A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  Walmer Castle, by contrast, was a patchwork. Parts of it were bare stone and wood, others newly furnished. The dining room to which she was brought had freshly painted walls and wide windows that looked out over the battlements and finally the sea. The long table was capable of seating many, but only the four of them were present, and after they sat, the servants were politely dismissed.

  They were there to talk, not really to eat. But Fina had already discovered that the English liked to take a long time to get to the purpose of a meeting. It wasn’t until a few minutes had passed in cordial pleasantries that Pitt broached the matter directly.

  “Fina, I understand the enemy—the man you call the stranger—is trying to gain control of the British slaves on Jamaica?”

  “Of my people,” Fina said at once. “Yes.”

  “To what purpose? What does he want with them?”

  Although she knew better, her magic reached out and tried again to slip behind his eyes. Almost nothing. The barest glimpse of sunlight cutting across the room, a twinge of stiffness across shoulders as he shifted in the chair, a flash of worry buried so deep it was like a glint of metal at the bottom of a well. The rest repelled her back, as though she were scrambling for purchase on a smooth surface, and with just as little effort on behalf of the surface. He wasn’t consciously deflecting her, any more than the stranger ever was. Neither of them was aware of her. But their minds or their magic were built the same, and they weren’t built for her.

  She withdrew back into her own head and met his eyes the usual way. They, at least, weren’t like that of the stranger. They were dark and quiet, and waited for her without impatience.

  “He wants to enslave them,” she said. “Just as you British do, but he can go one better. Your magic can force our bodies to obey, but our minds and wills are our own. He can make them obey and believe they want to, right until he kills them.”

  “How? They’re not his to control.”

  “No,” she agreed bitterly. “They’re yours.” She carried on before anyone could react. “It’s the spellbinding. He’s working his way in through the spellbinding—carefully, the way you would work a rope loose one thread at a time or bore your way through a wall with a needle.”

  “Vampires can enter the heads of those outside their territory if they’re invited to do so,” Wilberforce said. He, of course, had heard this before, but his face was still stricken. “As Clarkson gave the enemy permission all those years ago. Is that what we’ve done by spellbinding those poor people? Have we invited him in, and left them vulnerable?”

  “We might have,” Pitt said. “There might well be a way to invite a vampire to enter somebody else’s head, not just your own. And if that’s true, then I can see how the spellbinding might constitute an invitation simply by making people more susceptible to mesmerism.”

  “Clarkson said that the enemy—the stranger—helped him lift the spellbinding on Saint-Domingue,” Wilberforce said.

  “You were going to abolish it in your colonies,” Fina said. “If you had, he would have lost his chance. He wanted to make sure that never happened. He knew Toussaint and many of the others on Saint-Domingue were set to stage a rebellion. So he used Clarkson to make that rebellion bigger and more violent, to give your people a nightmare of what slavery would be like without it. He learned more about the alchemy, too, through Clarkson. Clarkson’s magic showed him the shape of the alchemy without Clarkson meaning it to.”

  “Is that all he wanted to accomplish by his deal with Clarkson?” Pitt asked.

  “It’s all I know,” Fina said. She lifted her head in a surge of pride. “But if he meant anything else, it wasn’t to free Saint-Domingue. He never expected that revolt to work. He never expected Toussaint would be able to take Saint-Domingue from him, or that we would try to free Jamaica. He didn’t care about us enough.”

  “And that was his mistake,” Pitt said. “Perhaps his fatal one.”

  “That’s all very well,” Hester said practically, “but now that we know, what can we do about it? Mr. Wilberforce has been trying to free the slaves on Jamaica for years without success. It isn’t so simple.”

  “That’s true,” Wilberforce said. “But our attentions have been focused on the trade rather than the spellbinding, and by the sounds of things, breaking the spellbinding would be enough to at least break the stranger’s hold. If we shifted the focus of our campaign—”

  “There’s a reason you chose that focus in the first place,” Pitt said. “You’ll never abolish spellbinding as long as the slave trade is active—especially not these days.”

  “We could try to outlaw spellbinding only in the colonies themselves. The traders will have no reason to object to that, which only leaves the plantation owners. I’ll speak to the others when I return tomorrow.”

  “It might work,” Pitt said doubtfully. “I’ll try to speak to Addington about it too—though I have very little influence left with him.”

  “I do wish you didn’t have so many scruples about mesmerism,” Hester said wistfully. “You could have all the influence you wanted with Addington. I’ll do it, if you want. I have at least enough mesmerism for that.”

  “You’re welcome to try, if you don’t mind risking the wrath of the Temple Church,” Pitt said with a smile. “But it isn’t only Addington that needs to be persuaded. It’s the entire House of Commoners, the House of Aristocrats, and the king.”

  “And you could have all of those as well,” Hester said.

  “No,” Pitt said firmly, “I couldn’t, and you know it.”

  Hester sighed. “Oh, very well. It just seems very unfair to have principles when our enemy has none.”

  Fina listened to the exchange without comment, but she made sure to remember it. Toussaint had made a deal with a vampire for the sake of his people. She was willing to do the same here, if it came to it—but if so, she wanted to do it with eyes open and clear, and a chance of survival at the end of it.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Pitt was saying to Hester, “I doubt it’s a matter of principle alone anymore. I’m not certain the elixir could stand the strain of strong mesmerism these days.”

  Wilberforce looked at him sharply. “I thought it was working well.”

  “It’s working exactly as well as I need it. I don’t happen to need strong mesmerism. Fina, is there anything else you could tell us about the stranger?”

  There was, in fact, though she suspected Pitt had asked only to change the subject. There was the flicker of another’s eyes looking out from the man on Clapham Common at night, and all it meant. But she hesitated. If she told them about the possible threat to their own soil, they might cease to worry about Fina’s people at all.

  “Only that he’s angry,” she said instead. “Very angry. I saw his childhood. The Knights Templar burned it down.”

  They were all quiet at that.

  “I found the stranger’s family in the Templar records we have,” Wilberforce said, after the silence had stretched a little too long. “Fina told me that he came from Marseilles. That was the territory of a branch of the Lestranges. They ruled from the Château d’If, off the coast.”

  “Lestrange.” Fina rolled the word over on her tongue. “The stranger.”

  “Exactly. Perhaps you had a glimpse of his true name from the very start. His first name isn’t recorded, of course, since he wasn’t killed. But it might give us a place to start. At the very least, we can learn more about him.”

  “I know too much about him already,” Fina said. It wasn’t true, but she felt it in that moment. Or perhaps what she felt was more complicated: she wanted to know about him so that she could destroy him. She didn’t care to understand him, and she suspected Wilberforce did.

  The downstairs bedroom set aside for Fina did not look like a castle chamber. It was a comfortable room, even a somewhat shabby one, with a rug on the floor and a white quilt on the four-poster bed.

  “I know,” Hester said, evidently seeing Fin
a’s glance flicker toward the deep window seat. She had offered to show Fina back to her room, while the other two remained talking in the library. Clearly, as far as she was concerned, Fina was her guest now. “They were gun turrets, and now they have cushions. It’s a disgrace. But they are rather comfortable, and if the French come, we can always kick out the glass and stick a rifle through them. They’re likely to come on my side, though, rather than yours. I’m across the hall, overlooking the sea.”

  Fina’s room overlooked vast scrubby ground on which saplings were beginning to grow, and an overhanging gray sky. It should have felt safer than the ocean, which carried a threat of invasion and something unnameable. But somehow she didn’t like to have her back to France.

  “I know something you might like,” Hester said suddenly. “Would you like to get settled here while I fetch it?”

  Fina nodded, taken by surprise, and Hester left the room. Her footsteps rattled up the stairs outside the door.

  It wasn’t long before she came back, leafing through a book. “Here,” she said. She dropped next to Fina on the bed and opened the volume. “Wordsworth wrote a poem for Toussaint Louverture—not very good, I daresay, and I don’t quite know why we have a copy when I don’t think Uncle William reads any poetry more recent than Shakespeare. It came out in the papers in February.”

  Fina looked at the words in front of her, in their neat print. She recognized the shape of Toussaint’s name from the letters he’d signed over the years—beyond that, it was an enigma of symbols in a language not her own. “I can’t read it.”

  “Never mind.” Hester turned the book back around. “I’ll read it—if you’d like it, of course. You might not.”

  Fina didn’t know who Wordsworth was. But suddenly she did very much want to know what had been written about Toussaint in this strange place; what people here had read, as he lay dying in a cold cell far from home and sunlight. “Please,” she said.

  Hester nodded with satisfaction. “Uncle William warned me I was being insensitive. But I thought you’d like to hear it.” She cleared her throat and began to read.

  It was short, only a few sentences, and it sounded to her dense and unpoetic. Most of it Fina could barely understand. It wasn’t the same kind of English that Hester and the others spoke: it was stately and formal and upright, like the chairs in the dining room that overlooked the sea. But she heard the words “alone in some deep dungeon’s earless den” and then “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee; earth, air and skies,” and all at once she was standing on the beach at Toussaint’s side the day the English fleet came, with the wind and the rain crashing about them. For the second time in the last few days, tears sprung to her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Hester’s voice came. Fina blinked and looked up at her. She had stopped reading, and her expressive face was concerned. For the first time, she looked uncertain. “Perhaps that was rather insensitive after all.”

  Fina shook her head. The tears dried in her eyes and didn’t fall. “No. The words don’t matter to me. Only I wish he hadn’t died so alone and far from home.”

  “You’ve come even farther than him.” Hester closed the book and sat back on the bed. “Mr. Wilberforce told us. Did Dessalines really try to kill you?”

  “Not himself. He sent someone. Someone I had fought alongside in battle.”

  “I want to go to battle,” Hester said, somewhat wistfully. “My uncle says I’d be very good at it, and he’d be happy to send me across the Channel with a battalion of my own and not one of our plans would fail. But I’m a mesmer, and mesmerism isn’t battle magic. And he warned me I’d hate the life of the battle-mage. It’s a good deal more giving orders than taking them. Is that what you found?”

  Fina remembered the pistol in the dark, the burst of fire. “I think it’s more blood and fear than anything else.”

  “I’ve never been afraid.” It wasn’t a boast, just a statement of fact. “Not even when my father held a kitchen knife to my throat.”

  “Your father did that? Why?”

  “Oh, I made him angry.” Her voice was carefully nonchalant, but there was a certain tight, brittle quality to it that Fina recognized. Her eyes were very dark. “To be fair, I was angry at him. We made each other angry, I think, when I was living at home.”

  “Is that why you live here?” Wilberforce had been vague on the circumstances of Hester’s estrangement from her father, either out of English decorum or because he didn’t know himself. “Did you run away?”

  “I didn’t run away,” she corrected, without much conviction. “I left. I wrote to my grandmother and I asked if I could live with her, and after her death this summer my uncle gave me a home here. It was very kind of him—too kind, probably, but he assures me the obligation is really all on his side, and fortunately he lies beautifully. And I love it here.” She paused, just for a moment. “I haven’t seen my father in years. He’s a revolutionary, you know, or claims to be. And of course he’s a genius, so allowances can be made. But the knife was too far. I had no desire to experience any such thing again.”

  The phrasing wrung a smile from her against her will. “No,” she said. “Neither would I.”

  Hester must have seen something in her smile, because she smiled back. “I like you,” she said. “I knew I would, when Mr. Wilberforce wrote. Shall we be friends?”

  “Did you ever think I might not like you?” Fina asked.

  “It’s highly possible,” Hester agreed, without a hint of shame. “A lot of people don’t.”

  But Fina did, she found. It came to her out of nowhere that Hester reminded her of Clemency, from her old plantation. She hadn’t seen Clemency in years, even in her dream-walks. But in Fina’s memories she was very young and very brave, and she mingled joy and fire as Hester did. Hester, of course, had never experienced anything like what Clemency had lived through. Privilege and self-belief were in every line of her. And yet Fina suspected that if she ever found herself in Clemency’s place, or somewhere like it, she wouldn’t break.

  “We can be friends,” she said.

  “Excellent.” Hester hid a yawn, and glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Excuse me. I’m desperately sleepy after all that riding. At least it wasn’t raining this time. Last week I was positively soaked—my boots were so full of water it sloshed over the brim when I walked. And you must be too, given the distance you’ve come. Sleepy, that is, not full of water.”

  Fina smiled, but her mind was elsewhere. “Hester?” she said hesitantly.

  “Mm?”

  “If you had a very important secret, would you trust Mr. Pitt and Mr. Wilberforce to do the right thing with it?”

  “Of course.” Hester turned to look at Fina properly. “I just wouldn’t necessarily trust that their idea of the right thing was the same as mine. I usually have very decided ideas about important secrets.”

  “What if the secret wasn’t yours?”

  “I would still have very decided ideas about it.”

  “No,” said Fina, though she couldn’t help smiling again. “Would you trust them with it? Would you tell them anyway?”

  Hester considered that seriously. “Yes,” she said. “I would. If I thought they needed to know it. I assume you have a very important secret?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She braced herself to be asked what it was, but to her relief Hester, after a pause, resisted.

  “Well,” she said instead. “I’m sure you know your own secrets best. But I’d tell them, if it would help.”

  Despite the distance she had covered that day, Fina was in fact far from sleepy. She had all but recovered from the intense mental fatigue that had settled over her at Wilberforce’s house. Without it, the castle was too strange and the bed too soft. She lay beneath the covers, barely warm, and stared up at the ancient English ceiling.

  It was after midnight when she resigned herself to the fact that she was never going to sleep. She got up carefully, not troubling to light a c
andle. She felt safer in the dark. A dressing gown lay draped on a chair, and she wrapped it tightly about her. Then, cautiously, she opened the door to her room and crept out into the silent corridors.

  Most of the doors she encountered were locked; she turned the handles, pulling back when she met resistance, and careful each time to cast her magic into the room and check for the whisper of another living mind. In the center of the castle she found a spiral staircase descending, and at the bottom the glint of a well. She didn’t like it, somehow. It felt like an eye down below, waiting.

  To her surprise, one of the doors upstairs yielded to her touch. The room she entered was something like an office: she could see the outlines of a paper-strewn desk in the dark, and a saddle-shaped chair beside a fireplace whose embers still gave a faint glow. Her attention, though, was drawn to the moonlight shining through a window directly opposite. It looked over the battlements, as Hester’s room did, and the ocean that glinted black and hard under the open sky. She went to it. The horizon was empty, and yet beyond it something waited. Its pull in the dark was a call without words.

  “France is just across that stretch of sea,” a voice behind her said. She spun around, her heart beating wildly.

  Her eyes had skimmed over the desk in the corner on the way to the window. She saw now that there was a figure seated behind it. A tall, thin figure, one who in the darkness looked and sounded very much like the stranger.

  “Forgive me,” Pitt said. “I should have realized you didn’t know I was here.”

  “I didn’t know anyone was awake,” she said when her voice had recovered. It was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. She had grown so used to looking for people with her magic that she had been lazy about checking with her eyes, and she had forgotten—foolishly—that one of perhaps the only two people in the world her magic couldn’t find was in the castle.