleep-dulled brain a few minutes to remember that they were riding north. Any sunrise would be to the east, on their right and not directly ahead of them. Shortly afterward, she tasted smoke on the wind from the sea, and her heart sank. None of them spoke, but they knew, even before they reached the top of the ridge that afforded them a view of the town.

  Le Cap was on fire.

  They soon encountered the occupants of the town coming up the road: a long, soot-stained, straggling line of them, carrying weapons and provisions and children on their backs. Toussaint rode through the middle of them, and they parted for him like a sea; Fina, following in his wake, had to take more care to avoid the surge of people about her horse’s legs.

  Dessalines cut across a group of men, stopping them in their tracks. “Have you seen Christophe?” One of them pointed backward, but by then there was no need. The general was toward the end of the procession, on a horse of his own.