A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  Stop.

  Her magic whipped out and seized the body standing over her before she had the chance to take it in. A woman’s body, clad in a man’s coat and breeches, thick hair bound up with cloth. Wiry muscles, strong and purposeful, a slight pull on the right shoulder where an old wound ached, the whisper of fire magic under her fingertips. It was this last that told Fina the name of her visitor.

  Marie-Jeanne. She spoke the words in the woman’s head and felt a tensing of muscles.

  Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière had fought by their side at the siege of Crête-à-Pierrot. Her husband had commanded a troop of men, and she had been at the forefront. Her fire magic had torn through the French lines. After her husband’s death, she had stayed with Dessalines, as his bodyguard and eventually his lover. Her magic was no match for Fina’s as long as Fina held her. However strong-willed, clever, and fierce Marie-Jeanne was, Fina could walk Marie-Jeanne’s body out of the house safely, if she wanted. But that wouldn’t save her own body, still in bed, from what was clearly a very real attempt on her life. If Marie-Jeanne was here with a knife, then there was no more safety for her on the island. Her borrowed time had run out.

  Fina fought her own fear and the stolen body’s racing heart and tried to think.

  She was here, and someone was trying to kill her.

  She would not think about anything else.

  Marie-Jeanne had a pistol strapped to her hip. Fina lowered the knife very carefully, dropped it, and moved Marie-Jeanne’s hand to the holster. The other woman’s fingers were twitching, fighting to rebel, so that Fina didn’t dare actually manipulate them to draw the pistol. Instead, she walked her backward to the farthest corner of the room. Then, before she could think too clearly about what she was doing, she withdrew her magic.

  “Don’t move,” she said, almost before she was back in her body. The words came thick and strange as she recovered her tongue. “I’ll move faster and stop you again. And this time I’ll have you kill yourself with your own pistol.”

  Marie-Jeanne didn’t move. “If you do,” she said, “the shot will draw the others who are waiting outside.”

  “How many?”

  “Too many for you to stop at once.”

  She was telling the truth. “You came alone to kill me before I woke.”

  “That’s what I told Dessalines I was going to do. It’s what I should have done. But we fought together at Crête-à-Pierrot. I owe you my life. I came alone because I wanted to give you a chance.”

  This was unexpected. “A chance to do what? Escape? Where would I go? Dessalines has people over the entire island.”

  “Then get off the island. You’re too dangerous to him to be kept alive now. It isn’t only your magic, though he’s always been afraid of that. Everybody knows you were Toussaint’s magician, and they don’t all believe that Dessalines was innocent of Toussaint’s capture. There are many who would follow you, if you chose to lead them.”

  She didn’t think that last was true, but perhaps it was. It didn’t matter. Clearly, Dessalines believed it.

  “If I die, they’ll know who killed me,” she said, just to be saying something. “It might cause an outcry in itself.”

  “So stay and be a martyr, if you want to,” Marie-Jeanne said. “Someone might rise against Dessalines on your behalf. But what would that achieve? It won’t bring Toussaint back. And without him, you know as well as I do that Dessalines is the right person to save this country.”

  “Toussaint is dead,” Fina heard herself say. It might not have been true yet. His attack might have merely distracted the stranger and allowed her to slip away. But she knew better. The raw grief in her chest knew better still.

  Marie-Jeanne nodded. Her face in the darkness showed neither surprise nor loss. They were too used to both. “Then you really need to leave Saint-Domingue.”

  In the stillness of the night, Fina heard the crunch of a footstep outside—a twig snapping, a stone grinding under a boot. Before she could stop herself, her head whipped around to the window. That was all Marie-Jeanne needed. Her hand on her pistol raised, and a sharp crack rang out. Almost at once, something hot blazed across Fina’s arm, and someone burst through the door.

  Fina didn’t hesitate. Her magic lashed out once again and caught at Marie-Jeanne; she was behind Marie-Jeanne’s eyes in time to see her own body tumble to the floor and the figures of three men enter the room with rifles aimed. The pistol in Marie-Jeanne’s hand was empty. Fina threw it to the ground, and as the men turned their rifles on her own fallen body, she raised Marie-Jeanne’s arms and unleashed flame.

  She had used another’s fire magic once before: a Frenchman, in the heat of battle, made to burn his own encampment to the ground. This was different. The magic at her fingertips was hotter and stronger; it spilled from her like a scream of rage and grief. It caught the men, who ran from the house with clothes aflame; it caught the walls and the floor and the blankets on the bed and made them an inferno. One of the men who had escaped the first burst raised his rifle and fired, but there was no clear sight through the smoke and the shot flew harmlessly past Marie-Jeanne’s head. Another scream of flame, and that man was running too.

  The room was clear then, but Fina didn’t stop. She burned again and again, until the room was black and charred and thick with smoke, until her borrowed lungs were choked and she had to stop to double over with racking coughs that were almost sobs. It didn’t feel enough. But it would have to do if she still wanted to live.

  It would have been safest to kill Marie-Jeanne in her own body. Fina could have slit her throat and left as she gasped out her life, or walked her into the fire. Perhaps she could even have commanded her heart to stop, as the most powerful mesmers were said to do. She had never done such a thing before, but rage was pouring from her in gouts of fire, and she could believe that something far deeper and darker could come out as well. In that moment, she felt she could have burned the whole world.

  She didn’t. Any hope of Saint-Domingue’s freedom lay in Dessalines’s hands now, and he would need Marie-Jeanne. Besides, Marie-Jeanne was not her enemy. She was strong and brave and fierce, and she had given Fina a chance when she didn’t have to. Only one, but that had been enough.

  Instead, she left Marie-Jeanne coughing in the center of the room. She slipped back into her own body, which she’d had the presence of mind to keep from flame. Her own lungs stung, but not as badly; her arm stung, too, where the shot had burned it, but there was very little blood. She pulled herself to her feet, grabbed the satchel that she always kept under her bed in case of such emergencies, and swung her legs out the only surviving window.

  The night air was cool outside after the heat of the blaze. At the front of the house the voices of Dessalines’s men were high and rough with panic. Fina dropped to the ground, picked herself up, and limped as fast as she could into the distance. Her eyes were sore with grit and unshed tears, but she did not look back.

  Summer 1803

  Fina had been preparing her passage from Saint-Domingue for a very long time. Since Toussaint had opened the ports to English and American ships, she had been watching those that came through, both by magic and by more conventional means. She had learned which ships could bring her to England or to France, which captains would respect her and which would treat her as a slave, and, above all, who could be trusted to bring her safely to her destination.

  There were considerably fewer British and American traders in Port-au-Prince now, and fewer still that she recognized. They were, once again, a country on fire. It was risky to make berth and, given the current state of the plantations, generally unprofitable. But war was its own source of profit, and many ships risked the fighting to bring weapons, charms, and supplies to the rebel armies. Fina had to wait by the docks for several weeks before she found the right ship. Fortunately, nobody knew her in that town—she had rarely ridden at Toussaint’s side in person. She had enough money to rent lodgings if she wanted to, but she knew she would
need it to buy her way off the island. Instead, she found work that nobody else wanted to do when she desperately needed to eat, slept where she could, avoided talking as much as possible, and watched constantly, through her own eyes and others’. When the Flyte came into port, she went to the men loading the docks and asked to speak to the captain.

  “Are you going to London?” she asked in English.

  “We are.” The captain had the rough, rolling accent she had heard on many of the English soldiers, but he looked at her without their contempt. This was Saint-Domingue. Color of skin or ragged clothes were no longer safe markers of status. “The long way back, given the war.”

  “Which war?” she said. There had been so many in the last few years.

  “Have you not heard? England and France are back at war. Back in April, but the news just reached this far. Bonaparte jailed all the British in France at the time. We won’t be able to stop along the French coast.”

  That, of course, was by far the safest for her. All the same, she wondered at the timing. Toussaint had died in April. “I’d like to book passage.”

  The veiled curiosity in his eyes was open now. “You’re looking to go to London?”

  “I am,” she said, with all the steel she could muster. “I have business there.”

  He nodded. “We aren’t built for passengers, but I’m guessing you know that. What are you offering?”

  They bargained, more for appearances than for necessity. She had enough money to cover the passage, and he was impressed.

  “Get on board,” he said at last. “We sail within the hour. You know,” he added, as she turned to go, “I met Toussaint once. I liked him.”

  “I know,” she said. It was why she had chosen him, although time and war had whittled her choices down considerably and this man had not been her first. But she understood what he was trying to tell her: that he knew who she was, and that she was safe. It lessened the coil of tension about her stomach just a little.

  She had only ever heard the stranger speak to a handful of people in her dreams. Her friends in Jamaica. Maximilien Robespierre. Napoléon Bonaparte. And, just once, an Englishman, who had been neither an ally nor a victim of the stranger but an enemy who was in some way like him. She didn’t know the name of this Englishman, and she had never seen him since. But she had heard them mention one name: Wilberforce.

  She knew that name, of course. She knew the names of most of the prominent abolitionists in England and in France, thanks to Toussaint; Christophe had even exchanged letters with Wilberforce a year or so ago. He at least she was confident she could find in England; she was confident, moreover, that he would try to help. At the very least, he would want to free Jamaica. If she was right, he also knew about the stranger. As much as the thought of English soil filled her with dread, she had nowhere else to go.

  But it was a long way to London. Every moment, despite all her precautions, she was rigid with fear as she had not been in years: that the men on board would hurt her, or sell her, or take her money and throw her over the edge of the deck. All the way across the Atlantic she stayed hidden belowdecks, stealing her glimpses of the sun from others’ eyes. She barely slept. When she did, she found herself once again on the beach at Saint-Domingue, buffeted by wind and wreathed in storm—not in Toussaint’s head this time, but only in her own. She saw Toussaint’s last look at her over and over again, and the hatred flame the eyes of the stranger. Then she would wake with a start, heart hammering and head pounding.

  She took to spending more and more time outside her own head, desperate for the escape of other bodies, other feelings, the soft quiet of the sea without sound. She would come out and force herself to eat, wash, and walk about the cabin, and then she would sink back under. She was losing herself, she knew, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

  One day or night, as she drifted in and out of sleep, she realized the darkness around her was changing. She was standing, then walking; she could feel dried yellow grass under her feet. The sky opened above her, a cloudless expanse of stars. In the distance were the shadows of trees, and a group of houses: not the ugly, functional buildings of a slave compound, or the ridiculous transplanted mansions of the plantation owners, but beautifully constructed huts, with wide, slanted grass roofs to give shade from the sun. Her heart caught in her throat. She had not seen anything like them since she was a very young child, but she remembered.

  A name came on the wind. It was a name she had not heard for many long years, a name she had forgotten entirely until that very moment. She had heard it in her earliest years, raised in reprimand or gentle with love, laughing in play or rough with the fury of childhood arguments.

  It was her name. Her true name, the one her mother had given her. For the first time in almost forty years, somebody was saying her name.

  A tall figure was standing beside one of the huts. It was difficult to see what he looked like in the starlight: tall, slender, white, well dressed in a dark green coat and white breeches. It didn’t matter. She had seen him in broad daylight in Toussaint’s camp, and she knew him.

  “So,” the stranger said. It was the voice that had spoken her name, and that she had heard many times in her sleep and in other people’s. Soft, pleasant, well-spoken—and yet, when she listened carefully, not speaking any one particular language at all. “Toussaint’s magician, the one with the lost name and the wandering soul. I’ve found you at last.”

  Her mouth felt dry. “I found you a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long. It was your name, you see. I couldn’t come to you directly without it. I suspected, for a long time, that the magician at Toussaint’s side who could roam the heads of others was the same one who had visited me at night. But it took a long time to find your name.”

  “They took it from me when I was five years old.”

  “Not quite. They tried, just as they tried to take your magic and your life. But names, like lives and magic, aren’t quite so easy to steal. It’s still there, buried, deep inside your mind, so deep you didn’t know it yourself. Too deep for me, I’m afraid. I couldn’t get it from you, even once I’d heard you. In the end, I had to go to your brother.”

  Her heart was already tearing itself loose in her chest. At that, it almost broke in pieces. Her brother. She had almost forgotten she had one, just as she had forgotten the name he’d called as they were torn apart. A shudder went through her, part shock and part hope. Hope was always the worst of all. “My brother.”

  “He’s still alive. He still remembers you. Would you like to know where he is?”

  She nodded silently.

  “Mm. I thought you would. I might tell you about him, one day. For now, I’m afraid we don’t have the time. Once this ship passes into British waters, you’ll be out of my reach.”

  Strangely, at those words, her heart became her own again. If he had told her, perhaps, she might have been lost. Even after everything, she might have made any promise to him if he had given her any hope of seeing her brother again. But he didn’t—and what was more, he enjoyed not doing it. She was used to every kind of cruelty, and this one was nothing new. Her self-possession was back as she folded her arms and met the stranger’s eyes. “Will I?”

  “Well,” he said, as if conceding a point. “For the most part. Where are you going?”

  “You said yourself. If you know how much time we have on this ship, you know where I’m going.”

  “I know you’re bound for Britain. I can’t imagine what business you might have with the nation that enslaved you.”

  “I think you can,” she said. “When you killed Toussaint Louverture, you left me with nowhere else to go.”

  “There’s never anywhere to go,” he said. “Believe me. Wherever you go, wherever you turn, you’re always here.”

  This said so much more about the stranger than it did about her—more, in fact, than she’d ever heard before. She looked at him closely. Perhaps the light was getting brighter, or he was
losing control of the shadows, but his features were easier to distinguish.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “What’s your name?”

  He laughed a little, but tiredly, almost sadly. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you,” he said. “Or to anybody else. It barely means anything to me. I’m nobody in the world, and never have been. I’m important only because I survived when nobody else did.”

  “Then why not tell me? I don’t use your name to find you, the way you use mine. I can find you just as well without it.”

  “Oh, I know you can. What you can do is beyond mere nightwalking. I could tell you. But I was raised to believe there was power in a name. It’s an old-fashioned idea, more superstition than magic, but you’ll find that people still cling to it. Why do you think your masters were so keen to steal your names from you?”

  “I don’t have any master,” Fina said. Inside, her magic raged. “And my name is whatever I choose it to be.”

  “Perhaps it is. My name, however, is still the one my mother gave me. It’s been mine for three hundred years. I’m afraid I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.”

  “What happened to your mother?”

  There was no amusement in his voice now, not even feigned. “You don’t need to know that.”

  “No. I need to know about my brother. But you wouldn’t answer that question.”

  “I’m not here to answer your questions, slave child.”

  “I’m not a slave.” Her magic reached out for the stranger, for his cool eyes and impenetrable mind. “And I haven’t been a child in a very long time.”

  He started to reply, but his eyes flickered and his voice died. “What—?”

  The landscape was darkening. The flat earth cooled under her feet, then folded in on itself, rising around them in walls of hard stone. A fort, perhaps, but as a candle kindled unexpectedly by a window she realized the settings were too lavish for that. This was a bedchamber. A four-poster bed stood by a fire that sprung to life as she watched, flickering; tapestries in rich colors lined the walls. A rug covered the oaken floor.